Girls Long For The Perfect Body example essay topic

On coffee tables all around America sit the current monthly edition of Vogue magazine. A magazine that is created in order to show America, especially teen girls, what the current perfect body image is. This body image is most times unattainable unless eating rice cakes and water for every meal is appealing. America had become a media infiltrated society.

This infiltration has taken a large toll on the female body. What is sexy and beautiful, now-a-days is determined by movies, television and magazines. Lauren Greenfield, a widely known professional photographer, has spent an extensive amount of time studying the modern day girl through her photography. She confidently probes the extremes and compulsions that plague many women in our media based culture. Girls today are conditioned by society's expectations to go to any extreme to attain the perfect body image. The media puts an immense amount of pressure on girls to have a beautiful body.

Magazines are one of the most popular forms of this infiltration. Greenfield portrays this type of pressure in a photograph of Evan, Kevin and Tim who are all 16 years old. The boys are dressed in togas, sitting on a bed with beer cans on the bed stand and are looking at a porn magazine. They are all mesmerized by a naked layout of a tall, tan blonde with a size two waist.

This perfect body is what guys accept as being normal because this is what the media portrays as normal and in most cases is what guys want. For girls this means that they must achieve this perfect body through breast enlargements, diet pills and liposuction. When a girl looks at these magazines, the pressure to become beautiful and sexy is overwhelming and forces the girl to want to look like the beautiful, tan blonde in the ad and fast. This leads to an unhealthy and extreme means of achieving this. Sacrificing having a healthy and strong body, many girls form detrimental habits to attain the perfect body.

At a hotel in Las Vegas, an ashtray is exploding with cigarettes, all of which have a red or pink lipstick stain on them. This picture taken by Greenfield, again shows that girls will sacrifice their bodies to have a perfect body. Many girls will smoke a cigarette instead of eating a meal. The nicotine from the cigarette defers their hunger, which causes them not to want to eat, and in the long run causes them to loose weight. This is a way that many girls go about loosing weight to become the perfect size zero. Today female stars are loosing weight as never before.

The normal clothing size for most celebrities has gone from a size four to a size two in the past couple of years. According to Adrienne Ressler, a body-image expert at the Renfrew Center, an eating disorder facility, "When [the media laud's] a celebrity for looking healthy, it's almost a guarantee that the [celebrity] will take it as an insult. No one wants to be the "normal, healthy example", says Ressler. "If you say you look great,' these girls hear 'You look fat. ' 'You look too thin is the compliment". Because celebrities are seen as being the beautiful, sexy women that are in America, girls want to look like them.

Celebrities rarely let it be known the harsh dieting and exercising that must take place to look like they do. They make society believe that their bodies are naturally perfect. "For the past five years, we " ve become increasingly obsessed with thinness", says celebrity nutritionist Joy Bauer. For instance, take the cast of the popular television show, Friends. "When the show debuted, they looked great to us", says Star stylist Danna Weiss.

"But now, when we see a rerun of an early episode, they look slightly plump because our views of normal have changed". Costly and time consuming daily beauty rituals that girls partake in have become a part of their every day lives. The popular Maybeline cosmetic ad, "Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's Maybeline" has given girls the assumption that beauty is only found through the use of cosmetics and beauty products. Lauren Greenfield emphasizes this in a picture that focuses on the bright red collagen boosted lips, on a model for Bobbi Brown cosmetics.

This picture portrays the use of artificial means to attain the perfect body. Women today are flocking to plastic surgeons to get just a little nip and tug here and there. This costly beauty perfecting technique has become quite popular with female celebrities. Almost every female celebrity has had some type of plastic surgery and because the stars bodies look perfect women want to attain that perfect ness also. In a popular song by TLC, titled Unpretty, the chorus illustrates the means that women go through so that society will accept them as beautiful. "You can buy your hair if it won't grow, You can fix your nose if he says so, You can buy all the makeup that man can make, But if you can't look inside you, Find out who I am too, Be in the position to make me feel, So dam unpretty".

The sexual appeal that is connected with voluptuous lips, is also connected with the teen idol, Britney Spears. Young girls who do not even know what sex is, yearn to look sexy because of Britney. Lilly, who is six years old, is shown in a picture by Greenfield, shopping in the same store that Spears does. Lilly wants to buy belly shirts to show off her body and cannot wait to be a teenager because teenagers dress cool so boys will like them.

This type of mind set that Lilly has is not uncommon. The drive to have the perfect body is forced upon girls of all ages. It causes many harmful emotional and physical stresses on girls. But we as a society has come to expect this of girls. Our view of a perfect body has become so warped by the media through all of its influences that even in some cases girls will give up their future to have the feeling that they are beautiful.

In a picture taken by Lauren Greenfield, Sara who is nineteen, decided to defer her education at an ivy-league college to see where her acting / modeling career is going to go. Both of her parents, who are both extremely educated, were very shocked and appalled with this decision. Sara's mindset was formed from the pressure that she felt from the media to look beautiful. She gave up on becoming an educated women, to become a women that people will view as beautiful. This is what most women want from society and this is why in many cases they give up what is important to attain this. The emphasis that is placed right now on beauty taking a girl far in life will only be short lived, because just like clothes fashion fades out so will society's view of the perfect body.

Society's role in forming the acceptable perfect body has made a large impact on girls view of body image. Media's influence on society through the use of magazines, television, and other means has deviated society's view of beautiful. Girls long for the perfect body that is so widely infiltrated around America. They will go to any mean to achieve this acceptable body image that society has taken as the norm.