The blurred messages over image (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

The blurred messages over image

8:38am Wednesday 30th July 2008 in

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I found it quite disturbing when looking at the news online the other day. A huge picture of Amy Winehouse took up the whole screen along with a story about how a waxwork model of herself had been unveiled at Madame Tussauds.

I wasn’t much interested by this apparently intriguing story so I scrolled down to the bottom to find a link for a story on the ongoing poverty in Africa. I’m not joking, Amy Winehouse being made into a 6ft model that will probably frighten the life out of most children is now apparently more important than people dying of starvation. Nice.

I don’t mean to be rude, Amy is certainly very talented and I do quite like her music, but surely there are more important and interesting things to read about.

The huge influence of the media today, I think, can sometimes be abused, certainly in this case. What are we learning and who can we look up to as young people?

Like most girls, I love to read beauty magazines and, shamefully, the ones with all the gossip about Big Brother too. The thing that gets to me about these magazines most though, is the fact that one minute they’re on about how fat one poor exposed celebrity is looking on the beach, and how she’s an unhealthy size 12 (goodness me, that’s obese), and the next they’re pointing out how you can see so-and-so’s ribs poking out and it’s disgusting how women are wanting to be so thin.

So then the question lingers, ‘which way is the right way?’ – a question that we shouldn’t have to be asking ourselves as young women.

There is no ‘right’ way to look in my opinion. To be comfortable with what you look like you have to be comfortable with yourself. This isn’t happening among a lot of women these days, because of these magazines and the confusing messages they put across.

Even though I try not to let such influences effect me, I do admit that at times I long to look like some of those models, because it is almost brainwashed into you that men will find you drop-dead gorgeous if you look exactly like that. However, it is probably a well-known fact that the women that men find most attractive are those who are not necessarily thin, and not necessarily curvy, but those who go out feeling confident about themselves.

I’m probably too young to remember how all this started but I look at pictures of Marilyn Monroe, who was apparently a size 16, and I really believe she was beautiful. I don’t mean through the way she looked, although obviously she was stunning, but I mean in the way she was so utterly comfortable within herself.

That is the kind of woman we can look up to. She represents the real potential that every woman can achieve, the human quality that is self-respect.