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Example research essay topic: How The Mass Media Effects Teenage Part 1 - 1,671 words

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How the mass media effects teenage girls Have you ever been fat? If you can eat everything you want to and still can hide behind the mop you are a very lucky person. Its a pity that great amount of people need to confine their food and are stick to different diets. You can ask: why these people suffer so much? Who force them to starve? Can you believe that they do such things by themselves?

And this is not a new kind of masochism they just want to become thin. If you ask them about all this diets they will tell you that they are sooo fat. I have a friend and since 15 years old she is trying to lose flesh. She knows how many calories are in bread and meat, milk and butter, apple and tea. She knows the amount of calories you can lose by standing, walking, running and lying.

Her diets are pretty terrible. For example: two carrots for breakfast, two for dinner and one for supper. Remarkable is the fact that even with all this contrivances she can lose more than few gramma's. And she is not fat.

She has this pretty roundness and great inferiority complex. When she was a teenager she read lots of magazines and could spend all days long watching TV. As a result she decided that she is fat. Teens, especially young females, become discontent with their bodies and may develop unhealthy eating behaviors in an attempt to achieve media-ideal body types (Field et al. ).

Such situation is pretty normal. Entertainment may negatively influence other aspects of teens' physical and psychological well being. Research suggests that media portrayals of unrealistic body images negatively impact teens's elf-esteem (Price-Lynch). Teenagers are liable to different kinds of influence. And there is no secret that mass media has great influence on people of all ages. What is Mass Media?

Mass Media refers to "print media (newspaper[s], magazines, books), the electronic media (radio, television, movies, and music), and the new media (computer-mediated communication) " (Carstarphen and Zavoina, xi). Although family and social relationships also have an influence, teens learn about society and sexual relationships from visual media images portraying body types, clothing, and other cultural norms (Johnston 10). So what we have? We have a ubiquitous Mass Media which propagandize body image and numerous of teenagers whos own appearance make them sick. Believe not but Mass Media or me do not care about their audience. Of course they are interested in people but they do not care about them.

The impact of the media in relation to women's perception of the ideal body image is undoubtedly. Whether it is television, newspapers, magazines, movies or the Internet, a clear majority of modern media promotes body images that are both unrealistic and unattainable for many women. These images promote thinness, sexuality and enhanced body shapes that are often unnatural. Content analyses of popular media indicate that the body shape standard for women has increasingly become thinner. (Bissell, web).

If look in the history we can clearly see how the media corrected and directed people tastes and body image. In 1890 's a rather plump body and a pale complexion considered as the pink of perfection. In early 1900 's ideal woman had to have an hourglass figure. Such look demanded tight corset, which in turn leads to different health problems.

In 1920 's came the era of the flat-chested, slim-hipped flappers. In 50 's & 60 's the perfect was considered such figure: full-figured shapes of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, as well as the gaunt Twiggy look. The concepts of beauty changed in 70 's & 80 's rather drastically taller, thinner look with no visible body fat and highly toned muscles. If we examine closer the conception of feminine beauty slowly changed from full-figured shapes of Marilyn Monroe to waif-like figure of Kate Moss. Nowadays beautiful woman is in average 179 cm height, 50 kg weight, with narrow hips and full breasts. Nowadays unnaturally thin models with artificial faces represent beauty.

Today's advertisers go to huge lengths to sell products and to convince women that their bodies are never good enough. Female models are typically tall, thin, young, white, and they appear "perfect." (Body Image & the Media... ) Each girl beauty or not want to look like adult woman. It is paradoxically because lots of adult women wanted to become young again. It is a habit of human nature we always wanted what we cannot have.

And this girls watch films and ads, read newspapers and magazines and dream about perfect body. As a result we have very oppressive statistic: In a survey of girls 9 and 10 years old, 40 % have tried to lose weight, according to an ongoing study funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (USA Today, 1996). A 1996 study found that the amount of time an adolescent watches soaps, movies and music videos is associated with their degree of body dissatisfaction and desire to be thin (Tiggemann & Pickering, 1996). One author reports that at age thirteen, 53 % of American girls are "unhappy with their bodies. " This grows to 78 % by the time girls reach seventeen (Brumberg, 1997). In a study among undergraduates media consumption was positively associated with a strive for thinness among men and body dissatisfaction among women (Harrison & Cantor, 1997). Teen-age girls who viewed commercials depicting women who modeled the unrealistically thin-ideal type of beauty caused adolescent girls to feel less confident, angrier and more dissatisfied with their weight and appearance (Hargreaves, 2002).

In a study on fifth graders, 10 year old girls and boys told researchers they were dissatisfied with their own bodies after watching a music video by Britney Spears or a clip from the TV show "Friends" (Mundell, 2002). But we must remember that such great negative influence Mass Media has only on those teenagers whos psyche is already vulnerable. Only those girls who already had body-image problems were at risk for negative effects. ("Effects of Long Term Exposure to Fashion Magazines on Adolescent Girls (Effects of Media-Portrayed Thin-Ideal Images) Psychologists Eric Stice, Ph. D. , University of Texas at Austin; Diane Spangler, Ph. D. , Brigham Young University; and W. Stewart Agra's, MD, Stanford University, randomly assigned 219 girls, ages 13 to 17, to a 15 -month subscription to Seventeen magazine (one of the most popular magazine among teenage girls).

Psychologists survey this group for 20 months. Teenagers read magazines with pleasure but there were no visible effects on body dissatisfaction, thin-ideal internalization, and dieting or negative affect over time. According to Effects of Long Term Exposure to Fashion Magazines on Adolescent Girls (Effects of Media-Portrayed Thin-Ideal Images) The only adverse effect occurred in adolescents with initially elevated body dissatisfaction: Exposure to the fashion magazine resulted in increased negative affect / depression for these adolescents. Wait a minute, can we say, but we already knew that teenagers are easily affected by mass media, that they are not satisfied with the they appearance.

We saw statistic and now this research cancel all this. Were we wrong? No, everything that I wrote early is true. "The discrepancy between our study and previous research is largely because we measured the effects in a natural environment, " said Dr. Stice. "Previous research that suggested magazine-portrayed, thin-ideal images would lead to eating disorders and low self-esteem among teenage girls consisted of laboratory experiments. This study suggests that the negative effects have little long-term impact. " ("Effects of Long Term Exposure to Fashion Magazines on Adolescent Girls (Effects of Media-Portrayed Thin-Ideal Images) In other words research confirm that the only at-risk individuals are those who already have body-image problems. "Perhaps high-risk individuals seek out thin-ideal media messages to learn more effective weight control techniques, " said Dr. Stice Mass media have fostered a shared consumer identity through which we accept rather than debate what is happening in our world.

Media-nurtured consumer culture encourages people to identify with media images, and to buy products to fit their media-based self-identities. Teenagers starting to develop their personality through the world perception. They are unsure, sometimes afraid and angry. They are trying to become the part of society and the main sources of information are Mass Media, their friends and family. Slowly family starting to lose its authority while friends and media became more and more important for adolescents. "Forty-one percent of adolescent females report that magazines are their most important source of information on dieting and health, and 61 percent of adolescent females read at least one fashion magazine regularly, " said the authors. "I think the media reflects a larger cultural pressure for an ultra-slender body, " said Dr. Stice. "Parents, peers and dating partners may play a somewhat more important role than the mass media because feedback from these sources about body size is more personal. " ("Effects of Long Term Exposure to Fashion Magazines on Adolescent Girls (Effects of Media-Portrayed Thin-Ideal Images) But we must remember that Mass Media is not only magazines and films.

It also includes ads which influence is sometimes far more disastrous. Messages in the media have given many young females warped priorities. Young girls are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of nuclear war, cancer, or losing their parents. (Women React) Advertisers often emphasize sexuality and the importance of physical attractiveness in an attempt to sell products. Such approach leads to situation in which men, women and teenagers became under the great pressure...

In recent survey by Teen People magazine, 27 % of the girls felt that the media pressures them to have a perfect body, and a poll conducted in 1996 by the international ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi found that ads made women fear being unattractive or old. (Peacock, M. (1998). "Sex, Housework & Ads. " Women's Wire web site. Online: web) On average girls sees advertisement from 400 to 600 times per day. By the time they became 17 years...


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Research essay sample on How The Mass Media Effects Teenage Part 1

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