The Media’s Effect on Women’s Body Image

The Medias impressionuate on Womens Body Image family line 1, 2010 go women ease up made real strides in the past decades, the culture at large continues to place a majuscule emphasis on how women look. These beauty standards, gener ally proliferated through the media, consent drastic impacts on young women and their physical structure numbers. Arielle Cutler 11, through a Levitt grant, spent the summer evaluating the efficacy of media literacy programs as a remedy to this vicious cycle. depute simply, the beauty noble-minded in American culture is thin. Large populations of average girls do not demonstrate clinically identifiable ingest disorderspathologies that the culture marks as extreme and unhealthybut quite an an entirely normative obsession with carcass shape and size, Cutler said. This ongoing concern is recognised as a completely mean(prenominal) and nevertheless inevitable part of universe a modern girl. I figure we need to switch over that. Anyone w ho is familiar with American culture knows that many of these cultural standards are established in the media. We are incessantly surrounded by all sorts of media and we realize our identities in part through media take ins we see, Cutler remarked.And the more than(prenominal) girls are exposed to thin-ideal kinds of media, the more they are dissatisfied with their bodies and with themselves boilers suit. The correlation between media image and body image has been proven in one study, among European American and African American girls ages 7 12, greater overall television exposure predicted both a thinner ideal adult body shape and a higher train of disordered eating one year later. Adolescent girls are the most potently affected demographic More and more 12-year-old girls are going on diets because they deliberate what you weigh determines your worth, Cutler observed. When all you see is a body type that only 2 percent of the population has, its operose to remember whats real and whats reasonable to expect of yourself and everyone else. As women occupy become increasingly aware of the effect of media on their body images, they have started media literacy programs to launch women and girls more aware of the messages they are inadvertently consuming. Media literacy programs promote an understanding of the effect media has on individual consumers and society at large.These programs take to reveal the ideologies and messages embedded in the media images that we merging on a daily basis, Cutler said. Advertising, she asserts, draws on peoples insecurities to convince them to steal a product, and few populations are as insecure overall as youthful girlswhich is why media literacy programs are so grievous for them. In programs such as that intentional by national organization Girls, Inc. , girls determine how to look behind the scenes and messages that advertisements are producing in order to reconcile their own bodies with the interpret of perfection presented by the media.The programs already in place have been found to be very effective College-age women have been the master(prenominal) focus, but 10-11 year-old girls are the most eventful target so that they can have these critical processes going on before internalizations of messages have really started, Cutler explained. But what sorts of standards do the media submit for women who are not white and not upper class, and how does this affect the body images of women in these groups? This question, Cutler has found, is one that is not always considerably addressed in the scholarly satisfying she has read. I realized at whatsoever point in my research that I had been ordinaryizing the experience of a particular typeset of girls privileged by their race and, even more so, socioeconomic background. It did not serve up that this blind-spot was reflected back to me in some of my research, Cutler said. While she asserts that certain standards of beauty are u niversal throughout the country and across all demographics, Cutler believes that media literacy programs should take racial and socioeconomic backgrounds more into consideration.Different groups have different issues and concerns, she said. For example, overeating is a real issue as an eating disorder, especially for lower-class women. How does this fact change the womens relationship to the beauty ideal? Cutler is reading studies about the body image problem among women in the U. S. as sound as evaluations of media literacy programs. She recommends greater sensitivity to the concerns of non-white, non-upper-class groups in order to increase the effectiveness of media literacy programs.