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Yes! Wow! I can be better starting right from this minute! Look at her! Look at her! But right afterward, I feel like throwing out all of my clothes and everything in my refrigerator and telling my boyfriend never to call me again and blow torching my whole life (Wolf 62).
Sound familiar? This was just one young womans reaction after experiencing a beauty magazine. So, what prompts young women to buy these magazines if the net worth ends up falling on the not so promising side? Well where else is a woman going to find the latest new product or technique for improving her image then from the very source that created her feelings of inadequacy! When examining the factors that contribute to a culturally ideological view of female beauty, it is not difficult to place blame on advertising companies. To obtain a better understanding of this, one must not only look at the model or celebrity endorsing or representing a particular product, but also take into consideration all of the different components that complete this socially unrealistic standard.
These components all play a role in designing the notions to which our culture presides. By creating a manufactured image to represent a cultural idea, print advertisements featured in beauty magazines greatly contribute to a fabricated myth of beauty producing an extremely negative impact on American women. Take a closer look hence, beauty magazine (as if it were only so simple to buy a magazine that would ensure beauty). Unfortunately, women fail to recognize and accept the unrealistic ideals that they are convinced of over and over again. Not very often do women see a magazine on a rack and consider the process taken to create such eye-candy. These are manufactured images!
Who wouldnt look good in a photograph after being captured at the right angle in the right light with the perfect background, only then to be retouched and shaped up with a little airbrushing here and there? Data Heyn, editor of two womens magazines, confirms: that airbrushing age from a womans face is routine (Wolf 82). An author agrees stating that, Computer imaging the controversial new technology that tampers with photographic reality has been used for years in womens magazines (83). How funny it seems that this truth always seems to disappoint men. Another method that print advertisers use to create these impractical standards is the match-up hypothesis. American females with high levels of body dissatisfaction may respond more positively to products in ads featuring physically attractive (hence thin) female endorsers, when compared to their not-so-dissatisfied counterparts (Stephan's, Hill and Hanson 2).
By placing beautiful women in print advertisements to endorse beauty related products, female consumers are convinced that the product too, will make them beautiful! From a theoretical perspective, celebrities are effective endorsers because of their symbolic admirable reference group association although they may not be a celebrity, or ever become one, the typical consumer may still symbolically aspire to identify with this group by purchasing the product recommended by the celebrity (Kamins 2). An investigator of the match-up hypothesis concluded that, It has been proposed that the physical attractiveness of a celebrity endorser may only enhance both product and ad-based evaluations of the characteristics if the product match-up with the image conveyed by the celebrity (2). Not a coincidence, then, that Cindy Crawford is the female endorser for 24 -hour Fitness! Through the use of these measures carried out by print advertising, women are continually exposed to unlikely standards. Although the advertising companies produce these manufactured images, they are not solely to blame for the ideals that they represent in print.
These ideals have derived through western popular culture, standards set over a period of time which have varied greatly through the last few decades. Within western industrialized cultures, there have been many changes over the years in the body shape and size that is considered attractive and healthy, especially for women (Grogan, 13). During the 1920 s, thin women were briefly in vogue, but their popularity was usurped by the likes of Mae West, Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. (Underwood 2). Voluptuous then and thin now, the standards set for physical female beauty have definitely changed over time. During the 1960 s, famous model Twiggy, set the ideal as thin, and in the 1980 s pop star Madonna created the thin but toned shape.
Social psychologists have emphasized the importance of cultural factors in determining what is attractive, demonstrating that the slender ideal is relatively recent, and has become thinner over the last few years with the emergence of the waif model in the 1990 s (Grogan 24). Our culture currently praising thin figures as ideal, are condemning those are anything but. This cultures intense preoccupation with weight is undoubtedly nourished by its stereotype of fat people. Like others classified as physically unattractive, overweight individuals are expected to be less intelligent, popular or outgoing than those who are slimmer (Stephan's, Hill, and Hanson 5). Ironically though, as much as western culture prefers a thin woman, other cultures around the world that arent saturated with this ideal have a different view of physical beauty. As one author writes, We have truly become a global village, particularly as a result of the Internet, there are few corners of the world left untouched by western popular culture impervious to its influences.
In fact, two researchers traveled to a corner of Peru that had little experience with western culture and showed men there a variety of images of women fat and skinny, shapely and tubular (bodies with less differentiation between waist and hip), the results, which were published in the Journal of Nature in November, 1998: the men found the heavier, tubular women more attractive and healthy looking. Peruvian men from far less remote villages who had more exposure to western culture regarded thinner, smaller-wasted women as more desirable (Underwood 2). One study conducted to prove the impact of western culture on other areas follows, In 1990, outdated copies of Playboy and womens Glamour magazines began to be shipped to the Soviet bloc; we will be able to watch the beauty myth unfold there in utero (Wolf 80). As western culture shines through advertising distributed wide, the standards seem to be set increasingly out of reach as time elapses. Therefore, it continues, the myth of beauty that is. Women influen...
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Research essay sample on Examining The Ideal Of Beauty In Print Advertising
