So for whatever reason, OK because it’s the end of fat camp, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about body image lately. Mine has never been great. I don’t think I know any woman who hasn’t gone through struggles with accepting the way she looks.
When I was a kid, I used to read my Dad’s Playboy subscription attentively. Possibly even more attentively than my brother did. Back then, the models used to look real. They had breasts that looked like they might actually move. They had some flaws. They were each shaped a little differently from each other. The women, not the boobs. Well. The boobs, too. Sure, they were more beautiful than most women, and they all had serious boobs, but they looked like actual human women.
I didn’t think I would ever look like one of those women, but they didn’t seem all that different from me. As the years went by, the women got more and more unreal looking to me. Surgical enhancement became more common. The pictures were more and more retouched.
Now? They’re all implanted. Their faces look like they’re made of plastic. It is physically impossible for any woman, including the ones in the pictures to look like the published result because they are only implanted but photoshopped to a point where no one could ever look like them. Necks and legs are lengthened, eyes are enlarged, waists are narrowed.
It’s the same, or maybe even worse, in fashion photography. They take girls who are already unusually tall and thin, and make them even more tall and thin.
Our natural tendency to emulate looks we see around us makes us think we should look like the images we see in the media. The women we see in magazines are not even possible in nature.
The other day at work, I was talking to a coworker about how hard it is to by clothes that fit properly. She’s tall and thin, I’m short and fat. It’s a universal problem, and our tendency to see our bodies as flawed makes it even more of a challenge because we make the issues about fit into a problem with the way that our bodies are built instead of just a problem with a garment.
The more unreal the images of us are portrayed in the media, the higher the rates of eating disorders, body dysmorphia and depression among everyone, but particularly young women. And these issues are occurring at younger and younger ages.
People have always altered their appearances, but it seems like we are taking it to extremes we never have before.
How did we get here?
How did we get to a point where people think that the feminine ideal is a look that is not even a human possibility?
How did we get a point where total hairlessness, plastic body parts,Botox and anal bleaching are considered beauty ideals?
Who even thought of anal bleaching in the first place?
How do we get images of real women back in the media?
Who is it who wants women to look like the images in the media anyway?
I only have questions.
If we saw ourselves the way others see us, how would we look?