To What Extent Does Pop Culture Reflect Society's Values?

Pop culture is a modern popular culture transmitted through media or magazines and are particularly aimed at younger people. In today’s society, pop culture greatly affects society’s values. Pop culture influences most young people, especially teenagers, because they are at the age where they believe everyone else’s opinions matter. The extent that pop culture reflects society’s values are influenced through media and magazines, specifically through body image, social position, and television. Younger people believe that they must do what others do, say what others say, and look how others look; rather than be the person they really are and not what pop culture makes them to be.

Society shapes people in many different ways such as people’s perception of other’s body image. Body image is the way a person sees them self and imagine how they look. It can be broken down into two opposing categories—negative and positive body image. Positive expectations are when people accept the way they look and feel about their body. For example, society glorifies a healthier and fit body that are usually found in the limelight. “Beauty is not democratic. It is unjust, distributed inequitably according to the luck of the draw” (843). In the article, Celebrity Bodies by Daniel Harris, he writes strongly about how society puts down the beauty of people’s bodies. Harris believes that beauty is much more than being “so slim that women could seek cover behind the nearest swizzle stick” (839). He’s beliefs counteract with negative body image. Negative expectations are when someone feels that their body does not measure up to family, social, or media ideals. This cynical idea of body types that people tend to focus more on is contrasted to positive body types. Society greatly values the criticism of other’s poor body images to those with it’s ideal body. Harris states that “It is a man-made aesthetic, or, rather, a woman- made aesthetic, since the desire of men for voluptuous childbearing hips and pendulous breasts seems all but irrelevant to its look” (839). In other words, people’s criticism is not significant, the health of others in their personal development and the content feeling people have of themselves matter.

Pop culture’s influence of social position segregates people into different rankings of society. These ranking are commonly based off of appearance and personal interests. For example, in a high school there is the popular clique; cheerleaders and jocks, the average guys, and the geeks or nerds. Social statuses impact people’s judgment of where others stand in society. In the article by David Denby called High School Confidential he wrote, “He’s usually a football player, muscular but dumb, with a face like a beer mug and only two ways of speaking – in a conspiratorial whisper, to a friend; or in a drill sergeant’s sudden bellow” (819). As has been pointed out, Denby describes the assumed image of a football player. The image he created came from the perspectives of society and the values it reflects. In the same article he writes “It’s possible to make teen movies that go beyond these fixed polarities – insider and outsider, blonde-