Here’s my latest column for the Ham & High:
Every day we are bombarded with literally hundreds of images of people. In our city few surfaces are left without some form of graphical advertising. And as any good advertiser designer will tell you – you can’t sell without a face.
But how often have you ever stopped to study the faces that sell you something? If you took the time you would probably notice something odd about the people enticing you to buy. On close inspection you will find something surreal – teeth that gleam just a bit too brilliantly white, cheek bones that protrude more than is natural and waists that you could only hope to achieve if you had had ribs removed …
In our digital age it has become the norm in the advertising and glamour magazine industry to touch up photos. And so what I hear you say? A toothless wizened hag is unlikely to induce even the most compassionate of consumer to buy the latest widget unless it was Halloween masks. In competitive markets and hard times these canny retailers are merely trying to put themselves ahead of the game.
I’m no stranger to leafing through the odd glamorous magazine myself. But page after page after high gloss page are full of armies of the unreal – a mystical race of people where no blemish goes untouched and no cellulite un-airbrushed. An exclusive club that no-one can enter even if you had unlimited resources, a digital plastic surgeon with Leonardo da Vinci’s touch and boundless energy for the gym to tone the most stubborn love handle.
As a lady of certain age I can (now) shrug off my imperfections and hope my suitors will be interested my humour and passion for people. But what about teenagers and in particular young girls? Images of human ‘perfection-plus’ have become so ubiquitous and impossible to avoid that we must urgently question how they are influencing young minds.
Trading standards would come down on you like a ton of bricks if you falsified the representation of a product. But there is absolute nothing stopping the full on and hidden manipulation of the human form. Caveat emptor you might say, but when our young are bombarded with the subliminal message that beauty is not only desirable but actually physically impossible to achieve then we have a serious issue.
The problem is more than just angst ridden adolescents. Hospital admissions for anorexia have increase by 50% since 1996 and more worryingly sufferers are becoming younger. Of course airbrushing is not only cause, but there is academic research to suggest how digital manipulation contributes to negative self image. It is not difficult to see why. Who can help feeling inadequate when confronted with such unobtainable perfection?
So what’s the solution – lock up our children and ban photoshop? Unsurprisingly, as a liberal this is probably a step too far! But at my party’s conference last month I was successful in getting a policy adopted that would force magazines to indicate clearly whether an image has been tampered with.
A visual prompt would serve as a reminder that the image being viewed is not real. It would offer reassurance to young minds that shouldn’t despair if their teeth aren’t perfectly white or their bum’s rounder than it is flat.
We cannot ignore what has become a serious health problem for our youth. Young people will always aspire, look up to and seek to emulate pop stars and models. Being young is difficult enough without imposing the hurdle of perfection. So let’s give them a helping hand and make sure they know that no-one can achieve the lofty heights of airbrushed beauty.
If you would like to get involved in the Liberal Democrat campaign then please visit www.realwomen.org.uk/takeaction
Lynne Featherstone 
RT @lfeatherstone New blog: Perfection! http://www.lynnefeatherstone.org/2009/10/perfection.htm
I also worry about the negative impact this has on young people’s relationships and sexuality and young men’s view of how women ‘should’ be.
Digital manipulation of images? Yes, it’s a serious matter if (especially) young girls are shamed into self-starvation by the dishonest re-shaping of iconic female bodies. So much is done to make women feel unable to be at ease in theri own skin: breasts or bottom too big or small, teeth imperfect, noses the wrong shape. Plastic surgeons flourish on this fear that some individuality or other of their appearance will leave a girl on the shelf, disregarded. Now this terrible pressure to conform induces (apparently) anorexia. After all, if a supposedly glamorous model has the physique of a Belsen inmate and yet is showered with fame and money, it makes a sort of sense to starve oneself.
There’s more to the dangers of manipulating photographs: we have, thanks to the skilled use of Photoshop, no way of knowing whether a news photograph is truthful or not. Stalin’s boys shamelessly airbrushed fallen comrades out of history, but they did so very clumsily so that when an Old Bolshevik was sent to the Gulag his ghostly presence could be discerned by the clumsy gap in the group photograph of Uncle Joe’s comrades, or by the odd arm or foot still left in the background. With Photoshop, the image can be so re-worked that it is simply not possible to detect any hanky-panky. History can simply be re-worked so that noone will ever know what has been done.
By all means try to make newspapers and magazines admit when a photo has been touched-up. It just might stop some unhappy teenager starve herself into abject illness and death. Making them admit that their photos of public events aren’t necessarily a true record – even harder.
What a superb idea. I would love to see airbrushed pictures identified. Women of all ages have a false idol to live up too, whether it be through touched-up photos or the bombardment of adverts pushing plastic surgery. I would also like advertisers to stop telling me that I am either too ‘poor’ or too ‘immature’ to be able to face plastic surgery, and trying to persuade me to buy some cream in the meantime. They are trying to normalize the concept of plastic surgery, prepping women for the day they will eventually be ‘ready’ for the real thing. They are also trying to make us forget that this kind of surgery is often rather brutal, almost always unnecessary and frequently goes wrong. Well done Lynne.
A difficult notion (“perfection”) – some photographers will find perfection by getting a high quality (pixels/resolution) photograph of their desired subject and – like any artist – would perhaps want praise or encouragement.
Others use photoshop to enhance or modify a picture to achieve artistic perfection.
Human beings are a funny lot: we feel “compassion”, we feel “offended”; in the animal world, there might be a “sniff” (of interest) and if none is there, the “sniffing party” moves on without further ado.
