Perfect Body Image Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Perfect Body Image - Essay Example Thus, only some women really need perfect body image as a part of their professional occupation and life style. To these groups belong film stars and TV stars, fitness trainers and fashion models. Film and TV stars are the main groups which really needs an ideal body image. Modern people judged others, and expected to be judged by other people, as being "Fashion In" or "Fashion Out " depending on whether they met the operant criteria. Those who best portrayed the "Fashion In" look became what the people called "role models." Those women selected as role models then set the standards for what other people emulated and perceived as right and normal (Gilbert 98). The people's desires for being judged "Fashion In" could conflict with their interests in developing other characteristics they valued, such as the characteristic of individuality; however, most people remained painfully aware of the problems associated with low performance with respect to fashion. That is, they explained how an assignation as "Fashion Out" carried a heavy social cost by relegating a person to an inferior social position. When judged as "Fashion Out, " any person could expect to be considered as general ly undesirable. Gilbert (98) explained one of the indignities a person might expect to suffer when judged as "Fashion Out." "When a person is fashion out they will usually get talked about by other people to other people. Although it's not nice to talk about people, it's something that just happens" (Gilbert 91). This social reality made it important for the people to know the bases for judgments about one's fashion status. In the following excerpt from one conversation about fashion, the people tried to help me understand some of the complexities involved in distinguishing between In their images the "Fashion In" woman is adorned in name brand clothes and shoes that cost a certain amount of money. Thus if a woman does not come from a family with the required level of economic buying power, she is forced to find other means to make the appropriate acquisitions or accept a status as "Fashion Out." (Rothschild 65). Fitness trainers need an ideal body image in order to promote healthy life style and active life style. For this group of women, ideal body means health and good pussycat form. Through their approach these researchers constructed health as an individual's problem and responsibility. By continuing to individualize health and health behaviors, we are able to blame the "victim" (Gilbert 84). While individuals may certainly have power to control certain types of health-related problems, those who individualize the phenomenon of health also camouflage the social, relational, and communal aspects of health (Rothschild 65). They divert attention from much-needed discussion of society's collective influence, concern, and responsibility. Thus, rather than simply viewing health as unidimensional and personal, we might be better off to think of health as a dynamic and complex social phenomenon occurring at the intersection of individual, social, relational, and communal planes. Further, viewin g health in this way enables us to politicize the concept of health.