Image Source : womensrights.change.org
The greatest threat to healthy female body image might just be…a computer program. That’s right : Photoshop isn’t just manipulating the colors and shades of the sky in the background, it’s manipulating the way we think about female beauty. More specifically, reinforcing the aesthetic of the skinny, the skinnier, and the emaciated.
The program can be used to do all sorts of things, from inserting people of color into all-white spreads to shrinking the size of cheeks and hips to fazing out ex-boyfriends. And while not all of these things are necessarily bad, most of the connotations we have with Photoshop are negative, as The Guardian points out.
Why? Because, well, in a society cluttered with ubiquitous and constant media images of young, absurdly thin white women used to sell products, Photoshop is most frequently associated with the exaggeration and reinforcement of the unhealthy standards of beauty to which women are held. There’s the altered Demi Moore cover, where Moore’s hip had miraculously disappeared. The aforementioned Ralph Lauren photo, which spawned protests against Photoshop outside the Ralph Lauren store in New York. Then an even more hideous Ralph Lauren disaster in which the model looks so thin it’d almost be laughable if it weren’t so awful.
Image Source : Askmen.com
It’s frustrating that so often technology gets manipulated for the purposes of exploitation, particularly the exploitation of women (See: iPhone Apps). In this case, the manipulation is particularly egregious, because it is an outright but often believable lie that asks women to compare themselves to an ideal that’s been entirely fabricated by a few brushstrokes. Read more ……
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