Photoshop Disasters: Technology Used to Uphold Dangerous Beauty Standards

The greatest threat to healthy female body image might just be...a computer program. That's right : Photoshop isn't just manipulating the colors and shades of the sky in the background, it's manipulating the way we think about female beauty. More specifically, reinforcing the aesthetic of the skinny, the skinnier, and the emaciated.

It's one thing that models are forced to be painstakingly thin -- model Filippa Hamilton, 5'8" and 120 lbs, was fired for being too fat. More disturbingly, even these ultra-skinny models aren't thin enough for fashion industry standards, leading to Photoshop disasters such as the infamous Ralph Lauren ad featuring a lollipop-headed and sick-looking Hamilton.

The program can be used to do all sorts of things, from inserting people of color into all-white spreads to shrinking the size of cheeks and hips to fazing out ex-boyfriends. And while not all of these things are necessarily bad, most of the connotations we have with Photoshop are negative, as The Guardian points out.

Why? Because, well, in a society cluttered with ubiquitous and constant media images of young, absurdly thin white women used to sell products, Photoshop is most frequently associated with the exaggeration and reinforcement of the unhealthy standards of beauty to which women are held. There's the altered Demi Moore cover, where Moore's hip had miraculously disappeared. The aforementioned Ralph Lauren photo, which spawned protests against Photoshop outside the Ralph Lauren store in New York. Then an even more hideous Ralph Lauren disaster in which the model looks so thin it'd almost be laughable if it weren't so awful.

The phenomenon of the Photoshop disaster is so well-known that it has it's own popular website of the same name. Some magazines, including French Elle and Australian Vogue, have deliberately not photoshopped models in spreads that wind up looking shocking when they should be just, well, normal.

It's frustrating that so often technology gets manipulated for the purposes of exploitation, particularly the exploitation of women (See: iPhone Apps). In this case, the manipulation is particularly egregious, because it is an outright but often believable lie that asks women to compare themselves to an ideal that's been entirely fabricated by a few brushstrokes.

NOW New York is trying to drum up support for legislation that would require all photoshopped images to have disclaimers. I think that's a fabulous idea. If it doesn't stop the manipulation of images to meet the current unhealthy standards, at least it will remind women and girls each time they look at one that hey, this isn't real. And I think that's a far better thought to reinforce than hey, this could be you.

Tell the New York State legislature to require disclaimers on Photshopped images.

Photo: Berklee's Photostream