Affects of Advertising on Adolencent Eating Disorders
Summary:
Advertisements are marketed to attract consumers to materialistic goods, they create an infatuation for perfection and for beauty. This infatuation may sound harmless, but it puts young adults on a path for desperate desire for acceptance and normality. When young adults find themselves on this path, they cannot judge what normality is, and define it as perfection.
Its late afternoon, and you're sitting in the waiting room of your doctor's office. Bursting with boredom, you pick up U.S. Weekly to see what going on in the world. Immediately you are bombarded with tedious amounts of ads. You see women in bikinis advertising golf clubs, and a big buff man without a shirt on advertising a laptop. Slightly confused, you begin to become self conscious or wonder, "Can I use a laptop without big muscles or with a shirt on"" You immediately start to desire the body, even more than the laptop. Then you ponder the reasoning for such contradistinct advertising. The average American sees over 500 ads each day, and the average teen sees 750, 50% more. (Mediascope) Although few of these ads are selling beauty enhancement products, the ads contain anorexic models and "masculine" men. The models in the ads are portrayed to have unrealistic bodies, which they don't even posses, but are produced by computers. These bodies become materialistic items that people desire to have. Adolescents go to great lengths to get these bodies because of their ignorance and conclusion that they need to have an unrealistic body. Men tend to see the muscle enhanced, masculine body and women tend to see the size 2 model, without any fat and gorgeous blonde hair. Consumers are led to think that beauty is more important than their body's condition, and carelessly destroy themselves. Advertisements lead to desire for unhealthy, unobtainable bodies in young adults by idealizing the image of normality.
bebe Spring Bikini Ad Calvin Klein
In a study, nearly seventy percent of adolescent girls said that magazine models credit their image of an ideal body and "Seventy-five percent of 'normal' weight women think they are overweight and 90% of women overestimate their body size." (Mediascope) The bebe ad above creates the adolescent female view of normality. Normality is what the media creates through idealizing unrealistic body features in ads. The bebe ad shows an unrealistically thin model displaying handbags in a bikini; the consumer viewing this ad will be under the influence that to wear this bikini, they will have to have the body of this model. This ad emphasizes extreme thinness, which is an atypical feature of average women. Adolescent women tend to compare their bodies to the ones around them, especially models. The comparing between themselves and models leads to depression and low self esteem, and ultimately a fear of being different, and not being thin. Also, women's ignorance to the spectrum of normality further leads to acknowledging that the models in the ads are normal. The confusion within the spectrum leads to the belief that one falls into the left, overweight side, as oppose to the center of the spectrum. Normality is defined through the media, and societal beliefs.
Men's interpretation of normality is illustrated by the media and more influentially, by society. In the above Calvin Klein ad, the man is portrayed as masculine through his rugged, bad ass personality. Men see this as normal because they are told by society to be aggressive, and to be aggressive, you must be muscular. The Abercrombie ad tries to display a typical American adolescent male, and idealizes the muscular, masculine phenotype, but in reality it is fictitious. The physiological societal belief that a man is defined by his masculinity drives men to put up a front, and build excessive amounts of muscle. They go to such extremes as steroids, or even weight loss, because the ideal normality is so hard to achieve. Normality is pushed closer and closer to perfection, and the media tries to equalize normality and perfection.
Calvin Klein Polo
The men in the Calvin Klein ads posses chiseled abs, and masculine attitudes. They represent perfection. Consequently, they also represent normality because they are masculine. This leads to the assumption that normality is perfection. The Polo ad portrays a refined sharpness with the model's hair being blown by the wind and the preppy collared shirt. The model is depicted to be perfect, and is still normal because the consumer can relate to the ad. The media has created an expectation that normality can only be achieved when perfection is reached. This is impossible because the human mind is always self-conscious and the human body is imperfect. This puts an adolescent on a cycle to destruction of themselves. The goal for normality becomes an infatuation to be perfect.
Guess Spring Break Miami Ad
Abercrombie & Fitch
Once an adolescent conceives his view of normality, he starts to desire. The above ads entice the necessity for normality. The Guess ad for Miami creates a desire for the location of the ad, with big bold letters, "MIAMI," but before you can get there you need to be normal and perfect for Miami. The media creates the desire for the location, and the body in this ad, it overwhelms the actual product they're trying to sell. The media wants consumers to feel this need, this desire that causes frustration. Paul Hamburg, an assistant Professor at Harvard Medical school claims, "The media markets desire. And by reproducing ideals that are absurdly out of line with what real bodies really do look like...the media perpetuates a market for frustration and disappointment. Its customers will never disappear." Humans thrive for what they can't have, Americans want more then they have, and once they get it, they desire more, it's viewed as progression. This progression, when applied to weight loss leads to such conditions as bulimia and anorexia. The desire to be the normal model, and fear of becoming the American normal statistic provides reasoning to strive for what is not achievable.
In the Abercrombie ad, a masculine man is surrounded by a numerous models. Men desire to be the man in the picture, surrounded by attractive models. They desire the body, and believe once they have a perfect body, they'll be able to live out this scenario. They reasoning for advertising is to create the desire for a product, and the media has made beauty a materialistic good.
Advertisements are marketed to attract consumers to materialistic goods, they create an infatuation for perfection and for beauty. This infatuation may sound harmless, but it puts young adults on a path for desperate desire for acceptance and normality. When young adults find themselves on this path, they cannot judge what normality is, and define it as perfection. They will set goals to reach the end of the path, but once they get there, they want more, so young adults jump into a continuous cycle of struggle for accomplishment. When young adults continue in the cycle, the sacrifice their bodies and compromise a healthy lifestyle. They fall into the traps of eating disorders and steroids, which can tragically lead to death. The media's use of ambiguous advertisements for unrealistic bodies leads to the perception that normality is defined by perfection and, ultimately, the self-destruction of one's body.
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