Introduction
Every day human beings strive to achieve satisfaction in their body shapes and sizes through physical exercises, dieting and use of medication meant for slimming or trimming their body to the desired sizes. Many organizations have established competitions aimed at promoting their products through the use of personal physical attraction as a selling point. This has created an endless craving for people to strive and achieve this desired beauty at all costs. In the modern world advertisements in television, internet, magazines and bill boards are full of these images of people that portray their physical beauty to capture the attention of their potential customers. This essay aims at pin pointing how these advertisements have impacted negatively on human beings and their perception of physical beauty with regard to men and women.
Discussion
Beauty is defined as any pleasant situation that gives satisfaction to the eyes and the mind of the person having it and attracts attention from other people (Hargreaves and Tiggemann 23). Whenever a caption is run on the television or bill board the most striking feature is how people have been used to the success of such advertisements. Most of these advertisements usually involve half naked people in order for them to reveal their body as much as possible. Women have been used more significantly in most of these advertisements that promote social issues like music and fashion.
Most of these advertisements have images of women in their bikinis, brassieres, or undergarments hence revealing almost all their body to the audience. In most occasions such images are meant to portray women as soft, delicate and weak people (Tiggemann, Polivy and Hargreaves 12). The complexion of their skin is always given a very light tone and soft texture while their expressions usually carry a delicate and weak perception. On the other hand men have been portrayed as strong, rough and hard core individuals who wear sad faces. This portrays men as people without happiness and ready to cause chaos. These images promotes gender imbalance and perceive women to be a weaker gender while their counterparts are perceived to be strong and aggressive.
The images used to show the physical beauty of men and women subject people to feelings of inferiority complex. This is very evident in the manner in which their physical appearance is given great importance by the media. The images of women in magazines’ covers are usually slim and light toned to imply that such are the characteristics that define a beautiful woman (Hargreaves and Tiggemann 17). This means that anybody who does not posses any of these traits is perceived to be ugly. Women who pose dark skin complexions and have a heavy body are perceived to be ugly. This also applies to men who do not have a tall masculine body as they are perceived to be weak compared to heavily built men. These comparisons usually arouse feelings of inadequacies that are generally translated to inferiority complexes in the victims’ minds. This in turn lowers their self esteem and dignity and subjects them to discrimination against those perceived to be their superiors. The use of human images to show physical beauty in magazines and other business promotions has led to the perception of women as objects rather than people.
Even though men have also been used in projection of physical beauty in the same way women are more significant in the manner in which their images are perceived. In most cases women are used to promote domestic products rather than office appliances or services. Images of women have been used to advertise the use of many household items like cooking oil, food spices, house hold electronics, kitchen wares and beauty products. In other occasions the use of images of women is very much subjective to an extent that even a product or service meant to be used by men has a woman on its advertisement. Such products include body perfumes and motor vehicles that will make a woman attracted to a man if the man buys the product. This has influenced the society’s perception of women and they are regarded as objects meant for sexual satisfaction and entertainment (Hargreaves and Tiggemann 19). Majority of the advertisements that have images of women are aimed at showing how women contribute to making men’s life enjoyable or how women can easily get entangled in the grip of a man just within seconds after using the product or service being advertised. Images of men portray masculinity and power possessed by an individual while the images of women are meant to evoke feelings of wanting to own them for self gratification rather than mutual satisfaction. This paints a very bad picture on how women are supposed to be treated and leads to many cases of women being sexually abused.
Conclusion
Different societies have various ways through which they value and appreciate beauty in individuals. However, such criteria used to measure the level of beauty like physical appearance should never be encouraged as people go to extreme levels to attain the assumed images. Some people take risky activities that compromise their health in order to attain a masculine or model like image. People should not be swayed by portraits and images that perceive beauty in terms of body appearance but they should value beauty in terms of health and mental well being.
Works Cited
Hargreaves, D. and Tiggemann, M. Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women and Children. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Tiggemann, M., Polivy, J., Hargreaves D. A. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used Against Women. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Print.