How Magazines Affect Women’s Body Image Research Paper

Body image is one of the most important elements of modern culture and social identity. Modern women of all ages borrow their identities from glossy magazines and copy body images popularized by TV. Ideal body image plays a crucial role in contemporary society determining certain standards of beauty. Ideal body image is one of the main determinants of contemporary society. Trying to keep abreast of time and the social dynamics of modern consumer cultures, ideal body image became risqué for modern women. The research paper aims to analyze the impact o magazines images on body image and perception of beauty among young women, from 17-25 years old.

By definition, “Body image is not the same as the body, but rather what the mind does to the body in translating the experience of embodiment into its mental representation” (Hutchinson 59 cited Craik 62). Thus, the researchers have treated cognition as a means for capturing the complexity and richness of experience, while they personified the mind as an entity separate from and superior to the body. Thus through the theoretical construct of “body image, ” the mind dominates the less able and less significant aspects of human experience encoded within this theoretical perspective as “the body.” Besides objectifying the body, body image research has employed a language of pathology to explain the multiple problems girls suffer as they learn to participate in their culture—a culture that places extraordinary value on what women’s bodies look like. Researchers in this tradition have used the names of various diseases (e.g., anorexia, bulimia, gender identity disease, body dysmorphic disorder) to categorize numerous phenomena of the body. Wolf goes on to describe how images of beauty are created in ways that leave many women convinced they could never fully attain that which is constructed as the “ideal” (Craik 32; Gimlin 48-49)

The girls’ desires for being judged fashionable could conflict with their interests in developing other characteristics they valued, such as the characteristic of individuality; however, the girls remained painfully aware of the problems associated with low performance with respect to fashion. That is, they explained how an assignation as not fashionable carried a heavy social cost by relegating a girl to an inferior social position. When judged as not fashionable any girl could expect to be considered as generally undesirable. Gauntlett (2002) explained one of the indignities a girl might expect to suffer when judged as “Fashion Out.”

When a person is fashion out they will usually get talked about by other people to other people. Although it’s not nice to talk about people, it’s something that just happens” (34).

The body images popularized by magazines are based on ideals of beauty and fashion values and appreciated by society. The girls share their knowledge about fashion through an array of cultural narratives including images and articles in such popular magazines as Cosmopolitan and the Look. Telling and considering these images are processes the girls used to apprehend and communicate their constructions of the ideal woman (Craik 29). Cultural stories of women’s bodies are ubiquitously representing much of what the girls see, hear, tell, internalize, and eventually live as fashion. Through their cultural images of fashion and body, the girls are developing judgments about whether their bodies are “right” or “wrong, ” “normal” or “not normal. Following Gronow (1997) young girls are learning to create images of women that they associate with being “normal.” For these girls normal means a perfected look—one they judge through standards for “healthy hair ” “the right clothes and shoes, ” the right “body shape, ” and “looking feminine.” Fashion represents one of the cultural codes or rule structures that link them to others and provide them with logic and a set of criteria for a life well-lived. Gimlin (2002) states:

“Many critics have argued that contemporary ideals of female beauty—and the work required to become ideally beautiful—have long-lasting and devastating effects on women. Sensitive and compelling, these works incite outrage at the self-torture, deprivation, and mutilation women undergo” (16).

Further, the code carries a moral weight of things as they ought to be. This quality in the girls’ explanations suggests the influence of popular and peer culture in their learning.

Critics admit that unfortunately many of the images young women call normal may not have been in their best interest. Thus normality may be understood as an example of false consciousness. False consciousness is one that “contains a false belief to the effect that some social phenomenon is a natural phenomenon…. [that] the particular interest of some subgroup is the general interest of the group as a whole” (Geuss 14 cited Purdy 99). This form of consciousness serves to support, stabilize, or legitimize social institutions or practices operating in the service of domination and oppression (Adorno 14). The girls’ sense of normality makes them overlook the problem of racism in their criteria of beauty, the problem of consumerism in their judgments about individual worth, and other problems that leave their own interests vulnerable to cultural assault (Coons 37). In this discussion of false consciousness it is important to note that, like other forms of false consciousness, the girls’ ideas of normalcy may be used as a springboard for reflection and critique, a point of departure for the development of more critical literacy. So, for example, we might wish to invite the girls to reflect on the words of Gimlin (2002): “The oppressed have been destroyed precisely because their situation has reduced them to things… They cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become subjects” (55) as it relates to their ideals of fashion.

