The Image of Beauty

I don't read a lot of magazines and when I do they're art magazines like Juxtapoz or music magazines like ATM. One of my favorite magazines is called Adbusters. It's an example of how the same media that companies use to bombard us with images on thin women muscle men can be used to call out these companies on their questionable methods of marketing and imaging. Adbusters strives to bring to light the twisted images that American media presents to not only Americans but, thanks to globalization, the rest world as well. There was one image in one of the most recent Adbusters that showed a map of the world and each country had a color to eat. the colors went from light orange to dark red which referred to the amount of obesity found in that country. The U.S., Canada, the U.K., Mexico, and Australia were the fattest countries and were colored dark maroon. That kind of media you wouldn't find in any other magazine except maybe Time but apart from that I couldn't imagine an obesity map right next to a skinny model in a Louie Vuitton add. After reading and watching the articles and videos that were assigned I couldn't help but think of why the media of America would push such a unhealthy imagine on our culture.  I can guess that the media profits off people wanting things that they don't have, so I guess they would want to advertise an image opposite that of the advertising target. Alternatively, I figured that maybe the media just chose a skinny model out of personal preference and that our culture began to feel self-conscious about that image and started eating more fast food? I just don't know. I do know that all the images we see everyday effect our subconscious minds and carve out cultural expectations. If you want to learn more about the effects that media has on our subconscious check out this resource:

Engeln-Maddox, Renee and Steven A Miller. Talking Back To The Media Ideal: The Development And Validation of the Critical Processing of Beauty Images Scale. Psychology of Women Quarterly. Cambridge: Jun 2008. Vol. 32, Iss.2; pg. 159.