The Media Vs Body Image
...surgery?" Sound familiar? Many men and women today are looking to the media and entertainment industry for the standards of what it means to be beautiful in today's society. Most of us spend a good portion of our everyday lives looking in the mirror, criticizing ourselves, and are repulsed by what we see. We compare ourselves to Jennifer Anniston, Tom Cruise, Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt, and Britney Spears, all of whom in society's eyes define beauty, glamour, and airbrushing. Airbrushing, that clever little concept that is used by magazines universally to make the pretty look perfect. Perfect? What exactly is perfect? Is it the stick-thin women that walk our streets with their bones protruding through their skin? This is the look that has become ever so popular as women and men all over the world starve themselves in order to conform to what they perceive as society's impression of beauty. Our beauty, the perfectionism that we strive for, where does it come from? Is it be photographed and put on a billboards that we drive by everyday or distributed on the magazine covers that we read in our doctors office? Or maybe it might be something a little more personal, something a little more than skin-deep.
If only I had a nickel for every time I've heard some healthy, attractive person announce that they would do anything just to lose 15 pounds. I mean, it's not like we live in America, home to the land of a $33 billion diet-fad industry. Many people all over the world are starving and yet here we are spending tons of money so that some highly educated individual can tell us not to eat. And then we get into the fad diets. Between the Jenny Craig Diet, the Atkins Low-Carb Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Metabolism Diet, and the Russian Air force Diet (it actually exists), it seems that many Americans obsess over the whole diet craze just to lose that extra few...
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