Preoccupations are often associated with feelings of desire and disappointment. That is, girls often report the desire to have a physical body different in significant ways from the one they see in the mirror. Thus desire becomes a salve for the disappointment and dissatisfaction they experience with their own bodies. Yet the disappointment about how the body appears stems from comparisons girls make to some idealized and unrealistic version of a body. It distracts girls’ attention from other possibilities for the body, including developing their bodies so they can perform well in terms of significant human characteristics such as strength, endurance, agility, grace, or courage. Garner (1997) claims that: “From measurements of Playboy centerfold models and Miss America contestants, he documented that these “model women” had become significantly thinner from 1959 to 1979 and that advertising for weight-loss diets had grown correspondingly” (30).

Adolescent girls continue to suffer in multiple ways as a result of these complex social processes. Meanwhile, the psychologists and psychiatrists who have historically led the study of what is known as “body image” have done so in ways that limit knowledge and understanding of girls, further contributing to the structures supporting domination and oppression of females (Holmstrom 196). That is, these researchers have almost exclusively studied “body image” through quantitative measures that assume objectivity. In the process, they have conveniently and openly ignored and dismissed contributions from social scientists and feminists who have studied the body from alternative and more hopeful perspectives. Those who study the construct “body image” from dominant perspectives have strengthened the body-as-object narrative. They have done so by rooting the construct of “body image” in the mind/body dualism (Gauntlett, 82).

Magazines popularized only slim bodies and ideal figures paying no attention to a variety of human bodies and different types of beauty. Many girls are supposed by images created by popular magazines trying to imitate and achieve an ‘ideal body’. In their images, the fashion girl is adorned in name-brand clothes and shoes that cost a certain amount of money (Garner, 30). A girl must have the economic buying power to “look right.” Thus if a girl does not come from a family with the required level of economic buying power, she is forced to find other means to make the appropriate acquisitions or accept a status as not fashionable. Following Gimlin (2002, 54) girls who obtain the economic means to display themselves with the proper accouterments may indeed attain the desired status as fashionable with its accompanying assignation as right and normal. Nevertheless, they implicate themselves in a harsh social system that treats humans as objects to be criticized and punished. As both groups internalize this system of relationships, they subject themselves as well as others to an oppressive system. The girls were aware of the injustice of these processes even while they admitted criticizing girls deemed to be less fashionable. According to Gimlin (2002):

For women, who are valued according to their appearances and whose appearances are—by their very femaleness— flawed, the struggle to construct positive conceptions of selfhood is certainly difficult” (50).

The body image created by magazines is used as a role model in this conversation, and the image of the model is evoked as a standard. This type of logic is particularly worrisome in an age in which the images of models that come to us through magazines and television are typically computer-manipulated images designed to distort women’s bodies to reflect unrealistic proportions supported by commercial interests. Such unrealistic representations are unlikely to be achieved by real girls. Nevertheless, discrepancies between the real and the imagined encourage girls to seriously jeopardize their health in their pursuit of the unattainable (Purdy, 41). Also troublesome, many girls are using such images as a standard for judging the personal worth of themselves and others (Gimlin, 44). Each additional criterion for “Fashion In” reduces the number of girls who can achieve the standard.

The costs for the pursuit of ’fashionable” remain monetarily, physically, and socially quite high (Gimlin, 61). Further, the pursuit of this standard of fashion is part of a social process that relies on girls’ uncritical internalization of multiple forms of racism and classism that are circulating rather transparently within their prevalent discourse on fashion (Hilton and Hippel 237). What is biologically right for an individual and what is socially constructed as normal may not be the same; indeed the two may be quite different, even incommensurable. While some girls may obtain the means to buy whatever is necessary to achieve the other criteria for their images for “looking right” and “being normal, ” such as sparkly, straight hair and brand name clothes and shoes, a girl cannot readily purchase a particular shape for her body. “Health professionals expressed that wanting a thin body has become a societal obsession, and it can be a very serious health threat to young Korean females” (Han 65).

Unique forms of self-confrontation have been employed in studies dealing with the behavioral effects of false body feedback. Typically in such studies, subjects are exposed to information that they have been convinced represents events occurring in their bodies, and the impact of the feedback is measured. As one scans the accumulated research in this area, it is inescapable that persons’ perceptions of what is happening within their bodies are surprisingly manipulable. Recall, for example, that individuals can be persuaded they are experiencing sensations of excitement when they are actually calm, and vice versa (Gronow 76). Recall that they can be convinced they are experiencing sensations of an elevated blood alcohol level, even though their alcohol intake has, in reality, been minimal. From a commonsense view, findings of this sort are quite unexpected.

One would assume that after making infinite observations of their own bodies, people acquire great expertise in registering and interpreting such body events. People would seem to be so knowledgeable about their own body sensations that it should be hard to mislead them in this area. However, the empirical findings cited earlier indicate quite the opposite. This is perhaps not so surprising if one considers previously discussed studies in which subjects sometimes failed to identify front view pictures of themselves or could not accurately correct errors in their appearance that were introduced by a distorting mirror (Holmstrom, 196). Despite repeated everyday acquaintance with their own most obvious exterior body attributes, people do at times evidence considerable error in their definitions of these attributes external features of the individual, there should be a greater probability of error when less visible and more hidden aspects of the body are involved.

