I am currently at school, doing my sociology coursework. I am doing whether magazines influence young girls to develop eating disorders.
I would like to know all your opinions, please give reasons! Don’t just say yes or no, I would like a good opinion :]
Thank you for taking the time to help me!
Yes, I think they do, along with television (which is more widespread, reaching more girls) and music videos.
I was raised to put less importance and value on physical appearance than personality, spirituality, intelligence, etc. However, as an adolescent, I also fell into the trap of feeling insecure and inferior because I didn’t look like the young models in Seventeen and other magazines. Young people are impressionable and even with good upbringings and positive role models, they can still fall sway to idealized media images.
Impressionable young girls + ridiculous societal ideals about the “perfect” body + a culture that places too much emphasis on appearance = low self esteem, body image issues, and eating disorders. No one can measure up to the images they are bombarded with because most of those images aren’t even REAL. We are striving to attain the unattainable — running a race with no end that can’t be won.
And that’s another thing — in the past, you would periodically see “perfect” images of “perfect” people in magazines and occasionally on tv, but with our modern media it is more prevalent and accessible than ever. No matter where you turn you are pelted with these images — you can’t escape it. So you have not only young girls who feel they need to live up to the supermodel or socialite standard, but also housewives who feel they should look and be utterly perfect with gleaming white smiles and salon quality hair at home, on the soccer field, cleaning the toilet…and you have families that are made to feel like crap because they can’t afford the “perfect, ‘affordable’ Disney vacation”. If every single appliance, window, and pillowcase in your house isn’t Green, you might as well throw yourself off a bridge, and if you’re not living in a 3-story McMansion and driving a tricked out Infinity, why bother living? We are bombarded with these messages constantly, and it’s no wonder why kids (girls AND boys) feel this unbelievable pressure to be utterly perfect. Their parents do so, and then inadvertently (or not) pass that message on to their children. It’s a vicious cycle.
Yes, I do think the media which includes magazines & the television play a great role in influencing eating disorders. Whenever I look through fashion magazines, I always see skinny beautiful models & it makes me want to be like them. They just look so perfect & flawless.
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yea probably. cos magazines have skinny people and they look good and then they all wanna be like them so they try to look like them and then they go on a diet and instead exercising or eating healthy they go on eating disorders? i dunno …XD
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Hi there,this may help.:It is a lot more complex than blaming the media.
The media most certainly contributes to dieting and size discrimination.From early-on children are taught by society that their looks matter. Think of the three and four year old who is continuously praised for being “oh so cute”. With an increased population of children who spend a lot of time in front of television, there are more of them coming up with a superficial sense of who they are. Images on T.V. spend countless hours telling us to lose weight, be thin and beautiful, buy more stuff because people will like us and we’ll be better people for it. Programming on the tube rarely depicts men and women with “average” body-types or crappy clothes, ingraining in the back of all our minds that this is the type of life we want. Overweight characters are typically portrayed as lazy, the one with no friends, or “the bad guy”, while thin women and pumped-up men are the successful, popular, sexy and powerful ones. How can we tell our children that it’s what’s inside that counts, when the media continuously contradicts this message?
Super models in all the popular magazines have continued to get thinner and thinner. Modeling agencies have been reported to actively pursue Anorexic models. The average woman model weighs up to 25% less than the typical woman and maintains a weight at about 15 to 20 percent below what is considered healthy for her age and height. Some models go through plastic surgery, some are “taped-up” to mold their bodies into more photogenic representations of themselves, and photos are airbrushed before going to print. By far, these body types and images are not the norm and unobtainable to the average individual, and far and wide, the constant force of these images on society makes us believe they should be. We need to remind ourselves and each other constantly (especially children) that these images are fake.
Diet advertisements are another problem. On television, in magazines and newspapers, we are continually exposed to the notion that losing weight will make us happier and it will be through “THIS diet plan”. Time and time again it has been proven that, for the long-term, regimented diet plans DO NOT work, yet our society continues to buy into the idea that they do. Pop-culture’s imposed definition of “the ideal body” combined with the diet industry’s drive to make more money, creates a never-ending cycle of ad upon ad that try to convince us “…if you lose weight, your life will be good.” The flip side is that as long as we continue to buy into their false claims by purchasing these (often dangerous) products, the more the diet industry will keep pushing their slogans at us. Also try the link bellow.
References :
http://www.something-fishy.org/cultural/themedia.php
Yes, I think they do, along with television (which is more widespread, reaching more girls) and music videos.
I was raised to put less importance and value on physical appearance than personality, spirituality, intelligence, etc. However, as an adolescent, I also fell into the trap of feeling insecure and inferior because I didn’t look like the young models in Seventeen and other magazines. Young people are impressionable and even with good upbringings and positive role models, they can still fall sway to idealized media images.
Impressionable young girls + ridiculous societal ideals about the “perfect” body + a culture that places too much emphasis on appearance = low self esteem, body image issues, and eating disorders. No one can measure up to the images they are bombarded with because most of those images aren’t even REAL. We are striving to attain the unattainable — running a race with no end that can’t be won.
And that’s another thing — in the past, you would periodically see “perfect” images of “perfect” people in magazines and occasionally on tv, but with our modern media it is more prevalent and accessible than ever. No matter where you turn you are pelted with these images — you can’t escape it. So you have not only young girls who feel they need to live up to the supermodel or socialite standard, but also housewives who feel they should look and be utterly perfect with gleaming white smiles and salon quality hair at home, on the soccer field, cleaning the toilet…and you have families that are made to feel like crap because they can’t afford the “perfect, ‘affordable’ Disney vacation”. If every single appliance, window, and pillowcase in your house isn’t Green, you might as well throw yourself off a bridge, and if you’re not living in a 3-story McMansion and driving a tricked out Infinity, why bother living? We are bombarded with these messages constantly, and it’s no wonder why kids (girls AND boys) feel this unbelievable pressure to be utterly perfect. Their parents do so, and then inadvertently (or not) pass that message on to their children. It’s a vicious cycle.
References :