The Influence Of Thin Models

“Fashion is killing women’s body image of themselves.” Zac Posen said it all in this quote. With the growing number of extremely thin models, there is also a growing number of women with eating disorders. Does the media contribute to this statistic? Everyday, thousands of images of women who are rail-thin are projected onto ordinary people as beautiful women. There is a larger discrepancy between models and ordinary women than there was ten to twenty-five years ago (Bennett). For example,
“Twenty-five years ago, the average female model weighed 8 percent less than the average American woman, according to researchers. Today, models weigh about 23 percent less than the average woman. Models are also leggier than before. Usually about 5 feet 10 inches tall, they are a good five inches taller than they were 10 years ago. Meanwhile, a typical woman is about 5 feet 4 inches and weighs 155 pounds, according to a 2004 SizeUSA study (Bennett).”
Some of the models are slightly bigger than they seem though. With advances in technology, more and more models are being photoshopped, and made to seem smaller than they are. But when kids see these …show more content…
With all of the pressure to be skinny and beautiful, many models are starving themselves. Some have come forward and talked about how they lived on “lethally small amounts of lettuce and Diet Coke (Bennett).” They don’t have set weight guidelines like men do in sports. However, these weight guidelines are not always a good thing. Some men are told that they need to lose weight before the next weigh-in in order to make the team or make a certain weight class, and many starve themselves in order to do this. In order to reach this goal weight faster, they eat very little or stop eating altogether. How can this be stopped? Perhaps by the regulation of food intake and weight loss of athletes and models alike, and reprimanding them when they do not follow the