What’s Being Pretty Really Worth? You pick up any magazine nowadays and all you see are skinny pretty ladies and hot looking fellas. Society has set up a beauty standard, where you have to e of a certain dress size, and have certain hair and kind of nose, which people are expected to live up to. But it is impossible to live up to the standards because all people are different, no one is created equally, each human has their own norm, we are all different. There’s a set perfection, like 60/90/60, with long hair and long legs for women, and muscular guys with a hot chevelure, made to be the beauty standard practically all over the world. Somehow women have it much harder then men do and the inability to live up to that social beauty criterion mainly affects females.
The media has a great downward affect on the body image issue, it is a source available to everyone, all the TV shows with pitch perfect actors, the internet, the magazines with photo shopped models. Talking about grown women who have trouble dealing with the body and image standards, what about the teenagers who haven’t even developed their brains fully yet? How are they being affected by the new standards? It’s hard to asset that there should not be a standard, because there always was one. Those standards were been different, but they were always there. Instead of trying to just stop it, people should take action in protecting the teenagers, and promote more of the reality- more of what people are really like, how they really are, how they were naturally born and not recreated by other humans. The new beauty standard has been affecting many people, not just throughout the country but also throughout the planet. In many major countries that have developed over time with broad media sources, there have been many ugly cases where people who didn’t live up to the "general" beauty standards, have done terrible things to themselves. You see a girl sitting in front of her TV watching all these shows with beautiful Barbie -like women, of course she would want to look like them, because people are constantly seeking perfection. But is that the perfection that a little girl needs? Why don’t these beautiful ladies rather inspire kids and teenagers to do great things, get an education, advice them to grow to be educators, instead of shoving what’s thought to be wrong with them right in their faces. One of the major problems that ensue from the beauty standard is suicide. Suicide rates among teenagers all over the world have risen over the past many years. Take South Korea for example, it has the highest female suicidal rate in the world, and what is the reason for all those deaths? As stated in the article South Korea- The Suicide Capital of the World, published on www.beyonghallyu.com by Victoria, “This could be due to societal pressures to be beautiful and the standards of beauty in South Korea.” Social expectation is a major factor in a lot of suicidal cases. South Korea is known to be the first country claimed to be the “suicide capital”; what other country is going to be next? Obviously it won’t be Africa, its media isn’t developed as say America’s is, yet even Africa has a set beauty standard, with all the cultural emphasis on the jewelry, general attire, and cloth, or its absence even. Therefore America might be the next to come on the list of countries with the highest suicidal rates over body image. With the high media availability to people of all ages, and the absence of limitation to certain things, that might be disturbing to young minds, there might definitely be a suicidal rate jump in the next decade. Or less. Point is, people have to be unified in order to prevent a disaster from happening. We must come up with ways of separating teenagers from such a broad exposure to the “standard” images. Teenagers are already susceptible to be irrational; adding the pressure of image is going to overflow their concentration on other