media world

Currently, we live in a skinny ideal world. If you don’t believe me, turn on your TV. You will be subjected to commercials full of people that probably don’t come even close to your body shape. The pressures to fit in are great, especially on young women. You cannot watch anything on TV, read a magazine, drive down any highway or browse the internet without seeing images of tall, thin, beautiful and perfect people publicized all over to sell or promote a product. Basically, unreal people. According to our pop culture, there is some kind of unwritten law that beauty brings a perfect life and a perfect life can only be lived by someone beautiful. Helen Coster describes her perspective on pop culture and states that, “the message society gives adolescent girls is that women should be docile and women should have a perfect body, which is ridiculous. That affects girls’ self-esteem so much.” There is no question that the media is serving as a negative influence on women and their bodies. The ideology and thinking that “thin” is “in” is in the minds of women and being any less than that is unacceptable. Carpenter agrees with Coster and believes that we are living at a time when the media ever more brilliantly portray visual images that exclude most women. The media promote conformity to their version of the female body, and we too often remain entranced by the very images that enslave us. Pop culture is always growing, which leads for the media to grow. With constant advertisements consuming our society about beauty, it is hard to ignore the pressure about one’s self-image. Consequently, if pop culture keeps feeding society the unrealistic figure of how a body should look like, women around the world will persist on suffering from low self-esteem.