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Body Image Research Paper

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How the media affects body image of females in America

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What happens when those eyes are the shallow, blind eyes of the media? Beauty is no longer valued as personality or kindness, but as how many bones stick out of one’s skin. There are many factors in today’s society that contribute to the idea of beauty such as appearance. The main poison affecting how society views beauty is the media. Female adolescents and adult women in the United States are more interested in beauty and obsessed with body image now than ever before. The twenty-first century is obsessed with the media and what it delivers to the public. What the media emphasizes is what the women of the world desire. If the media advertises skinny as beautiful, that is what women aim to achieve. Magazine advertisements, television, and runway models all have one thing in common: distortion of body image. When opening the monthly issue of Allure or Vogue, many of the women are extremely thin. The clothes worn in these ads are tiny an very revealing. It appears that the fashion industry is trying to say that the skinnier one is, the better the clothes will look on the body. When a female turns on the television to watch Gossip Girl or Victorious, the girls are gauntly skinny. The media has a negative impact on body image for females of all ages in the United States, leading to eating disorders and plastic surgery. Body image is crucial to females in America, the message the media puts out to society is hard to miss. Beauty equals perfect hair, perfect skin, and a slim body; however this theory was not always so. According to the Body Image Timeline: Western Society, in the 1800’s the ideal body type structure was plump, fleshy, and full figured. At the start of the 1900’s, slenderness became more fashionable. By the 1920’s, the washboard look was

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