A young woman stands in front of the mirror and is
disgusted by the reflection that only she can see. Thunder thighs,
flabby arms, and a potbelly obstruct her view of the beautiful smart, and
loving woman who stares back at her. This is exactly the type of
person the advertisement agencies and the media prey upon, someone who
is self-conscious and ashamed of her body, someone who is willing to go
to any length or pay any price to have the “perfect” body. The advertisement
agencies and the media do not just prey upon self-hating persons, they
help to create them and we let them.
We learn from a very early age all about assumptions
concerning body image. Television commercials and magazine advertisements
teach us that we must look like models and surround ourselves with beautiful
things in order to live a worthwhile life. We are constantly bombarded
with images of beauty every time we turn on the television set or flip
through the pages of magazines. Day after day, hour after hour, minute
after minute, our minds are being filled with images of beautiful people
endorsing products that they claim will make us beautiful as well.
We believe what these advertisements claim, and we buy the products.
After using the product, we begin to compare ourselves to the so-called
beautiful people in the advertisement and soon realize that we do not measure
up. Therefore, we learn from a very early age that it seems our bodies
are inferior to the rest of the world’s, yet we still listen to them.
The advertisement industry and the media have a
strong power to influence our opinion on what we see as being beautiful.
Advertisements dictate what we must look like in order to be accepted in
a world so obsessed with body image. They tell us in order to be
considered sexy and beautiful in today’s world, women must have the tanned
body of a half starved adolescent. The advertisement industry and
the media created this bizarre body image, and millions of American women
buy it. An example is of a hand cream advertisement that ran in “Good
Housekeeping.” The advertisement shows the right hand of a young
woman, probably in her twenty’s, with a freshly done manicure and no wrinkles
or veins in sight. This Neutrogena cream promises to “visibly reduce
the signs of aging on your hands.” It is a little wonder that “reduces
the look of age spots” and gives your hands “a more youthful tone and texture.”
I can see it now, all the housewives flipping though the pages of “Good
Housekeeping” trying to find new recipes, and then they come to this advertisement
and compare the youthful hand to their own. This new product seems
to be the answer to every housewife’s prayers, it’s a miracle in a bottle
and the cream is still bought.
The non-super model population of American women
are bombarded by the message that approval from others, especially men,
means everything, and without it you are nothing, an outcast, unworthy
and unloved. Advertisements tell us that in order to get approval
and to be loved, we must buy all of the products that they sell, then,
and only then will our lives be worth something. We, women, try so
hard to look like Claudia Schiffer that we spend millions of dollars each
year buying products that the advertisement industry claim will make us
look like her. There is something about our bodies that we all would
like to change because we feel that our bodies are not good enough, but
should we really let this get us down? We want to change ourselves
because of the pressure that advertisements place on us to be one of the
beautiful people. They make us feel worthless just because we do
not look like a super model. I believe we can rise above the media
and critics, we need to focus on our inner beauty and strengths and then
maybe when we would look into a mirror, we would not just see what we look
like on the outside, but we would be able to see the person we really are.
