Perfect Body With an alarming 50 percent of 3-to-6 year old girls worrying about their weight, it makes you wonder, what are we doing wrong? (Hanes). If I were to ask you, what do you consider the perfect body, how would you respond? Most girls would reply: thin body, skinny waist, and big breasts. In today’s society, the media controls all aspects of our lives. From popular Smartphone applications such as Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr to advertisements and movies, the media has managed to distort the image of beauty. The highly sexualized world we live in today promotes the image of the perfect body by mass producing Barbie dolls and Disney princess dolls causing girls to begin to glorify the unrealistic body image at a young age. Peer influence
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On the application Instagram, you can view other peoples posts and post your own pictures. Women are now comparing themselves to other women through this application causing feelings of shame and anxiety to arise. Seeing a picture of a beautiful girl may cause you to look back at the picture you had just posted and see only flaws (“Does Instagram Promote Positive Body Image?”). Twitter is the same concept as Instagram. Users can “tweet” about their body, following up the tweet with a picture of themselves or another girl causing the viewer to negatively reflect on their body and ask themselves, why don’t I look like that? Jannath Ghaznavi, a member in the Department of Communication found that, “25 percent of female Internet users over 18 and 8 percent of Internet users between the ages of 12-17,” are being exposed to images on Twitter with, “Explicitness of attire, sexual suggestiveness, and social endorsement.” Ghaznavi also states that, “[On] Twitter, about eight percent of the 'thinspiration ' images also had pro-eating disorder tag” (Scutti). Tumblr may be the worst offenders in promoting unrealistic body images and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Tumblr is a place where users can find images for keywords that describe the image allowing specific photos to be easily found. Some blogs on Tumblr promote extreme thinness, or a concept known …show more content…
Different ethnic groups place greater emphasis on achieving the perfect body than others. The more emphasis that is being placed on one to be thin, the higher the levels of body dissatisfaction. African-American women tend to have a larger, more full bodies than Caucasian women; however, African-American women have greater body satisfaction than Caucasian women (Presnell). Not only does one’s ethnicity contribute to the pressure to have a perfect body, but also the influence of your parents. It has been proven that, “Direct messages from parents encouraging their children to lose weight predict higher drives for thinness and body dissatisfaction among daughters” (Presnell). The more criticism parents throw at their children increase the children’s chances in body dissatisfaction. Peer influence also plays a big part in the pressure to have the perfect body. If many of your friends are going on a new diet, you are going to want to join too. Dieting is an example of the bandwagon effect. You don’t want to be left behind once all your friends go on it. In The Skinny Sweepstakes, a girl named Chloe explains that, “A lot of girls at school would skip meals. We’d do it together. We went on fad diets together too”(Marano). Peer and parental influence puts a lot of pressure to have the perfect body because you don’t want to disappoint your parents or
On the application Instagram, you can view other peoples posts and post your own pictures. Women are now comparing themselves to other women through this application causing feelings of shame and anxiety to arise. Seeing a picture of a beautiful girl may cause you to look back at the picture you had just posted and see only flaws (“Does Instagram Promote Positive Body Image?”). Twitter is the same concept as Instagram. Users can “tweet” about their body, following up the tweet with a picture of themselves or another girl causing the viewer to negatively reflect on their body and ask themselves, why don’t I look like that? Jannath Ghaznavi, a member in the Department of Communication found that, “25 percent of female Internet users over 18 and 8 percent of Internet users between the ages of 12-17,” are being exposed to images on Twitter with, “Explicitness of attire, sexual suggestiveness, and social endorsement.” Ghaznavi also states that, “[On] Twitter, about eight percent of the 'thinspiration ' images also had pro-eating disorder tag” (Scutti). Tumblr may be the worst offenders in promoting unrealistic body images and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Tumblr is a place where users can find images for keywords that describe the image allowing specific photos to be easily found. Some blogs on Tumblr promote extreme thinness, or a concept known …show more content…
Different ethnic groups place greater emphasis on achieving the perfect body than others. The more emphasis that is being placed on one to be thin, the higher the levels of body dissatisfaction. African-American women tend to have a larger, more full bodies than Caucasian women; however, African-American women have greater body satisfaction than Caucasian women (Presnell). Not only does one’s ethnicity contribute to the pressure to have a perfect body, but also the influence of your parents. It has been proven that, “Direct messages from parents encouraging their children to lose weight predict higher drives for thinness and body dissatisfaction among daughters” (Presnell). The more criticism parents throw at their children increase the children’s chances in body dissatisfaction. Peer influence also plays a big part in the pressure to have the perfect body. If many of your friends are going on a new diet, you are going to want to join too. Dieting is an example of the bandwagon effect. You don’t want to be left behind once all your friends go on it. In The Skinny Sweepstakes, a girl named Chloe explains that, “A lot of girls at school would skip meals. We’d do it together. We went on fad diets together too”(Marano). Peer and parental influence puts a lot of pressure to have the perfect body because you don’t want to disappoint your parents or