The Body in Health, Lifestyle or Sporting Magazines Essay

The Body in Health, Lifestyle or Sporting Magazines - Essay Example The myth about beauty will be broken by revealing the real benefits media enjoy by impacting the values of women. The paper also focuses on identifying ways through which this insecurity can be prevented or remedied. Changing standards of feminine beauty with time The portrayal of women as a marketing object has a long history in media but the trend of extremely thin models is not very old. Earlier, the idea of female beauty was closely linked to her realistically voluptuous body. In the early 20th century, the culture of fashion underwent a shift from the chubby female figure to a thinner fragile look. However, this thinner new female ideal was not really misleading and made women think about taking care of their health. This description of a female figure initially created a healthy trend in common people as they started to incorporate sports activities in their free time to make their bodies healthier and more active. During the mid 20th century, ideal female body image became thi nner (someone like Marilyn Monroe who was a size 14 was considerably overweight as compared with today’s standards). After initial acceptance of this idea, the trend went on following the notion, â€Å"the thinner the better†. Unfortunately, with the passage of time, these underweight models became the representatives of female beauty, which is still the case today. However, with the development of digital imaging techniques, the beauty ideal presented today to young women is more unrealistic and unattainable than ever before. The recent hype for promoting the thin beauty is increasing towards unattainable thin figures, most of the time being artificially â€Å"perfect† which is facilitated by digital tools and computer. In this way, the media can be held responsible for creating stereotyped notions of beauty, being linked with skinny, ultra-slim and very female bodies (Arya, 2009). The myth of beauty Being surrounded by so many media with so many skinny women r aises the question of what actually can be called an ideal or perfect female figure. The description of beauty described by the media seems to be quite similar to a Barbie doll:   a thin and tall figure, always smiling and ready to be played with. The ideal body shape broadcasted by media is actually of the skeletal and underweight woman. The representation of skinny women is supported by media to such an extent that it became the standard for the ideal body for Miss American contests, where most of the contestants weigh much less than 15% of their expected body weight and therefore giving a clear-cut message that it’s ok to be underweight but still you can look pretty (University of California, 2007).