There has been extensive research focusing on the way women are predicted in the media and how this display directly affects the way women feel about themselves, especially adolescent girls. A woman’s adolescent years are crucial to the way she develops as a person, both behaviorally and psychologically. These are the years that she will forge a personal identity, a self-concept, and an orientation toward achievement that will play a significant role in shaping their success in school, work, and life. To further describe the stages of development, psychologist Erik Erikson formed a psychosocial theory based on the progression of one’s personality. He describes the adolescent stage as the internal conflict of identity vs. role confusion because during this time, one tries to find their place in society. Girls at this age often look towards their role models to help shape their identity, who are, in most cases, celebrities or other women in positions of power or influence who have all the qualities associated with the unrealistic standards of beauty that young girls are constantly exposed to. Nowadays, most teenagers have cell phones and can easily keep up with celebrities, models, and all things pop culture in just a click of a button. There was a study conducted by Borzekowski and Bayer that describes the effects of easily accessible media on adolescents. They stated that more than “two-thirds of adolescents have used the internet for health information, either personal or academic reasons. They also found that young girls who read beauty or fashion magazines are more likely to reduce their caloric intake to 1200 or less calories per day. They are also said to have greater body dissatisfaction and greater drive for thinness,” (Bayer, 2005).
Body dissatisfaction is very common and was the topic of a study conducted by Grabe, Hyde, and Ward in 2008. 50% of the girls and undergraduate women that they surveyed claimed to feel body dissatisfaction. Grabe, et al. linked this feeling of inadequacy to “critical physical and mental health problems,” leaving one experiencing these negative feelings at a greater risk for developing an eating disorder. They summarized how the unrealistic expectations for one’s body image, as shown in the media, gives adolescent girls a false idea of what is “normal” and is dangerous to both the mental and physical health of young women. According to a study conducted by Wiseman and colleagues, they found that there had been a dramatic increase in diet advertisements from 1973-1991. The additional increase in diet advertisements was also recorded in a study by Anderson and Didomenico in 1992. They found that women’s magazines had 10.5 times the diet promotions compared to men’s magazines, placing an unequal pressure on women to achieve a constructed definition of thinness.
Studies have shown that the standard for female beauty has been becoming thinner and thinner over the past three decades, creating a larger gap between measurements of the idealized body and the body of an average young woman. In past years, models weighed an average of 8% less than the average woman, but now, they weigh almost 25% less, according to a study conducted by Seid. An analysis of 500 Playboy centerfolds during the years 1985-1997 supported this trend, discovering that “three-fourths of the models had body mass indexes of 17.5 or below–the American Psychological Association’s criterion for anorexia nervosa,” (Wiseman, et al, 1992). These studies go to show how media and popular, even glorified, magazines, such as Playboy, are promoting this archetype of physical appearance and attraction, leading young women to believe that they need to look like centerfolds in order for men, or others in general, to find them attractive and desirable.
But just how much influence do magazines have on a girl’s self-image and esteem? More research has been conducted to target the media’s effect on girls’ weight concerns, perception of body-image, and the methods of which these girls use to lose weight or control their figure. There have been several cross-sectional studies that have described this positive association between reading fashion magazines and weight concerns or symptoms of eating disorders. Girls as young as 9 years old began purging at least once a month in order to achieve the level of thinness shown in movies, television, and magazines. In this study, Field et al surveyed almost 6,000 girls between the ages of nine and fourteen who claimed that they did not purge or take laxatives in order to lose or control their weight. They followed up with these participants a year after the initial survey and found that “74 girls began using vomiting or laxatives at least once a month to control their weight,” (Field et al, 1999). This study came to the conclusion that these behavioral changes stemmed from an innate desire to be accepted by their peers and by society as a whole. In order to change the prevalence of eating and mental disorders associated with low self-esteem cultivated by unrealistic standards of beauty in the media, advertisements, television, and magazines, industries should incorporate more diverse and inclusive models that accurately represent the majority of women in society. Similarly, 548 fifth-twelfth grade girls self-reported how often they read fashion magazine, in addition to their attitudes and behavior relating to diet and exercise for a cross-sectional survey. The conductors controlled for weight status, school level, and racial group, but the results revealed that those who read fashion magazines more frequently were “twice as likely to have dieted and three times as likely to have initiated an exercise program to lose weight, than infrequent readers,” (Field et al, 1999).
