Never Just Pictures

As we've been discussing about Ramamurthy's excerpt in class, we've come to the conclusion that advertisements hold a lot of power in modern culture. A simple picture may induce people to do crazy things such as starving themselves. In the passage, "Never Just Pictures", the author discusses the issue of how many women and even men are succumbing to the might of the "pictures" as more fall to anorexia and the "skinny fad" which has hit America. The author even discusses how the advertisements manipulate people into believing that it's normal to be depressed as one is becoming skinnier through starvation and that beauty is supposed to look like death. 120
The advertisement has and may always be lying to the masses with its material. Many many years ago, it was the norm for women to be plump because it showed that she was of a good family and background. Men even found the body of the Statue of Liberty to be attractive at one point! But now, the very skinny body is what men desire, due to the endeavors of modern advertising.193 The author states, "So, yes, the causes of eating disorders are "deeper" than just obedience to images. But cultural images themselves are deep." (381) We may quickly glance at an image of a young girl who probably has zero percent body fat and think nothing of it but later on it will probably come up in our minds when we see more "plump" women walking about, especially if we are constantly exposed to these images. Just as the author states, images have more power than we think.