Media Influence on Young Women

Media Influence on Young Women

With such an infatuation with the media and celebrities you have to think about what it is
doing to our young people, especially women. Hero sized role models or distasteful bad
influences? This has become a big issue in today’s society with the ever slimming and enhanced
celebrities, models, and even the media. Many young people, girls and women in particular,
look up to these people and take ideas from them about how they should look and act.
Some may believe that the medial influences are good for young women. Celebrities
give women role models to look up to and someone to follow. After all women do tend to dress,
act, and follow celebrities in everything they do. Many well known celebrities play good well to
do characters in movies. Aren’t these superhero, motherly figured, politically leading
characters that celebrities portray in movies good for young women to see? They lead by
example by portraying good characters that people should follow.
Most, including myself, would believe that recent media influences are harmful to the
development of young women. Women are getting the wrong idea about how they should look
and act because they are seeing all these fake airbrushed celebrities. They are told this is the way
they should look and act and therefore follow the “role models”, or lack there of, into traps.
These traps include mental and ultimately sometimes physical consequences. Commercials
advertising clothes now feature size 0 models in less than covering clothes giving young women
the idea that they must be rail thin and scantily clad. It’s even been proven by the American
Psychological Association “that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young
women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls’ self-image and healthy
development”. Celebrities may play well to do characters in movies but ultimately this is not
how they are seen because they go back to their...

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