At the end of my freshmen year I noticed something was going on with my best friend; she was loosing a lot of weight, never eating and never had any desire to do anything.  In tenth grade, another one of my friends started to display the same patterns. Two years later one friend admitted to have been struggling with anorexia and bulimia, all being triggered the comment of "you look a lot like Leighton Meester but heavier."  My other friend is still unable to admit it and now continues to struggle with these diseases as a freshman in college.  To this day I am still greatly effected by watching not one but two of my best friends go through something that I have no ability to help or relate to.  Since this has happened I have become very intrigued in how one that struggles with these disorders thinks and processes things on a daily basis, thus leading to my interest in this topic.  I settled on this specific research question because after being interested in the topic of mental health in girls for the past years, I wanted to learn more on a bit larger scale.  I wanted to expand my research to learn specifically how the media negatively effects all part of women's lives and not only their mental health, as I have been researching in the past. Topics I have been researching include their eating habits, their unhealthy relationships with other people and how one presents themselves differently.  The very first ILP helped me to direct my interest to a larger scale when I learned about how the media has significantly changed since the 1990s, I linked this change in media to the heightened percent of women that report being dissatisfied with their bodies, 50%.  My opinion was very one sided coming into this.  I thought that everyone viewed skinny models in the media as wrong and photoshopped.  After finding my argumentative source, I learned that there was another side to my point of view.  I plan on avoiding this bias in my writing by being able to keep an open mind in how other's view my topic and incorporating both sides of this argument in my writing.  I believe I am a stakeholder in this topic as well as I have a potential in being a stakeholder in this topic.  When being a stakeholder in this topic, I play the part in being a woman in today's society that is exposed to the media. In my potential in being a stakeholder, I could play the part in a woman being negatively effected by the media and further having the stakeholder of a mental illness.  Even though I have decided on this as my research topic, I feel like I have a lot more to learn on this topic.  First off, I do not know the brain side of this topic.  As in how the brain works differently in a woman who has been negatively effected by what the media is portraying compared to a confident woman.  I feel like this information would be important in my argument because it would be a good way to get the reader to believe that there is a dangerous reality to this argument.  I also do not know the exact definition of a "thin" model.  To many it probably seems obvious, but in this topic the idea of the "thin" model is a very important part of this argument.  I wish to find out how women view differences in the models that impact their lives; what does a thin model look like compared to a too thin model, a thin model compared to a normal model or a thin model compared to a plus size model.  Besides wanting to investigate into the brain and "thin" model definition, I hope to discover if there is a way to prevent women to falling into the media's standards of beauty.  Further more I hope to discover if there is a common trigger in all women that can make it so easy for the media to negatively effect them.  

After thoroughly presenting my argument, I hope to accomplish a sense of awareness on the effect the media can have on people, especially women and how an average advertisement of a thin model in a magazine is seen through some women's eyes.  I also hope to accomplish my reader gaining the ability to deny society's standard of beauty and be able to have their own opinion on what beauty really means to them.  I believe I can effectively address my research question in an 8-10 page paper because even though it is one question, it has many different parts to it.  I can not only break it down into the multiple ways the media negatively effects women but I can also talk about why women let the media effect them and how the media has changed over the years.  With that being said, I might need to include the other parts of how the media negatively effects women into my research question.  In my research I have found more agreements than disagreements.  The agreements I have found on this topic are that people view the way that the media puts very thin models on pedestals negatively and that there should be no standard of beauty in society based on what is printed in a picture.  I have found one disagreement on this topic and it was stated by a man.  This man disagrees that the media can negatively effect women and that portraying skinny models is what society should view.  On the spectrum of scope, I would say my research question falls in the middle.  It is not as specific as what exactly negatively effects women in the media but it also is not as broad as the statement of the media effecting women.  Based on just the question, on the spectrum of complexity my research question falls a little below the middle of the line due to the lack of information given.  After reading my paper, I believe my research question falls greater than the middle of the spectrum.  My research question can be broken down into multiple different ways.  Even though the reader may think that it is a simple answer to how the media negatively effects women, they will learn that it is not as simple as they think.  As far as controversy goes, I believe my research question falls in the middle of the spectrum.  This topic can cause more controversy depending on the different advertisements that come out and how they display their models.  
