Through studying the media in this course, seeing the media’s prevalence on our psychological health has never been made more clear to me than now. The media question I chose for this paper is: How does the media influence body imagine and it’s psychological effect on young women from the ages of twelve to twenty-five. This question felt extremely important to me because I personally suffer from the media’s effects on my own body. I feel as if I am supposed to be tall and thin, blonde and tan, light-eyed and freckled, just to be considered beautiful by the world. This leads me to another though, we are taught we have to be thought of as beautiful to a vast number of people in order to believe it. I chose this topic to raise awareness of how women are influenced by the media and the long-term psychological effects it has. The importance of this topic is severe because not only will it help many understand the effects media has now but it will also hopefully help in forming a social change in how media is represented to reduce the number of those effected negatively by the media. For this paper I used two sources to gain more knowledge on the topic and to help me make a valid argument. My first source (Thompson & Heinberg,1999) introduces surveys and statistics to show that various forms of social media play an important role in the starting and continuing of eating disorders. Social pressures along with media messages, give negative internal standard of attractiveness also aiding in women’s body dissatisfaction and an increase in bad eating habits. My second source (Derenne & Beresin,2006) has a scientific method approach to it’s explanations of body image issues such as the history of women’s body image, the changes of this image, the effect of this change, and what we as a society can do to stop it. Now, what exactly is body image? Body image, in short, is how we see our bodies and how we feel about them. Studies have shown that negative body image has become an epidemic all over the world. Unfortunately, many more women suffer from having a negative image of their bodies from how sexualized women have become in the media. In this culture, the extreme expectation to focus on appearance is at an all-time high. In a survey performed on a group of college students, 74.4% of women who had a normal weight for their height, or normal BMI, confessed that they thought about their physical appearance/weight very often. This body imag