This is the story of a quote, a question, a Culture Clip and a poll. And it’s not a very pretty one, even though all four are about beauty.
First, the quote, from Leslie Gornstein, writing for omg.yahoo.com, on the practice of slimming, altering and retouching actors and musicians in movies, TV shows and music videos:
Stars may want you to think that beauty is all just a matter of hair and makeup and lighting. They don’t want you to know that there are people out there like Deep Pixel who essentially make them look skinnier and smoother on film and video, in the same way that magazines touch up still photos.
That prompted us to publish a poll yesterday (on our homepage and Facebook page) asking, “How often do you think the (still and video) images you see of models, actors and musicians are retouched (‘Photoshopped’) to make them look thinner, sexier, etc.?”
Well. Plugged In readers started voting early and often, and it seems that you overwhelmingly believe that this kind of retouching going on all the time. That the pretty we see when watching movies, reading magazines or slouching on our couches in front of the TV is artificially enhanced in some way or another.
And you certainly have good reason to think so, even though the implications are kinda sad and sobering. And sometimes it’s not just isolated to moving some pixels around.
Like this Culture Clip implication, linked to Photoshopping by way of a scalpel and a culture obsessed with the “perfect look”:
Fourteen-year-old Shimali De Silva, an Australian singing hopeful who made her way to the finals of the international singing contest K-Pop Star Hunt, was offered a “surprise” before entering the final phase of the competition: a consultation with a plastic surgeon. “The doctor brought out this terrible mug shot and said to me, ‘You’re 14, but you look 30,'” Shimali reported. “He pointed out the curvature of my forehead, the ratio of my nose to my chin, all this stuff that I hadn’t even thought about. I was trying not to be effected by it, but as a 14-year-old, people tell you that the way you look is important if you want to break into this industry; that sunk in and I started tearing up.” (After Shimali called home to tell her tale, her mother flew to Seoul to take her out of the contest.)
Here’s a picture of the very cute Shimali, so you can see for yourself just how crazy and off-kilter this kind of expectation is:
And in pretty much exactly the same way it was crazy and off-kilter for BBC Radio 5 commentator John Inverdale to make that crack about Marion Bartoli after she became, according to USA Today, “just the sixth woman to win Wimbledon without dropping a set.”
He asked his listeners, “Do you think Bartoli’s dad told her when she was little, ‘You’re never going to be a looker. You’ll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight’?”
Guess we better post a picture of Bartoli too.
Recent Comments