Stereotypes In The Media Essay

The media reflects current social inequalities and allows them to continue by making them a normality. People who use the media see these stereotypes on a daily basis and take them as fact. Some people don’t even realize that these are stereotypes, and so they repeat them to friends and the stereotypes spread.
Stereotypes are ideas about a certain group of people that tend to be bad or derogatory. Now that media is an everyday part of most people’s lives, these stereotypes are encouraged by major media outlets. Many of the stereotypes in the media are about women. Because of these stereotypes, many women are treated worse than men, and this affects their everyday lives. In the article, “Gender Roles in Media,” Allison Lantagne, a teen writer
She mainly focuses on how beauty standards that have been put forth by the media impact how women see themselves and how many women act. “These beauty standards, largely proliferated through the media, have drastic impacts on young women and their body images… ‘We are constantly surrounded by all sorts of media and we construct our identities in part through media images we see,’ Cutler remarked. And the more girls are exposed to thin-ideal kinds of media, the more they are dissatisfied with their bodies and with themselves overall.” (Ossola) Ossola quotes a woman named Arielle Cutler who spent her summer studying how media literacy programs can help media not affect people negatively who use media on a daily basis. Here, Ossola is saying that beauty standards, which are mainly promoted through the media, can have a serious effect on how many women see themselves. Many of these stereotypes that can be seen in the media are in the form of images, which show young girls the 2% of women. Most women do not have perfect bodies or look as beautiful as the women in the photoshopped pictures. This is unfair to women, because they compare themselves to the beauty standards set by