Women's Beauty, Photoshop and the Pursuit of an Ideal

Here is Keira Knightly in a poster for the movie "King Arthur" before and after Photoshopping. In the Photoshopped poster, her waist shrunk and her bust grew. According to an article by Dana Macario on MSNBC News online, "Concerned that the perfect images of celebrities we see every day are affecting kids' self-esteem, the Brits are fighting back. As part of a Body Confidence campaign, the government is urging parents to teach their kids about altered images." The British government is apparently providing youth with downloadable pamphlets showing images altered with Photoshop, concerned these ideal images would be damaging to self esteem and put girls under extraordinary pressure to measure up.

There are some videos I've seen put out by Dove, the soap company, that show similar transformations of models going through the entire process of beauty, make-up, photos and then all of the Photoshop retouching to the photos. They are astonishing to watch. This model, prior to this rigorous routine, actually seems to look much more like an every day "ordinary" woman.



I'm not suggesting women "let themselves go." I'm all in favor of women doing all they can within reasonable means to look their personal best which may include proper diet, exercise, makeup, choosing clothes that are flattering and so forth. Clearly though, some women, and young teen girls especially, go through turmoil in their pursuit of perfection and develop self-harmful behaviors like anorexia and bulimia. I also believe that plastic surgery, except for cases such as in correcting a birth defect or damage from an accident, is also going to harmful extremes in the pursuit of beauty.

Women have been distorting and crippling their bodies throughout history in the pursuit of a beauty considered ideal by the culture of the time. There was the practice of foot binding that took place in China up until the early 20th century. It stunted foot growth and caused women to hobble. I apologize for this painful photo below.

Some would say today's high heeled shoes and pointy toed shoes for women are also potentially damaging to the feet.

From Stylite.com on January 25 of this year, "In results published last week in 'The Journal of Applied Physiology,' the scientists found that heel wearers moved with shorter, more forceful strides than the control group, their feet perpetually in a flexed, toes-pointed position. This movement pattern continued even when the women kicked off their heels and walked barefoot. As a result, the fibers in their calf muscles had shortened and they put much greater mechanical strain on their calf muscles than the control group did." This information, by the way, has not prevented me from wearing heels, but neither do I wear them every day and for every occasion.

In Victorian times, bustles and corsets were used to enhance and create an unnatural silhouette. Look at this "Gibson girl" with her corseted waist. Does this not look painful? No wonder the women in Victorian novels are prone to fainting.

Much of what we see in Hollywood today is "fake" or artificially enhanced beauty, as so many celebrity women, the ones that are considered "bombshells," received their unnatural proportions through surgical enhancement. As harmful as this is to young girls, I think it may also be just as harmful to men. Even men who choose to avoid pornography -- it's easy enough to stumble across it accidentally on the Internet -- could be more subtly influenced by the media in unrealistic expectations of female beauty.