Advertisements Affect on Youth

 

Start with youtube video called Onslaught by Dove.

 

Young children today are so worried about how they look and how they dress.  Today 42% of girls in grades 1-3 want to be thinner, 51% of 9-10 year old girls feel better about themselves when they are dieting, 53% of 13 year old girls are unhappy with their bodies and by the time they are 17, 78% of them will be.  Why do you think that these girls feel this way?  Advertisements of women being ‘perfect’ influence adolescence.  By the time they are 17, these girls have seen 250,000 TV commercials telling them they should be a decorative object, sex object, or a size they can never achieve. In this advertisement it shows how photoshopped this female model is.  In the top picture she has no flaws, but she was changed completely to be the ideal for the company.  Seven million girls and women under 25 suffer from eating disorders, because of women seeing ads of how they should be.  Eighty percent of women feel worse about themselves after seeing a beauty ad.  Twenty billion is spent on beauty advertisements in the US annually, that’s a lot of money to be spent making women women feel worse about themselves.  Forty percent of newly identified cases of anorexia are in girls fifteen to nineteen year olds.   I do not think that is acceptable for advertisements to be causing women to feel like this.  

 

Are Males Affected By Photoshop?

 

With hundreds of beauty products on the market it’s no surprise that the advertisements have a dramatic affect on their audience by encouraging them to purchase the “miracle product” that will make them beautiful.  In recent years, studies have started to focus on how men are affected by media advertisements.  Several of these studies have found that men of all ages become more self-conscious and even develop eating disorders as a direct effect of media advertisement.  Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty has criticised the use of photoshop on male models.  Magazines, such as GQ, use photoshop to create the perfect male model.  Areas of the body such as the jaw line and abs are electronically altered to be more appealing.  Sixteen percent of high school boys have an eating disorder and many report that they are more afraid of gaining weight than getting cancer or other terminal illness.

 

Images on Women in Different Cultures

 

Outrageous body ideals unfortunately, are not only an issue in the United States. Many countries around the world use advertising to normalize unrealistic body images with their youth. When looking at studies showing the ideals of a particular culture one can see that many of them take beauty to the extreme. This leaves young men and women in countries such as South Korea looking to plastic surgery to “correct” their bodies to fit the mold that has been fabricated through hours on Photoshop. In Latin American countries such as Brazil and Mexico, the days of guitar shaped women are gone as the ideals begin to shift towards a westernized hourglass shape. This has led to a rise in breast augmentation and anorexia to allow for the tiny waist and large hip and bust that is so unrealistically fought for. For the men in countries like Brazil plastic surgeries are usually more centralized to the face, as Germanic features are idealized, while remaining tanned. As the use of Photoshop becomes more extreme, the desire to “be beautiful” becomes more extreme as well. Plastic surgery has become a real life Photoshop for the youth that has grown up in a world that allows them to believe there is only one way to be beautiful. Cases of Body Dimorphic Disorder leading to Anorexia and Bulimia are spreading from country to country, as “models” get thinner and thinner. By refusing to leave models the way they look naturally, companies are feeding into the insecurities of adolescent children, and telling them that they should feel ashamed of the way they look because naturally they will never be as beautiful or handsome as the fabricated person on the cover of a magazine, or the almost animated creature selling some product. On a brighter side however, there are many companies that are fighting against using Photoshop to advertise their products, but the idea is unfortunately still in its infancy. These companies, instead of just using untouched photos, are calling attention to this fact as if it is some brand new idea to use real looking people to sell products instead of unrealistic Photoshop creations.  These baby steps towards a better culture are just that, baby steps and have yet to become popular in the countries where the advertising is the most extreme. There is hope for this trend to end, but it will take time and effort from today’s youth all over the world to push back against advertisers.

 

Actions taken against the use of Photoshop

 

In the celebrity world where stars are constantly lauded for being perfect and holding to the golden standard of glamour that an A-list Hollywood star would be admired for, one may or may not be disappointed to know that celebrities are humans too – and would much rather remain that way. We all know about glossy magazine covers and the celebrities who look fantastic on these covers, but actress Kate Winslet was less than thrilled at seeing an unrecognisably thin version of herself and was filled with outrage at the blatant photoshopping of her body on the 2003 cover of “GQ” magazine.

 

The cover read “Hollywood’s Sexiest Girl Next Door”, to which Kate stated in an interview “So why is it that women think in order to be adored they have to be thin? I just don’t understand that way of thinking” and “what is sexy? All I know from the men I’ve ever spoken to is that they like girls to have an arse on them”. This sassy (in a good way) response was directly aimed at a culture obsessed with oppressing females with the “ideal” body type of being flawlessly thin and this was even expressed in the comment but GQ editor Dylan Jones who claims that it’s the norm “whether they are a size six or twelve”.

 

Brad Pitt was for a similar cause in choosing photographer Chuck Close to photograph him for his feature in W Magazine as Close was known for his attention to detail in photographs without the use of retouching. Close shared in an interview that “You (Brad Pitt) can’t be the fair-haired young boy forever … maybe a photograph of him with his crow’s-feet and furrowed brow is good for him”.

 

Both stars are similarly against photoshopping their appearances for the sake of a magazine cover but it seems that in this comparison, Kate Winslet is more of a victim of unwelcomed retouching of her photos than with Brad Pitt who is allowed to heroically embrace his “flaws” that come with his age. This could be in itself representative of the pressure placed on women particularly in the media, where the idea of growing old or not being forever young or thin is frowned upon and these media outlets feel legitimised to alter women’s bodies to feed into that culture of perceived perfection, thereby making photoshop a necessity.

 

Associations and even congress have stepped in to control the out-of-control situation of photoshop and misleading consumers. The American Medical Association (AMA) announced that it was against the manipulation of images in advertising as photoshopped images of unattainable standards may result in psychological problems such as unhealthy self-image and eating disorders.

 

Congress also passed the “Truth in Advertising Act of 2014” to promote more responsible advertising by “direct(ing) the Federal Trade Commission to submit to Congress a report on the use, in advertising and other media for the promotion of commercial products, of images that have been altered to materially change the physical characteristics of the faces and bodies of the individuals depicted”. However, this form of regulation may not be entirely successful as it is nearly impossible to police all the ads in the world that adhered to a standard in propagating for the unrealistic alterations of images to make people appear perfect. This thereby brings the question of whether regulation and action should be shifted into the hands of the consumers, and the importance for consumers to be more educated in media literacy, to call bluff and to disapprove of such industry standards of a made-up “perfect” portrayal of bodies/body parts.

 

Is Photoshop Bad?

 

*Plays short video clip of man saying that photoshop in media is similar to special effects in movies*

 

Photoshop has become a major problem because it has become so commonplace that it has set the standards for not only beauty, but acceptance. According to a survey conducted by the Huffington Post, 15% of eighteen to twenty four year olds surveyed were convinced that billboards and magazines represent an accurate depiction of “real-life women.” Therefore, women cannot be expected to be able to combat the effects of Photoshop if they are not even aware of them. Even those who are informed have trouble resisting beauty propaganda. Perhaps when one truly steps back and remembers that the photos seen in media are retouched, it is easier to be realistic about one’s own body image. However, when passing a billboard, no one is asking “I wonder how retouched that model is” and most are asking, “why can’t I look like her.” That question is extremely hard to answer considering that thirty three percent of women say that the body they aspire to have is nearly impossible to achieve.

 

Nowadays, there is such a narrow selection when talking about the “ideal body type.” This is due in part to the power of Photoshop. Not only do the after effects of Photoshop take a toll on body image, but the before effects are crucial as well. For example, take a woman who is on the curvier side and is happy with her body. She sees an image of someone like Kim Kardashian or Beyonce without retouching and values their curvy figures, thus feeling confident about her own. Later, she sees the same photos, but their curves have been minimized by Photoshop. Suddenly, the woman feels as though her body type is not good enough for advertisers or consumers. Therefore, even though she is fully aware of the retouching, she is still hurt that people felt the need to retouch a curvy figure in the first place.

 

Victoria’s Secret models have often been used as an example of how the images altered by Photoshop can be a reality. Hailed for their live fashion shows in which they look to be absolutely flawless, many have argued that Photoshop cannot be producing unattainable body image standards if real women look like this. However, the diet of a Victoria’s Secret model before the annual fashion show is anything but healthy:

 

“She sees a nutritionist, who has measured her body’s muscle mass, fat ratio and levels of water retention. He prescribes protein shakes, vitamins and supplements to keep Lima’s energy levels up during this training period. Lima drinks a gallon of water a day. For nine days before the show she will drink only protein shakes – “no solids”. The concoctions include powdered egg. Two days before the show she will abstain from the gallon of water a day, and “just drink normally”. Then, 12 hours before the show she will stop drinking entirely.”

This regiment is surely detrimental to the health of the models and is almost comparable to a real life retouching through extreme diet and exercise. Campaigns like Aerie’s campaign #aerieREAL is trying to combat the effects of retouching by eliminating it altogether. The company is attempting to bring back the idea that natural is beautiful, regardless of shape, size or imperfections. While Photoshop is not the sole cause of body image issues, it definitely contributes to the ways in which women view themselves. Sadly, Photoshop is so common today that its effects are almost permanently ingrained in women as the true standard of beauty.

Questions

1. In all honesty, are we really ready to embrace “real” models, or would we still rather have photoshopped images?
2. How much of photoshop is ok, is light retouching ok? Where is the line drawn?
3. Can Photoshop be seen as a world of escapism if people acknowledge and accept that it isn’t entirely real? (Like special effects in a movie)
4. With the media being shown through the predominant lens of the male gaze, are guys just as affected by the prevalence of photoshop? In what ways?