Body Activist Empowering Audiences to Love Themselves - Essay Sample

Introduction

Ashley Graham is a plus size model as well as a body activist (Graham, 2015). She effectively applies logos by critically addressing her aim to persuade the audiences to become one own role model in order to make oneself feel confident and love who we are in ow own bodies regardless of what type of a body one has. To adequately convince her audiences she employs the ethos effectively by narrating on how she became a plus size model. She also explains the kind of bullying she received as a result of her body type until she decided top do something about it and become a body activist. Additionally, she employs pathos to explain how she sees herself in other women who struggle with issues related to confidence and beauty. She explains on how at time she had to clarify that she was not only a model but a plus size model.

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Confidence

Also, she related to her audiences when she mentions her straggles finding her confidence especially in the modeling business. She further explains on how she seeks affirmation from other individuals to build her confidence to a point that she felt that she actually did not need it. On the contrary Kilbourne is a pioneered activist concerning the image of women in advertising (Kilbourne, 2014). Using her background as an activist she used ethos to appeal to her audiences. Persuaded the audiences by employing logos by addressing the aim and emphasize on the influences that advertisements had in the society culturally as well as individually.

Importance of Body Image

Among the two speakers, they employed a lot of statistical data to provide evidence the importance of body image to ladies and what effects it has on them. Kilbourne offers statistic in percentage on the number of women who suffer from eating disorder as well as the number of women who are on diet from an early age. Additionally, she offers pictures of adverts that are directed towards slender women. My employing this method she helps the audience understand the advertiser’s focus and their impact on such women, on the contrary Graham offers data from a survey that was conducted on thousands of ladies and asked on how they felt about their bodies. This information was very vital as it helped the women realized the rising concerns about body image in the community and emphasize on the need of the society to work together to redefine the vision of beauty.

Concerning Kairos, the modern people would agree that advertising had a lot of influence on women two decades ago and still does even today. Although the advertising firms and industries have significantly changed many of the advertisers still use their adverts to body shame ladies’ images. In light of this, it can be concluded that Ashley is supporting the work done by Kilbourne by fighting stigma of the impacts that come about by being a plus size as well as campaigning for people to change their views of their bodies. She has appeared in multiple of the Magazines that Kilbourne discusses.

Conclusion

My thought on Kilbourne speech is that we really need more activists and people to speak up on the impacts advertising and how it is important to make everyone feel equal and beautiful, it is not right for the advertisers to make beauty seem like its supposed to be slender, there is a need for normalcy and therefore they should find a way to strike a balance between this issue to ensure that they reduce stigma on a lot of women. I can relate to this and I believe that adverts should reflect the population and try to influence the population to fit the advertiser’s opinion of beauty. I also believe that the focus should not only be on the female but also the way men are featured in the adverts. I also relate the Graham speech because as a child I was highly criticized for being a little bit over weigh compared to my classmates. Having an activist allows other people to with the same issue not to feel like they do not belong.

References

Graham, A. (2015). Plus-size? More Like My Size [DVD]. https://www.ted.com/talks/ashley_graham_plus_size_more_like_my_size?language=en; Tedx.

Kilbourne, J. (2014). Slim Hopes: Advertising & the Obsession with Thinness [Video].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7143sc_HbU; ChallengingMedia.