Body Images and Popular Culture in China

Chen clams that Chinese girls have stronger preferences for a thin ideal predict body dissatisfaction because it has been rooted in Chinese history for centuries as their traditional idea. However, I believe that this is not the case, because the mass media and western ideas have a strong impact on today’s China. Young Chinese women have often said like a habit, “I want to be skinny.” Why do Chinese do they desperately wish to be slim or prefer to be thinner? There are many popular and famous celebrities who are typically skinny in China. The mass media pervades the everyday lives of people living in Chinese society. It plays an important role in influencing their attitudes on how they view themselves in term of body image. Not only influencing them on styles, fashions, and makeups but body images dealing with society’s standard what is beautiful and cute. They are powerful conveyors of the sociocultural ideals, so they can illustrate people’s mind about body images. Especially Chinese women are engaged in a rational struggle to understand the significance of pubertal weight and shape changes in a culture and full of confusing messages about female sexuality and female desires. The mass media and interpersonal influences on body image affect many young Chinese women. They create the body images as a message to the society, and the message spread among young Chinese women. Appearance pressure associates with body dissatisfaction. The message spread through typically TV, magazines, advertising, and films. In Dong’s “Who Is Afraid of Chinese Modern Girl,” she describes high class of modern Chinese girl’s qualities are appeared in the mass media. The figures are considered as good and respectable women figures in China. She states, “The magazine juxtaposed photos of real women with advertising images and fashion sketches and created a space for imaging the modern by blending reality, desire, and fantasy” (Dong 196). According to magazines’ surveys, majority of