Fashion

            The American woman of today can never be too thin or too pretty. In most cases today, thin equates beauty, so the present ideal is a thin, fit, radiantly healthy woman. In magazines stuffed with models and advertisements, billboards on the highway, and actresses on TV, the message of what women should look like is everywhere. From the "sweater girl" of the fifties to the scantily clad Britney Spears, the media has directed the flow of fashion trends, and the inescapable presence of these images in effect shapes the image of women today. Depending on the time period, different body types are in and out of style. What was considered "sexy and voluptuous" is now considered "fat", while what was considered thin and unhealthy now projects the ideal of self control and power. In the developed world the preoccupation with the body and with beauty is intensifying, and the beauty industry, despite nearly thirty years of feminism, is a multi-billion dollar year industry.
             It is unfortunate that the media influences American society to the point that it defines the "ideal woman". One reason media is so influential is that advertising is a 130 billion dollar a year industry. The average American watches thirty hours of TV a week and spends one hundred and ten hours a year reading magazines. That adds up to an exposure of up to fifteen hundred ads daily. Advertising is a powerful educational force in our culture due to the simple fact of exposure. .
             Economics is also a significant factor in the development of the ideal image. There is a wealth of businesses that depend upon the American desire for thinness to survive. Exercise and diet companies are an example. In order to create a market for their product, they attempt to make women feel inadequate about their own bodies through advertisement. According to Naomi Wolf, author of the book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, "the diet industry has tripled its income in the past ten years from a $10 billion industry to a $33.