Televisions Impact on Young Teens Essay -- Cause Effect Media Image E

Television's Impact on Young Teens   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  With the ever growing world of mass media becoming more accessible to our children, we must realize the effect television has on the youth of today. The views and images portrayed on television go right to the heart of American youth. Young men and women are being taught that being over weight or not being skinny enough means that you are unattractive and lazy. The ideal female body which television portrays as being normal has gone from the voluptuous figure of Marilyn Monroe and Mimi VanDoren to the skinny waist and bust-line of Pamela Anderson and Brittany Spears. It has become an obsessive, unattainable goal for our young teenage women. These teens find themselves in an endless battle to try and attain figures that are only made possible through cosmetic surgery and a profession that pays you to look a certain way. Many girls who find themselves unhappy with their appearance turn to starvation, which later turns to binge eating, then to self-induced vomiting(B attegay 54).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Eating disorders are far more common in the United States than in any other country. While some countries like Russia and Bosnia are struggling to find food, Americans are creating problems by consuming too much of it. Americanized countries or even any other industrialized countries with the direct influence of television are found to have considerably more problems with eating disorders. Carolyn Costin states in her book The Eating Disorder Source that western women seem to be at greater risk for developing disorders and the degree of Westernization seems to increase the risk. Costin then goes on to say that Evidence suggests that anorexia nervosa is uncommon outside the Western world and in less affluent Western countries. Furthermore, when immigrants move from less industrialized countries to more industrialized countries they are more likely to develop eating disorders. Costin is trying to say that you are at a greater risk of developing an eating order such as anorexia or bulimia in an Americanized culture because of the importance and constant reminders in forms of mass media that you should look thin, loose weight and keep the weight off. These are all things that are ongoing in our brains and degrade the self-image we behold of ourselves. Constin goes on to say: â€Å"Advertisements for taking off weight and keeping it off are fo... ... the product, but also causes insecurities of what we should look like holding the product. The consumers feed the fire of the sources flurry to put products in our faces.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Overall, media has increased its knowledge of its audience more rapidly than ever before. We are monitored by sources we would have never imagined and the problem is getting worse. With the new age of wireless internet and Cracker Jack baseball card sized phones, companies are tracking our every move. They know what we watch, who we call, where we go, and what we buy. They know what products to offer us and they know where to find more people like us so they too can be targeted.(Cantor p.32) The bottom line is that the media’s effect on us through television is much greater than we know. If they can convince us that our bodies are not slim enough, they can convince us that their products are worth buying. We need to rally for tighter standards from the Gatekeepers of television and the rest of mass media. The producers will only keep giving us more and as the audience becomes more and more desensitized we will only continue to want it until we become a warp ed society without values, morals or standards.