Two Studies

We are reading Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel by Jean Kilbourne in my Critical Theory class. It's pretty good and has lots of pictures, pick it up.

In it are two case studies (I love case studies) that I think everyone should memorize to interject into conversations whenever applicable. They're really good and useful. Here they are:

"Male college students who viewed just one episode of Charlie's Angels, the hit television show of the 1970s that featured three beautiful women, were harsher in their evaluations of the attractiveness of potential dates than were males who had not seen the episode. In another study, male college students shown centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse were more likely to find their own girlfriends less sexually attractive."

yeah. and the next one:

"The influence of the media is strikingly illustrated in a recent study that found a sharp rise in eating disorders among young women in Fiji soon after the introduction of television to the culture. Before television was available, there was little talk of dieting in Fiji. "You've gained weight" was a traditional compliment and "going thin" the sign of a problem. In 1995 television came to the island. Within three years, the number of teenagers at risk for eating disorders more than doubled, 74 percent of the teens in the study said they felt "too big or too fat," and 62 percent said they had dieted in the past month."

I feel like I've heard versions of these studies before, but never in plain language.