The media has been increasingly important within today's society. The media is what showcases that general audience's interests, such as current news, the weather, what is trending, new movies, etc. In the past decade social media has been increasingly popular. In every age group, from young adults to senior citizens, there has been an increase with social media usage. The idea of social media is to allow the freedom to post, chat, and share content that they think is interesting. However, this freedom allows people to post negative things such as, pornography, slander, hateful comments, etc. One of the main topics I would like to address is how and why the media has such a huge effect on beauty standards.

The reason why I chose this topic is because I have had personal experience with people shaming me for how I look and comparing me to the men that appear on T.V. Therefore it is a topic that I am passionate about and have a lot to say on. This research question helps emphasize my values on self-love and the differences between doing what you want versus doing what you think you want. For example, in my personal experience, I was always made fun for being "anorexic", and "a stick". This negativity definitely made me feel shameful of how I looked and made me try to change myself. To figure out what was considered "attractive", I turned to social media. The attractive men were always tan, muscular, lean and looked very confident. With those images in my head. I started to develop more of superficial, harsh mindset about how I should look and tried to achieve the body image that was deemed "attractive." Eventually down the line I realized that these portrays of the ideal body image and were negative things that were controlling my life. So I started to change and develop more of a self-love attitude instead of a self-hate and superficial mindset. The reason why I am qualified to write this is because I have personal experience that shows how the media has a negative impact on body image as well as the ability to present statistics that shows the link because social media and body image. 

The source that I will be using is the "Social Networking Statistics" from the "Statistic Brain Research Institute". This source presents numerical data on the number of people who use social media, the type of social media used (like Facebook), the reasons why people use social media, and the average hours people in different countries use social media. The main interest of this article is the numbers that show us how many people are exposed and are on social media. 

For example, with 1,374,000,000 people using Facebook (Statistic Brain) they are bound to be exposed to advertisements or videos that portray attractive men and women who are trying to sell a brand or product using their image as a way of persuasion. An example of this would be a Versace commercial for their new fragrance, Eros. It portrays a sexy muscular man in his underwear who gets soaked in rain and shoots an arrow to the sky. Then they show the cologne at the very end for about five seconds. The main tool they used to get your attention was the attractive man walking in the rain with just his underwear on. A simple saying can summarize my point with this example: sex sells. This is credible because it presents real statistics confirmed by the three different companies: Browser Media, Socialnomics, MacWorld. There is a potential bias within this article because it does present the author nor does it present the date. This means that these numbers are most likely different today than from whenever they were taken from before.

Another source that pertains to my research question is "Female Body Image and the Mass Media: Perspectives on How Women Internalize the Ideal Beauty Standard" by Kasey L. Serdar. This article talks about females take on the ideal beauty standards and what their reaction was to being exposed to these standards. The major interest is how females models are seen as attractive, when they are medically underweight and meeting the criteria to be diagnose with anorexia. However, women are still trying to match that body image. Because of the media content that they are exposed to, they are willing to sacrifice their health in order to fit society's unrealistic standards. This is a credible article because it provides facts and references from other sources that relates how media affects the way people look at their own body. This is also published under the Westminster University in Utah, meaning that someone had to have a very solid article in order to be put under the college's name. There is potential bias in this article because there was no date in which this article was published. This means that the statistics she presented may be outdated and incorrect. The author is also arguing against the media and their portrayal of beauty. This creates bias because she stands on one side of the argument, instead of getting facts from both sides.

My third source is "Nutrition and Body Image" from "Teen Health and the Media". This source gives quick facts about the data from surveys asking about how people felt about their bodies after being exposed to commercials and TV shows. For example, one of their studies had shown that 10 year old boys and girls were unhappy about their own bodies after they watched a video on Britney Spears or a clip from the "Friends" TV series (Nutrition and Body Image). The point made here is that even the media influences children, who should not even have to worry about how they look to others. This article also gives statistics on eating disorders, such as how many are diagnosed, who is diagnosed and the amount of deaths that result from these disorders. The main interest of this source is how it links their surveys to how people feel about their body after watching the media. This is a credible source because it states their statistics and also confirms as to where they got their numbers from. This website is also under the College of Education department of the University of Washington. However, there is bias in this article because there is no date as to when this was published. This could once again show incorrect information that could not be applied to today.

My research question is arguable because I am arguing only one side of the argument, the negative impact media has on body image. Not only are there negative impacts, but there has also been positive outcomes. Some media has gone against the norm and broadcast plus size models and emphasizes the beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. It has been agreed between my sources that the media has made people feel less confident about their body and that there is a definite link between media and body image. These different perspectives helped show that there are millions of other people that have felt the same way I had felt. It also shows how the ideal beauty standard can be unhealthy and not realistic. I might revise the fact that my question is broad. I am talking about numerous effects that media has on body image and that might weaken my main idea because of how spread out my points would be. Instead, I should narrow down to how media affects the development of eating disorders, or how media presents a false goal to the public. I also could add the ways in which the media persuades the audience to follow these standards. For example, they use logically fallacies (Old Spice for example), target people's insecurities but offer a "solution" to it, and they also use modes of persuasion (pathos and ethos) to get the audience to do what they want. With these techniques, this is how the media has such a huge impact on society's beauty standards.

