Media industry has been growing at an exponential rate over the past few decades, largely due to the implication of electronic media. Before, getting news was limited to newspaper, magazines, radio, and a few television station; but now the news has been opened up to the limitless world of the internet, which appears to be limitless when it comes to the acquisition of information. The addition of social media networks is making it even easier to spread data across the globe. These new additions have greatly increased the amount of media exposure the average person receives in a day, causing the contents of this media to become increasingly influential to the United States consumer market.

Since the 1940s, popular US media has upheld a progressively thinner body image as the ideal for women. This ideal has been created through two primary practices: pursuing extremely skinny models, and the wide use of Photoshop. Young girls are heavily influenced by what they view in the media, and the unrealistic beauty standards created by these practice have caused direct harm on the society’s overall mental and physical health through increased cases of depression and eating disorders. Women’s portrayal in advertisements and media is negatively impacting the health of female adolescence in the United States.

When viewing images and media, young girls are constantly comparing themselves to the images that they see. 19 year old Essena O’Neill, a former Instagram model, shared in this universal experience, and is using her fame to spread awareness. She remembers looking at catalogs for various surfing brands with bikini clad models and wondering “Do I look like that?” and “How can I look like that?” At just 12, O’Neill began heavily restricting her diet, and thinking abusive and self-destructive thoughts in hopes of looking like those model that she saw in the catalog. After 7 years of suffering, and a successful modeling career, O’Neill decided to leave all of that behind, instead trying to get the word across to young girls that was you see on social media and in the media is “not real life.” She doesn’t think that is right to portray women the way they do in the media, because it has an immediate impact on the health of young girls, as seen by her own experiences; going on to say “It's very heartbreaking to think that maybe young girls would have done the same thing to people before me.” With adolescents on average suffering “13 thoughts of self-hate every day,” O’Neill was not wrong to question the ethics of women’s depiction in media.

The use of Photoshop is a common practice for the media, used for everything from advertisements to music videos, and is even used before uploading picture to social photo-sharing apps. These uses of Photoshop are causing girls to think that the bodies that people are seen with online and in the media are real, when they are in actuality an altered version of real bodies. There is no regulation concerning Photoshop in mainstream media, so many celebrities are taking it into their own hands to spread positive messages to young girls. In November 2015, Zendaya participated in a photoshoot with Modeliste magazine, and when the magazine was released she found the images to be heavily altered, with her hips and torso had been slimmed in the photos of her already slight frame. She proclaimed that “These are the things that make women self-conscious, that create the unrealistic ideals of beauty that we have,” and took it upon herself to post the original photos on her social media. This situation is just another point in the ongoing debate on whether retouched pictures have formed impracticable perceptions of beauty.

The portrayal of women in the media is having a direct effect on the both the mental and physical health of adolescences in the United States. The media is creating unrealistic beauty standards and celebrating bodies that only very small percentage of women have with little regulation, the media is causing young girls to become depressed, leading to eating disorders. With the drastic increase of media exposure to young girls in the US over the last few decades, it is becoming increasingly important to monitor what is being shared.