Photoshop

Body image is a pretty common topic on feminist blogs- consider Broadsheet's recent article on recent cover girl Nancy Pelosi or here which talks about photo retouching and the recent trend against it. Photo-retouching is pretty common practice in magazines, making beautiful women even more impossibly beautiful and giving us some impossibly high standards of beauty to boot.

So I googled some images:


and


And I got to thinking. When I see images in magazines of impossibly beautiful images, like the picture of Britney Spears or Mariah Carey, it does make me feel bad about myself. As the blog Feministe points out, these images create an idea that beauty is something that can be achieved rather than something you're born with naturally, that if you work hard enough and pay enough money than you're beautiful. These magazines create two-fold ideas: 1. that if you're not beautiful, obviously you're not working hard enough and 2. you're never, ever going to be beautiful enough.

Looking at these photos, though, I feel better about myself. Namely, I know that the ethereal beauty are reachable with a few hours on Photoshop and, conversely, that even the most beautiful women are as ugly as me.