How media influences women
We, the American public are hit from every imaginable direction every waking moment of our lives by slick advertising agencies trying to coerce us into or tell us why we need to buy their products. Their products will make us happier or thinner, or prettier. The advertisers often use the picture of youth and vitality so that the public will associate that particular product or service with being young and beautiful. They do this because of course in our society youth and beauty are to be coveted. Everyone would like to be forever young and beautiful or for as long as they can anyway. So, everyone is trying to look younger or wants to look younger. The things that we can associate with youth are obvious. We see the picture of youth and beauty everywhere. Look in any magazine, Watch TV, see billboards, everywhere you turn we see young, beautiful people. Youth is synonymous with beauty so little wonder why when you read this bumper sticker "few women admit their age, few men act it" a lot of women won't divulge their age. To do so would be to admit they are perhaps older than they look or if we were to know their real age we might say something (hopefully to ourselves) like "jeez, she looks a lot older than that!"
The weight loss industry is now a thirty-three billion-dollar industry. Advertisements aimed at selling diet products portray food and the self as enemies and the diet products as our friends. What consumers are not told is that ninety-eight percent of those who lose weight through diet products such as pills, shakes, ect. gain the weight back including additional weight. The advertisements only tell us that "you can never be too thin," and "starving and suffering got you into shape." The diet industry deliberately perpetuates dangerous attitudes about food and body image because it is profitable for them to make women feel terrible about their bodies, and the majority of women do feel that way. It is common knowledge that women in our culture are entirely more affected by the slender ideal then are men and by beauty ideals in general. It is also more evident that the frequency of eating disorders is astoundingly higher among girls and women than among males. Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to "doctor" images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman's body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women's bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women's body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they
Some common words found in the essay are:
Watch TV, Marilyn Monroe, , fashion model, diet products, eating disorders, five percent women, ideal fashion model, average fashion model, percent women, average fashion, picture youth, youth beauty, majority women, thin women, lose weight,
Approximate Word count = 1092
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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