The Image of Modern Man

As much as women are portrayed through advertisements, music, and movies as sexual objects, men are imagined as objects of ridicule at best and at worst, contempt. Light hearted advertisements targeting women show men making ridiculous purchases as their wives and girl friends shake their head in disbelief. Men struggle to take care of children, fail miserably to keep the kitchen clean, and can't help but ogle every woman within a hundred yards.

While there will always be heroes in movies and on television, unless the male lead is the dashing romantic who women are anxious to fall into bed with, men are inept, bungling, inconsiderate, unfeeling, ready to be trampled upon by the women in their lives.

Gone are the Ward Cleavers and Lucas McCains, who taught their children valuable lessons, while, in Ward's case, his wife was supportive and caring, and in Lucas's, he raised his son Mark on his own.

I suggest we could go a long way toward restoring family values by departing from these trends. We certainly do no one any good by allowing young boys to grow up with images of men as insipid and spineless creatures driven by the basest of instincts and allowing young girls to be inculcated by the sights and sounds of women driven to fit into a size four.

Secret at Seventeen

A teenager has called out Seventeen Magazine for its patently false imaging of young girls in the magazine's photo spreads. Julia Bloom says the magazine's portrayal of young girls does not help the young readership, and in fact, does them harm.

“Here’s what lots of girls don’t know. Those ‘pretty women’ that we see in magazines are fake. They are often Photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life,” Bluhm said.

Kudos to Ms. Bloom for her courage to take a stand. How many women, your and old, have have dealt with terrible self loathing dimply because they do not measure up to a plastic standard that they can never come close to achieving without hardship and surgery?


But Seventeen Magazine is merely a reflection of the greater society in which we live. A society that values image to such an extent that it sacrifices substance. Weight loss advertisements and exercise videos, while occasionally positing products as producing a healthier you, focus on the visual impact using their food supplements, their diet plans, their gym equipment will have on the user's image. Hair treatments tout the product's ability to attract sexual partners, as do clothing lines and beverages.


Sadly, women's rights organizations pay very little attention to the issue, parlaying political acumen into secondary issues such as equal pay and sexual discrimination. The truth is, both of these are the result of the Barbie image, the Victoria's Secret image, the Seventeen Magazine image that is foisted upon men and women and accepted, making women little more than playthings. We can create laws that demand equal pay for equal work, but that doesn't solve the underlying issue.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/05/08/teen-takes-on-seventeen-says-magazine-contributes-to-body-image-issues/#ixzz1uInu1pTF