The Effects of Media on Adolescent Girls Essay

The media can have both positive and negative effects on anyone especially teenage girls. I personally think one of the problems with the media is the unrealistic images that they put out there. They put these images out there and make it seem like if you don’t look like this you wont be happy, successful, or accepted by anyone. Duke University statistic says “40% of all 9 and 10-year-old girls have already been on a diet”. This is a huge problem today and a problem that is just going to continue to get worse. Many people don’t understand or know just what effects the media has on teenage girls. I hope you can see what it does to their body image, problems they get from it and the eating disorders they could possibly

I can remember her standing in front of the mirror looking at herself. How she thought she was beautiful, I don’t know. Because the image I saw was of a person who looked like a living corpse. She had to have weighed only 100 pounds, her hair so thin, the black bags under her eyes, and her overall grayish complexion made her look as if she were a dead. As she saw me staring at her in the corner of her eye, she slammed the door in my face. That was the big sister that I knew now. She was no longer the big sister that I could go to and get advice from or have a good laugh with. No, she was too busy with her own schedule and not to mention her terrible mood swings. My older sister

After examining multiple sources, the damaging effects on women that is influenced through media involves many different aspects as it includes body dissatisfaction and body shaming, mental disorders including eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem, and impacts on sexuality based on how women are portrayed in media. It can be concluded that they hypothesis was correct in the sense that the media is influencing the sexualization of girls and causing these negative effects to occur.

Every day adolescent women are being influenced and affected by the media. The media includes anything from magazines, television shows, billboards, radio advertisements, commercials, newspapers and more. Through the media, women are being exposed to all forms of advertisements, including images that display misleading figures of women. These advertisements do not feature women with large hips, wide shoulders, lengthy arms or fuller figures. Instead, the women found on the front pages of magazines and advertisements are usually cookie-cutter cropped and photo shopped models with thigh gaps, perfect curves, high cheek bones and all the features of a deceivingly perfect looking woman. The media neglects to show the average woman, who comes

Over the past decade, media has become a major part of day to day life for the average person living in the United States of America. Media finds its way into your household in a wide variety of ways, including television, movies, music, and the internet. With society’s growing obsession with media, it is easy to see how it plays a role on impacting the lives of children, women, and men. Mass media effects people’s body image, self-esteem, and the overall way society is portrayed. There is a major link between media and a person’s mental as well as physical health.

70% of girls don’t feel good enough; that the bar is set too high for them to reach. Girls’ self esteem plummets at around age 12 and usually doesn’t recover until their 20s because media exposure tells them who to be. Many girls believe that happiness is a size and to be happy or feel good about themselves, they will do anything like plastic surgery, or even develop eating disorders. Although many factors impact how a girl perceives herself, such as genetics, the media, peers, the impact of the world can really push them over the edge and could lead to depression. Although youth and being skinny is glamorized, women should love and support their natural body types instead of changing their bodies through makeup and plastic surgery, making

There is no doubt that the media powerfully influences modern society today. Whether it is television, magazines, celebrities or musicians, the world of pop culture creates role models for society to look up to, whether or not those influences are good or bad. The impact media and pop culture has on young girls also proves to be very significant, as young females are affected by wanting to be the ideal girl in the modern world, and fulfill those standards in order to feel happy about themselves. Articles such as Wonder Woman by Gloria Steinem, Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination by Deborah Ross, and The Globalization of Eating Disorders by Susan Bordo, all represent that

The media and advertisements are meant to influence our everyday lives in society. Young girls are being exposed today more than ever to the over sexualized images of women within the media, advertisements and in pop culture. Young girls are seeing these types of images everyday either in magazines, television shows, movies or fashion. The research questions I propose to explore: “Are the images that young girls are exposed to within the media influencing their body image and self-esteem?” I would also like to study: “Could the ways women are exemplified in the media lead young girls to have a poor self body image? Finally, “Can the influences of the media and advertisements lead young girls to depression or develop eating disorders?”

A magazine advertisement’s main selling point is a model or the “perfect body” that all girls dream of having. We all think that these advertisements cause no harm. But in reality, teenage girls are developing self-consciousness and sensitivity around their peers. They worry that their shape, size, and muscle tone is all wrong. On womensenews.org, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of “The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls”, states, “The body has become the central personal project of American girls.” A lot of young women start to question themselves, “Am I pretty enough?” or “Am I skinny enough?” Because of these questions, most girls end up depressed or having suicidal thoughts. A 15 year old girl wrote on a website stating that she worries that she’s not good enough.

