In today's society people are being influenced by everything and everyone; whether it's people telling us to eat healthy or a salesman informing us that now is the best time to buy a brand new car. Aside from pressure in our local lives, young girls are receiving pressure from today's media. The pressure that is being received is not on the positive side. The media is showing us through photographs in magazines and commercials on the television that the only way to be beautiful is to be the skinny size zero Victoria's Secret model. The pressure that today's media is trying to administer to young girls is forcing them to look down upon themselves and question their body image, causing them to consider self-harm things like starvation, binging and mutilation; it also takes a toll on the young girl's mental health, which could lead to things like self-esteem and anxiety issues.
With the way our society has changed, not everyone looks the same, like we all did in the early 1900's. Take the iconic Marilyn Monroe for example. She was a "curvaceous" model, and since then models have become thinner and thinner to the point where the typical model is as much as twenty percent underweight and most likely has anorexia (Dittmar, Halliwell, and Stirling 45). In today's world, people come in all shapes, sizes, and different frame structure. Our society has changed since the last century, some people, mostly women and young teenage girls, look at themselves and feel that their specific body type is not right. Women and these adolescent girls have always been encouraged to achieve the ideal body, one that is thin and fit (Monro, Huon 85). A lot of times these girls question the way they look and are dissatisfied with what they look at on a day to day basis. The ideal female beauty has become the image of thinner, but women today are getting bigger, and the gap between the actual body size and the ideal image of a woman is widening (Dittmar, Halliwell, and Stirling 44).