Effects of the Media on Women's Body Image
             Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In the eyes of society, women like Pamela Anderson, Tyra Banks and Carmen Electra are the epitome of perfection. What girl would not want to be just like them? Every year, millions of people are hurting themselves trying to be carbon copies of these sex symbols. The media presents society with unrealistic body types promoting people, especially women, to look like them. Through TV shows, commercials, magazines or any form of advertising, the media enforces a certain body type which women emulate. The so-called perfect body type causes many negative effects on women in the US. Women who focus on unrealistic body images tend to have lower self-esteem and are more likely to fall prey to eating disorders. The media has a dangerous influence on women's health in the United States. The media is a primary factor in the development and maintenance of women's body image problems.
             Women start to feel insecure about their bodies by looking at media images daily. This provokes women to diet more because they feel more pressure to be slim. "But advertisers are not particularly wicked people who set out to delude and mislead us. They simply provide images that we find seductive. Advertisers are the voice of society projected on a billboard or a TV screen" (Buckroyd 52). The magazine racks in any local store are saturated with magazines highlighting beautiful women adorning the covers. Commercials on TV feature tall, thin women promoting a certain product. The media presents an unrealistic body type for girls to look up to. They do not reflect on images from everyday life. When walking around in any place, very few people look like the women in commercials, most of them thin, but not overly so. Flawless images appear so often in daily life, it's hard to remember that they are not real. Often many girls don't...