Media has a significant impact on a person’s body image. This doesn’t just hold true for individuals, but society as a whole. Fashion is largely propagated through media, making media the most persuasive cause of body dissatisfaction. A study consisting of 742 females between the ages of 19 and 25 years old with a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds concludes that an increase in body satisfaction in females is most prevalent when exposed to media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, and fashion magazines and not when exposed to YouTube and Pinterest. The results of a chi-square analysis in the study showed that African-American and Arab-American young females were found to have significantly more positive body image than Euro-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic-American females.
It is hard to find an overweight supermodel, the vast majority are tall, super-thin, and under 25. However, due to the ever-changing nature of media a few newer emerging designers like Cassey Ho, the CEO and Lead Designer behind POPFLEX, a fitness clothing brand, actively include models of varying body types and colors. There are ethnic variations: black, South American, African, and Asian models are included now, but the sense of style and presentation are very much inflections from a Western base.
Cosmetic products for ‘whitening’ the skin, along with surgery that enables minorities to pass (Gilman, 2001) more readily, have been common in the United States as part of what Sullivan (2001: 66) has referred to as ‘the Anglo-Saxonization’ of minorities. Similar products for whitening paving a way to propagate the standards of Western beautification are widely sold and used in Asian countries. In South Korea, plastic surgery is normalized to the point that South Korea is dubbed the “plastic surgery capital of the world”. According to ISESP data as of 2021, South Korea has estimated the highest number of plastic surgery cases per capita in the world. One in five Korean women has undergone plastic surgery, compared to just one in twenty in the United States. A big contributor to this is the popularization of K-pop and Korean media depicting unrealistically perfect entertainers.
A question stands: Does media only affect the consumers? The answer is no. The content fed to the consumers by the media is tampered with highly to portray few ideal body standards. Media images are often digitally airbrushed so that the models portrayed in these images become removed from biological reality and do not provide achievable standards for appearance comparison. This affects the consumer base heavily but also has a significant impact on the people who are being used to portray these standards- the models and influencers. One of the biggest challenges faced by models is the pressure to maintain a certain body type because high expectations are placed upon them to cater to the mind-boggling ideals the media wishes to propagate. This leads to industry workers resorting to extreme measures such as crash diets, over-exercising, and eating disorders to fit industry standards. It not only affects them mentally but has physical implications too.
There has also been a trend of rising body dysmorphia in adolescents. Increasing social media influence and increasing screen time seems to be a factor in declining body image. Recently a phenomenon called “Snapchat dysmorphia” has presented in which patients seek surgical consults to appear like their filtered selves in real life. Body dysmorphia is a common occurrence for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who have been heavily exposed to media at an extremely early age. According to data from NIQ, despite only 26 percent of households counting a cohort member, tweens are driving 49 percent of mass skin care’s growth.
People in today’s society do not choose whether or not they receive these advertising images that decide what they should look like. It is not possible to completely shut out the body ideals portrayed by the media as it is not possible to shut out the media itself. However, we can do our best to create a positive body image for ourselves and stay healthy by understanding that we are perfect the way we are, and in fact, the ideals forced upon us by the media are unnatural. If we keep this in mind, it is possible to stay well both mentally and physically while being satisfied with our bodies.
Citations:
Markova, I. & Azocar, C., (2018) “The influence of social media and fashion magazines on body image of culturally and racially diverse young women”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 75(1).
Featherstone, M. (2010). Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture. Body & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X09354357
A new reality for beauty standards: How selfies and filters affect body image, EurekAlert https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-08/bmc-anr080118.php
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