Unrealistic beauty standards affect men and women

Patients who have multiple plastic surgery procedures may have not only potential medical issues, but psychological issues as well, said Dr. Afshin Parhiscar, director of plastic surgery at Long Island College Hospital.

"When you have someone who is unhappy with every aspect of his or her body and who, by most standards, looks good to begin with, you have to wonder about their self-perception and all the issues that go with that," Parhiscar said.

People magazine has also called into question the message that is being sent to young girls when an already attractive 23-year-old celebrity chooses to undergo so many alterations.

Regardless of age or social status, women are choosing to go to the extreme to reach the desired looks or body standards created by the media. Besides resorting to cosmetic surgeries to have Jennifer Aniston's nose or Angelina Jolie's lips, many women are also excessively exercising and dieting to have Jessica Alba's body.

The media constantly enforces the idea that if women lose weight, they will have it all – the perfect career, family and sex life – making the majority of women feel inadequate.

"We have this hysteria about weight that is out of control," said Christine Smith, an assistant professor of psychology and human development at UW-Green Bay.

Some women find thin models in the media attractive and try to imitate them through dieting or exercising. If done excessively, it could lead to the development of eating disorders, according to the National Eating Disorder Association.

NEDA also said persuading the media to present more diverse, realistic images of people with positive messages about health and self-esteem would help reduce the pressures many people feel about fitting one standard, which may decrease the possibility for eating disorders.

Negative Body Image

Brenna Coleman, author of the article "Media Portrayal of Women," said magazine and television commercials are degrading women with ads, flaunting half-naked female bodies to sell any type of product from fragrances to running shoes.

According to Duane Hargreaves, who wrote "The Effect of Television Commercials on Mood and Body Dissatisfaction: The Role of Appearance-Schema Activity, "Teenage girls who viewed commercials depicting women who modeled the unrealistically thin-ideal type of beauty caused adolescent girls to feel less confident, more angry and more dissatisfied with their weight and appearance."

Kristina Wortz, a junior education major at UWGB, said throughout middle school and high school, she struggled with issues in regard to negative body image.

"I think a lot of people at that age do," Wortz said. "When you're young, you start looking at magazines and seeing movies and start questioning, ‘Why don't I look like that?'"

Megan Kiefer, a junior human biology major at UWGB, has also been self-conscious about her body at certain times in her life.

"When seeing other girls getting attention for their looks or body, it makes me want what they have," Kiefer said. "No one really wants to see a heavy-set girl in a bikini."

Similarly, Smith said women who are attractive get reinforced in many different ways in this culture, so it makes sense that they would attempt to do things that would get them more cultural rewards.

"In this society, beauty is everything," said Guadalupe Flores, a junior criminal justice major at UW-Oshkosh.

Women aren't the only ones affected negatively by unrealistic standards created by the media.

A study conducted by the University of Missouri found that men are also reacting negatively to unrealistic ads. They found the images that were making men feel inadequate and self-conscious weren't of idealized men, as typical with females. Instead, it was of women in magazines such as Maxim and Playboy.

Josh McQuillan, a junior majoring in secondary education at UW-Oshkosh, said when looking at attractive women in magazines with friends, it often leads to joking about how they would never be attractive enough, muscular enough or have enough money to be with someone in the media.

"It is meant in good fun, but sometimes you can't help but lose confidence because of your inadequacies," McQuillan said.

Bashir Buruin, a senior political science major at UWGB, felt similarly and said, "Men value their appearances just as much as women do. Showing men pictures of women they know they can't possibly have is bound to affect their self-image."

Body images of unrealistic proportions are not only aimed at adults, but can also be found in ads toward children as young as 3 years old.

A Barbie doll has a figure that is unattainable in real life and is a role model for 90 percent of girls ages 3-11, according to Just Think, is an organization that teaches young people to lead healthy, responsible, independent lives in a culture highly impacted by media.

The Media Awareness Network, which is home to one of the world's most comprehensive collections of media and digital literacy resources, said researchers generated a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions.

They found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition.

"Society wants the modern day Marilyn Monroe," Flores said. "However, most people don't realize that Monroe wasn't a size 00 or 0 like society expects now."

Marilyn Monroe, an American actress, singer and model, was 5 feet 5 1/2 inches and weighed around 120 pounds. Although it varied, she was a size 8 for most of her career.

According to the Center for Disease Control, the average American woman is around 5 feet  4 inches and weighs 164.7 pounds, which averages to about a size 12.