The Beauty Myth

Yesterday’s conversation regarding the beauty myth just proved why the beauty myth is such a huge problem. Many people, men and women, simply think that it is not a real problem or at least that it is very over exaggerated. I believe that the pressure that is put on women to look a certain way is in fact a very big problem. The images that are displayed all over the media are of women with unrealistic bodies and standards of beauty. The super models on walkways, commercials, and magazines, are no where close to what an average healthy women looks like. They are in fact anomalies within society (whether they naturally look that way, are air brushed, or partake in activities like excessive dieting and exercising to look that way). And yet the average woman begins to believe that that is what she is supposed to look like.

The issue of health kept being brought up yesterday. There is a huge difference between being healthy and thinking that your body does not meet the requirements of beauty laid out by today’s society. Many very healthy women believe they are fat because they are not a size zero. What is not healthy (physically or mentally) is when those healthy women try to become a size zero and force their body to be something it is not. It is one thing to say that educated, adult women should know better then to think they should look like a super model, but very young impressionable girls probably do not know this. The repetition of these images of beauty will eventually lead them to believe that that is what beauty is and they should try to be that.

The issue is that the media has a responsibility to society, and society has a responsibility to the media, to not do things that will harm the public. I fully agree that a huge part of the problem is that consumers continue to purchase goods, buy magazines, etc. that contain images or are marketed with images of these super model women. The public needs to start demanding that the media portray a variety of body types to mirror what women look like in real life.