Tuesday, 22 November 2016

Study task 2: The Media & Body Image - Maggie Wykes & Barry Gunter



"Blaming the media for reproducing and extolling unrealistic female bodies has almost become a popular tourism. Even medical opinion notes that the media can influence young women to starve themselves and therefor act as a possible casual factor of disordered eating. Yet surprisingly, little work has addressed either the nature of media representations of the body, or the ways in which audiences interpret and use such images in our contemporary cultural context."


"a muscular, toned, fit and hard-bodied ideal is being promulgated in respect of men in the same way as a thinness ideal is being projected for women" 

"it has been suggested that men seek to embrace physical strength, hardness and power to reinforce the traditional masculine ideal" 

"with women, lower boy self-esteem and higher body dissatisfaction have been found to motivate a drive for thinness. A comparable drive for muscularity has been hypothesized to occur among men who are unhappy with their body image." 

"Given changes in gendered roles and the growing socio-cultural emphasis on looks and grooming, it may well be that men feature more and more frequently with poor body image, low self-esteem and consequent self-harming or mental health problems"

"Large-scale surveys have produced consistent evidence that the desire to loose weight is prevalent among many national populations"

"The Daily Mail has created thousands more anorexics than Vogue, because Vogue simply shows thin women while The Daily Mail keeps up a non-stop commentary on the weight gain of famous women and links it to their sexual orientation and career success. (julie Burchill, Guardian 8 July 2000)"    

"it (The Guardian) also printed the response from a leading model agency, which argued that 'women who bought magazines featuring thin models were as much to blame as their editors and advertisers'. In other words, consumers not producers were normalizing waif-like women."

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