Laurie Essig

UK Liberal Dems try to ban airbrushed photos in ads

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

The Liberal Democrats in Britain are taking aim at advertisers who airbrush photos to a perfection unattainable in the world of real bodies.  Jo Swinson and other members of her party are calling for a ban on the use of airbrushed photographs in advertisements aimed at children under 16 and a warning on all airbrushed advertisements so that consumers will know the extent of the alteration. Don't beef up Keira's bust Lib Dems take aim at advertisers over altered images - News, Films - The Independent. The blogosphere is of course going crazy with the craziness of the proposal, but what if the Liberal Dems are right even though they're so clearly wrong? The wrong part is obvious:  the government trying to control advertising could not possibly be a good idea.  If ice cream is made to look creamier, does that count?  Are we just talking bodies?  If so, what's "unrealistic" airbrushing and what's "necessary"?  If I have a photo taken and there's a large, visible zit on my chin, can I ask the photographer to take it off?  Truth be told, I am certain my head shot on this site has had a fair amount of photoshopping. But, I'm going to say something that is increasingly unpopular in both academic and activist circles: advertising is controlling our minds and our bodies and it controls them so it can sell us more stuff. That's how consumer capitalism works.  We see these ideal types, these icons of beauty and desire, and we want to be them.  We look in the mirror.  We are clearly not at all like these ideal types.  We feel bad about: our wrinkles, our cellulite, our small breasts, everything about ourselves.  We remember that the ads said if we just bought this toothpaste/car/pair of shoes/mascara, then we would be more like the images floating in the space of ads. Reductive?  Maybe, but the desire to imitate those people with the most status is a nearly universal impulse.  Anthropologists call it prestigious imitation.  Now think about how radically prestige changed with the birth of photography.  Previously we might have looked to our parents or older siblings, village elders, or even the Queen as the most prestigious and therefore worthy of imitation, but with the invention of cinema and the creation of movie stars, all that changed.    Early on in the cinematic era, anthropologist Marcel Maus, understood we were starting to shape our very bodies in an effort to imitate matinee idols. Writing in 1934, Maus had a “revelation” while lying in a hospital bed in New York.

I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realized that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema.

More recently, philosopher Jean Baudrillard pointed out that it is not the actual people, but rather representations of people, copies without an original, that we imitate when we try to become like movie stars.   In other words, I may want to look like Jennifer Lopez, but chances are that I will never see the actual Jennifer Lopez and if I did, I probably wouldn’t recognize her.  What I want to be is like the images of J-Lo that saturate our culture and my imagination.

Not just advertising, but the film and TV industries have learned to deploy an entire array of technologies that make us want to look like people who do not exist in the real world. Coupled with this is a cosmetic surgery industry that promises to reshape our real bodies to make them look more like the two-dimensional ones we see on screen and on billboards.  The result is a culture where many of us (and most women and girls) feel ugly.

But what to do?  Have the state censor it all? Mandate cellulite, wrinkles and stray hairs?  Probably not.  How about the other plan of the Liberal Dems to create Media Literacy classes?  It's a start.  I'd hate to think anyone thought of these images as real people any more than we think Barbie represents a realistic version of a female body.  Perhaps we could even take a lesson from Christian Orthodoxy for our postmodern, secular cultures and apply iconography to contemporary media.  Within Christian Orthodoxy, images in icons are purposefully made skinnier and elongated to give them a more spiritual and less fleshy quality.  The same is true with icons of our consumer culture.  We want bodies, especially female bodies, that are elongated and very nearly inhuman.  We long to escape emodiment for the purely pleasurable realm of heavenly consumermism: always looking perfect in the designer clothes we wear, always looking skinny even in bikinis, always looking young and desirable.  It is a fantasy, a desire, an unreal representation of real bodies.  In the same way that Orthodox Christians look at an icon of Jesus and know it has been altered, we ought to be able to look at an ad or a movie star and see that what is represented can only exist in the spiritual plane.  Here in our fleshy real lives, bodies don't look anything like the ones we see in the iconography of film and fashion.

UK Liberal Dems try to ban airbrushed photos in ads

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

The Liberal Democrats in Britain are taking aim at advertisers who airbrush photos to a perfection unattainable in the world of real bodies.  Jo Swinson and other members of her party are calling for a ban on the use of airbrushed photographs in advertisements aimed at children under 16 and a warning on all airbrushed advertisements so that consumers will know the extent of the alteration. Don't beef up Keira's bust Lib Dems take aim at advertisers over altered images - News, