AM I NOT GOOD ENOUGH?
Am I Not Good Enough?
By Alicia Armstrong
My project is an abstract painting and collage, completed in humanities, to represent the emotional negative effects the media has on its viewers particularly females, and how they view themselves as less than perfect. The desire to be perfect is huge in our society and the media plays a big role in making women feel less than perfect. Today we consume the media’s rhetoric on how we should look, act, smell, and even eat. I chose this subject for my project because this is a subject that affects me the most when it comes to food rhetoric.
It has come to my attention and the attention of others that I am not perfect or good enough until I eat certain foods that will make my body appear “sexy,” which is what I want. In society today we are surrounded by the many quotes that “encourage” us to be better such as, “eat smaller portions,” “thin is the new beautiful,” “drink more water and consume less food,” “just do it,” “you are what you eat” these are just a fraction of the rhetorical quotations. Thanks to the media women in our society today feel like we need to look perfect, or better than we do now, to be perfect however we feel like we need to be skinny which is what perfect is in our society. To be perfect you need to eat right, the very frequently used advice for women today, but eating right isn’t always easy and that confusion is what causes women to have an eating disorder. Today it is estimated that more than 8 million people have an eating disorder, and 95% of that are between the ages 12 and 25.
I chose to use dark colors such as, blue, purple, red and brown, in my abstract painting to represent the emotional confusion and frustration women go through when deciding on what they should and shouldn’t consume. I also chose to represent these emotions by the taping the mouth shut on and putting a question mark on it. I chose to make an abstract painting using water colors to really emphasize the distortion of what it means to be perfect in our society today. The abstract painting I feel represents how messy and distorted this issue really is, it’s dark and less realistic, and then there’s the words on the painting that really emphasizes what the media wants its viewers to consume. The different words and phrases on my painting are from the magazine Cosmopolitan a frequently viewed magazine that targets young women from the ages 16 to 25. The media isn’t very secretive about its rhetoric it’s just the way it displays its rhetoric that confuses its viewers and my goal for my project is to bring the rhetoric out in the open and not have it be confusing anymore.
By Alicia Armstrong
My project is an abstract painting and collage, completed in humanities, to represent the emotional negative effects the media has on its viewers particularly females, and how they view themselves as less than perfect. The desire to be perfect is huge in our society and the media plays a big role in making women feel less than perfect. Today we consume the media’s rhetoric on how we should look, act, smell, and even eat. I chose this subject for my project because this is a subject that affects me the most when it comes to food rhetoric.
It has come to my attention and the attention of others that I am not perfect or good enough until I eat certain foods that will make my body appear “sexy,” which is what I want. In society today we are surrounded by the many quotes that “encourage” us to be better such as, “eat smaller portions,” “thin is the new beautiful,” “drink more water and consume less food,” “just do it,” “you are what you eat” these are just a fraction of the rhetorical quotations. Thanks to the media women in our society today feel like we need to look perfect, or better than we do now, to be perfect however we feel like we need to be skinny which is what perfect is in our society. To be perfect you need to eat right, the very frequently used advice for women today, but eating right isn’t always easy and that confusion is what causes women to have an eating disorder. Today it is estimated that more than 8 million people have an eating disorder, and 95% of that are between the ages 12 and 25.
I chose to use dark colors such as, blue, purple, red and brown, in my abstract painting to represent the emotional confusion and frustration women go through when deciding on what they should and shouldn’t consume. I also chose to represent these emotions by the taping the mouth shut on and putting a question mark on it. I chose to make an abstract painting using water colors to really emphasize the distortion of what it means to be perfect in our society today. The abstract painting I feel represents how messy and distorted this issue really is, it’s dark and less realistic, and then there’s the words on the painting that really emphasizes what the media wants its viewers to consume. The different words and phrases on my painting are from the magazine Cosmopolitan a frequently viewed magazine that targets young women from the ages 16 to 25. The media isn’t very secretive about its rhetoric it’s just the way it displays its rhetoric that confuses its viewers and my goal for my project is to bring the rhetoric out in the open and not have it be confusing anymore.