Yet Again Another Unrealistic Expectation for Women
While women have made pregnant strides in the past decades, the culture at large continues to identify a cracking emphasis on how women look. These beauty standards, largely proliferated through the media, accept drastic impacts on young women and their body images. Arielle Cutler 'xi, through a Levitt grant, spent the summer evaluating the efficacy of media literacy programs as a remedy to this vicious wheel.
Put simply, the dazzler ideal in American culture is: sparse. "Large populations of 'boilerplate' girls practice not demonstrate clinically diagnosable eating disorders—pathologies that the civilisation marks equally extreme and unhealthy—but rather an entirely normative obsession with trunk shape and size," Cutler said. "This ongoing business concern is accepted as a completely normal and even inevitable part of being a modernistic girl. I recollect nosotros demand to change that."
Anyone who is familiar with American culture knows that many of these cultural standards are established in the media. "Nosotros are constantly surrounded by all sorts of media and we construct our identities in role through media images we run into," Cutler remarked. And the more than girls are exposed to sparse-ideal kinds of media, the more they are dissatisfied with their bodies and with themselves overall.
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The correlation betwixt media paradigm and body image has been proven; in one study, among European American and African American girls ages vii - 12, greater overall television exposure predicted both a thinner ideal adult body shape and a higher level of disordered eating one year afterward.
Boyish girls are the well-nigh strongly affected demographic.
"More and more 12-year-old girls are going on diets because they believe what you lot weigh determines your worth," Cutler observed. "When all yous see is a torso type that only 2 per centum of the population has, it'due south difficult to remember what's real and what's reasonable to expect of yourself and everyone else."
As women have become increasingly enlightened of the outcome of media on their body images, they accept started media literacy programs to make women and girls more aware of the messages they are inadvertently consuming. "Media literacy programs promote an understanding of the effect media has on individual consumers and society at large. These programs aim to reveal the ideologies and letters embedded in the media images that we encounter on a daily basis," Cutler said.
Advertising, she asserts, draws on people's insecurities to convince them to buy a product, and few populations are as insecure overall every bit adolescent girls—which is why media literacy programs are so important for them. In programs such as that designed past national organization Girls, Inc., girls acquire how to look behind the scenes and letters that advertisements are producing in order to reconcile their own bodies with the view of "perfection" presented by the media.
The programs already in place accept been found to be very effective; "College-age women have been the main focus, but 10-11 year-old girls are the most of import target so that they can have these [critical] processes going on before internalizations of messages have actually started," Cutler explained.
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But what sorts of standards do the media portray for women who are non white and not upper class, and how does this affect the torso images of women in these groups? This question, Cutler has constitute, is one that is not always well addressed in the scholarly cloth she has read. "I realized at some point in my enquiry that I had been universalizing the experience of a particular set up of girls privileged by their race and, even more then, socioeconomic background. It did not assistance that this blind-spot was reflected dorsum to me in some of my research," Cutler said.
While she asserts that certain standards of beauty are universal throughout the land and beyond all demographics, Cutler believes that media literacy programs should accept racial and socioeconomic backgrounds more than into consideration. Different groups have dissimilar issues and concerns, she said. For case, overeating is a existent upshot as an eating disorder, especially for lower-grade women. How does this fact change the women's relationship to the beauty ideal?
Cutler is reading studies nigh the body paradigm problem amidst women in the U.S. every bit well as evaluations of media literacy programs. She recommends greater sensitivity to the concerns of non-white, non-upper-form groups in lodge to increase the effectiveness of media literacy programs.
A Lot of Googling!
Since existence posted on the College website in 2010 this story about body prototype has been viewed more than 200,00 times; that'due south 155% more than the second most viewed story.
79% of the page views came from people using a Google search
Users spent vi minutes, 13 secondson the article, which is 133% college than average for stories on Hamilton's site.
On its 10th ceremony, we contacted the writer, Alex Ossola '10, and the researcher, Arielle Cutler '11, for their reactions.
Source: https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/the-medias-effect-on-womens-body-image
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