Essay On Media And Body Image

Especially for young and impressionable children and adolescents, the idea of what is desirable is affected by what they observe. Because media consumption in the United States has grown indefinitely over the years, most of what children observe come from television, movies, and social media. In all of these platforms, children observe what society deems as a desirable: beautiful, slim woman, and tall, muscular men. This in turn causes young people to create concerns about their own body image, weight and shape. This paper will focus on the way an adolescent’s body image and self perception about their weight and size is influenced by the media, as well as how media can be positively incorporated into their lives. Firstly, it is important to understand how much media the youth of today are actually exposed to. In today’s current day and age, adolescents are flooded with an influx of media, from television and films, to music and social media. Research suggests that, on average, “a child or adolescent watches up to 5 hours of television per day” and “spends and average of 6 to 7 hours viewing various media …show more content…
Well, research suggests that a large percentage of adolescents are dissatisfied with their bodies, with a larger amount of young girls reporting more body dissatisfaction than young boys. As said before, in many cases, girls in these studies reported a desire to weigh less while the boys wanted to be more muscular. To see how this desire correlated with the media, an analysis which involved just female participants explored the effect of media exposure of slim bodies on body image. What was discovered was that the was a significant increase in the amount of negative body image after viewing images that emphasized a slender body compared to after observing images regular or plus sized women and inanimate objects. Even more concerning was that this “effect was found to be stronger in women younger than 19 year of age.” ADD