There has been a lot of research discussing the correlation between body image, societal pressure, and eating disorders, as well. In Fiji, Becker et al performed a cross-sectional design in order to compare two groups of schoolgirls before and after “prolonged regional television exposure with a modified 26-item eating attitudes test, supplemented with a semi-structured interview to confirm self-reported symptoms,” (Becker et al, 2002) the girls who watched the eating attitudes test, showed key indicators of disordered eating, suggesting the negative effects that television has on the behavior and eating attitudes compared to those who weren’t previously exposed to media. Because society idolizes an unhealthy and potentially hazardous ideal of beauty and perfection, it also promotes the unhealthy and drastic methods that women need to take in order to achieve such an unachievable goal.
Research done by Kilbourne in 2010 supports the fact that young women are set up for failure when they try to obtain a “perfect body,” describing how girls learn to grow up comparing themselves to the women seen in advertisements and how “failure to live up to them is inevitable because they are based on a flawlessness that doesn’t exist,” (Kilbourne 2010). The pictures, posts, and magazine covers that society reads all retouch the models illustrated throughout them. Therefore, women are striving to achieve something that the model doesn’t even actually have. Cellulite is smoothened out, breasts are enhanced, and waists are shrunken amongst many other technological tricks and edits used by the media to portray an unfeasible archetype of the perfect female body and perfect physical appearance.
This constant pressure placed on women by an environment they long to be accepted into has been shown to negatively affect physical health, as previously discussed, but it also affects one’s mental health in a way that is both dangerous and even fatal. Young women with low self-esteem or body image issues are more likely to be depressed, anxious, or suicidal compared to those who are satisfied with their appearance. Our society places such a high value on our physical appearance and how others perceive us, placing self-image at the center of teenage concern, affecting their well-being. It is difficult for girls with negative self-image to think positively about their bodies if they’re constantly comparing theirs to others. Multiple studies have been conducted to determine the lengths at which women will go to obtain the image they want and how harmful these methods are to their health
Researchers at Brown Medical School conducted a study with adolescent patients at Bradley Hospital to determine a causal relationship between body image and weight concerns such as body dysmorphic disorder, eating disorders, and mental disorders — depression and anxiety. The study found that “one third of inpatient adolescents had problematic image concerns and that these patients were more severely ill than other adolescent inpatients in several important domains. Those with eating disorders had significantly higher rates of depression than those without body image concerns,” (Dyl, 2006). It is often hard to recognize these hints of depression in adolescent women due to the prevalence and normalization of body dissatisfaction within society. It isn’t normal to want to starve yourself, or even worse, want to harm yourself just because you do not look like the retouched model walking down the runway. When trying to treat patients with psychological distress, professionals often don’t target body image problems, but rather treat symptoms of mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and PTSD.
In this same study, researchers found that only one out of fourteen participants with body dysmorphic disorder were clinically diagnosed. This is due to the fact that clinicians don’t ask enough questions about body dysmorphic disorder and eating habits, in addition to the fact that girls with body image problems are likely to be too embarrassed to answer honestly and refuse to seek treatment. It is very important to try and recognize signs of body and eating disorders, as well as negative self-image in teens because, if not treated, these concerns could turn into a more chronic condition in the future. Adults who participated in this study also reported that their feelings of body dissatisfaction started in their adolescents. Bradley’s study recorded how body image concerns take up much of a teenage girl’s life, taking up a lot of “mental energy and detracting from their quality of life,” (Dyl, 2006). Therefore, it is imperative for teens to “verbalize their negative feelings and concerns about their appearance in order to get them to value themselves as individuals and recognize the importance of other non-weight, or non-appearance-based qualities and activities as contributors to their self-esteem and self-worth,” (Dyl, 2006). Instead of placing such a high value on appearance, the media should promote healthy lifestyles, diversity, uniqueness, and realistic body expectations, to decrease body image concerns and the negative health effects that come with these concerns.
