Mirror, mirror, on the wall
For my research paper, I decided to look into the media affecting the body image in teenage girls. I choose this topic due to mainly girls complaining about their bodies. Many say that they are too fat or just not attractive, when in reality they aren’t. These girls say things like that manly because they have been manipulated by the media.
When teenage girls are presented with media, they compare their physical body to those on the media and then they experience guilt or ashamed of their body. Models of the covers of magazines and in advertisements embodying the “thin ideal image”but also fictional characters in television shows and movies are almost always portrayed to be thin and beautiful.
To back up on how media has affected the body image, researchers’ Dittmar, Halliwell, and Stirling did an experiment which exposed women to magazines, television shows or television commercials. The average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day and by the time she is 17 years old, she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media. The results of the experiment came back as there having a linkage between media exposure and the general dissatisfaction in women. Researchers Martin and Kennedy gave 13 to 17 year old girls a subscription of Seventeen magazines and as those girls looked through the magazine, 68 percent felt worse about their own appearance.
In all, media is a constant reminder of the negative body image that is
being taught in our culture and it continues to be supported by the rest of the
population. With teenagers being continuously exposed to the media, there can be
serious health consequences, not only in the physical sense but also in the
mental sense.
When teenage girls are presented with media, they compare their physical body to those on the media and then they experience guilt or ashamed of their body. Models of the covers of magazines and in advertisements embodying the “thin ideal image”but also fictional characters in television shows and movies are almost always portrayed to be thin and beautiful.
To back up on how media has affected the body image, researchers’ Dittmar, Halliwell, and Stirling did an experiment which exposed women to magazines, television shows or television commercials. The average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day and by the time she is 17 years old, she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media. The results of the experiment came back as there having a linkage between media exposure and the general dissatisfaction in women. Researchers Martin and Kennedy gave 13 to 17 year old girls a subscription of Seventeen magazines and as those girls looked through the magazine, 68 percent felt worse about their own appearance.
In all, media is a constant reminder of the negative body image that is
being taught in our culture and it continues to be supported by the rest of the
population. With teenagers being continuously exposed to the media, there can be
serious health consequences, not only in the physical sense but also in the
mental sense.