In today’s world, most if not all of us have some kind of exposures of social media. Teenagers are spending more time on social media per day than any other activity. Therefore the media one of the strongest influencers to the younger generations than anything else. But these media outlets have been ramming to our young’s mind that girls should be only sexy and beautiful and men to should powerful and masculine. This create an inequality toward young girls or women because it limits the possibilities of what they can actually be in the real world. The media have negatively influence the young generation of how women specifically show be view in the world.
According to the documentary Miss Representation,“ the ideal image of the perfect body of a woman have become more and more unrealistic” (Newsom, 2011). The images that are shown on these media outlets has already been photoshopped. This provide young viewers to an expectations that are physically impossible to achieve. In the old days when internet was not easily accessible to the public, it reduced the exposure of young people from these expectations. But now, as technologies has drastically improve and very easily accessible to almost everyone, it has become a more powerful tool to influence and alter the thinking of our young. Before one was even born, they have already been assigned of how they should live their lives.
Girls are represented by the color pink, have dolls, and other feminine toys. Boys are represented by the color blue, have action figures, play sports, and other masculine activities. Our society and the media have already set a standard of how each and everyone of us should behave and live our lives. Young girls and women are spending more and more money on beauty products and medical procedures to look like those models from the internet. Also according the the documentary “women today spend the average between $12,000-$15,500 a year on cosmetic products and services, and cosmetic procedures on people under the age of 19 have more than triple from 1997 to 2007” (Newsom, 2011).
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Women are spending more and more each day on cosmetic products than they would spend on education purposes. This illustrated that in today’s society, we view beauty and appearances more than intellectual and knowledge. This is because the young generation have been bombarded with an unrealistic body image by social media at a younger and younger age each day. Therefore they were taught at a young age that looks are more important than education. This led to young women to believe that they should only be view as sex object, and as time goes by they too believe that they are nothing more than just sex object.
In the documentary Dr Caroline Heldman stated that “self-objectifying has becoming a national epidemic” (Heldman, 2011). This problem lead to the increase of depression, eating disorder, self-shaming, and anxiety. It also lowered one’s self-esteem, self-confidence, and cognitive function. This lead to the decrease of women in politics and other intellectual fields.
As we see today in politics or anything other professional occupations, there are generally more males compared to females. Females are generally see as housewives and nurturer and men are typically view in more office and other intellectual positions. According to the textbook Introduction to Sociology, “ on an average day, 84% of women spend time doing household activities compare to the 67% of male.” (Griffins et al., 2012, Social Stratification and inequality, para. 1).
This challenge women to be successful and intellectual when she still have household activities that needed to be taken care of. Even when women made it to the level of professional as men, they are not been treated as equally intellectual to men. Women generally make only 77 cents for every dollar that her male counterparts make (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Although women’s right have improve compare to during the 1900s, society and media still treat women like they should only be housewives and nothing else. This belief is one of the factor why women will never be view as the main income of the household, or a big role in society or occupations.
Therefore because of these setbacks, we don’t see a lot of women involved in politics. In today’s society, we see a lot of changes when it comes to the situation of women in politics. We see that more women are now involved but still far from the level of men in office. (Women have usually been found to have less political involvement than men) (Hansen 1997). Women still view that they won’t be as persuasive and that their voice won’t be as matter as the men will be. Because of this viewpoint women are less encourage to run for office or any other political positions.
