By Kailey Franklin and Michaela Schmitz
On average, teens see more than 5,260 com- mercials advertising clothes, makeup, and the general idea of beauty over the course of a year, according to mirrormirror.org.
Interestingly enough, the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reports that only 5 percent of the population nat- urally possesses the body type portrayed in those advertisements.
As a result, many people, particularly young teenage girls, develop unhealthy habits and even disorders.
About 24 million people of all ages and genders suffer from an eating disorder, such as An- orexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorders, says ANAD, (National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders).
Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and this isn’t surprising, teens say, considering that only one in 10 people with an eating disorder ever receive treatment.
“No matter where you go, you’re convinced you’re ugly,” said Katy Clifton, a MedSci Academy sophomore.
Clifton isn’t the only person to feel this way. Out of 12 female Indian Trail High School and Academy students randomly interviewed, all 12 agreed that the media’s portrayal of beauty is harmful. Eleven of them agreed that the media influences their ideas of physical beauty to some degree.
“Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn’t obtain by being healthy,” said Mary Pipher, in Reviving Ophelia. “When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.”
The female students unanimously agree that there is a problem in today’s media. However, 12 male ITHSA students also interviewed, gave starkly different responses to questions on the topic.
Many of the male students thought that the media was only harmful if people let them- selves be influenced by it.
“I say that it’s harmful to people that can be easily influenced,” said Kenosha Military Academy Senior Matthew Bolton. “Other than that, it supports a healthy body type. Maybe a little extreme, but it does.”
Most of the interviewees agree that the media is most harmful to teenagers, primarily girls. However, their reasons varied.
Phillip Kuszel, a General Studies senior, said that teens were most vulnerable because they are still finding themselves.
Nivas Mcthuraj, also a senior, disagreed. “It’s more harmful to teenage girls because they tend to be a bit more self-conscious,” he said.
While most people think the media is harmful for promoting unhealthy habits such as binging and purging, many also criticize it for the rampant sexualization of women.
PBS.org reports that in a 2008 study of 1,988 advertisements from 50 well-known American magazines, researchers from Wesleyan Uni- versity in Connecticut found that about half of those ads showed women as sex objects.
Researchers considered a woman as a sex object depending upon her posture, facial ex- pression, make-up, activity, camera angle and amount of skin shown.
“Women are constantly turned into things, into objects. And of course this has very seri- ous consequences,” said Jean Kilbourne, cre- ator of the award-winning documentary Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women.
“For one thing, it creates a climate in which there is widespread violence against women. Now I’m not at all saying that an ad…directly causes violence,” she said. “It’s not that sim- ple, but it is part of a cultural climate in which women are seen as things, as objects, and cer- tainly turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person.”
Kilbourne is an author, senior scholar at Wellesley College, and national speaker on women and the media issues. She is an out- spoken critic of advertisements concerning women, alcohol and tobacco.
According to safehorizon.org, about one in four women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime, and according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), one in six American women have been the vic- tim of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.
Also according to RAINN, victims of sex- ual assault are three times more likely to suf- fer from depression, six times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and four times more likely to contemplate suicide.
Depression and eating disorders are also conditions that tend to co-occur with each other.
Lisa Lilenfeld, PhD, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Argosy University in Arlington, Va., who specializes in eating dis- orders, states that being so malnourished and so severely underweight as people often are with eating disorders leads to physiological changes that affect states of mood.
The National Institute of Mental Health reports that up to 75 percent of people with an eating disorder also suffer from depression or anxiety, which shows that all of this is intricately intertwined.
“Everyday, I try to look my best,” said Au- tumn Mitlo, an art teacher at ITHSA. “But I make sure that I look ‘beautiful’ for myself, and not for anyone else.”
“The media and culture influence us by mak- ing us think that to be beautiful, you must look a certain way; to think that there is only one right answer for this is ridiculous,” Mitlo said. “Cultural beauty standards have made me work harder to be myself and be unique. I try to not let cultural standards affect me in a neg- ative way. I think that all people everywhere are beautiful, and therefore, so am I.”