Research Paper

1) My Final thesis:

The media’s portrayal of the perfect body through the use of advertisements negatively impacts female adolescents mentally, physically, and socially.

2) The structure of my argument:

a. The most prominent reason behind the media’s use of the ideal woman in advertisements is due to capitalism. Businesses and corporations want their products to sell in large quantities in order to increase total profits. Thus, businesses use images of beautiful women in their advertisements to boost sales.

b. Teenage girls experience changes due to puberty and, as a result, they are more susceptible to believe in the media’s misleading representation of the female body.

c. The image of the perfect female affects teenagers mentally so narcissism, body dysmorphic disorder, and depression result.

d. Mental changes within female adolescents spur physical changes to occur. Exterior changes are achieved through diet, exercise, and surgery which can become too extreme and lead to self-harm.

e. The mental and physical changes that occur can cause teenage girls to feel shameful and embarresed. As a result, adolescents decide to isolate themselves from others, which effects every aspect of their social lives. Also, with such an emphasis on themselves, girls lose sight of what is truly important in life.

3) My sources:

2 books, 2 periodicals from online databases, 2 internet sources (from Media Awareness Network and The Social Issues Research Centre)—(It wasactually hard for me to find books and online periodicals with the information that I wanted.)

4) My Favorite Source:

Beauty and Body Image in the Media from The Media Awareness Network is short and sweet, yet it is really packed with solid and useful information. Also, it contains the next interesting point.

5) Interesting fact I learned from the above source:

“Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that media images of female beauty are unattainable for all but a very small number of women. Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions, for example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition” (Beauty and Body Image in the Media).

Research Paper + Possible Thesis Statements

My research paper topic deals with how the media portrays body image.

Here are my possible thesis statements:

1. The media's portrayal of the perfect body negatively impacts society physically, mentally, and socially.

2. The emphasis on body image within American media effects women more so than men due to women's natural self-concious behavior and American culture's stress on the physical beauty of women.