False Images

This is an amazing website: http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/ from Sweden's health ministry, on the amount of photo re-touching that goes on in the fashion industry (don't worry, it's been translated into English).

I am glad to have boys - and young ones at that - so I don't have to deal with this issue directly, as mom's with girls do. According to Newsweek, by the time she's 12 an average girl will have seen 77,000 advertisements - and who knows how many of those have been re-touched. The power these images have to change a child's image of herself is frightening.

Even as as a mother of boys, this trend worries me. I want my boys to appreciate the women and girls in their lives for who they are, not how they look. Further, I never want them to hold those girls/women up to some unattainable standard set by a computer-generated image of all things.


Thanks to neo-neocon