While I’m still just in the brainstorming stages of my advocacy project, I do know what I want to advocate for. I know girls my age who have and are still struggling with eating disorders; I even feel the pressure to look a certain way myself. I want to emphasize the idea that women of all shapes and sizes are beautiful – not just women who meet the ultra-thin body image portrayed by the media, and not just women who have curves. I want to encourage women to be comfortable with their bodies and to stop feeding into these standards of beauty. I just have to find the best way to convey this message, and what kinds of things I should include.
I know I want to focus specifically on college women, and I was thinking of using a display board as my medium (like the ones we had to use in middle school for science fair projects). I could have a picture on it of one of the typical airbrushed models we see in magazines with the headline: “SHE doesn’t even really look like that – so why do you feel like you have to?” I could also use other pictures of celebrities before and after being airbrushed, along with one or two statistics about the prevalence of eating disorders among college women, encouraging everyone viewing my project not to become another statistic. I know that I also want to address the pressure that women feel to look a certain way from their peers, not just from the media, I just have to figure out how to go about this.
If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!
I think a display board would be great. You could also tie in some personal stories and talk about how the issue of having a “perfect” body image has affected your friends/other people around you. Overall, your topic idea is really powerful, and I know that you’ll be able to hold the audience’s attention. Good luck!
I think you have some really great ideas so far! I believe education and raising awareness are the best ways to influence people and affect change, and a visual display would be a grab way to do this. Having the airbrushed model could be particularly effective since we are so used to seeing them everywhere. I was also thinking about using pictures or posters to illustrate obvious discrepancies in the fair treatment of women today. I’m not writing specifically about body image anymore, but I’m definitely going to write about unfair expectations of women in today’s society and I think a negative effect on body image is a big part of that. Let me know if you want to talk about ideas or work together for the project!
I just read your persuasive essay post from last week and, combined with your advocacy project plans, I just have to say – wow. Your paper is pretty powerful, and at the same time, it maintains a certain level of reasonableness that most articles on this topic fail to reach.
I think your plans for your advocacy project are especially great, and this is definitely an issue that has a huge impact on college-age girls. The ideas you have so far are good ones, just be sure to keep up the level-headed tone from your paper. I know I’ve read essays on similar topics that go into man-hating or extreme hatred for those who are “too skinny,” making the entire paper fairly off-putting, but you’ve already proven yourself through your persuasive essay, so I have faith that your project will be great 🙂
I think it’s pitiful that our culture feeds so much into how we conduct our own social selves, and that culture relies on a very superficial image of human beings. I suppose we all want to be size 4s or lean and muscular, but really it’s an indication of how much we care about our image. I don’t mean to be as harsh as this sounds, but if you’re so concerned about your image, then there’s nothing else to you that isn’t skin-deep. Take hipsters, for example.
Really what I would focus on if I were you is that eating disorders are no way for someone to be healthy, let alone attain a good image. And if people want to judge them for something that is completely acceptable (you know, not being morbidly obese), then they are not the people you want to be friends with anyway.