Body Image: The Media and Eating Disorders
In the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Evil Queen asks her magic mirror the infamous phrase, “Mirror, mirror in the wall, who is the fairest of all?”. The Evil Queen and her mirror are both fictional characters, of course, but if it were in real life, her mirror would tell her to lose about 10 pounds, to get a nose job and some Botox. The scene mentioned is a metaphor about how the media plays a big influence on our body image. Beginning with eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, and obesity just to name a few, the media proposes a standard that is unattainable to achieve for most of us.
The idealization of body image saying that skinny is beautiful, that is the media dictatorship. Men, Women and the younger generation are usually more vulnerable to associate a “skinny” image with happiness and beauty, making a large number of people practice abusive diets among other non-healthy ways of losing weight. According to Ryanna Clayton, “More and more children are feeling weighed down by what they see on the scales. Pressures from the media, advertising and peers can pull a child into a crisis of how they perceive themselves.” The media is supposed to be a helpful tool offering so many benefits like information, culture, and connecting people around the world. In this case, it can have a negative impact leading to a negative body image.
Younger girls have a tendency of watching what they eat, usually afraid of gaining weight because they associate a fit body with popularity and intelligence. They have countless eating restrictions, inadequate nutrition standards, sometimes believing in myths and not in facts, and the ineptitude to cope with food at all. Society acclaims a skinny body, therefore society, as well as the media is guilty of some of those eating disorders , is not just a very small body that is associate with an eating disorder; obesity is the other spectrum of this self-image...