The “worst” part of the human world is indeed the strive for perfection; alas, this is part of evolution: In nature, youth is full of energy, able to proliferate, so the future is in the youth. Now comes in our compassion and we feel that everyone deserves a chance. Immediately, there is conflict.
Commendable as this is, there is no correct” right” or “wrong” answer, I am afraid.
It is now nearly twenty years since our daughter died — having suffered for more than two decades with a pernicious and devastating illness, anorexia nervosa.
It is not generally known that eating disorders claim the lives of 1 in 4 of those struck down by such illnesses or that many victims are condemned to years and years of suffering, eventually becoming terminally ill and dying – usually prematurely. I am a founder member of the Eating Disorders Association (now called Beat) and for many years was editor and co-ordinator of a support network and correspondence for those bereaved or caring for a loved one chronically or terminally afflicted.
The causes of eating disorders are various and manifold. The striving for “perfection” in whatever sphere of daily life may be the common denominator that identifies those who fall prey to these intractable, ruthless diseases. The young and immature are especially vulnerable and influenced by
the subliminal messages (not only in glamour magazines and other promotional advertising material) that assail them in the western world. The “celeb” culture, the expectations – in terms of material possessions, desirable life style and self image – are unreal. The “throw away” habit of anything and anybody that has outlived its usefulness or that has been superseded by a more up to date model is perceived as “normal”.
I think Lynne’s proposal that airbrushed or otherwise technically manipulated adverts should be clearly identified as such is a good one. Much as the ingredients of the (pre-packed) food we eat should be (intelligibly) printed on the packet.
This is perhaps a very small step in the right direction. But I fear there are many other destructive forces at work in the western world that conspire to undermine the integrity and self-worth of many if not most of us today. Our sense of personal identity and individuality is devalued – we become numbers or ciphers all too often in today’s technologically advanced and robotic world, losing the warmth and compassion of human interaction. The worship of false icons, living in a world of “make believe”, rejecting “the real”, “wanting it all … and now” are not the values upon which to build healthy, positive and dynamic people who are able “to feel comfortable in their own skins”.
I would be interested to hear from others who have had any personal experience of anorexia nervosa.
Elizabeth Gromyko
Well done for raising a really serious issue, Lynne.
For me this is all part of the same enormous lie as the propaganda perpetuated by and in the Thatcher years that we can, and should, all aspire to become rich and that the supremacy of the individual is all.
Young people are taught overtly and covertly by the pressures around them to aspire to these empty non-values. So-called perfect beauty, the ‘right’ clothes, the ‘right’ image, financial wealth, status are all distractions from what life should be about: realising one’s own genuine strengths and potential, caring for and respecting one another and the world in which we live, and so on. Many, many young people’s lives are so full of worries about how they look, what they wear, do they measure up, that they have no time or energy to look above the parapet and see what is really going on in the world. We end up with a society whose members are careless of the effect their activities have on others. Are we surprised that young people will do anything to achieve what they believe is important, even if it involves crime?
Surely manipulating the minds of our youth is the really criminal activity? Other contributors have drawn the parallel between air-brushed photos today and the manipulated photos of Stalin’s Russia to represent who was in and out of favour – now you see him, now you don’t.
Finally, the images Lynne refers to are part of a frenzied search for eternal youth and a denial of the importance and value of experience and age. The alternative to impossibly perfect, air-brushed images of the twenty year old body is the wizened old crone. Lose one and you become the other. We marginalise our elders enough through action, inaction, perception, and particularly through language. On the whole we all collude with this. If we all valued society’s elders as they are generally valued in traditional societies, listened to their wisdom and held them up to the young as people to be truly respected, we might find that the power of the image-manipulators would be lessened.
A discussion to continue?
Jennifer
Good idea but not important enough to spend a lot of time on more like just another nagging bother in this new age. I am far more concerned about high prices of food high prices of fares and the new tory idea about annoying the sick and poor and making them guilty until proved innoccent. so im afraid airbrushing is way down my list. get real and maybe get elected.
Tresa – of course during times like these preserving jobs and keeping a roof over are way more important. But there is room to tackle more than one thing at a time – and our proposals to take 4 million of the lowest paid out of tax altogether are about some of those type of things – but that doesn’t mean, surely, that there isn’t room to address other issues like the rocketing statistics on eating disorders. It is just a small step – but an important one – surely?
Good on you Lynne.
I have two wishful thinking comments.
I wish you were my MP because you champion (and take the trouble to communicate) issues which really matter. I’ll leave a hint to my MP (for Windsor) to visit your website and then reflect on whether he is really communicating with his constituents and championing issues which matter.
Second wishful thinking comment is that all MPs champion the rights of the citizens who voted them in (regardless of what wretched party they belong to).
Keep up the good work!
The thought that women spend half their lifes worrying about some part of their body has got me thinking of my daughters primary school, their policy is that young girls and boys can change in the same classroom together for PE. I find this very disturbing, especially when there are boys telling little girls their stomach is too big or their bum is fat. I would like someone to champion the rights of parents loike myself who find this situation unsuitable. In a school where boys are going aroung pulling down girls skirts or being kicked in the bums again by boys, if find it totally unacceptable for this situation to occur. I cannot even allow my girl to wea her pe kit under her clothes as it’s not school policy.
Howver until this situation is resolved I will be pulled in by the so called head of the school because this policy stinks.
It seems that some adults in power have more of a say about our childrens bodies than parents themselves have. It comes to the issue that the government in their high nad mighty ways have taken away the rights of children and given them to other authorities, however when there are problems which is inevitable parents are to blame or so says society.