CNN “The Ideal Woman”

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history-of-beauty-explainer-intl

The idea of this article is to examine the ideal body of a woman and how this has changed over time, especially through history, art, and fashion, and to look at the different ideas surrounding body image, health, and culture nowadays. The article explores the social contract and its connection to the media and fashion, and examines how women in different eras felt extreme pressure to change their looks and fit into a standard. 

Starting with prehistoric times in the 1800s, curvy was considered the ideal, as we see through art, for example, Venus and the way that she was seen as round and fertile; then the classic Baroque also had the same idea of the curvy ideal; however, there was an evolution with corsets and understructures, which was a sort of modification about how people looked. However, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the idea was the “Gibson girl,” who was very tall and slim at the waist but still had curves. There is still the idea of the corset; however, it is more about bra support. Then in the 1920s- 1950s there was more of an idea of thinness but there is a rebound and change after this, this was the era of flappers and they were thin and there is a link with disordered eating rising in this era however in the 1940s-1950s the fuller body came back with one of the people who showed it the most being Marylin Monroe and in 1953 there is the start of the play boy magazine. In the 1960s-1970s there is a waif ascendant even though everyone is talking about freedom and there is the example of Twiggy which shows us the supper thin ideal and there is a Feminist move, there is the change from the idea of the corset and there is a movement to controlling the body through diet and exercise and there start to be more people with anorexia looking for hospital treatment. In the 1980s-1990s there was the idea of supper thin women with the raise in supermodels such as Cindy Crawford and then wanting to look lean and athletic but at the same time the early 90s there was more of a trend to the Kate Moss aesthetics which lead to a lot of peopled dying from anorexia and there is at the same time a largproblem with obesity considered by the world health organization and there was media about thin vs obes. In the 2000s, there started to be a concern around bodies, and more children started to feel insecure in their own bodies and started to do more diets as well as exercising for weight loss. There was a large number of children under the age of 12 that underwent treatment. Lastly, in the 2010s, there was a new idea about diversity when there is a movement on social media that talks about body positivity, and one of the greatest changes we could see was how there started to be a use of plus size models and there being more size inclusion in the fashion industry and even in the toy industry with barbies forming in different shapes and not just colors. There was also the growth of the selfie culture, caused by the Kardashians, leading people to look differently. 

this is soothing we can see in different ways especially in museums and galerries that talk about our cultures obsession with bodies and size, also looking at how fashion relies on body modification such as corsets and undergarments and this is something we still see today in different ways aswell as there being a change in both diet and exercise, there have been changes when it comes to people talking positively about extreme thinness and speaking negatively about obesity and vise versa, this makes youth very vulnerable because they start to internalize different ideas about body images and this leads to low selfesteen which then leads to disordered eating symptoms ptoms. What we can see as a whole is how body ideals are evolving just as everyones body does aswell and there are a lot of changes because of also looking at the fashion industry and the media we see everyday and this can lead to a lot of difficulties with mental health and there needs to be a change in how we see body culture since it is important to understand it is always evolving and it is impossible to stay the same.