African American Women

Literature Review:
Increasing eating disorders amongst teenage girls in correlation to women portrayed in music videos

Young woman face numerous obstacles and confusion about their body image in everyday life. A lot of teenage female’s views of their body relates to what is displayed in music videos. Music videos are made partly to promote fashion, the music itself, and uphold trends. However, they tend to focus mainly the physical appearances of young people. These trends promote the ideal to be as thin and flawless as possible. This ultimately reinforces eating disorders in young females.
A number of females agree to the feeling of wanting to be thin. A study by Marika Tiggemann, Ph.D, (1996), was designed to test the correlation between
The method of testing, of whether or not female teens sense of body image were affected by music videos, consisted of questionnaires given to 522 females in the surrounding communities. The study focused on the depictions of females in rap music videos. Davies concluded, from the information gathered, that rap music videos contained more drug substance abuse and explicit sexual content involving females when compared with rock, country rhythm and blues music videos. Davies also concludes that African-American youths are exposed to 3.3 hours of black entertainment music videos, otherwise known as B.E.T. Davies says BET depicts scenes that objectify African-American women. The videos portray an unrealistic standard on how women should look, and often female teens want to achieve this look. According to the music videos, it is only desirable if the women have curves in the “right” places and an overall thin-like appearance. This study could have been expanded to include numerous ethnical groups, simply because the channel B.E.T does not just target African American youths but youths in general. The music videos on B.E.T expose all ethnicities of females and could play a part in youths feeling dissatisfied with their body type. Davies results may be altered if more female teens with different backgrounds who watch BET are added to the
2007) writes about a researcher named Tara Liegh-Fleming, who explores body image views of Aboriginal girls. Leigh-Fleming gains her insight by holding an interactive discussion group called, “Body Talk”. She felt that basic surveying, the approach that other researchers had done, may not be as effective as group conversations with the young women themselves. Body Talk, is a monthly discussion group set to unveil the full intricacies about how young females deal with the pressure from media exposure. While Leigh-Flemming obtains information from these group talks and adds it to her research she also wants to provide help and awareness for teenage females. This method of research is based on personally interviewing teens while providing support for towards their feelings of their body image. This relates to eating disorders by letting the teens distinguish between realistic and unrealistic body imaging. Conversations would stress the importance to not to starve oneself to achieve the unrealistic standards of media, including music videos. The method of gaining information through conversation would be more effective for data