Rough Draft formal paper #2

How exposure to media effects a woman’s standards of body image

Dear, _________

Women everywhere are being constantly bombarded with images of beautiful, half-naked, skinny “role models” and it is effecting the way that girls view themselves, consequently lowering their self esteem.

In our society today, it is becoming increasingly harder for a woman to fit the standards of what the media portrays as beautiful.  We all want to be seen as attractive, and that’s not a crime, however 

In the United States today, we are constantly bombarded with images of the “ideal” man or woman, and these images effect us and shape what we come to know as our “generalized other.”  Our generalized other “functions as a sort of monitoring or measuring device with which individuals may judge their own actions against those of their generalized conceptions of how members of society are expected to act.” (Devor, 530) In our world today, media is one of the main factors that shapes and idealizes our conception of the “self.” This __?___ particularly effects the females in our society. Since we are subconsciously comparing ourselves to what we see on movies, television shows, magazines, and on billboards and ads everywhere we go.  The images we see contain attractive females, with bangin’ bodies, beauty, and sex appeal.  In our patriarchal society, it is easy for women to be pressured into placing priority in vanity and appearance, since females in our society haven’t exactly been (something about how women were confined to the home and domestic tasks

 Media has created this idea of beauty that we are pressured to conform to, and consequently we learn what is acceptable to be considered beautiful in our society.

As women, we are expected to look good for the opposite sex and essentially turn ourselves into objects for men in this male dominated society, and this can have extreme consequences for girls who compare themselves to the images of women that they see in the media.  Shelly Grabe, a professor at the University of Wisconsin stated, "I want to stress that it's totally normal for women to want to be attractive, but what's happening in our society is that many women are striving toward something that's not very realistic or obtainable, and that leads to a lot of health consequences." (Grabe)  In a society with rising rates of obesity and eating disorders, girls face many obstacles to fit into the expectations of our society’s idea of what is attractive and desirable.  The most devastating consequence of our medias skewed portrayal of beauty: the distorted and unrealistic standards females compare and judge themselves by.  This unrealistic portrayal of beauty in our media greatly effects women in our society to strive to be the rail-think barbies that they see on TV and in magazines.

The images in media portray extremely beautiful woman in skin-tight and skimpy clothing, with perfect symmetrical faces and rockin’ bodies. Take Cosmopolitan Magazine for example, with a different beautiful bombshells on the cover every month surrounded by sex, dieting, and beauty tips.  The message of the magazine reads loud and clear: stay skinny, always look pretty and use sex to your advantage.  Girls are pressured to place a high priority on their looks