It is no secret that the media plays a major role in influencing the way that women compare, judge, and discipline their bodies. Though it has made great strides in how it portrays women, the media still continues to place great emphasis on how they look, promoting the idea that “identity is created and manipulated through one’s appearance, encouraging women in particular to view their bodies as commodities or texts from which their values can be read” (Rubin, Fitts, Becker, 2003, p. 52). In Western cultures, the media constructs and upholds narrow, rigid, standards of beauty that primarily center on being thin, fair, and having fragile features (Zeilinger, 2015). It is also no secret that in an attempt to attain these ideals, thousands have fallen victim to body dissatisfaction disorders, such as dysfunctional eating. …show more content…
Unfortunately though, despite greater awareness of the negative effects of media on body image, many misconceptions still surround this topic, notably how it affects different ethnicities of women. For instance, “up until recently, there has been a clinical and lay misrepresentation that body image and weight-related concerns predominantly affect white upper and middle-class girls and women” (Rubin et al. 2003, p. 49). This misconception implies that because being thin and having fragile features are viewed as a European-American aesthetic preferences, women of color – African American and Latina women – are “protected”, “immune” from the development of body dissatisfaction disorders (Rubin et al. 2003, p. 50). However, as several contemporary studies have found women of color tend to report greater body dissatisfaction and equivalent rates of purging behaviors as their white counterparts (Rubin et al. 2003, p. 50-52). In addition to these findings, research on socioeconomic status, often considered an “unusual suspect” amongst eating disorder risk factors, have been inconsistent; some studies suggest