Media and age

We are all affected by the media whether we want to admit it or not, no matter how big or small the impact is. Media is a great part of so many people’s lives nowadays due to its usefulness in connecting us with the world around us, keeping us updated and entertained. A large percentage of social media users are teenagers/young adults, therefore the media does have a lot of power over people this age. What exactly are the impacts of media on teenagers and how do they have such influences on us?

Media is not the only cause of body image issues, but it is one of the main contributors. Over 80% of Americans watch television daily and many of the audience are adolescent boys or girls. Various studies have associated exposure to unrealistic ideals in media with body image problems and disorders in teenagers. We have been exposed to impossible standards of our own body since a very young age: even in media whose main audience is obviously children, they still visibly highlight the value of attractiveness. I actually took a look back to many children movies and quite a number of them send out the same questionable message: the main good character(s) is/are always, always skinny with a teeny waist, flawless skin, perfect, voluminous, sexy hair, eyes half the size of their head, perfect eyebrows and eyelashes; while the villains are often portrayed as unattractive with oddly over-exaggerated features. This implicitly sends a message to young girls and boys that in order to be loved, to have a “happy ending”, they must be beautiful. Not smart. Not strong. Not funny. Not interesting. Beauty, beauty is all that matters.

Recently, on the internet there’s also a pretty popular article about (an) artist(s) who “beautify” all the Disney villains and turn them into “gorgeous gods/goddesses”. These evil villains were “sexualized” and suddenly became “hot” characters. Even though it’s art and it is highly creative as well as extremely cool and entertaining, the problem with the pictures is that all the characters were twisted into a “mould” and all their exaggerated features were gone and were replaced by some so-called “desirable traits”. Some examples are Hades (from Hercules) and Ursula (from The Little Mermaid). 

Hades’ original funny face with gigantic yellow eyes, dark circles, crooked nose, pointy teeth and a giant ear-to-ear smile was replaced by a younger Hades with more symmetrical and attractive face, mysterious eyes and a magnetic smirk; and the original Ursula with a little large body, mohawk-ish hair (?), double chin, purple skin and colorful makeup was replaced by a much, much skinnier, younger Ursula, with long, voluminous platinum hair, smokey eyes and red lips. Even her beauty mark was gone and her skin was not even purple anymore. These are the kind of things that many media users, including teenagers, look at on a daily basis, which makes them feel like there is something wrong with their body that is not considered likable. In the project above specifically, it seems like all the original characters were replaced by younger versions of them and were beautified and sensualized, not only somehow subtly sent out the message that “youth=beauty&sex”, but they also put in many teenagers’ mind the “I’m not enough if I’m not a specific type, if I don’t look a certain way”, leads to a bunch of young people desperately chasing an “ideal” that is probably not even real.

There are also way too many magazines that aim at teenagers of all genders, with tons of pictures of models with, again, flawless skin, flawless hair, flawless body, which makes us feel like we are personally attacked just by sitting there and reading, forgetting that all those photos were done with an entire group of professional makeup artists and professional photographers.

Media also accentuates many stereotypes about teenagers – either directly or indirectly – and many of them sometimes set pretty questionable examples. There are numerous movies/tv shows where teenagers are divided into groups, or “cliques”: jocks, nerds, rebels, prince charming or the beauty queen; which is ridiculous. The fact that so many popular movies/tv shows for teenagers have this kind of categorization slowly eats into many young people’s mindset and makes them feel like they have to “belong” to a group, or “the group”. Media often portrays the “jocks” and the “pretty kids” as the “popular ones”, while portraying the “nerds” and the “rebels” as the “outcast,” which makes teenagers feel like it’s their responsibility to look a certain way, to act a certain way in order to be “cool”, to be “liked”, to have “friends”, which is sad yet ludicrous. Media also does a pretty good job in making it seem like teenagers either love school to a degree where it’s kind of strange or they hate it so much they’d rather take a one-way trip to Mars than to go to school – which is the case for quite a few television shows. Whenever a teenager is going to school in a TV show, they always look like a granola bar: crumbly and falling apart. Teenagers in media also do an impressive amount of problematic stuff: it seems like they are always sneaking out, smoking in a sketchy parking lot, throwing/going to gigantic parties, or having sex in the bathroom stall with someone they just met at said parties. I mean, some of us might do said activities, but not all of us, yet somehow television shows just make it look like that’s all we do.    

It might seem like I’m just blaming it on the media, that we can’t have nice things because TeenVogue keep posting articles on how to apply lipstick and because Hollywood keeps making movies. No, that is definitely not my point. The media does a sweet job of entertaining us and opening our eyes to possibilities, to interesting things and we could even learn a lot from it. Sometimes the media does exaggerate stuff up a bit too much, sending us questionable lessons, and might give off the wrong vibes, the wrong messages. In a media-saturated world, a world where every place we look is covered in marks of television, of internet, of magazines, it could be incredibly hard to keep a sane mind and to look at things the way they are, not how media make they look like they are. The media affects teenagers in an interesting way and set examples for many of us to follow, therefore it could be dangerous if many of their points are crooked. Teenagers are like the babies of adulthood – they learn from whatever they see: from their friends, from grown-ups, from the media. If media keep adding into stereotypes and setting funny examples/standards, maybe that’s why so many of us try so hard to follow those ideals and accidentally fall into those patterns, maybe that’s why so many of us act like hard-triers, angsty, upset and confused people. Those are some of the impacts that media have on teenagers. The exposure to unrealistically high standards and the pressure of blending in/standing out stressed many of us out and confused us to a point where we feel like it’s a necessity to pretend to be something that we are not, which is kind of really sad.