Monkey See Monkey Do (Remix)

It is said that most people have to see or hear something three times before they remember something enough they are able to recall that information later on. This information will begin to stick in one’s head whether or not the message is positive or negative. Such is the case of the media, the specific purpose is to convey messages to the masses; and these messages are everywhere in the world we live. Over the years with the evolution of technology, media has found more ways to get to their target audience. Each day the message varies, but whether you are looking at a magazine, listening to music, watching TV, or searching the web you can trust the media to be broadcasting their message. The most common theme of these advertisements are often not hard to miss, “You are only beautiful if you look like this.”

Media as a whole has three main objectives; advocacy, entertainment, and announcements. Underneath those objectives you can fit many different categories of media such as advertising, marketing, propaganda, music, sports, acting, and the list goes on and on. Americans are told from a very young age, from these many different sources, that if we do not fit what media shows and shares as what “looks right”; what is “pretty” or “handsome”, everyday individuals are ugly and imperfect. Media is, in a sense, shaping what our culture considers handsome or beautiful.

If “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and the beholder sees what the media shows us, isn’t beauty in the eye of the media? Subliminally, we are told from a very young age how we should look and act. A perfect example of this is at your local Wal-Mart, when looking at the toys for young boys and girls. Wander down the girl’s aisle and you will see lots of bright colors, particularly in pink, and the kinds of toys “only girls“ play with--dolls. Often it is Barbie; a blond hair, skinny, big breasted female, whose favorite activity is shopping, and that becomes a young girl’s role model. Walking down the boy’s aisle is a different story, though. All their toys are dark greens, blues and black; their role models super heroes, and G.I. Joe’s figures with large muscles and kung fu grips. When it comes to how we are “supposed” to look and act we are exposed at a young age to what media considers the “norm“, but realistically we are far from that image.

Everyday we see messages that tell us what we should look like, what we should dress like, how we should speak, and a large portion of this information is found on TV and in movies. When watching your favorite TV show or favorite movie, is the leading role played by someone who has an unfit body, bad teeth, and a poor taste in clothing? Or is it that the best things happen to the characters who look the best? While there are exceptions to this, movies and television shows that incorporate everyday people, for the most part what you see portrayed on screen is a very blunt message of the image you should be. For women it is generally blond, with big breasts, full lips, a tiny waist, and curvy hips. For men, it may be less strict, so long as you are a tall man with large muscles. TV shows for example, take the Biggest Loser. It’s a TV show and show dedicated to showing the public over the span of a season of a group of obese people losing wait. Another to take a good look at would be the TV show the Jersey shore, it’s a show fallowing the “life” of a group of adults from with what some people would call the “perfect” body. To these characters it all about GTL, it’s their life. Whether in reality television or the latest box office hit, the idea of portraying perfection is there.

This message that you are not “all you can be” is found almost anywhere, in advertisements all over the place. It can be found in late night TV, selling the latest pill that is not yet FDA approved (and is really just a tape worm eating you from the inside out), advertisements on the One Crunch, Six Pack Abs Machine, in newspaper ads, and advertisement banners at the top of a webpage. The concept that we are told we are not perfect is used to sell these products and ultimately make money. It might be safe to say that everyone has, at one point or another, fallen victim to media’s theme of imperfection. I have even fallen victim of it, and though I recognize it happening, the message is everywhere and hard to avoid at times. A person can be told they’re imperfect so many times that after a while it may stick with them and they want to do something to change it.

No where is this being spoken more loud and clear than on magazine racks. Open up any of the popular magazines, Men‘s Health, Cosmopolitan, or People Magazine, and you‘ll see similar articles all over the place-- “10 Ways to Last Longer in Bed”, “Drop 5 Pounds in a Week“, “Kristen Bell‘s Secret to Great Abs“. All these magazine articles are selling the same point. You are not okay the way you are, but if you buy from us we’ll make you better. When is it ever okay to just be ourselves. While these articles may have been written from a helpful standpoint, their bottom line is still focused on changing who we are. Inspiring change is one thing, but lowering one’s self-esteem in order to do it is the wrong way to go about making change.

It is also vital to mention music, as this theme of body perfection shows up again and again in popular song lyrics. Keeping things clean, “You love my lady lumps (love), my hump, my hump, my hump.” The Black Eyes Peas are a rather popular band, but the song “My Humps” is sending the same message about what men should find attractive in a woman’s body, particularly when talking about Fergie’s looks and why guys love her “lady lumps“. You can find tons of songs that are shaped around this concept. After all, everyone knows that Sir Mix-A-Lot “like[s] big butts and [he] cannot lie”. On top of the explicit music lyrics, the music videos for these songs only continue to show a hard to attain image of what one should look like. The average music video finds plenty of scantily clad women gyrating in the arms of their tough, well dressed, “blinged out” boyfriends; hardly a good message about looks and beauty.

In a medias voice on what is “perfection”, being okay in ones skin is something that is hard to accomplish. We can hope that even with media telling us daily we could be better and that we are not perfect, that people as a whole are able to come to a deeper understanding with one’s self and find what they think is beautiful. Sadly, that’s not always the case. It can be too easy to get wrapphttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=3124575992399192770ed up in the media’s portrayal of beauty and perfection, to begin changing ourselves to fit what we think the rest of the world wants us to be. And when we change ourselves to fit someone else’s standard of perfection, we lose ourselves. Whether or not we will ever be able to avoid this message, it’s hard to say. When media influence begins at a young age, when the message that we need to look, act, and do things a certain way shapes something as benign as the toys we play with, can we fully realize we are being molded in someone else images? The real trick is finding yourself when media is
telling you to be someone else. A monkey, when shown an action repeatedly, can learn to imitate that action. A person, when shown an image repeatedly, can learn to imitate that image. Is this monkey see, monkey do behavior beneficial to us? Or is it more beneficial to look beyond the media, and learn from the images we aren’t seeing?