The media has a strong influence on how girls view themselves and their peers. The media- magazines, television shows, music videos, billboards, etc- sends the message that the only way to look good and be happy is to be skinny (Kirchheimer). Girls who have a healthy weight feel uncomfortable with how they look and feel that they are not skinny enough to be accepted by society’s standards. “…at age thirteen, 53% of American girls are ‘unhappy with their bodies.’ This grows up to 78% by the time girls reach seventeen,” says J.J. Brumberg. (qtd. in National Institute on Media and the Family). This statistic is overwhelming; it is upsetting that young girls can not be comfortable in their own skin. According to D. Hargreaves, many thin models have a weight that is mistaken as the best way to be beautiful and causes young girls to have a low self esteem (qtd. in National Institute on Media and the Family). In order to get to this “perfect” weight, many girls fall to eating disorders to attain their desired weight. Unfortunately, this method of losing weight is unhealthy and extremely dangerous to the human body. These different methods include “fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, and self-induced vomiting” (Media Awareness Network). The fact that girls go to these extremes to get thin is scary and heartbreaking. This is why the media needs to send a more positive message about body image to young girls.

In today’s society, the media remains a pronounced source of information throughout the westernized world and beyond. Men, women, and children alike interact with some sort of media in their day-to-day lives. This wealth of information can be significantly useful and provides an essential way of communicating important intelligence. However, it also acts as a means of entertainment. Because of its ever-present existence, this aspect of modern culture tends to influence and impact those who interact with it regularly. Although often a beneficial source of communication, media can have a negative impact on those that consume it, especially female viewers. Fictional media, more specifically, impacts an

Growing up surrounded by media brings pressure to teenage girls to have what society defines as the ideal body. As a teenager one wants to fit in with the most popular group. Recent movies like “Mean girls” and “16 wishes” have shown the role of the popular girl to be thin, beautiful, and smart. As a media consumer, females assume that if they achieve this look they will become popular as well. Many teenagers go through stressing situations in order to accomplish the ideal body image. For instance, many teenagers develop eating disorders or go through plastic surgery. Today in social media, we see celebrities going through dramatic changes; like lip injections, face thinning, hair/eyelash extensions, tummy tucks, breast enlargement, etc. Now everyone uses social media in order to see each other’s life, and one tends to follow their favorite celebrities. By following these celebrities, one sees their changes and wants to go through the same procedures in order to fit in to what society defines beautiful. Teenage girls are pressured from the media to have the “ideal body.”

She desires beauty, but does not look like “them” therefore she is not beautiful. She fits into her clothes, but the sizes do not fit the standard. She passes up the toast for breakfast, the hamburger for lunch and the Chinese takeout for dinner. She sweats daily so that someday she will not have to sweat it at all. She looks at the scale unsatisfied knowing twenty pounds is not enough. She, along with millions of teenage girls feel pressured to build or maintain the perfect body. Thoughts on how one perceives their psychical appearance or body image, can start at the age of six and last through adulthood. Due to the desire of excessive weight loss teenage girls are affected by eating disorders, relationships, and the strong opinion of the media.

Currently, body dissatisfaction is not uncommon among young girls. Past research results told us that current unrealistic standard of female beauty, which puts a particular emphasis on thinness, is the most likely cause of body dissatisfaction among adolescent girls (Fallon, 1990; Heinberg, 1996; Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegel-Moore, 1985). Viewing unrealistic ideal-based images can also result in increased schema activation and anger, as well as to decreased confidence (Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2002). Many social efforts have been made to reduce women’s body dissatisfaction, such as the inclusion of diverse-sized women in women’s magazines (Zacharakis, 2009), the banning of fashion shows and advertisements featuring underweight or very underweight models (Alfano, 2006; BBC, 2012; Dittmaretal, 2009), just to name a few.

The impact of idealized bodies and lives perpetuated by media influence on self-image, self-esteem, and the perception of self has been routinely studied by researchers. The underlying hypothesis of much of this body of literature is that when young people, who are still developing their perceptions of self, are subjected to the idealized images recognized by the sociocultural influences as being ‘the norm’, adolescents are likely to experience negative perceptions of themselves as they fail to live up to the airbrushed, photoshopped, and heavily posed versions of what the human body can look like (Ricciardellia & McCabe, 2001). Indeed, studies have shown that women and girls in particular are more likely to be less satisfied with their own appearance after viewing pictures of thin, attractive models (Richins, 1991). Recent studies have shown that boys do encounter pressure from the media; however, the pressures they face are different from those experienced by girls in that girls face more pressure regarding their