Youth and Mental Ilness
Even young girls are susceptible to this mad race of looking a certain way and this has a very negative effect on their mental as well as physical development. They are always under pressure to look a certain way to be accepted as sexy and beautiful. This pressure in the growing up years prevents them from concentrating on their career goals and aspirations.
The population is being constantly being bombarded with TV commercials, magazine covers, hoardings showing these ultra thin models over and over again.
The celebrity images of Nicole Richie and Kate Bosworth make matters even worse. According to Lamb, a psychology professor at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt., ” these images are making girls as young as 9 and 10 vulnerable to falling prey to this sexy image.” What worries her all the more is that they start working on this from a very young age and are even encouraged by their parents to do so.
This feeling of wanting to be sexy is ok for the teenagers but such behavior at a preliminary stage in life should be negatively reinforced. The pressure and hype is so much that girls shy away from sports also because the athletic figure is not considered sexy by many.
Murnen has studied this topic for 15 years and he remarked “We have done studies of grade-school girls, and even in grade 1, girls think the culture is telling them that they should model themselves after celebrities who are svelte, beautiful and sexy.”
Murnen’s research says that only 18% of the girls in the vulnerable age group do not get affected by this and are supposed to have high esteem for their bodies. But this is a very meager percentage. 6000 girls were studied and it was found that the more the girls were exposed to fashion magazines, the more risk they had of having a poor body image.
Katie Ford, chief executive officer of Ford Models has a different view point. Her megastar models include Christie Brinkley and Rachel Hunter .She thinks that the thinness propaganda among models in U.S.A is not the problem. The actual problem is obesity and the dangers associated with it. She says that “You can look as far back as Greek statues and paintings and see that. It’s part of women’s fantasy nature,” Ford says. “The question is: When does that become destructive?”
She says that eating disorders and obesity are a result of numerous issues and cannot be blamed entirely on the television, glossy fashion magazines and entertainment industry.
