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Personal Column: Are advertisements harmful to teenagers?

Teen adverstisements give false sense of reality.
Teen adverstisements give false sense of reality.

Azia Stanton,Staff Writer
Azia Stanton,Staff Writer
Advertisements are all around us through television, billboards, magazines, the internet and in many other mediums. We have become so accustomed to seeing ads that most of the time we don’t recognize how many ads we are exposed to and how much they influence our daily lives. Just think about Geico insurance, automatically we think of the little goofy gecko that they have on all of their commercials because it has been drilled in our brains.

Teens are the target audience for most advertisements because they are the most easily influenced. Teenagers don’t fully understand the complex marketing schemes in the same way some adults do. Adults minds are significantly more developed than a teen’s mind, so a teen is more susceptible to be influenced to do things that an ad falsely portrays as good, fun, or ‘cool’. They don’t understand that advertisements are meant to dazzle your mind and make you think you need or want things that may be unhealthy . An example of an unhealthy portrayal in ads is how skinny the female models are on TV. Just think about the Victoria’s Secret girls shown to have a size 0-1 waist and a size 36 C Chest. While these images may be true to some extent, they are also air brushed, weight is taken off, and certain parts of their bodies are edited to make them look more desirable. Girls starve themselves everyday to look like the models they see all around them in advertisements. Because of this, teens are putting their lives at risk becoming dangerously thin while failing to realize that what they are seeing is a lie.

However, while some young ladies think starving themselves is the right answer to get their body to look like the girls on television or in the magazines, other girls see it a different way. They think if they spend $50- $75 on one bra, or a pair of underwear, or even a corset that the television is advertising, they can get their body to appear as the models they idolize. Once again, teens are being hurt because they are spending all their money on items that won’t provide the service it is advertised to do.  A study found that 56% of all teens believe that the media’s advertisements are the main cause of low-self esteem. All these commercials and ads do is hurt the teenage girls confidence and make her think that she isn’t beautiful because she does not look like the women portrayed on TV.

Since young girls have come out of their mother’s womb, they have been taught that if you aren’t skinny then you aren’t beautiful, so now every time they think of the word ‘beautiful’ they think tall, skinny, and big chest. The media has told us that if we don’t fit that exact description then we will not be considered beautiful. So to be reminded of that everyday of your life through TV, magazines and other forms of ads, is hurtful and causes us to think differently of ourselves because we are constantly being exposed to the false way of how we are supposed to look.

While females are usually the ones who end up hurt the most by the models on television, males are also being hurt with the false portrayal as well. The typical male model on TV has and 8-pack, nice and muscular arms, and completely straight and perfect teeth. While seeing this on television does motivate the males to work out more, they also want to see immediate results, so many young boys turn to steroids. They don’t know the dangers of using the steroids, all they know is that it will make their body look like the males on TV. Male teens may hide their unhappiness with their body better than girls, however it does not mean that the pain is not there and that they are not hurting because they desire to be more attractive.

The ads on TV are giving the children false hopes of what a beautiful person is supposed to look like. What is shown on the TV is not real and most likely is unachievable without the help of either surgery, or photo editing. Teens don’t realize that it is all just fabrication to sell their product, the teens are looking at what they don’t have.

Every year millions of children try to change their body because of ads and pictures, and of those million kids, 40% of the females tried losing weight before age 13. These teens are striving to look like what is depicted on TV and in the end, the girls get to the point where it is severely unhealthy for their bodies to be as thin as they have made themselves, or the males now have health problems because of the steroids they have been introduced to.

The National Institute of Metal Health (NIMH) estimates that eating disorders affect more than 5 million Americans. Of those 5 million, many of the disorders begin as early as the age of 8 years old. The NIMH also states that 53% of girls are unhappy with their body image because of their celebrity idols who appear to be so skinny. The celebrities are idols for the children and teens and they strive to be just like their idol, so they will do whatever it takes to be like them, even if it means harming themselves.

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