The Media Vs Body Image

"I wish I could look like her... If only I could lose ten more pounds... Maybe I should consider plastic surgery?" Sound familiar? Many men and women today are looking to the media and entertainment industry for the standards of what it means to be beautiful in today's society. Most of us spend a good portion of our everyday lives looking in the mirror, criticizing ourselves, and are repulsed by what we see. We compare ourselves to Jennifer Anniston, Tom Cruise, Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt, and Britney Spears, all of whom in society's eyes define beauty, glamour, and airbrushing. Airbrushing, that clever little concept that is used by magazines universally to make the pretty look perfect. Perfect? What exactly is perfect? Is it the stick-thin women that walk our streets with their bones protruding through their skin? This is the look that has become ever so popular as women and men all over the world starve themselves in order to conform to what they perceive as society's impression of beauty. Our beauty, the perfectionism that we strive for, where does it come from? Is it be photographed and put on a billboards that we drive by everyday or distributed on the magazine covers that we read in our doctors office? Or maybe it might be something a little more personal, something a little more than skin-deep.

If only I had a nickel for every time I've heard some healthy, attractive person announce that they would do anything just to lose 15 pounds. I mean, it's not like we live in America, home to the land of a $33 billion diet-fad industry. Many people all over the world are starving and yet here we are spending tons of money so that some highly educated individual can tell us not to eat. And then we get into the fad diets. Between the Jenny Craig Diet, the Atkins Low-Carb Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Metabolism Diet, and the Russian Air force Diet (it actually exists), it seems that many Americans obsess over the whole diet craze just to lose that extra few pounds. In fact, at any one point and time, 50% of all teenage girls in the U.S. are dieting. On the contrary, I prefer a different set of diet rules, I like the one that says that if you drink a diet soda with a candy bar, the calories in the candy bar are cancelled out by the diet soda or if you eat something and no one sees you eat it, it has no calories. By the way, did you know that any food used for medical purposes don't ever count, such as chocolate, red wine, ginger ale, and my personal favorite, Ben and Jerry's brownie batter ice-cream. Ah, ice cream the number one recommended cure for just about anything! Never underestimate the healing powers of Ben and Jerry's.

Speaking of people in dire need of ice cream, People Magazine recently did a story entitled "Wasting Away" which observed and recorded eating disorders among female college students. It started by discussing an unpleasant incident in 1996 in which sandwich bags disappeared in large quantities from the kitchen of a college sorority house. Upon investigation, the sandwich bags were discovered piled in a basement bathroom, filled with vomit. These admired, successful young ladies were forcing themselves to be sick in order to adapt to the sort of bodies they saw depicted in the lovely world of film and print. Entertainingly enough, in the very same exact issue, just a couple of pages over, People Magazine printed a picture of Mariah Carey, with a caption that trashes how Mariah "scarcely squeezed" into her designer dress for the Oscars. They condemn eating disorders and exclaim that all that really matters is the beauty on the inside, and yet in the very same issue they criticize a celebrity for being too large to even fit into her dress. The double standards of not only People Magazine, but also society are having terrible effects on women and men across the country. Professor Theresa Thompson of University of Dayton just recently assigned her class in a communications course in which the students observed and recorded the overall message of magazines for girls in the age range 8 to 18. The messages being sent out to girls of those ages came down to three things, beauty, body, and boys. In the category of the body, the magazines did not educate girls about exercise and health, but rather they spoke of being attractive and what girls could do to make them selves' look more beautiful. Eating disorders were portrayed as a serious problem, not because of the obvious health risks, but instead because of the affect the disease has on your hair, nails, and skin. One magazine had a quiz that invited young girls to determine if they were a beauty or a brain, implying that the two are opposite of one another.

And talk about sending bad messages to teen girls, has any one been to the movies lately? When browsing through the current movie titles I see that the majority of them are romantic comedies, action and horror films. These are your typical categories of films, however when viewing the previews or the movie posters for these movies there