How Teen Girls are Affected by the Media

For years, the media has progressively held up a thinner body image as the ideal look for women. The media is everywhere. You wake up and begin your day by turning on the television to check the weather. You leave for school and notice all these ads at bus stops and on buses. Coming home from school, you see these ads again and proceed to turn on the television to watch the newest episode of Pretty Little Liars. The average teenaged girl sees 400-600 advertisements per day, and by the time she is 17 years old she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media. Unfortunately, we cannot escape the media. Girls’ appearance is always being criticized and commented on. Boys’ appearance has always been spoken about significantly less often in media.

Leading teen girl magazines include a focus on appearance, using an appeal to beauty to sell certain products. This is similar to commercials aimed at women, as they also use beauty to sell products. It is shown that 59% of television is taken up by commercials. Just 3% of this fraction of commercials is aimed at men. The image that girls consider to be “beauty” is unattainable for the majority of the female population. Research indicates that mixed messages from the media make the transition to adulthood extremely difficult. Studies also show that while the number of boys who say they “have confidence in themselves” remains stable throughout their adolescence whereas the numbers for girls have dropped steadily. This was caused by the gap between a girl’s actual image and society’s unrealistic message about what girls should be like. An interesting study explains the act of researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions. They found that her back was too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body was too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A real woman with these proportions would eventually die from malnutrition. It is proven that 99% of girls aged 8-10 years old own at least one Barbie doll.

The number of real life women and girls who seek similar underweight bodies is high, and they can suffer with severe health consequences. In 2006, it was estimated that around 450,000 Canadian women were affected by an eating disorder. Another effect shown on teenage girls are their sexual interpretations. Continuous pressure on girls is exceeded by the media’s tendency to represent very young girls in sexual ways. The fashion industry has begun to use younger and younger girls as models, posing and mimicking the visual images similar to pornographic media.

It is confirmed that young girls are bombarded with images of sexuality and these images are bombarded by stereotypical views on women and girls seen as powerless. As these teen girls continue to view these media messages, they will continue to be influenced by stereotypical images. The outlook on beautifully, obsessively thin and skimpily dressed girls is shown as objects of male desire. The overwhelming presence of images in the media has taught women that their real bodies have become invisible in the mass media. Teens judge themselves by the beauty industry’s standard and constantly compare themselves to other people. These messages being sent to women about thinness, dieting and beauty is stating that the female body is an object to be perfected- and that they are always in need of adjustment.