Several psychologists and numerous others have claimed that many girls experience a form of “identity crisis” created and caused by magazines. It has been common to explain the “crisis” as an artifact of a girl’s efforts to integrate various elements of childhood identity into a more coherent adult identity (Gimlin, 44). Adolescents are believed to be aided in accomplishing this psychological task by participating in various groups, including peer friendships, clubs, religious groups, and even political movements. Across these different groups, adolescents have numerous opportunities to try on various roles, looking for those that suit them well. In their pursuits, they are guided by messages from peers as well as by messages communicated by the larger society (Holmstrom, 196). Neither the peer group nor the larger society speaks univocally or directly.

Thus the work of interpreting these messages and integrating them into one’s life may be difficult and distracting. Nevertheless, Gimlin (2002, 48) contends that adolescence is a critical period for the development of an authentic self well suited to each individual. These young adolescents experienced a lack of beauty not as a neutral condition, but rather, as a punitive one. In a social sense, it was doubly punitive. First, the girls expected a lack of beauty to cause boys to turn away from the “ugly” girl, leaving her to suffer the lack of their social attention. To make matters worse, they expected other girls to distance themselves from the “ugly” girl, fearing that close physical proximity to an “ugly” girl would cause them, too, to be ignored by boys. Thus the girl construed as “ugly” was expected to suffer abandonment from both boys and girls (Gimlin 45, 47).

If girls are to break free from the vicious social cycle of being judged on the way their bodies look, they must more fully understand the roles they themselves play in perpetuating this dominant cultural narrative. It is disturbing for girls to allow boys to evaluate their worthiness based on some arbitrary set of standards of beauty. When girls begin competing against each other, there is little hope of unified resistance. If girls could learn to stand up for themselves as a group, rather than compete with one another based on their looks, they would open a space of possibility for further change (Gimlin 48). Learning of this sort would require considerable effort because it is countercultural.

That is, it is inconsistent with many of the messages the girls have heard from more experienced members of their peer groups and from the larger society. Young girls must learn to understand and speak a new and different language, through their bodies, if they are to survive as vital and healthy adults. On the surface, their conversations about experiences of the body may seem like mindless adolescent chitchat about fashion. When internalized sexism, racism operate within girls’ lives, they limit human possibility. In short, these forms of social injustice restricted social freedom for these girls and reduced their chances for healthful living. With sustained help from caring adults and each other, it seems quite possible for girls to invent or appropriate an alternative language, one through which they can imagine and create an array of possibilities for living meaningful and healthy lives. “Dissatisfaction with their bodies causes many people (women and men) to strive for the thin ideal” (Gronow 89).

The need for further development of critical literacy was highlighted for us in how the girls used images in their lives. That is, the image was a powerful source of knowledge for these four girls. Not only were these girls using images as interpretive frames for learning about their worlds, themselves, and specifically their bodies; they were often accepting the visual images they saw at “face” value. If we hope girls will learn to desire and live healthy lives, we need to help them become more aware of how these and other cultural narratives become disabling and/or empowering resources for their health and well-being (Gimlin 52). The ways in which people learn to view their bodies make a big difference in how they treat their bodies and lead their lives. As educators, we must spend more time helping adolescent girls critically examine cultural narratives of normality and cultural images of the body in hopes of helping them develop a wider view of who healthy women are, and how we can all become healthy and strong. When girls learn to identify various forms of their oppression, and envision preferred possibilities, they can begin to disrupt the forces of their own oppression.

In sum, magazines create false body images associated with fashion and uniqueness. Many young women try to replace fashion with the ideal image of their bodies and appearance following images of slim and tender bodies. Even with the right clothes, some girls would be relegated to the status of not fashionable because they do not fall within certain parameters for body shape. The main problem is that the girls do not identify femininity as an explicit criterion for judgments about being fashionable. Femininity is, however, tied to “looking right, “and “looking right” is one criterion for being judged as fashionable and cool. While the perfect woman is a myth, her image is not. The girls are internalizing the myth of the perfect woman through ideal bodies.

Works Cited

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Coons; John E. A Grammar of the Self. First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, January 2003, p. 37.

Han, M. Body Image Dissatisfaction and Eating Disturbance among Korean College Female Students: Relationships to Media Exposure, Upward Comparison, and Perceived Reality. Communication Studies, 54 (2003), 65.

Holmstrom, A. J. The Effects of the Media on Body Image: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 48 (2004), 196.

Garner, D.M. ‘The 1997 Body Image Survey Results’. Psychology Today, 30, January-February, 1997 p. 30.

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