One of these stories comes out every few months anyway, where they show some ‘real’ woman, like the dove campaign or this or jamie lee curtis forever ago without any airbrushing. Its a friggin gimmick, the magazines can’t realistically ditch their advertisers and still make any money. If you need a comparison, check out the price of an adbusters magazine sometime, it was about ten dollars an issue for an ad free magazine when I bought them… I think that was almost a decade ago, so who knows how much it costs now.

Figuring out what we all like about ourselves without a magazine or some other cultural narrative to dictate perfection to us is the best answer. Demanding that advertisers make you feel better about yourself when they have no incentive to do so and would most likely lose profit as a result is a losing battle.

mko- I don’t know if it is hypocritical when a lot of those ‘real beauty’ ads were selling cellulite cream. You know, that thing over 90% of women have, and was used as a brand new source of insecurity around the 1970′s. You can see the invention of new conditions to avoid all the time in beauty advertising, I mean, I have seen magazines talking about ‘ugly hand veins’ like anyone can work out all the time/get as thin as the ads dictate without their veins showing. veins are airbrushed off of the hands of models most of the time now, because, i guess that women should be concerned about anyone knowing that they contain blood. ? It has always been pretty crazy, but its getting weirder and weirder as time goes on.

I agree that much of this IS nonsense. I wish people would focus on cardiovascular health instead of body image. THAT would be worthwhile.

As said by #19 above, Madison Avenue does play mind games on how women feel about themselves.

The resulting controversy is another example of photoshopping potentially impacting the integrity of the creator, as discussed in the Euginie Samuel Reich posting.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/files/2009/10/IMG_1928.JPG

(especially in comparison to pics from a while ago)

Here’s an observation that I’d like to ask everybody about: it seems that most American women fall into two groups:

1. “I’m going to keep my weight to a level that is reasonably attractive to men.”
2. “Screw it. I’ll be as fat as I want.”

That is, I don’t see many women who are just overweight to be noticeable. Yes, there are some, but it seems that the majority of women fall into the above two groups. Here’s another way to state it:

Suppose we built a histogram of the number of women in each class of body mass index. Doesn’t it seem as if that histogram would turn out to be double-peaked?