Sex, Lies and Photoshop

[kiley9806]

i agree with you kat - it makes me sad that this is the world we have created for our children. i hope that i can instill a sense of self in my own kids, and pride for being just who they are.

[AcadieLibre]

What does an Average woman mean to people? Average in what way? Ever since they started to do modern day advertising they altered images to push on the public what they believe the public wanted and what crap they could sell them. We live in a society where we are bombarded with fake images of beauty. It is up to parents to teach children not to buy into it, not for the government or the companies who job it is to sell products to educate our children, their job is is sell illusions and fantasy and a lot of worthless crap. It must work, people buy into it.

Altering images to make women look thinner, larger breasted, fuller lips, etc. has been being done since print was cheap enough and mechanized enough they could mass produce and market looks, then add photography and you can make everyone beautiful. And it happened way before Digital Cameras and Photoshop were around. It has been going on for almost a century now. It happened prior to that, just not on such a massive scale.

Its fantasy and thats what they are selling. No ones fault but the public who keeps buying these products, these magazines and fawn over these surgically altered people, who have ribs removed to get a nice curve, place bags of saline so they can have bigger breasts, the skin on their face chemically peeled off so they will have more youthful skin. And even after all that they still need to be "Fixed" before the magazine goes to print or the ad is plastered on bilboards around the city.

This is not new, for thousands of years people have done horrid things to themselves to attain what they consider beauty. Recently one company did the campaign where the "Average" woman was Beautiful, it was just a big con job by the advertising company and the Parent corporation. People don't want average, they want the illusion that they too some day can be this astounding beauty. Just look at how many women went to those atrocious Glamour photos that women were flocking to. I still see women who use them and post them as just there every day look. Men are not different, now they get peck implants, butt implants, and a ton of other surgery so they can to be "Beautiful".

If you put an an average person in an ad you try to sell $300 face cream, the odds are you going to be out of business very soon, snake oil salesmen just have larger budgets these days. I think the world had much more serious issues then this, if people choose to be gullible thats up to them, why we live in a free society.

[Greg_Nuspel]

Good news for Canadians, I read somewhere that research shows that Canadians enjoy comedy in advertising more than sex. I wish I would have keep that article.

[Marko]

It is about retouching and a law that they are considering in France.

That is supremely interesting, that law. I'm not sure how i feel about the whole thing. I'm all for crediting the retoucher; but the rest of the law suggests banning websites and make it illegal to promote negative body sterotypes. In theory yahoo, sounds like a good thing -...but putting this in practice brings up some civil liberty issues for me in terms of policing or enforcing anything. If I am a website owner they could take me down for showing a retouched image..that's what it's sayin'.

Personally I think I'm fairly unaffected (in terms of my own body image) by the stuff, but I can easily see the effects on today's kids. Really, when I was a kid it wasn't that bad; retouching was done but it wasn't as extreme. They would retouch the prints and the negs to fix up blemishes - but they didn't have the today's easy peasy tools. They could not pull in a woman's waistline to absurd porportions as easily. This can be done in less than 1 minute in P.Shop and it is done to all the images we see (or the vast vast majority of them)

If every picture we see is indeed fake and indeed affects our self image, it's a problem, No? Some parents are busy. Some kids are stubborn, it's hard for parents to be totally on top of something as pernicious as glamour marketing. It's everywhere on 10 different levels; all fake, all motivated to do only one thing - separate you from your money via the deceit in the marketing. The problem, is the way it's done - unfortunately it does imo bash many a young person's self image. So for me it can be seen as a health issue or a mental health issue. And because of that, the government can get involved and maybe they should.

I'd be looking to get better answers than banning websites though - I think I'd be for 'mandatory credit of the retoucher' as a first step.
Thx for listenin' lol - Marko

[kat]

Marko you wrote it exactly how I feel about it..but soo much better than how I word it!!

[edbayani11]

as advertising people say, 'truth in advertising'