Thinspiration

Morning brought another day and another million of messages sent to us by mass media, but some messages have stayed the same for the past couple of decades. The message that makes young beautiful and healthy women be anorexic. Eating disorders don’t simply pop up in our life without any reason.

Looking over the magazines like Cosmo or People makes you think about buying the diet pills not out of need but simply because they are on every other page next to the pictures of overwhelmingly thin celebrities. You start to compare yourself with the stereotypical perfect woman’s body and that when the starvation is on. Unfortunately, not that many girls think how it is just a stereotype that was set by people like themselves.

Thinspiration is taking over all the media portraying the ideal female’s body as a dry stick that cloth are just hanging on. Even worse, going to the grocery store is a learning experience how diet has to be the part of your life. Almost every food article that you can find in the closest Ralphs has a non-fat duplicate. You walking down the aisle and you see walking skeletons pathetically looking for non-fat cucumbers.

 Who believes that being extremely thin is actually beautiful and attractive? Some of you might be shocked if I say that there are hundreds of girls who died for that belief. According to ANRED’s statistics, one out of every one hundred young woman, between ten and twenty, are starving themselves, sometimes to death. (http://www.anred.com/stats.html)

These statistics grow with every year because media is where we get our information and that is part of our knowledge. And if we are acknowledged that being skinny is the goal and the portrayals of skin bodies are idolized then that is what we want. Every day on TV there are at leat 20 commercials I get cought by  about dieting and loosing weight.  Look into todays fashion industry that is full of barely visible models that w look up to. Models are not just girls doing the runways and taking pictures they are what is considered to be beautiful and graceful. And, sadly enough, with every year runways get slimmer and thinner not only in terms of models’ bodies but in desingnes. Beautiful cloth are made for what is called beautiful bodies which are size zero in worst case size 2.

There is a big impact mainstream has on girls starving themselves to fit in that category of beauty that was set by mass media. It promoted so-called thinspiration that millions of females live with every day.

Framing on Fox

It is surprising how well all the news stories on the Fox News Channel use

a technique of framing. If one watches Fox news, he or she can easily

notice that the Republican Party, its representatives, and affiliates are

at almost all times portrayed in a positive light. The Democratic Party,

its representatives, and affiliates, on the other hand, in almost all

cases, are portrayed in a negative light.

This pro-republican story depiction is achieved with the use of framing

which excludes various aspects of a particular story and only keep those

elements which are favorable to republicans. Fox can easily throw away

facts or alternative points of view on this or that issue or event and

this way would hide a real picture and deviate from presenting information

objectively.

The viewer is often left with the impression that McCain is good and Obama

is bad. For example, the story about  Cory the Plummer  which appeared on

the Fox website on October 31, tells about a business owner who does not

like Obamas tax plan. Although Cory the Well Driller  owns 4 businesses,

the news anchor described him in such a manner that he is from a lower

class, poor, and outraged that even more money would be taken away from

him if Obama became the President. People who watched this story would

most likely have an opinion that Obama wanted to impose high taxes on

working class of the American society, although Cory’s income probably

sums up to several million dollars and will be taxed fairly, according to

Obama’s plan.

 

Rihanna and Katy Perry shaping the society

Theodor Adorno, a founder of Frankfurt school of thought in the first part of the 20^th century, analyzed the contemporary popular music and compared it to live, or as he called it, serious music. Adorno s main argument was that popular music was standardized and repetitive; it was  pre-digested for the listener by the music industry. I believe that Adorno’s theory is relevant today.

Many songs that belong to mainstream music sound very similar. Producers from record companies make sure that the music hits are composed in such a way that listeners will replay these songs in their minds over and over.A large number of modern hits use the standardized structure that Adorno described. For example, Rihanna’s song  Umbrella,  Katy Perry’s song  I Kissed a Girl,  and Justin Timberlake’s song  I m bringing sexy back all have similar rhythm and repetitive lyrics. Therefore, we could argue that, in a way, songs and singers like Katy Perry are shaping our society and the way we view the world. Is that good or bad? I think there is no certain answer.

Some songs bring us the information that we were not aware of before. There are many artists that tell the story in their music: the story of people’s lives and struggles. Lots of songs talk about war and what consequences it has.  Other songs give us information that is not that much informative. But in the end it is without a doubt that music industry has a strong influence on us. Songs also set a lot of stereotypes that people adopt and then treat them as “that is the way it is supposed to be”. For example, how the vast majority of the Rap singers use the word “gangster” in their lyrics and by that they create a stereotype that all the people related to Rap are somehow related to gangsters. . If the same lyrics are repeated in your head over and over again through out the day it is more than certain that it will mark your conscious and change the perception of certain things.