The role of attractiveness within our society has been studied by many. It seems as though everyone wants to look a certain way. We idolize celebrities and strive to be just like them — to have the perfect nose, perfect eyebrows, and perfect body. Even though perfect isn’t something one can achieve, some still strive to achieve it with the assistance of cosmetic surgery. Television shows such as Botched show the dangers of cosmetic surgery in the way that it portrays botched cosmetic surgeries and the process that these qualified surgeons go through in order to fix them. Shows like this provide awareness of the risks of cosmetic surgeries, but also highlight the prevalence and normalcy of getting such procedures to “fix” a part of their appearance. The patients on these shows illustrate just how far some people are willing to go to change the way they look, and sometimes, even in order to look like someone else. The role of reality television and the increasing percentage of plastic surgeries performed in the United States was examined in a study conducted by Crockett, et al. In this study, forty-two first-time patients seeking plastic surgery were surveyed about their perception of cosmetic surgery as shown on television compared to their own experience, and how that perception affected their decision to proceed with their surgery. Of the forty-two patients, fifty-seven percent of them were deemed as “high-intensity” viewers of plastic surgery reality television shows. In conclusion, those who regularly watched one or more reality television shows “reported a greater influence from television and media to pursue cosmetic surgery, felt more knowledgeable about cosmetic surgery in general, and felt that plastic surgery reality television was more similar to real life than did low-intensity viewers,” (Crocket et al, 2007). The increasing exposure of plastic surgery in the media has influenced the way people view these procedures and has had an effect of impacting the rates of surgeries performed per year.
Similarly to this study, Adrian Furnham, et al. aimed to determine how the media has negatively affected self-image, and how these negative effects have pushed women to undergo cosmetic surgeries. Researchers surveyed 204 participants regarding their views on cosmetic/plastic surgery, as well as their introspective views on body image, body satisfaction, and self-esteem. This study summarized that “females with low self-esteem, low life satisfaction, low self-rated attractiveness and little religious beliefs who were heavy television watchers reported a greater likelihood of undergoing cosmetic surgery,” (Furnham 2012). This greater likelihood can be attributed to the fact that many celebrities and social media influencers have undergone plastic surgery themselves. Adolescent women, especially, look up to these celebrities as role models and constantly compare themselves to them, which can be seen as a factor in why rates of cosmetic surgeries performed are increasing. Harrison (2003) also found that “exposure to the thin and ideal body images on television predicted young people’s acceptance of cosmetic surgery to achieve ideal” proportions.
Many studies have shown how social media has been a source of advertisement for celebrity plastic surgeons which can be potentially dangerous. A study conducted by the Aesthetic Surgery Journal observed that only 18% of the 1.7 million posts on Instagram that contained plastic surgery related hashtags were posted by “board-certified plastic surgeons. Others were posted by barbers, salons, dentists, and other non-certified physicians, putting patients who respond to ads at risk,” said the study. Just because a cosmetic surgeon has a lot of followers on social media, does not make them a certified professional. This trend shows just how influential social media is on the way we perceive things, such as surgery, in addition to how we perceive ourselves.
There has been a 115% increase in cosmetic procedures in the United States since 2000, but the specific types of procedures have been shown to be shifting, “influenced by the people they follow on social media.” For example, Kylie Jenner is one of the biggest social media influencers of our time and a study from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that “66% of facial plastic surgeons said that nonsurgical procedures such as lip fillers used by social media and reality TV stars were the most common in their practice,” out of 2,500 surgeons. Kylie Jenner has been coined to be the “queen of selfies,” inspiring all young women to try and achieve the perfect selfie and the same amount of likes and internet admiration as these celebrities do. Almost half of plastic surgeons that were surveyed by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery said that “looking better in selfies on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook was an incentive for getting surgery,” demonstrating how social media not only affects the way we wish to look in real life, but online as well.
To summarize, multiple studies have proven that there is a relationship between the way the media portrays women and the way that women, especially adolescent women, feel about themselves. Social media has sparked a trend of unrealistic beauty standards that society is still striving towards, and the actions taken in order to achieve this “perfect” physical appearance have been demonstrated to be potentially dangerous. Therefore, advertisements and media platforms in general, should aim towards promoting realistic standards of beauty and uniqueness in order to reduce the negative mental health effects associated with the “thin ideal” portrayal.