Lies, Damn Lies, and Photoshop

Katie wrote this:

Long story short, I know a guy who I counted as a good friend last year and most of this year. Last term, I realized that he is a narcissistic, chauvenistic sociopath. I came to this realization soon after his frat got into a hazing scandal in which they made a pledge take a picture with a fat girl as a running joke. That fat girl was me. I wrote a letter to my school newspaper about it. You can read it here. He never recognized this to my face (he was in the pledge class), nor did he or his fraternity ever apologize to me. It was one of the most painful things I have ever been though. There, you have been let into my life way more than you want or need to, all to give you context for this.

Mayjah wrote this in response

The feminists won. Eons ago. Right? But body dysmorphia is getting more warped, girls are trying harder to take starvation to new extremes, only to turn around and “enhance” their tits and their lips. Is that a 12-year-old boy in drag or is that a woman? Soon there will be a generation who doesn’t even know what a real, healthy, unaltered, unenhanced girl looks like. Maybe it’s already here. How is this winning? I don’t have any sons yet. But I want this to end with me and my generation. I want my sons to know what beauty is and what dying looks like, and to know the difference. I want them to know that extra layer of adipose that girls have just under the surface is so valuable they should be getting down on their knees and saying a little prayer to it. I want my daughters to know they deserve to wake up every morning and breathe deeply of life, taste everything, and fear nothing.

They both wrote a lot more than just that, and you ought to read both of their articles in their entirety.

I’ll wait.

First of all, Katie: you have your shit together more at ?19? than I had until I was in my 30s. As Randy Jackson would say “You know I have mad love for you, right?” (which, given that his name is Randy is probably not something he should say, but he means it in the same non-creepy sense I hope to convey).

I’ve been “heavy” my entire life, and the only thing harder than being a heavy boy is being a heavy girl. It’s one of the many ways that reality is unfair, but it’s true. Look at just about any TV sitcom and you have a good chance of seeing a fat guy with a beautiful woman. Message: “It’s OK to be a fat guy, but girls must be thin and gorgeous.” If an attractive guy does have a relationship with a heavier girl, then you can bet that most of the storyline of their relationship will revolve around her weight.

Open Your Eyes

Mayjah’s post was titled “Open Your Eyes”. I think that is what made me remember the Dove ‘Campaign For Real Beauty’ ad a few years ago.

If you were online at the time, you probably saw the video of a model getting transformed from “off-the-street” to “onto-the-billboard”.

If you don’t remember it, here’s the video, and it’s well worth the 74 seconds it will take you to watch it:

The bulk of the response that I remember hearing to this ad could be summed up like this:

“So what, everyone knows that models are touched up? They’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s not news.”

To which I say, with all due respect, shut the fuck up.

(Oh, I guess I should make it clear that I don’t think any respect is due to people who are this dense.)

I was 33 years old and pretty computer savvy when I saw that ad, and even I was surprised at how drastic the changes were.

Maybe we shouldn’t evaluate these stories from what a bunch of computer geeks think about them, maybe we ought to evaluate them through the eyes of a teenage girl who has no idea what Photoshop is.

And, trust me, even these days, there are a lot of those girls.

But what struck me the most when I saw that ad was that it needed to be seen by teenage boys at least as much as it needed to be seen by teenage girls. (And maybe even younger than “teenage”.)

Why?

Because for the majority of the girls out there, it won’t just be their own pressures and misguided body image issues they have to deal with, it will also be the misguided images that boys have of “what pretty girls look like”.

That video above goes too fast. I wish they had put some sort of a “Time Elapsed” indicator on it, to give you an idea of how long it took for that transformation (not to mention how many people.

But take another look at her face before anything is done to her:

This is a beautiful woman with really nice features. No, her skin isn’t perfect (is yours?) but you’d have to put her high up on any scale of attractiveness.

This is what she looks like when she’s had her hair and makeup done (by several people we assume are highly trained professionals):

Wow. It’s the same person, but would you have picked them out of a book of pictures of women as being the same person?

I wouldn’t have.

Now we come to the really jaw dropping part, and the part you can only really appreciate when you see all the things that is done to her in a computer graphics program (either Photoshop or something very similar):

This is a work of complete fiction. This person doesn’t exist. You ought to have to put a disclaimer on the bottom that says “Loosely based on the picture we took of a model.” This is an art project, not a photograph.

Even if you know it…

I saw this video shortly before we were home vising some family. One of them was a young teenage girl and her younger brother.

I showed them this video.

They were both surprised.

He quickly lost interest.

She didn’t.

She emailed it to her friends, and spent probably the next hour talking about it with them.

I don’t have a daughter, but I’ve got a son who is now 6. He’s already picking up some stereotypes of what are “girl” things and what are “boy” things. (“Boys don’t wear pink, it’s a girl color,” he told me one day as we were walking back from school together.)

“I want this to end with me and my generation”

I do too.

Someday I’ll show him this video and we’ll talk about some of these issues. It probably won’t be too far in the future.

If you have a niece, a cousin, someone who is at a age before they know what is done to pictures of people they see on TV and in magazines, download it to your laptop and keep it around somewhere easy to find (or search YouTube for ‘Dove Evolution’).

Take a few minutes. Watch it with them. Talk to them about it.

Tell them how to share it with their friends.

You never know whose body image you may save, or whose esteem you may keep from being trampled down by unrealistic expectations.