Photoshopped women: so what?
When Redbook recently ran a Photoshopped image of Faith Hill on its cover, Jezebel cried foul. But I think we’re starting to overreact. I don’t think we should start under-reacting, either, mind you. I just think that after decades of the same old thing, we should learn how to look at these images and not allow ourselves to be affected by them.
Nothing new here
On the one hand, they’ve been airbrushing photos like this since before there were even computers—around the time “reefer madness” played the scapegoat in our society just like violent video games play the role today. I don’t know why it’s still so shocking to people.
It serves little more purpose to me than an arbitrary sin we can point our fingers at and declare, “I’m better than you!” I feel like it’s a petty, insecure attempt to make people—nay, force them to be—afraid of the media. I don’t see the point to such a strategy. We’re saturated with media, almost as much as we’re saturated with water. We can’t run away in fear from something that saturates us, so we’re forced to find a way to live with it and be happy.
Exhibit B: Media whoring
On the other hand, I also have a background in journalism, where it’s considered unethical to even mirror a photo if that means the subject of the photo is looking in at your page, instead of out and away from it. Unethical. That’s literally the industry jargon they use to describe it. The mere fact that one sector of published media worries about ethics and the other sector doesn’t really says a lot about the entertainment industry. It’s built upon the principles of excess, the unreal, and the unnatural.
And we eat it right up.
Glamorous post-production for men
As an amusing side-note: Does anyone else notice that we direct guilt at the media for Photoshopping women’s pictures, but to have no problem with special effects making Hollywood’s leading men look like they’re crashing cars into helicopters and the like? Notice how we don’t worry about movies creating “unrealistic standards of badass” for men. After all, men can tell the difference between a movie and real life. But we’re saying that women can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake?
I jest. And despite a little joking around on the subject, there is serious a consequence.
Media consumers must watch what they, er, consume
When Jezebel explained why they’re pissed, they made a point, and they made it passionately:
...In a world where girls as young as eight are going on the South Beach Diet, teenagers are getting breast implants as graduation gifts, professional women are almost required to fetishize handbags, and everyone is spending way too much goddamn time figuring out how to pose in a way that will look as good as that friend with the really popular MySpace profile, it’s fucking wrong.
It is, indeed, horrific what so many women put themselves through in the quest to attain the “perfect image.” No one should be anorexic. No one should need breast implants.
However, I don’t think blaming the media will make any progress toward solving the harms mentioned above. I don’t think pointing blame in any direction will help, really. What really needs to happen is for people to understand how to consume media responsibly.
They have to learn to differentiate not only between what’s real and what isn’t, but what’s realistic and what isn’t. Perception is a tricky thing. Everyone knows what it’s like to accidentally misperceive something. It is each individual’s responsibility to make sure their perception of things is realistic. That much would be true whether magazines Photoshopped women’s faces and bodies or not.
Opening a cultural discussion to the masses
When my girlfriend sent me that link to Jezebel, she said it was very sad. I say, it’s good. Good that we have people who continually expose the practice of image manipulation so that we can share this truth with each new generation of young people coming in behind us.
The consequence of lifting of the curtain on unrealistic images is that more people get involved in an intricate, sophisticated cultural dialog that ultimately forces people to confront perception, image, and reality.
Conclusion
In a related subject, look at fashion magazines. Many of us blame fashion magazines for making people to look like something that doesn’t exist. However, I think the people who produce these magazines see fashion as high art… something that doesn’t apply to real life. The problem, then, becomes an audience that can’t tell the difference between art and reality.
In a day and age when senators like Hillary Clinton bolter their popularity by calling on bans of violent videogames, for fear that gamers can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, it’s ironic to note that more women turn anorexic to imitate what they see in magazines than gamers turn violent to imitate what they see in videogames.
Gamers don’t get violent because not only do they understand that the images on their screen are fake—they’re accustomed to it. They’ve lived with that notion for so long, it’s like second nature to them. And for this reason, the images on their screens pose no threat to their mental health.
That is what I would like to see happen to people who see pictures of Photoshopped women in magazines. I want the audience to be immune, because only then can we continue to live and be happy in our media-saturated culture.