While women have made great strides in gaining greater freedom and rights over the past decade, society and culture at large continue to place great emphasis on their appearance. Certain standards of female beauty are presented in many different forms of popular media, bombarding women with images that portray what is considered the "ideal body". Such problems often emerge early in a woman's development and continue throughout her life. While trying to live up to specific beauty standards disseminated through media by society and culture, a woman's life is often drastically affected. both physically and psychologically. What remains similar among the bodies flaunted across the media is that they all possess popular standards of some sort of objective beauty. Women have a tendency to fall prey to advertisers and somehow unknowingly accept the creation of such standards for a woman's body which is unrealistic for most of the society. Slim, good-looking models are so prominent in today's culture that chronic exposure to them reinforces a discrepancy for women between their actual body and ideal body. The media feeds this unrealistic image and convinces women that to be accepted and considered beautiful it is better to be thin, have silky hair and a flawless complexion. Unrealistic media images of women are so widespread that it seems that women who meet that standard are more the norm than the exception. Cultivation theory argues that images depicting women who match the sociocultural ideal of beauty are extremely prevalent in pop... middle of paper...ded) for possessing society's sick vision of beauty. Due to the portrayal of specific beauty standards in the media, women have reimagined true beauty, resulting in drastic impacts that affect women's lives both physically and psychologically. To reach the social standard of this “ideal body,” women of all ages take drastic measures to achieve it (extreme diets and plastic surgery). However, having come so far in gaining more freedom and rights, women should strive for more representative images of real women that celebrate things other than physical appearance, so that women can have substantial and legitimate role models to aspire to. Hopefully one day all women will be able to look at a photograph in a magazine and then at their own image in the mirror and not experience a moment of disgust but rather a moment of confidence and self-confidence...