For years, Adobe Photoshop has allowed for imperfect
pictures to become miraculous perfections. Unfortunately, it’s no longer used
to just enhance pictures, but to completely manipulate photos as a way to
entice us (consumers) to buy products so that we can look a certain way; the
way they want us to look.
With the media portraying the average American woman as 5’11” and
117 pounds, when in reality the average American woman is 5’4” and 140 pounds, it’s
no wonder our nation has turned to eating disorders (8 million people to be
exact) as a direction correlation of their negative body image.
It has been said that on a typical day we are bombarded with
400 to 600 ads from magazines, billboards, television commercials, and
newspapers, all telling us how we need to look or what we can do to look that
way. One study showed that 68% of a sample of Stanford undergraduate and
graduate students felt worse about their appearance after looking through
women’s magazines. Well, why wouldn’t these women feel worse? They are
comparing themselves to pictures of men and women that have been altered to
show that person with cropped legs to make them appear slimmer, airbrushed
muscles to make them look more defined, and retouched skin to make it seem flawless.
The media is trying to make us live up to unrealistic ideals. And sadly, we
fall for it.
The weight loss industry makes
over $55.4 billion of revenue per year because of the falsified ads the media has created. It’s no
wonder they want you to think you’re fat and that you need to lose weight, they
get your money for telling you that. However, the ideal thinness that is given
to us by the media is achieved by less than 5% of the female population. Why
are we letting them control us?
It’s time for people to take a stand. We are all beautiful
in our own way. I once read a quote by Andy Warhol stating, “If everybody’s not
a beauty, then nobody is.” I believe in this quote whole-heartedly. We need to realize that we each have our
own characteristics, abilities, likes and dislikes, which make us unique and
beautiful in our own way. We need to stop living up to someone else’s idea of unrealistic
beauty and start seeing the beauty we all have.
Sources:
