Body Image

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In the current world, we live in today, media expresses all types of advertisements which frequently include women. For the past few years, media has taken a negative effect on the female population. Our understanding of social media’s effects on how young women know and visualize their bodies when looking through the refracted lens [when] provided by media (Perloff). Young girls seem to be more vulnerable and an easier target because girls yearn to be beautiful. Girls as young as 9 years old have been found to show considerable dissatisfaction with their body shapes (Hill et al.,1994). It was found that two-thirds of a sample of adolescent girls wanted to be thinner (Huenemann et al.,1989). There is a problem in what is being displayed on …show more content…
Females always feel a constant pressure to live up to the expectations seen on media. Young girls idealize and internalize thin-ideal models and judge their body afterwards. The social desirability of thin body shape and physical attractiveness involve young adolescence in actual body comparison (Heinberg & Thompson, 1995). Because self-concept development is a key task of adolescence internalization of the thin ideal as a personal goal from social sources like mass media may operate differently for preadolescents and young adults, who have already passed puberty and therefore acquire the secondary sex characteristics that signal adulthood (Cole et al, 2001, Cole 1996, Harter, 1998). Even when they are viewing animated children's programming such as Disney's classic Cinderella, “children are still exposed to content glamorizing the thin female body ideal; however, this ideal is typically represented in the form of young women” (Herbozo et al, 2004). The results indicate that “both print and electronic media exposure are associated with an increased drive for thinness, leading authors to the conclusion that media exposure fosters internalization of the thin ideal among young female audiences.” Scientists explain how thin internalization puts emphasis on the effects of media exposure on young women. Dittmar and Howard (2004) found that women who reported higher levels of …show more content…
weight gain) associated with puberty act to shift girls away from a thin ideal body type” (Geet al., 1996; Oring et al., 2002). Girls’ body dissatisfaction has been found to predict an array of negative social and psychological outcomes, with severe cases leading to clinical eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia (e.g., Abell & Richards, 1996; Attie & Brooks-Gunn, 1989; Johnson & Wardle, 2005; Killen et al.,
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