Digital Body Image
A featured picture on PhotoshopDisasters shows a provocatively posed model in the magazine Maxim. But what’s this? The picture has been retouched? Shocking! The repeating nature of the background of the image clearly reveals where the retoucher tucked in the sides of the model, enlarged her breasts, or both. The glaring hack job is comical on first sight.
…perhaps her bathroom tiles are deliberately crooked.
But, when you think about it, the implications are rather serious. Certainly, consumers become aware of the pervasive, dramatic nature of retouching when they see a screw-up such as this Maxim error, or when they see something like the Dove commercial showing a model before a shoot and after. Indeed, the umpteen layers of professional make-up, perfect lighting, and extreme digital retouching are par for the course. Now, it’s not too hard for a 20-something guy such as myself to see these photographic liberties as media’s latest sally against whatever non-warped ideas of body image society has left. And yet, with the utter inundation of modified images, it’s still difficult to keep a grip on what a normal body looks like: it’s hard to keep sight of the coast when the current keeps pushing you out to sea.
Furthermore, the issue becomes more personal when you try to explain this retouching to, say, a teen/tween daughter. You can show them before and after pictures, side by side, and they understand. That is: they’re smart; logically, they comprehend what you are saying. However, I don’t think young women (and, increasingly, young men) get it. “Sure,” they think “these magazine pictures are fake, but if my friend Chastity is closer to looking like the picture than I am, I still have to relentlessly pursue proportions of an extreme type.” When it comes to retouching, you can take a fang or two out of the beast, but it still bites and holds on — sometimes through the teens, and sometimes forever. Derek K. Miller writes about trying to give his daughter’s some perspective at his blog Penmachine:
Second, I have two daughters approaching adolescence now, and I can see how the relentless repeated messages from these sources could warp their perceptions of what is normal. My wife and I continue to point out the distorted perspectives as part of teaching our kids media awareness, but it’s a fair bit of work.
Third is my experience over the past year, specifically with health and weight. Between the beginning of 2007 when I was diagnosed with cancer, and the end of July, I lost over 50 pounds. It’s taken more than eight months to gain it back, sometimes requiring me to eat more than I actually want to.
Beforehand, I thought that my stable long-term weight of about 200 pounds (91 kg) was a little higher than it should be, but nothing to be too concerned about. Now 200 pounds seems like a lovely, wonderful weight, a healthy place for me to be, even with all my new lumps and bumps and scars from my treatments and surgeries.
So looking at the shows and magazines that are obsessed with the tiniest weight fluctuations and skin changes in celebrities grinds my teeth. These are trivial, pointless concerns—and what annoys me most is that it’s not only obviously what sells, but it also invades my brain when I don’t even want it to. Why is there even room in my memory for whether one or the other stick-thin actress has a pregnancy “bump”?
But here’s the thing: as bad an influence as the magazines are, even doing something like removing the retouched images wouldn’t do much; they are just one source of pressure on young women. The front lines of outlandish body proportioning have moved to cinema — and due to the advancements in technology, the effects in this medium become more believable every single day. Obvious examples are easy to spot, e.g. Angelina Jolie was just a starting point model for her digital avatar in the movie Beowulf.
As educators of young people, though, we have to be ready to expose the more subtle retouching in film. It’s no longer “you can’t believe every body you see” — everyone knows that — it’s “you can’t believe every body you watch.” Sometimes it feels like a piece of a Brave New World.