10. Women in the Media

In a variety of ways the mass media helped make us the cultural schizophrenics we are today, women who rebel against yet submit to prevailing images about what a desirable, worthwhile woman should be…the mass media has engendered in many women a kind of cultural identity crisis…We are ambivalent toward femininity on the one hand and …feminism in the other" (Douglas 8)
Images of female bodies are everywhere. Women—and their body parts—sell everything from food and shampoo to cars and beer. Popular film and television actresses are becoming younger, taller and thinner.
Women in the Media, they are thin, they have a beautiful skin, beautiful hair, they have a thin waist, they are tall and they have big breasts. They are flawless.
And there is a definite impact these people in media have on for example younger viewers.
Perhaps this is part of the reason that so many teenagers today are unhappy with their appearance and are often on a diet .
But what most women and men don't realize is that every image of a model or actress in a fashion or beauty magazine has been touched-up using the latest computer technology to remove bulges, pimples, stretch marks, etc.


Like the Picture above, i know so many pictures like these, unfortunately i can post them all :)
Even Elizabeth Hurley even admitted that her breasts were electronically enlarged for the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine.
MoreoverJean Kilbourne argues that the overwhelming presence of media images of painfully thin women means that real women’s bodies have become invisible in the mass media. The real tragedy, Kilbourne concludes, is that many women internalize these stereotypes, and judge themselves by the beauty industry's standards. Women learn to compare themselves to other women, and to compete with them for male attention. “This focus on beauty and desirability effectively destroys any awareness and action that might help to change that climate.”

1. picture retrieved on the 5th January, from http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00660/news-graphics-2008-_660936a.jpg

2. picture retrieved on the 5th January from http://photos.commongate.com/11/39234_955jz3tv5v_l.jpg