The Media's Negative Affect on Women Essay Example

The Media’s Negative Affect on Women Our society’s media portrays women in a very distorted and twisted way. Women in the media are made out to be purely sexual objects. Only images of women who are thin, over sexualized, and what our cultural believes to be “beautiful” are shown on television, magazines, and ads. Lyrics in popular music often also degrade women. Constantly being bombarded by these inaccurate depictions of how females should look and be treated has many negative effects on women. Inaccurate depictions of females in the media causes women to have self-esteem issues, become over sexualized at a young age, and makes mistreatment by males seem acceptable. In our culture the “thin ideal” is considered to be the only form of beauty. The “thin ideal” is the judgmental belief that to be considered attractive one must be dangerously slim like the women that are portrayed in the media. The problem with this is that the photos of women in the media undergo much editing before the public sees them. Women are left believing that these drastically digitally altered images are reality and find themselves unable to measure up to them. Comparing their bodies to the unrealistic bodies featured in the media causes a whole slew of issues for these women. “University of Connecticut researchers discovered female undergraduates who viewed advertisements displaying ultra-thin women exhibited increases in body dissatisfaction, negative mood, levels of depression and lowered self-esteem (Nauert)”. College aged women are not the only ones who feel bad about their own bodies after viewing images in the media. “Among 5–12th graders, 47% said they wanted to lose weight because of magazine pictures (Gurian)”. This alarming statistic directly shows how much of an impact the media actually has on young girls. Women of all ages feel the pressure to form into the “thin ideal”. Some women cave into this pressure and go to extreme measures to try to achieve this look. Dieting,