Documentary

Is the media pressuring the idea "Thin is Beauty and eating disorders are okay"?

Society has this unwritten law that in order for you to be beautiful you have to be thin, we came up with this by looking at models and actresses. Everywhere we look pictures are being posted of thin girls and everyone talks about how beautiful they are, but have you ever stopped and thought about what it has taken them to get so incredibly thin? The answer is probably not. Everyday millions of adolescent teens wake up look in the mirror and hate what they see looking back at them. The world is cold and cruel to those that they see as misfits. In high school girls are even more worried about their body size because all of a sudden some of your friends are getting more compliments and being called beautiful while you are just awkwardly standing there trying not to let it get to you that they said nothing to you. In todays society media promotes "pro-ana" there are even websites that give girls step by step instructions on how to starve themselves and become that thin that everyone thinks is so beautiful, they are not even concerned about the fact that they are slowly killing themselves just to please people that will one day forget about them and they will be stuck fighting to get over something they thought was the answer. you do not have to turn on the TV any more to see thin women any more when you go to the store and look at magazine covers you always see articles about how to lose weight and then you look at the picture and there is this thin beautiful woman and all you want is to look like her because everyone thinks shes so pretty. There has been research proving that when teens see pictures promoting this is beautiful, and they do match up to the picture, they feel unhappy with their bodies. These pictures are all over Facebook, tumblr, instagram,and pintrest.When you see these images and you feel like you want to be that thin think to yourself is it really worth doing something that is going to eventually kill you.

Proof #3

Marika Tiggemann and Hayley K. Dohnt in their article "Body 
 
Image Concerns in Young Girls: The Role of Peers and 

Media Prior to Adolescence." state that  media is an 

important way to spreading socio-cultural ideas to 

adolescents.A sample of 128 were  recruited after 4 years of 

schooling, they were individually asked about their aspects 

of 
body image and what they knew about dieting. After the 

questions were over and the results were reviewed they 

found that by the age of 6 most of the girls wished to have a 

thinner body.They also found that peer and media influences 
 
played a major role in them feeling this way; watching TV 

shows and reading magazines that were appearance 

focused played a role as well. The study highlights that girl 

5-8 already live in a culture where peer and media already 

influence that thin idea.Body image dissatisfaction is known 

as a pervasive problem experienced by a large proportion of 

society.Although initial research targeted
 
adolescence as the age of onset for body dissatisfaction,a 

growing research consensus has now established that 

preadolescent girls ( age 8–11 years) are also dissatisfied 

with their bodies and wish to be thinner.By the age of 6 many 

girls both desire a thinner ideal body and are aware of dieting as a
 
means to achieve this.Socio-cultural models are regarded as 

 providing the most theoretically sound explanation for the 

development of body dissatisfaction and dieting behaviour in 

women and adolescent girls.These models are promoting 

the 

ideal that being thin is what it takes to be seen as beautiful in 

the eye of society.This thin ideal is transmitted and 

reinforced 

through a number of different socio-cultural mechanisms, 

primarily parents, peers and the media.Finding the ‘roots’ of 

body image concern is crucial for the prevention and 

treatment of both eating disorders and depression.In 

contrast, peers and themedia have receivedmuch less 

research attention. However, these influences are very likely 

to be present in the socio-cultural environment of even quite young girls.Young girls may engage in conversations with 

their friends about pop stars or models, thereby reinforcing 

media-presented societal messages of the thin idea.

Proof #2

In The article " A tale of corruption" Arthur Crisp discusses

 

 how a group of colleagues presented the information they

found after doing research to find the impact western

television had on Fijian girls; their finding supported that

such exposure lead to eating disorders and body 

dissatisfaction. They repeated this experiment three years 

later to find an increase in the number of girls with an eating 

disorder. 3/4 of the population said that they felt too fat, and 

wished to lose weight.When asked why they felt this way 

they replied with " Our size might get in the way of us 

receiving out dream jobs, the idea employee is like the thin 

western women on TV." Western television programs, 

including their advertising elements, may now also have 

catered for this educational need, on what is and is not 

acceptable when trying to get to that magic size of 00,in 

Fiji.These Fijian schoolgirls no longer have the experience of 

feeling at home in their bodies because, they are always 

trying to be like all of the super thin women they see all over 

TV. Television has not only corrupted the values of women in 

the U.S but also in Fiji, all of the evidence gathered from

these experiments leads these colleagues to believe that the

connection between media and the way females view their

bodies is undeniably strong. Now, there are websites that

promote "pro-ana" that teach young girls how to adopt tactics

that increase their ability to starve themselves in order to

please society by being, what they consider beautiful,

excessively thin.

Proof #1

In the article “On body image and strategies to both increase and decrease body size among adolescent boys and girls” Marita McCabe and Lina Ricciardelli state that the research conducted found that females were not happy with their bodies and were more likely to try to lose weight due to what they see on TV, Magazines, and the internet. In males it was found that males had attention grabbing eating and exercise patterns, which leads to significant health problems. It was also found that parents play an important role in passing on the sociocultural message dealing with the ideal body to their children. Females see very clearly that society has this opinion that the ideal body type is thin. The research focused on how girls reacted to models sizes. It was found that in adolescent males they became unhappy with their muscle tone not their weight when looking at the males they were observing. The results found highlighted the importance of looking at sociocultural pressures to lose weight or gain muscle tone and mass. Throughout this investigation it was found that more females were dissatisfied with their bodies than males. This research concludes that media does in fact play I vital role in the way people look and feel about their bodies.