I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can't take the pressure.~Bridget Jones' Diary
Over the past few years it has become increasingly obvious that the media is taking on the role of parent to this generation of children. When "the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements a day and watches three years' worth of television ads over the course of a lifetime," (Kilbourne, 1999) it is impossible to ignore the presence of the media in our lives. It sets standards for all groups of individuals (men, women, African-Americans, Jews, etc), and presents us with warped stereotypes that are impossible to reach. The media wouldn't be such a powerful dictator of human behavior if "we didn't live in a culture that encourages us to believe we can and should remake [ourselves] into perfect commodities. These images play into the American belief of transformation and ever-new possibilities." (Kilbourne, 1999, p.132). What is so powerful about advertising is not that they are trying to get us to purchase their product, but that ads sell values, beliefs, and behaviors, which are dangerous or harmful (dieting, excessive thinness, casual/unprotected sex, substance dependency, and many others). Essentially, in this way, the media dictates who we are and what we should be.
MIXED MESSAGES
While the negative messages of ads attack all individuals, the media victimizes women, and young women, more than men. When girls hit puberty, they often feel more self-conscious and worry about pleasing the standards others set for them. Also "normal physiological changes during adolescence result in increased body fat for women. If these normal changes are considered undesirable by the culture (and by parents and peers), this can lead to chronic anxiety and concern about weight control in young women." (Kilbourne, 1999, p.134).
First the media plays with young women's insecurities about their bodies by repeatedly exposing them to an unnaturally thin ideal that represents less than 10% of the female population (who are genetically designed to look that way). At the same time "women are ...invited to have a romance, indeed an erotic experience, with...the food we eat. And the consequences become even more severe as we enter into the territory of compulsivity and addiction." We are encouraged with words like "indulge" and "splurge" to use food as a way to soothe and pacify any emotion other than happiness. The phrase "comfort food" has become all together too common, and women turn to food as medicine for their frustration rather than seeking therapy or other, healthier outlets for these emotions. The conflicting ideas of having to be unnaturally, unhealthily, and inhumanly waif-like and depending on food to deal with their frustration with their body can be overwhelmingly confusing to girls, and often can lead to unhealthy eating habits. Today close to 80% of women wake-up unhappy with their body.
COUNTERADVERTISING
It is very hard to change our perception of beauty and other aspects of life unless our environment was to change first. We need to challenge the images and values presented by the media, and a powerful way is through counteradvertising. While dealing with a serious issue, many counter ads are able to make parodies of popular ads and use the humor to convey their message. One of my favorites at Adbuster's website is for McDonalds. The setting for the ad is the emergency room where doctors are operating on a person in the background, and in the foreground is a heartbeat monitor with the golden arches in place of a heartbeat. At the bottom of the monitor, it says "Big Mac Attack!" implying that the person on the operating table has just had a heart attack from unhealthy eating habits. Another describes a package of chicken as having "Great legs. Nice breasts", similar to the way many women are objectified by advertising.
While counteradvertising is on the rise, and TRUTH ads, which attack the tobacco industry, are becoming more common in many teen magazines including Seventeen and Teen People, counteradvertising is still not very prominent, and other action should be taken to raise awareness about the effects of advertisements and the underlying messages they convey. We must all try to promote a media 'consciousness' so that we can question the validity of the ads we see and recognize what the underlying messages are. Because there is no way for us to escape from today's media culture, we must find ways to ease the effect it has on our lives. Teaching media education/literacy in schools, starting in elementary schools, is essential, because then children will be aware from a young age the effect advertising has on their life, and hopefully will not be as vulnerable to its messages. There are many organizations which are working on spreading media literacy and bringing it into school curriculums.