Body Image And Eating Disorders
Attractiveness is defined as having a quality that is alluring or providing pleasure or delight especially in appearance and manner. Women and men are constantly judged in their everyday lives on how attractive they are by each other. Members of both sexes are pressured by other’s standards and expectations and sometimes these pressures can become too much, resulting in eating disorders and skewed self-body images. Body image is the subjective concept of one’s physical appearance based on one’s own observation and reactions of others.
Appearance has been shown to affect adolescents negatively more so than older Americans. Adolescents have shown to place more importance on their body image and feel more negatively about their own bodies. Being discontented with their own body is very common among females that an average young woman is described to exist in a “normative discontent” state. In a national survey, results showed that almost fifty percent of women reported being unhappy with the way they look especially with their weight and lower and mid torso. The areas that women are usually dissatisfied with are body parts that undergo dramatic change during puberty such as the bust, hips and thighs (Lewis and Rosenblum).
Perceptions of one’s own body weight affect girls’ body images. Physical attractiveness does as well since it is a main part of social evaluation and self-evaluation. There is a saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but in society, there is usually a social consensus on what is considered to be attractive, depending on the culture. In Caucasian cultures, thin and slim-hipped females are considered ideal. Females in these cultures have also been shown to overvalue thinness and often overestimate their female and male peers’ value on thinness. Hispanic and Asian cultural groups in the U.S. have also shown to share the same preference of thinness with these Caucasian groups. Even though the body is subject to evaluation, research has...
View Full Essay
