“All women are beautiful, and we come in different shapes and sizes! This industry is crazy!!! It is NOT OKAY to alter a woman’s body to make it look thinner. EVER!”
We should be saying things to ourselves much like what Meaghan Kausman said about her own edited photo, but instead we find ourselves having thoughts like: “I want those long legs. I wish I could have her thin waist.” But the worse thought of them all: “Maybe if I just skip a few meals….”
Photoshop: great for minor photo tweaking but terrible for the media industry to utilize whenever someone does not meet their standard of beauty –if there even is such a thing.
For years, the media industry has been zoning in on creating the “perfect” human. “Oh, let’s just pull that cheekbone up a little bit and puff up those lips and slim down that waist while making those legs extend just a little further…”
Very few celebrities have escaped the “Photoshop magic” and if they somehow evaded that, then they sure got hit with criticism. However, not all women in the media take those severe edits silently. Female celebrities such as actress and producer, Lena Dunham, Australian model Meaghan Kausman, and pop singer Lorde all took to their social media sites to speak out against their “fixed” flaws and mutilated pictures.
(Courtesy of Meaghan Kausman’s Instagram)
An example of social media retaliation against the evil Photoshop: Meaghan Kausman posted this on her Instagram shortly after she discovered the edited photo along with a lengthy caption including the key statement: “Above is their version, below is the real version. My body is a size 8, not a size 4. That’s my body!”
It’s almost amusing that the “less is more” mentality is often used when it comes to creating magazine covers clothes wise, but once it comes to make-up, the MORE the better and even worse that when it comes to the human body, we are back to the LESS is more mentality.
As I sit here with my guilty pleasure laid out in front of me –Cosmopolitan. [As a self-coined feminist, I feel like I almost contradict myself by reading the “Bible” as many women call it, but hey, I get to indulge in a little sleazy pop culture every once and a while.]
I cannot help but crave to see the beauty of these celebrity icons without the layers of make-up. I want to see them wearing the clothes they would wear out to get their daily Starbucks frappé, and without having the “magic eraser” of Photoshop ran over their body.
I don’t know where this trend of size 2 bodies and six packs came from, but looking around my college campus, I see very few people who fit that category without putting some un-human effort into working out and skipping out on indulging in the beauty of a Big-Mac.
I am not bashing anyone who does have the “Barbie” body but I am just suggesting that we should throw some “average Josie’s” out there, every once and while. As cliché as it sounds, I believe that beauty comes from the inside…having the “IT” body, whatever that means, is an added bonus to your already beautiful self.
In the words of Lorde, “Remember flaws are okay :-).”
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