Home » Photoshopping gone wild: ah, but you should see the pictures!

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Photoshopping gone wild: ah, but you should see the pictures! — 11 Comments

  1. “Now, of course, we can do a great deal more–to get less or more, as the body part dictates. Less cellulite. More breasts. Longer legs. Whiter teeth. And on and on and on, while women compare themselves to these otherworldly images and turn to the next step, plastic surgery, in a vain attempt to approximate what only the photoshop can accomplish.”

    We seem unable to leave well enough alone. An aunt once remarked that if humans had zippers down their midline, they’d be forever rearranging their innards to match someone else’s. The quest for the perfect appearance is only part of the package. We can’t be partially anything desireable–safe, comfortable, loved, etc. Or as Kenneth Burke defines the human:

    “Man is the symbol-using inventor of the negative separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarch and rotten with perfection.”

  2. What if you were sentanced to prison in France for proposing excessive thinness and you went on a hunger strike?

  3. The models in magazines are getting thinner (or doctored so) while we are supposedly having an obesity “epidemic.” Is there an opposite effect going on in society or something?

  4. Typical male question: If we outlawed mirrors, or at least taught that vanity about appearance was a sin, would anything change?

  5. Humans are not the only species affected by this striving for perfection and maximum sex appeal. There are plenty of examples in courses of evolutionary biology showing that this tendency can run amok and produce decadent extremal designs barely compatible with survival and even leading to extinction, as 3-meter wide branching horns of an extinct great deer sometime dwelling in boreal forests in miocene.

  6. Neo,
    If you substitute me for you and Tae Kwon Do for dancing, then you’ve written my story too. But at 5’0″, I was at least a little further from the ideal than you. Funny how that works out.

    I never got to the point of being a tournament champion, but perseverance paid off. I did earn my black belt.

  7. I’ve never understood why women would idealize these models as female perfection. For myself, the fashion models are the farthest thing from sexy: mere androgynous swizzle sticks! Ugh!

  8. To a certain extent, photoshopped people don’t seem real to me. They are, if I hadn’t noticed it already, purely an image on paper rather than the portrait of a person.

  9. Pingback:Linking around: Bush/Obama/Hamas & more | The Anchoress

  10. You’ve just reminded me of a magazine cover I saw last year. It showed three different well-known blonde starlets of different ages (I don’t remember who), with title text that said something along the lines of, “Whether 25, 35, or 45, They All Look Great!”. Of course each and every one of them had been photoshopped to look 21. The 45-year-old looked exactly the same age as the 25-year-old. It was completely absurd.

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