We Must Close The Confidence Gap Analysis

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” – Confucius. Beauty has had a specific image or ideal for the past 100 years from the help of pop culture and advertisements that women are constantly viewing daily. We can go through the different ideas of beauty through idolized women in the past who were often considered to be the ideal beautiful. With the help of makeup and the aid of different styled clothing, women were able to fit in to form into the ideal beauty.

Janna L. Kim (2007) discoursed (as cited in Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2012) Media as a tool that can shape the perception of females on their ideal figure. “Sexual objectification in media is characterized by a striking emphasis on female appearance. The media’s ideal women are styled according to the latest fashion trends, and their bodies have all the right curves.” (p.

Identity not only mean your name and sex but it also means what and who you are as a person and how you act as a person. In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” – Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Gendered Interaction: Masculine and Feminine Styles...” – J.T. Wood, and “The Confidence Gap” – Katty Kay and Claire Shipman identity is a major theme that is talked about. In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” the main argument is that Hispanic women often struggle being identified. In “Gendered Interaction: Masculine and Feminine Styles...” J.T. the main argument being made is that women and men have different ways of communicating. In “The Confidence Gap” the main argument being made is that women’s lack of confidence affects their work life in a negative way. Identity is related to the three reading passages because it states how women and men are identified in certain aspects of their life.

As presented in the movie Miss Representation, media and technology are important because they work as powerful messengers that build many people’s way of thinking. As we live in a technologically advanced generation, being exposed to media is so easy. Both media and technology works as delivering any ideas that shapes our society. They shape our minds about politics, our emotions, and our importance. Then, it means that media can also manipulate our perception of gender role. Among all the ideas that media tries to indoctrinate, it can also portrait the importance of a woman to being all about physical beauty. Media presents a perfect woman’s image focusing on their bodily figure making their value, worth, or mind would depend on their physical appearances. Thus, it influences the way men think what is important about women is their bodily attractiveness. In any kinds of media such as advertisement, films, or video games, women are generally appreciated by their looks, not by their intellectuals or achievements. As media depicts an unrealistic body image of women’s beauty, many young girls’ value is set as to become someone else with attractive appearance, nothing like smart, powerful, or leader-like.

The images displayed on social media, the Internet, and television display women as perfect beings that must keep up with trends, makeup, fashion, and hair to be relevant. The demand for a woman to always look drop dead gorgeous can be overwhelming can even spike our confidence but for those of us who grew up as tomboys or uninterested in beauty, it can have us give up and become wallflowers.

It’s difficult to envision a world where idealized female imagery is not plastered everywhere, but our present circumstance is a relatively new occurrence. Before the mass media existed, our ideas of beauty were restricted to our own communities. Until the introduction of photography in 1839, people were not exposed to real-life images of faces and bodies. Most people did not even own mirrors. Today, however, we are more obsessed with our appearance than ever before. But the concern about appearance is quite normal and understandable given society’s standards. According to Jane Kilborne, “Every period of history has had its own standards of what is and is not beautiful, and every contemporary society has its own distinctive concept of the

Images used of women in the media usually present women as sex objects to be viewed by males. The media representation of women suggests women should have the appearance of mannequins, tall and thin, with very long beautiful flowing hair to compliment their glowing blemish free skin, with long perfect legs. It can be argued that the media encourage women to view their bodies as an ongoing project that is in constant need of improving. The content of magazines aimed at women mainly contains information and images based on beauty and fashion, with

What is beauty? Everywhere you go such as grocery stores, bookstores, fitness centers, school, or movies theaters, images of both men and women who society has deemed "beautiful" are deliberately posted in order to sell a product, charm an audience, or merely to gain attention. Different individuals have different perceptions of beauty. However, society has degraded beauty into giving it a particular shape which seen to idolize muscular man with ultra thin women. Nearly every adolescent growing up in the United States is exposed to various encounters with mass media every day. designed to reach a larger amount of audience with his technology. Clearly the objectification of women is a huge issue in society and is often led by advertising. Media

some type of media platform throughout the day. Among these forms of media are photos and videos of woman idealized as the perfect woman. Magazines release photos of women whose looks are highly unachievable and thought as as the ideal woman. An average woman exposed to these photos may feel depresssed and may want to look like the model through unsafe dieting and other eating disorders. The media has affected girls as young as six years old into changing their appearance to look similar to those idealized in television and magazines. The mass media’s portrayal of women today sets standards of beauty that are highly unattainable and unrealistic,

I do not think the media is entirely to blame for the way that women see themselves and their means of value in the world. I think the value placed on appearance is partly ingrained in our base instincts. For men, finding the best mate is about being strong or wealthy, a protector and provider. For women, it is more about being pretty, good genes to pass on to offspring.

Society creates a standard of beauty for women that often changes along with society due to a new perspective on what it means to be beautiful in our culture. These standards for beauty create what our society believes makes a woman desirable, attractive, perfect, and overall beautiful.  Which then enforces unhealthy and unrealistic beauty ideals that negatively affect women's self-image and their body image because society has attributed beauty to self worth. The result is with the ever changing standards of beauty means women use various ways to alter their bodies and appearance by clothing, makeup, hair, dieting, exercising, and even taking extreme measures to perfect their looks through surgery.

Not only my primary sources, also in all my secondary sources indicated how the media play a deviant role in women’s physically and mentally health. In the report by Bloom, Gitter, Kogel , and Zaphiropoulos in 1999 not only proved that women are influenced by the media false image, they starve to death, wear excessive makeup and follow the media ideal and standards beauty. Women never can be satisfied with their appearance and their looks since the media definition of beauty changes during the time.

The media have constructed attractiveness for a long time many sociocultural standards of beauty and. Especially women’s body images have been a primary concern because the value of women has been measured how they look like. How women have similar body traits with the modern female body images has been a significant and essential issue, historically. The sociocultural standards of beauty which have been created by the greed of the media have dire impacts on young females. The current beauty level of the female body image in the media is thinness. In fact, the preferred female body images have been changed through the media. Throughout history, sometimes skinny women’s body images were loved, and sometimes over weighted women’s body images were preferred. Whenever the media have dictated the ideal female

In recent times, the world’s view on woman is very unhealthy. Women portrayed on magazines and TV shows are thin, beautiful, and are always covered in perfect makeup and styled hair. Runway models are known to have

ideals influence the way society views beauty as a whole. In doing so, media festers an