Tie Between Television And Eating Disorders example essay topic

Mission Impossible: Keeping Up With America's Beautiful Body Image Everyone hears beauty comes from the inside, not the outside, but due to constant bombardment of beautiful, thin, glamorous girls deeply engraves the image in the mind's of women that they need to accomplish those looks to matter in today's society. When a thought is flashing in front of women at all times of the day, it is extremely difficult to get the idea out of their minds. Every move of the day that women make can revolve around how to stay ideal like the images they see and hear about around them. This somewhat gross obsession that has been strung along slowly with the growth of America is leading many women into virtually self- starvation accompanying eating disorders to stay the closest they possibly can to the cover girls of today's society. In order for women to see the constant reminders of up-to-date sizes of models and actresses, media must be readily available. There is no way to be emancipated of the images unless women completely refrain from magazines, television and clothing stores.

Taking this hobby or pastime from their schedules is a great chunk of a part of life. Women should not have to stop their normal daily routines of a short television program; which has become part of life, in order to start living a worry-free life again. A mind-blowing piece of evidence has proved simple television programming to create a mass eating disorder crisis when first introduced. In 1997, Dr. Anne Becker, American Psychiatric Association, found the evidence correlating the tie between television and eating disorders.

In Fiji, the ideal body was robust up until four years ago when satellite television was beamed into the South Pacific. The thin actresses and models quickly made impressions in the minds of the Fijian girls, and within a few weeks many girls had adopted styles of the American women as well as the serious symptoms of eating disorders. When Dr. Becker surveyed 65 girls, the girls that watched television three or more nights a week were fifty percent more likely to feel fat and almost two-thirds had dieted since the television programs became available. The facts are clear: television caused the mass need-to-be-thin attitude that arose among the Fijian girls. The shows available were ones that contained actresses that stay up with the thin-is-in television way of life. The otherwise unknowing girls would have went about their lives without giving a second thought to weight, as normal, if the satellite television had not been introduced.

Not many more scenarios can prove the point of media-induced dieting than the Fiji epidemic. This proof created by a simple television network being introduced shows how much a little exposure to the media can cause a type of brainwashing. American women have to deal with the exposure every day. Through television images, women are losing the concept of a normal body and striving toward an unnatural view of beauty: thin women with huge breasts and stick legs like a twelve-year-old. What real women's bodies look like are labeled wrong and unattractive. In 1996, Karen Schneider worked on research that shows virtually all mown are ashamed of their bodies.

It used to be adult women and teenage girls, who were ashamed, but now many see the shame down to very young girls: ten and eleven years old. Society's standard of beauty is an image that is literally just short of starvation for most women. The numbers of women and girls have increasingly grown with the addition of skinny models and actresses to magazine covers and television shows. In 1976, 0.5 to 1 percent of girls or women had anorexia or bulimia. According to New York City psychotherapist and author Steven Levenkron, there were an estimated eight million anorexics and bulimics in the United States in 1996. The extreme increase in the recorded amount of girls with eating disorders between the twenty years above is the same time models grew smaller in size and actresses were chosen according more by looks than talent.

Levenkron also shows the differences in reality and television standards in womanly body sizes. The average height and weight of a model is 5'9" and 110 pounds, while the average height and weight of an American woman is 5'4" and 142 pounds. This drastic difference is the gap that women see when they compare themselves to the said-to-be perfect bodies. There is no way to slightly believe they could all become these starved glamour girls, but they try no matter what. In order to get through the overemphasis on weight and size in today's society, women need to define their own bodily images in their minds and stick to the averages they need to stay healthy. Body image is defined as a mental picture of the size, shape, and form of the body.

It also describes feelings about physical characteristics. By obsessing about weight, a significantly distorted perception of the body may lead to self-destructive behaviors aimed at improving the appearance of the body. By informing the women of the feelings the media may cause before they get caught up may help them deal with the feelings once they do set in. Eating disorders need to be addressed before girls enter the age of puberty when they become most vulnerable, because the way media is looking, they do not seem to be changing the way they make women appear. Even though the root of the perfect-body standard is very unclear, the public calls itself the victim, accusing the media of a force-fed invasion of the ideal images. The media position is that if they react to the images that the public tends to like.

Both sides place the blame on each other, but without the media, the public could not blame anyone but themselves for the problem if they continued to have one. So until the media does try to cut back, there is no way the public can try to rescue American women to escape the starvation they face day to day.

Bibliography

Becker, A. (1999).
Fat-Phobia in the Fiji: TV-Thin Is In. Newsweek, 99 (5), P 70. Levenkron, S. (1992).
Eating Disorders: A Hollywood History. People, 102 (2), P 96-97. Schneider, K. (1996).