Body Image. An essay which involves discussion of why body image is so important to society in the present times.

Essay by FastEddy93University, Bachelor'sA-, April 2004

download word file, 5 pages 4.9 3 reviews

Downloaded 361 times

Body image involves our perception, imagination, emotions, and physical sensations about our bodies. It's not based on fact. It's psychological in nature, and more influenced by self-esteem than by actual physical attractiveness as judged by others. It is not inborn, but learned. This learning occurs in families and among peers, but these only reinforce what is learned and expected culturally.

In this culture, women are starving themselves, alternating between starving and gorging, obsessing, pounding and wanting to remove what makes us female: our bodies, our curves, our pear-shaped bodies.

Our psychological boundaries develop early in life, based on how we are held and touched or not held and touched. Someone who is deprived of touch as a young child, for example, may not have the proper information she or he needs to differentiate between what is inside and what is outside herself or himself. As a result, boundaries may be unclear or unformed.

This could cause the person to have difficulty getting a true sense of his or her body shape and size.

Now a days, you can be whatever you want to be, any dream can be achieved as long as you do what you have to do in order to get it. We live in a world full of opportunities. With all the freedom that women have they still remain obsessed with body weight. Women are confined to a false look on beauty, attached to the false belief that our value is based on our appearance only.

"It appears that the more powerful women become, the more pressure there is for us to get rid of the padding and curves that make our bodies so different from the bodies of men..." J. Hirschmann

In the United States approximately 10% of girls and women are suffering from diagnosed eating...