Of all the articles that I have read, I took the most interest in this article. I find it fascinating how the media plays such a huge role of how women view their bodies. It is sad that even self-help magazines such as Shape have articles that tell women how to tone their bodies and to not be ashamed of how they naturally look, but then the “trainers” are skinny and healthy looking. I can see how frustrating this would be to a woman who is self-conscious about her body. How can a magazine that promotes healthy thinking about body images be so contradictive with the images it portrays in other articles about famous, skinny models?
Reading this article reminded me of a research paper that I did on Barbie and why they changed the structure of the doll. Makers of Barbie thought that the skinny shape of the doll affected the way young girls viewed their bodies. The previous Barbie’s measurements on a full sized person would have been extreme and very unproportional. The new Barbie doll has more realistic measurements for a normal sized woman.
As a child growing up, I was never insecure about my body because of the way Barbie looked. I admit, I thought she was gorgeous, but never did it make me want to change the way I looked. If the public had such an issue with Barbie and there was a change made, why hasn’t the media changed the way that models look? There are too many women and adolescent girls who have some sort of an eating disorder because of how society portrays how a woman should look with extremely skinny models. How many eating disorders will be enough to make society stop showing skinny young models?
