The Online Reflector

By Cecilia Perdomo
Staff Writer

The media and their ideals have influences on a person’s perception of their body. Over the years, the media have become more liberal and open about topics that used to be ignored.

Today, the media display thin women who are “picture-perfect” and flawless. However, the way the media portray women is distorted because real women do not look like that.

According to an article from the 2007 issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly, the media’s constant practice of featuring women who are thin, attractive and perfect by way of digital manipulation or airbrushing sets up standards of attractiveness for women that are impossible to realize.

Women with curves and an average body feel pressured because it is not what the media define as beautiful.

For example, Britney Spears has always been in shape and then she had two kids. Once she had the kids, her body revealed her curves and her assets.

For a woman who just had two kids, I think that she’s in pretty decent shape. However, the media did not see it that way.

“Britney used to be fit and healthy and weigh about 118 pounds,” said Edward Jackowski, M.D., author of “Escape Your Shape.”

“Now she weighs about 160 pounds and has a triple chin, a big belly and excess fat all over her body.” E! Online also wrote, “The bulging belly she was flaunting was so not hot.”

The media’s ideals basically say that if you do not look like this, you might be pretty, but you are not beautiful or sexy.

In a poll I conducted by handing out surveys to 25 participants from Craven’s Hall, 99 percent of the women said they saw a correlation between the media and eating disorders. Fifty percent said it affected their body self-consciousness.

These percentages, though unscientific, help show that the media ideal has a great influence on women. These deceitful images could be one cause for the rise of eating disorders in the U.S. over the past ten years.

It is ironic that the media display women who are thin as the ideal when the U.S. is one of the countries with the highest obesity rate.

A study published in the 2007 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology said that persistent media exposure to social messages about the necessity of a slender body lead people, psychologically, to the ideal of being thin.

They found that this situation led to eating disorder symptoms. As most Americans are aware, two of the most common eating disorders are anorexia and bulimia.

To parry media misconceptions, the beauty product company, Dove, started a campaign called “The Campaign for Real Beauty.”

According to the Dove Web site, www.campaignforrealbeauty.com, the mission of the campaign is “to make women feel more beautiful every day by challenging today’s stereotypical view of beauty and inspiring women to take great care of themselves.”

I am extremely excited that Dove started this campaign. The campaign will be the voice of real women everywhere. To learn about or join the campaign, visit its Web site.

The media may say what is beautiful, but people need to realize that there is no perfect woman or man.

People the media put in front of the camera are not flawless; the media just know how to hide it well with airbrushing and Photoshop.

Everyone is beautiful in his or her own way, and I for one, will no longer let the media affect my self image and self esteem.