Writing About The Role Of Media In Promoting Anorexia (Research Paper Sample)

ANOREXIA: THE ROLE OF MEDIA
Anorexia is an eating disorder characterized by refusal to maintain a healthy body weight, low self-esteem and intense fear of getting fat. It affects people of all ages but majorly the young adults and female adolescents (11-17) years. The media is a platform of entertainment and information, be it the newspapers, magazines, televisions or the internet. About 60% of Kenyans own and watch television for an average of 3-4 hours a day. Given this fact, the media has the power to influence many people’s lifestyles and behavior.
The media plays a big role in promoting anorexia. 50% of commercials aimed at women (such as beauty products) mention physical attractiveness in which slender bodies are glorified. This leads to young adults who are not slender as per the commercial standards to feel dissatisfied with their bodies and to be emotionally stressed. They therefore purchase advertised products for improved appearance or dieting, so that they lose weight and have the model size bodies, even if it’s way below the required body mass index.
Beauty magazines post information on ways to lose weight and keep it off, the ideal body size and so on. Anorexics will therefore use this as their manuals in getting their notional perfect size. Fashion magazines also support anorexic tendencies by promoting and endorsing messages that promote thinness and dieting. 73% of teenage girls who abuse diet pills and self-purge frequently read women fitness and health magazines. Moreover, many magazines use computer modification to create slender ‘perfect’ images of women that don’t really exist
Try counting the number of television personalities and great movie actresses that are overweight and you will come up with very few or none at all. There is the therefore a high probability that someone will have television personalities as his or her role model and try to emulate his or her life including body size. This may lead to adoption of poor eating habits to lose weight to be in the same category as that actor’s, actress’ or TV personality’s size. Most commercials and movies depict overweight people as having n...