Magazine Article Evaluation- Chelsea

After evaluating twenty five magazine articles from a variety of different magazines, such as: Self, Cosmopolitan, Complete Woman and Women’s health, there is an obvious trend with how the media tries to target women and their bodies. The most obvious way they promote weight loss and beauty is through unrealistic images of women that are stick thin with perfect bone structure. Most women understand that the pictures shown in magazines have been photo shopped and still they try to compare themselves to models. The real victims of advertising are adolescent girls because the media plays a significant role in the way young girls feel about themselves. Advertisements are significant to adolescent girls as they begin to notice to society’s beauty standards. Magazine advertisements reinforce a beautiful and thin body ideal, and research indicates that models in magazines are the standard to which many adolescent girls hold themselves when picturing the ideal body. This is disturbing in many ways, because it can lead to body image dissatisfaction. Body image dissatisfaction occurs when females become unhappy with their appearance, specifically their weight. It encourages adolescent girls to strive for an unrealistically thin and unhealthy body ideal. Since advertisements make up almost half of the space in teen girl magazines, they can be very influential. Many of these ads depict women as beautiful, thin, and sexy. If young girls see these same images over and over, they may begin to think that they too should be beautiful, thin, and sexy to meet society’s beauty standards. The trend of increasing body image dissatisfaction is alarming because it can lead to more serious disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and even drug use more common effects of body dissatisfaction, such as excessive dieting and low self- esteem are now common among middle school girls (6th-8th grade). In the past, these issues were almost exclusively a problem for high school and college females. Even worse, 80% of 10-yearold girls have actually tried dieting. It seems that advertisements in teen magazines are now affecting younger girls as well. Since teen magazines account for more than one half of all reported adolescent reading, advertisements in these magazines may be one source of the body image dissatisfaction.


Citations:

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Frost, L. (2001). Young women and the body: A feminist sociology. New York:aaaaaPalgrave.