Influences in Body Image Perception
The term body image refers to the perceptions that you have about your body. It is not just about body functions, but ideas, feelings, and experiences about your physical appearance and attractiveness to yourself and others. How do we form our personal image of what is attractive in fellow human beings? We currently seem to believe that women must be thin and soft, and men muscular with wide shoulders and narrow waists. This has not always been true, as for thousands of years from cavemen drawings to Renaissance paintings, we see images of full-figured women who were symbols of attractiveness, health, and fertility in their time.
Even as late as the mid-twentieth century, the movie star Marilyn Monroe (who wore a size twelve) was a symbol of beauty and sexuality.
Extreme fatness and thinness were considered unhealthy, but there was not a great deal of obsession with weight. Even today there may be certain cultural groups (although there are individual exceptions) that are not as concerned about thinness as the rest of the population.
In the last fifty years or so Americans have entered an era of mass media messages with television, internet, movies, and advertising exposure. New ideas of attractiveness are quickly spread throughout the world to promote sales of fitness machines, cosmetics, diet programs and products, clothing fashions, medical surgeries, and weight loss medications. Advertisements often appeal to the human need for social acceptance and to be attractive to the opposite sex. We seem to have come to a point where one definition of female and male attractiveness has been determined to fit all instead of celebrating our differences. This fuels the market economy as people spend billions of dollars trying to look like the ideal body shown continually shown to them.