Persuasive Essay On How Thin Is Too Thin
How thin is too thin?
Liz Harten
We see them everywhere we go. While in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, on line in the grocery store, on our coffee tables and in our mailboxes. Magazines will always be around and will always convey the same messages. “Get pretty now”, “How I got thin”, “and 25 new diet secrets”. Are you trying to tell us were ugly and fat? Big shot magazines may not be trying to tell us that but it is the idea the young teenage girls have in their heads.
There are so many major women’s magazines out today; all of them have been sporting the same messages for years. In 1984 Glamour magazine put a survey out to women asking them about their body image. The first of its kind it brought back some pretty shocking results. 75% of women thought they were too fat, 60% of women …show more content…
surveyed said they were ashamed or dissatisfied with their stomachs, hips and thighs. We would hope that now over two decades later women would feel differently, we would hope that in 26 years the media could change these results. To test this Glamour did another poll. The same questions. The same sample size. But hopefully different results. Sorry Glamour not so lucky. In 2010 50% percent of women surveyed we unhappy with their bodies. This is just one magazines poll but most experts had predicted these results for Glamour and similar magazines.
Unfortunately for most teenagers all of this bad influence comes at you at once. You’re just starting high school and what most girls want is to be accepted. They want to find a group of friends and be accepted by those friends. For advice they go, not to their parents but to their magazines. To a fifteen-year-old that is the bible and if I listen to what is says then I will be accepted. Even if that means dying my hair, losing twenty pounds and buying all new make-up. At least I’ll have friends right?
Magazines influence their readers in three main ways. Articles about appearance, here you will find pull out exercises to save, new healthy snacks to try, how to dress for your body type. These are great steps to start with. Until your three days in and it’s not working or your body is not matching up with what the magazine says it should. Here young girls start to compare their developing bodies to models and begin to think “Why don’t I look like that?”
Advertisements are everywhere in the major magazines.
Seventeen starts off their mag with 7 strait pages of advertisements, Cosmo Girl! Had 12 and Teen Vogue, though less ads in the beginning makes up for it with one on every other page of their magazine. That’s a little ridiculous don’t you think? These ads are all covered from top to bottom with underweight women and oiled up, muscular men. They send out an image that if you want to be as happy as I am in this picture then you have to look like this, that in order to look like this you need to buy this product. And teenage girls do.
It’s the photos clearly that are what make girls so badly about themselves. They see perfect retouched models and believe that that is what they should look like. Unrealistic as these pictures may be we can’t help but to want to look like that. In a survey given to 20,000 teenage girls “70% said that magazines strongly influenced what they thought was the ideal body type”. You’ve seen all of these before we walk past them everyday where exactly are the negative influence? It’s easier to spot than you think. Let’s look at some quotes from the covers of 3 popular women’s
magazines. Exercise Related “Walk your way to slim”
“10 Lbs in 10 days!”
“Get Flat Abs”
Beauty Related
“So Long Cellulite”
“Perfect Skin Tips”
“526 Ways to Look Beautiful”
Right here when you first glance at the magazines you can see all of the ways you can enhance your appearance. These are the magazines company’s ways of getting the reader to open the magazine, and they work! Images of female bodies are everywhere. Women—and their body parts—sell everything from food to cars. Popular film and television actresses are becoming younger, taller and thinner. Some have even been known to faint on the set from lack of food. Women’s magazines are full of articles urging that if they can just lose those last twenty pounds, they’ll have it all—the perfect marriage, loving children, and a rewarding career. This is not going to happen but if no one begins to stand up to it now our children will believe the same things our generation did. When women start to stand up to the images the media present then maybe in another 20 years the percent of women who do not like their body types will go down a lot more.
Liz Harten
We see them everywhere we go. While in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, on line in the grocery store, on our coffee tables and in our mailboxes. Magazines will always be around and will always convey the same messages. “Get pretty now”, “How I got thin”, “and 25 new diet secrets”. Are you trying to tell us were ugly and fat? Big shot magazines may not be trying to tell us that but it is the idea the young teenage girls have in their heads.
There are so many major women’s magazines out today; all of them have been sporting the same messages for years. In 1984 Glamour magazine put a survey out to women asking them about their body image. The first of its kind it brought back some pretty shocking results. 75% of women thought they were too fat, 60% of women …show more content…
surveyed said they were ashamed or dissatisfied with their stomachs, hips and thighs. We would hope that now over two decades later women would feel differently, we would hope that in 26 years the media could change these results. To test this Glamour did another poll. The same questions. The same sample size. But hopefully different results. Sorry Glamour not so lucky. In 2010 50% percent of women surveyed we unhappy with their bodies. This is just one magazines poll but most experts had predicted these results for Glamour and similar magazines.
Unfortunately for most teenagers all of this bad influence comes at you at once. You’re just starting high school and what most girls want is to be accepted. They want to find a group of friends and be accepted by those friends. For advice they go, not to their parents but to their magazines. To a fifteen-year-old that is the bible and if I listen to what is says then I will be accepted. Even if that means dying my hair, losing twenty pounds and buying all new make-up. At least I’ll have friends right?
Magazines influence their readers in three main ways. Articles about appearance, here you will find pull out exercises to save, new healthy snacks to try, how to dress for your body type. These are great steps to start with. Until your three days in and it’s not working or your body is not matching up with what the magazine says it should. Here young girls start to compare their developing bodies to models and begin to think “Why don’t I look like that?”
Advertisements are everywhere in the major magazines.
Seventeen starts off their mag with 7 strait pages of advertisements, Cosmo Girl! Had 12 and Teen Vogue, though less ads in the beginning makes up for it with one on every other page of their magazine. That’s a little ridiculous don’t you think? These ads are all covered from top to bottom with underweight women and oiled up, muscular men. They send out an image that if you want to be as happy as I am in this picture then you have to look like this, that in order to look like this you need to buy this product. And teenage girls do.
It’s the photos clearly that are what make girls so badly about themselves. They see perfect retouched models and believe that that is what they should look like. Unrealistic as these pictures may be we can’t help but to want to look like that. In a survey given to 20,000 teenage girls “70% said that magazines strongly influenced what they thought was the ideal body type”. You’ve seen all of these before we walk past them everyday where exactly are the negative influence? It’s easier to spot than you think. Let’s look at some quotes from the covers of 3 popular women’s
magazines. Exercise Related “Walk your way to slim”
“10 Lbs in 10 days!”
“Get Flat Abs”
Beauty Related
“So Long Cellulite”
“Perfect Skin Tips”
“526 Ways to Look Beautiful”
Right here when you first glance at the magazines you can see all of the ways you can enhance your appearance. These are the magazines company’s ways of getting the reader to open the magazine, and they work! Images of female bodies are everywhere. Women—and their body parts—sell everything from food to cars. Popular film and television actresses are becoming younger, taller and thinner. Some have even been known to faint on the set from lack of food. Women’s magazines are full of articles urging that if they can just lose those last twenty pounds, they’ll have it all—the perfect marriage, loving children, and a rewarding career. This is not going to happen but if no one begins to stand up to it now our children will believe the same things our generation did. When women start to stand up to the images the media present then maybe in another 20 years the percent of women who do not like their body types will go down a lot more.