“Size zero, long, straight blonde hair, Caucasian, and blue eyes is the look among females seen in Abercrombie and Fitch.” (Harbin). If one were to expect average females to look like these models portrayed in advertisements such as Abercrombie and Fitch’s or the girls from the hit reality TV series The Hills, then all women would be considered attractive and beautiful. Women feel the need to adhere to standards that the media has portrayed. But there’s a catch: In order to achieve the media’s unattainable standards of being thin and beautiful, women would have to drastically change the way they eat, live, and socialize. With that being said, women develop emotional, psychological, social, and eating disorders. The media’s portrayal of a beautiful female has driven average women to drastically change their bodies in order to be satisfied with their own body image.
“Women tend to have a monkey-see, monkey-do attitude. Women see the way other females appear in the media and they try to recreate [that] look” (Harbin). Although, this type of behavior doesn’t have a serious affect on some females, most women strive to look like these women in magazines and television. These women forget that what is “ideal” and what is “desirable” are two different things. Women are starting to feel far less attractive and desirable due to the cultural normalization of what is considered beautiful. “The body parts on displace have become less and less realistic” (Graydon), but most females don’t realize this. Most women know that the images they see on magazines are airbrushed and distorted in some way. With the use of Adobe Photoshop and the possibility of cosmetic surgeries such as breast implants or liposuctions, women on television and magazines look the way they do. Nonetheless, the need to look and feel thin has driven women to compare themselves to mannequin-like bodies and airbrushed faces of other females in magazines.
“One study of a sample of Stanford graduates and undergraduates found that sixty-eight percent of students felt worse about their own appearances after reading women’s magazines” (Harbin). Specifically, an issue of Vogue magazine contains 98 percent advertisement and about 93 percent portray thin and tall females wearing some type of high-end merchandise made for their body type. Teenage girls also feel that they are “[too] fat.” and they would be “be happy if [she] were taller, shorter, had curly hair, straight hair, a smaller nose, bigger muscles, longer legs” (Body Image and Self Esteem). Since the women they see on magazines and television are thin, they feel the need to have a slender body. Sadly “over three-quarters of the covers of women’s magazines include at least one message about how to change a woman’s bodily appearance by diet, exercise, or cosmetic surgery” (Harbin). It may be a consolation to encourage exercise but it’s not usually the first thing women do to attain the thin and beautiful standard. Most women take over-the-counter diet that claim to burn fat and decrease appetite such a Hydroxycut and Ephedra to reach that size zero. These diet pills are far from being safe and they are not FDA approved. Regardless, women take these diet pills as a means of becoming thinner faster.
“Of course, women are not the only targets of the mass media” (Sexton). Men are brainwashed into thinking women should look like the women they see on television and magazines. With this kind of pressure, women are likely to engage in unhealthy lifestyles to look like Megan Fox or Jenna Jameson. Men admire other men with attractive female partners. “Thus, female beauty may be an asset, not only of personal significance for individual women, but it also may be of additional social significance for men” (Beauty Politics and Patriarchy: The Impact on Women’s Lives). Women don’t like to feel that they are not beautiful enough for their significant other, nor would they want to be compared to other females who “seem” to look better. Women relate their physical attractiveness to their “overall feeling of self-esteem” (Beauty Politics and Patriarchy: The Impact on Women’s Lives). Women who are able to adhere to the media’s standards of beauty are considered to be society’s way of saying it is “simply [being] feminine” (Beauty Politics and Patriarchy: The Impact on Women’s Lives). Also, being attractive can lead to better opportunities such job offers, promotions, and other incentives that come with being thin and beautiful. Today, models did not attain their jobs because they were voluptuous. The “size zero, five feet and seven inches tall” standard has to come into play. Even in the normal everyday society beauty has its perks: “it has been well-established that pretty waitresses make better tips than unattractive waitress” (Sexton).
