Media and Teen's Body Image Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Media and Teens Body Image - Essay ExampleMedia creates a negative personify image of young girls portraying and popularizing very thin models and distorted bodies. Such displays undo associations of femininity with excess, over-indulgence and lack of control. Women with eating disorders are merely the extreme version of the far-flung need for a slender body prompted by the opposition in consumer culture between discipline and excess. Bordo (1989), one of the most popular feminist writers and critics, suggests that eating disorders characterize the late western self. In this case, media becomes the most influential source of information which forms tastes and preferences of young girls. Following Holmstrom (2004)Research has shown that a discrepancy between the actual self (attributes you and others rely you possess) and the ideal self (attributes you or others believe you should possess) can produce negative emotional states such as sadness, discouragement, and depression. An av erage girl may be discouraged by the discrepancy between her body and that of the media ideal (196).Statistical results vividly portrays that the incidence of bulimia nervosa (one to two per 100 women) and anorexia nervosa (one per 1,000 women) of western women suggests a social pathology (Gauntlett 78). Also, a canvas of readers of the popular magazine, Vogue, suggested that almost 15 % of 25- to 24-year-old respondents were anorexic or bulimic. These results correlated with respondents extreme concern about their body images, self esteem and ability to cope with dialect (Gauntlett 80). Young girls over-estimated their own body size and identified over-thin models as their ideal body shape. Increasingly, analysis of anorexia has been linked to feelings of powerlessness. Critics (Snow 187) underline that what begins as a refusal to be department of the power structure becomes a form of power and control in the behavior itself.For many girls, ideal body images represent adulthood and independence. Bordo (1989) argues that media practices produce self-regulating female subjects through with(predicate) the demonstration of control over the physical body (29). Through processes of self-monitoring and self-regulation of the body, multiple demands and conflicts placed upon it could be accommodated. Bordo states that the preoccupation with the internal management of the body is produced by instabilities in the macroregulation of desire within the system of the social body (Bordo 1989, 96). Media depicts and popularizes an ideal body image which becomes standards for many girls. Femininity is constructed as a process of selecting an ideal image and adapting usable clothing and cosmetics to realize an approximation to that ideal (Gauntlett 28). Attributes of femininity are also shaped by the