Every day like all of us here on Myspace and Facebook, I log on to check my page. We all hope to see that we have received new messages or comments, or maybe a friend request from a cute boy or girl. We see new blog posts from our friends, and new birthday reminders. Now, every day I log onto my myspace page, I am getting more and more irritated by advertisements displaying what is supposedly a 19-year old girl's body and there are two different pictures side-by-side to each other. The first picture on the left is not very pretty. There is a girl holding up her shirt, and the only part of her you see is the side of her torso. The stomach is bloated, coming out over her pants from all sides. There are a few stretch marks as well, both on the side and in the front of the stomach on the bottom part. The picture on the right is nicer to look at. The abs look firm and defined, and the stomach is sitting perfectly inside the skirt that the girl is wearing. If you look closely enough, you can see some faded stretch marks on the side. Under the two photos it says "I went from this.... to this in 4 weeks" the text is black and is bolded to catch your attention.
Under that statement it says "NO DIET- NO EXERCISE". The text is red and capitalized to catch your attention and push urgency. Red is a color of aggression and leadership. Finally there is a link to the website that says "Click here to learn my trick". This statement is typed in red as well, but is not capitalized. The advertiser has used three different types of texts, two different colors and two very distinguished photos to draw you in. Go ahead, click on the link. The website that comes up is a blog about Emma's weight loss success. The blog is not from a blogging website such as blogspot, but is just called emmasweightlosssuccess.com. A little fishy, don't you think? The website states that "My name is Emma Himes. I live in Redding, CA and I wanted to share my weight loss story with you. I'm no medical guru or anything like that. I'm just a mom who figured out a system that works better than all the famous diets you tried (you know, the ones that didn't work?). Hopefully my story can inspire you to try my method and lose some weight!" There is a photo of a girl on the right side of the page holding a cute people. This girl looks right around the age of 21. She has three kids and a husband? You couldn't have fooled me. This posting isn't about the weight loss products that were featured on Oprah. It isn't about the sugarcoated phoniness of the website. It's about the fact that here in the year 2008 we are still so stuck on the idea of the ideal body for a girl. In a time when people are becoming more open-minded about gay marriage, becoming more concerned about animal rights, becoming more concerned about the environment, and becoming more concerned about the state of our country, one thing seems to remain the same-- body image. Magazines still feature stick-skinny models, celebrities are still portrayed as beautiful when they look like they've eaten grass for a week, and advertisements are still being shoved in our face about losing weight.
Even on Facebook, I will see advertisements that say "19 and overweight? CLICK HERE!!!"
What can we do about this? All we really can do is resist. All we really can do is know that we need to be happy with who we are and not let some stupid advertisements make our decisions for us. Eating disorders are still prevalent today and remain far too covert and hush-hush. In 2008, I thought we'd be past this, but I guess we aren't. Show them you're beautiful and show them you're impervious to their desires.

http://www.finddesirenotdemise.com