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Media Influence on Beauty Standards

First, it was the invention of motion picture. Then there was the arrival of television, and now with social media available for 24 hours, there is no shortage of extraordinarily beautiful people setting beauty standards for not-so extra ordinarily people. Despite that human history has been strewn with struggles after struggles to secure one’s freedom and way of life, people have never been completely free of the influence from the media that is ceaselessly reinventing itself. As the influence of media is ever so present in people’s lives, the beauty trends in the media have also been dictating what people should look like and shouldn’t. Both Hao in Hello Peril: The in-betweens of Asian American Body Image (2019) and Hahn in Toxicity of Beauty Standards (2019) deal with this very aspect of media manipulating people to subscribe to unreachable beauty standards. Hao focuses on how Asian American women are trapped in two competing cultural beauty standards, both of which pressure them to be thin as the global success of popular K-pop singing groups who practice an extreme diet to look thin. In the same vein, Hahn discusses the dangers of following the beauty standards with blind faith by illustrating the current beauty trends from diets to plastic procedures. While both articles shed light on the toxic nature of media’s playing such a huge role in shaping people’s perception of beauty, Hahn’s article (2019) is more convincing in two aspects: first, in Hahn’s article, are there not only more examples and statistical data, but also those examples were published by reputable organizations with clear in-text citation; whereas, Hao’s article (2019) provides s no data ; second, the tone of Hahn’s article (2019) is much more objective and informative, whereas, Hao’s tone is subjective and skeptical.

Looking at the number of examples and data that help illustrate the influence of media on beauty standards, Hahn’s article (2019) is filled with a wide array of examples from reputable institutes such as Eating Recovery Center and Los Angeles Times. Compared to Hahn’s article, Hao’s article (2019) lacks examples since there is only one example which is about K-pop singers’ practice of extreme diet. Even the example of K-pop singers does not come with any citation, but the author’s own commentary about it. Given that the main idea of Han’s article (2019) is more specific on the manipulative nature of media in people’s lives, it might not be a surprising discovery that Hao’s article (2019) which mainly discusses the duality of life Asian American women must deal with in terms of how they should look. Hahn, on the other hand, specifically addresses that people are dictated by what they are exposed to daily. Those daily influencers come in the forms of ad campaigns, T.V personalities, movie characters, and social media. Hahn does not stop at identifying the culprits who do everything in their power to persuade viewers to buy them and imitate them. She also provides statistically alarming numbers of people of all ages taking extreme measures to look like beautiful people on these media platforms. For instance, she quotes an article titled, “Body images and Eating Disorder” that talks about that “40-60% of elementary school aged girls are concerned about their weight” (“Body images”, 2019, cited in Hanh, 2019, para.3). Hahn points out that the article also states that over half of teenage girls tend to resort to potentially dangerous practices of skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and even taking laxatives to control their weight. Hahn also provides the popular trends in the effort to stay thin. This point is further explored in the article when Hahn starts to talk about girls’ trying to bank on their attractive looks and become an ‘Instagram model’. She points out how social media has been the number one driving forcing behind the popular image of beauty by providing another telling result of a survey conducted by the brand Dove. According to the result, out of 1, 027 women between the ages of 18 and 64, 25% answered that social media is the major player in shaping “their conception of beauty” (Dove, 2019, citied in Hahn, 2019, para.4). However, 78% of the respondents said that the way women are depicted on social media platforms is not at all close to what real women look like.

Another aspect that makes Han’s article (2019) more convincing on the influence of the media, is how the article is told, in other words, its tone. Due to that the tone of Hahn’s article is much more objective and straightforward, it is easier to see the issue at hand without having to try to extract the purpose of the article. The tone is informative and objective as she provides a slew of examples and statistical numbers that clearly reveal the power of the media. This tone allows the readers to see the problem and be able to relate to the people introduced in the article. Compared to Hahn’s article (2019), Hao’s article (2019) is much more nuanced than less informative. The readers are forced to read between the lines. Hao’s being an Asian American woman seems to have been deeply affected by the problem she raises in her article. That is probably why her tone is much more personal and resentful of what is being done to Asian American women. Because of this personal nature of her writing, it leaves little room for the readers to process her claim themselves and accept it. In addition, Hao’s subjective tone does not sound very persuasive talking about Asian American women struggling to satisfy both their parents’ culture, which believes that thin women are beautiful and western culture, which now perceives that beautiful Asian woman must be thin. This claim of Hao’s may make its readers pause and think if there is even one place where thinness is not celebrated in this society. If thinness were not celebrated all over the nation-perhaps all around the world, no companies would never be praised for their use of plus size models and adding plus sizes in their clothing lines.

Hao (2019) and Hahn (2019) bring the ugly truth of the manipulative nature of the media in what seems to be the most vulnerable aspect in human lives: how attractive do I look? This being the focal point of the two articles, Hahn’s endeavor to delineate how strong of a hold the media has on people by providing a variety of realistic examples readers can easily relate while Hao provides a personalized account of what K-pop singers do to stay thin with no specific source cited. Hahn’s tone in the article comes through as an informative voice which allows its readers to see what is truly going on for themselves, while Hao takes a deeply scathing tone for the cultural pressure that deepens the inner conflict of Asian American women between the two sets of beauty standards. It was disturbing to read about how deeply school aged girls are impacted by social media platforms and the list of the things they do to their bodies was cringe worth information.

Hanh’s article (2019) does a great job painting a realistic picture of that the influence of the media spares no one. The two articles being web-based articles do not provide more in-depth analysis of the role of the media. Particularly, with Hao’s article being more as an op-ed than a news article, it forces an agreement on its readers. However, since a thin body has been celebrated as the most distinct features of an attractive individual, the argument that Asian American women are conflicted between their ancestral culture and western culture is not as convincing as all women feeling pressured to look thin regardless of their races. Overall, it is Hahn’s article that successfully informs and warns its readers of how dangerous it is to follow the beauty standards the media have concocted and made people ingest the dose of it regularly. Therefore, I recommend that Han’s article (2021) for readers who are looking to learn more about what the influence of the media with clear examples and data.

References

Barroso, A., & Brown, A. (2021a, May 25). Gender pay gap in U.S. held steady in 2020. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/25/gender-pay-gap-facts/

Hahn, E. (2019, November 15). The toxicity of beauty standards. The Catalyst. Retrieved November 20, 2019, from https://millardwestcatalyst.com/10919/opinion/the-toxicity-of-beauty-standards/