If you’re reading this, I assume you have already read Part I of my Hypersexualization of Women. If not, read that first then come back to this one with a better understanding of the foundation for the rest of this content.
In the last article, we left off talking about how hypersexualization influence’s young girls, but we didn’t bring one key factor into the mix which is something I plan to touch on this time: The Look. The look of these women who are plastered all over the media matters quite a lot to the people viewing them, mainly young girls and boys alike. Many of the women who tend to be shown in ads and in the media are tall, white or white-passing, and blonde, and while nothing is “wrong” with almost all models looking like this, there is something that isn’t right about it. Many young girls, who don’t fit into this point of view of what they assume men think is beautiful, tend to look down upon themselves and try to change themselves to fit this very uptight standard.
Though this, to young girls, is a subconscious effort that they don’t yet understand which is what makes it so hard for the media industry to grasp. They assume that children do not get exposed to this kind of advertising, and if they do, that they will not be directly affected by it because they are far too young to understand what is going on. This is false, obviously, and to back up my own personal claim there was a study done on this as well. To sum it up, young girls were shown two dolls, one in tight clothing and one in loose fitting yet cute clothes, and asked which one they wanted to grow up to look like. 68 percent of the girls said the doll with tight clothes looked how she wanted to look, and 72 percent said the tight-clothed doll was more popular than the loosely clothed doll. You can read more about this experiment and get the full effect, but this itself shows that young girls do already see themselves as sex objects without much second thought.
The Hypersexualization of women is clearly affecting younger generations and it’s something that we, as a society need to fix and work on. It will not only help the younger generations but the older generations as well. The representation of all types of body shapes and sizes in media will strongly benefit everyone.
