I’ve said on several occasions that I picked the folks who work for me here at ShrinkGeek because of the fact that they represented a fairly wide range of perspectives on health and fitness.  They also happen to be big geeks, but that’s beside the point.  While we can all pretty much agree that the best way to improve your life is to eat less and exercise when we wander beyond that particular point we start to diverge in our viewpoints on how, exactly, to go about doing so.  On some things we utterly and completely disagree.

Rafe wrote a piece yesterday that falls into that particular category for me.  So much so that I felt the need to address it in a separate post.

Let me state right up front that there are some things in his post that I agree with.  In particular I am, like Rafe, not convinced that a warning label indicating that an image has been altered with photoshop is going to make a big difference when it comes to self-perception.

That being said, though, I have a very different opinion than Rafe when it comes to the harm that this kind of practice can inflict on society.  Rafe believes that this practice is relatively benign.  I, on the other hand, think it is exceedingly dangerous, and I’m not talking about the murky kind of dangerous that you can’t really see, either.  I’m talking about the very real possibility that the distorted sense of self-image that is being forced on the youth of today, and in particular on young girls, is killing them.

A study back in December of 2008 found that the number of pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia websites increased by a startling 480% in just two years.  For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept (and I’ll be damned if I’m going to link to any of them), these are websites where teenagers encourage each other to literally starve themselves in order to lose weight.  They talk about ways to “safely” purge (i.e. force yourself to vomit) after eating and ways to distract yourself from hunger after going without sustenance for days on end.

You may believe that the increase in these kind of web sites is simply due to the fact that more and more teenagers are getting online and that the problem has been around for a long time, but it is my personal opinion that this is one of many indicators that while our waist lines continue to expand our sense of what is realistic in terms of beauty is being skewed beyond recognition.  In this era of CGI, Photoshop, and auto tune we are constantly being assailed by unrealistic and, more importantly, unattainable standards of personal achievement.

Rafe states that in order to break this illusion all you have to do is step outside and look at the people around you, but I don’t think it’s nearly as simple to overcome as that.   Again, I have to return to the children.  Yes, an adult can look at the cover of a magazine and understand that the image they are seeing has been digitally manipulated, but the same cannot be said for an eight year old child.  What’s more, even if we we as adults realize that what we’re seeing isn’t real there is still the nagging voice in the back of our heads that says “this is what society sees as beautiful.”

If you want proof of how skewed our self image is currently you need to look no further than the picture I have attached to this post.  The model you are seeing is of twenty year old model Lizzi Miller.  Glamour magazine made quite a stir when they posted this un-doctored photo of her along with an article about being secure in your own skin.  I don’t know about you, but I happen to think Ms. Miller is quite fetching.  The thing is, she is considered to be a “plus sized” model.

She wears a size 12-14.

This image represents someone who the fashion and beauty industry considers to be fat, my friends.  With standards like that is it any wonder that teenage girls are so desperate to get thin they are looking for ways to “safely” puke after they eat?

Another recent example that comes to mind is Susan Boyle, the contestant on Britain’s Got Talent that absolutely blew the world away with her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables. It wasn’t so much the fact that she had an amazing voice that stunned the public, but the fact that voice came out of someone who was so unattractive.  In a world where our pop divas are manufactured and processed for our consumption we simply could not believe that someone so “ugly” could sound so good.

Men are not immune to these influences, either.  It may be more subtle, but guys can still be moved towards attempting to achieve the realistically unobtainable.  For a short time after the movie 300 came out there was a lot of buzz out there about men who wanted to be able to complete the “300 workout.”  This was an infamous series of exercises that was considered to be the final challenge for the actors and stunt men who worked on the movie at the end of a rigorous four month training regiment designed to make them look like Spartans.  Only one actor was actually able to complete the challenge, and yet everyday guys who weren’t being paid thousands of dollars to work out for several hours every day under strict supervision of a dietitian somehow got it in their heads that they would be able to pull it off.

What we see and hear in popular culture has a direct influence on how we look at ourselves, and while I’m not sure that what the French are doing is going to actually change anything I have to applaud them for at least taking some kind of stand and saying “this is not right.”  The continued pursuit of perfection that is being forced down our throat by the fashion and entertainment industry is having an increasingly negative impact on how we see ourselves, and in some cases that negative self perception could end up being fatal.

In conclusion I’ll simply say that while the practice of editing photos in photoshop in order to sell a product is not illegal, the undeniable impact that it has on society as a whole certainly teeters into the immoral category – and it is far from benign.