Women and Diet Pills, Part 2

A good way to see how images of beauty have changed throughout time is to
look at art. Artwork often portrays idealized images of the period in which the
art was created. When you look at paintings depicting Greek gods and
goddesses, for example, you may be surprised to see how round and plump
the women are. Renaissance women were also portrayed with round bellies
and wide hips. In the 1920s' Art Deco period, slim, boyish women are often
portrayed.

In today's world, the media—television, radio, movies, the Internet,
newspapers, and magazines—are like the circulatory system that carries
cultural "blood" to all parts of our society. A good deal of the messages that
are pumped through the popular media have to do with selling products that
promise to make young women more beautiful. But in order to sell you a
beauty product, a company must be sure that the buyers' ideal or conception
of beauty is the same image that the product promises to bestow. For example,
if in a certain place people dislike plump abdomens, then it makes sense for a
company to advertise products that promise to reduce the size of a person's
abdomen. However, if everyone in a certain place liked plump abdomens, it
would be ridiculous for a company to try to sell products meant to slim
everyone's stomach down, because no one would buy the product and the
company would lose money.

To be sure that their products are desirable to the population, companies will
on the one hand study society for trends and then develop products that are
compatible with those trends. On the other hand, however, companies
themselves also try to create trends and to keep profitable trends going by
promoting certain ideas over others and trying to get you to believe their ideas
are good ones. Companies have many tactics for persuading you into thinking
a particular idea, image, or product is the "right" one and worth spending your
money on. Often these tactics consist of using actresses, models, sports
heroes, and other people who exude images of health, physical strength, and
beauty to endorse products.

Advertisements involving such people imply that by using the product, you can
become like the person who is endorsing the product. In the vast majority of
cases, however, the famous or beautiful people you see never even used the
product they are endorsing before they were offered money to endorse it!

<<Part 1

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