Girls! Think back to when you were five years old. You’re walking through the toy isle in your favorite store, searching for the perfect, new Barbie doll you saw on T.V, when you suddenly stop in your tracks. You’ve spotted a flawless, plastic girl with shiny skin and fine blonde hair. You pick up the box with a smile on your face and hug it throughout the store until your parents are ready to check-out. You’re thinking to yourself how you want to look just like the doll when you grow older. After all, she represents the perfect woman. If the first made Barbie doll was a real life person, her measurements would be 39”-18”-33”. This of course is an unrealistic body structure for a real life woman. However, you still feel that having an incredibly tiny waist with slightly larger hips will make you appear beautiful to the public eye. The media is already influencing you and you don’t even know it.
Magazines, television, movies, billboards, etc., are corroded with the image of perfection and beauty. This sends the message to teenage girls that in order to be beautiful, they have to look a certain way, therefore making them go through any extreme to fit the flawless image. Of course without these feelings of wanting to change your appearance, how else would plastic surgeons be paid?
Discrimination of weight is the biggest problem with the media. If an adolescent is told she isn’t “the ideal size” like a super model, she could stop eating and possibly even contract serious conditions. This is where anorexia and bulimia come into play. So could we give partial credit to the media for these diseases? Instead of showing us what they think is beautiful, they should encourage everyone to be proud of whom they are and satisfied with what they have. Besides, there are more important things in life to worry about other than portraying society’s ideas of perfect images.
Remember those pep-talks your parents gave you when you were upset about your appearance and blamed them for passing on “bad genes”? I bet they told you that as you age, beauty fades but the person you are always stays the same. Yes, I’m sure this phrase seems familiar to you, and you should believe them when they say it. So stop worrying about looking like the models in the magazines and love yourself, and remember; everyone is beautiful!