Is Media Distorting How We View Ourselves?

More and more the debate deepens as to whether the media i.e. magazines, television, etc. is influencing and possibly corrupting the ‘normal’ person’s opinion of themselves and their body image. With our modern-day ‘obsession’ with the modelling industry and our fascination with celebrities, the Western world is under more pressure than ever to remain looking young, slim and beautiful. However, we normal people are finding extreme ways to conform to this stereotypical ideal image such as starving and purging resulting in anorexia and painful cosmetic surgery to artificially ‘mould’ our bodies to what we see as desired.

The hardly-publicised statistics concerning these issues are becoming increasingly worrying. For example, recent statistics have shown that approximately 1 in 100 women, aged 15-30 have anorexia, however, it’s not just women that are affected by this mental eating disorder, as 10% of anorexia cases are in fact male and most shockingly, it’s been reported that girls as young as 5 years old are having weight concerns and have even considered going on a diet. Such public insecurities have been blamed on the ‘glamorous’ fashion world of modelling, where scarily skinny women are used to advertise clothes and beauty because they supposedly look better on a skinny body. In fact, anorexia has becoming so big of an issue, especially in the modelling world, that in Spain’s fashion week last year, models were not allowed to take part if they had a body mass index of less than 18- showing that some measures are being taken to raise awareness of the stupidity of starving to look glamorous and ‘desirable’.

Similarly, the cases of people having cosmetic surgery procedures is on the increase, as the amount of surgical procedures rose by 8% between 2006-07, with approximately 91% of surgery being performed on women. The question of whether the vast amount of cosmetic surgery taking place correlates with media influence can be supported by comparisons between Western and Eastern countries. Western countries (e.g. America, UK, France, etc.) are well known for their obsession with celebrity and fame and so have a huge media coverage, whereas Eastern countries (e.g. China, etc.) are significantly less interest in media and so it is much less broadcast. Interestingly, it is in such Western countries that cosmetic surgery procedures are becoming common practice and is no longer strongly socially unaccepted. Whereas on the other hand, there are few cosmetic surgery procedures taking place in Eastern countries and amazingly, those that do take place reflect Western body image ideals, such as having bigger breasts, which are outside of their cultural norm!

So the questions remain…why starve oneself to the point of anorexia? Anorexics have a distorted body image, meaning that what others see when they look at the individual, is completely different to what that individual sees, for example, what outsiders see as very skinny, an anorexic would see themselves as overweight which causes them to be extremely unhappy. One explanation as to why anorexics suffer starvation, is because of the positive reinforcement they receive in the form of compliments for losing weight, or complaints of the individual being too skinny which is what the anorexic wants to hear. However, research shows that anorexics may have an underlying predisposition for the disorder, as research shows that if one identical twin suffers form anorexia, then their twin has a 50% chance of also developing the disorder. When concerning cosmetic surgery, many wonder why people would suffer the pain and bruising of procedures. It can only be assumed that the rewards in the form of greater self-worth and the compliments they would receive outweigh the punishment of the pain.

However, there are people in media who are trying to portray the curves of normal women as the most beautiful and desirable; people like Gok Wan. Gok hosts his own television show ‘How To Look Good Naked’ in which he tries to help insecure, curvy women to love their bodies and appreciate what they’ve got, although if he is to change the views of the whole nation he is going to need others like him with similar views to help! One question that he, and thousands of others want to know the answer to is, where will our obsession with body image stop?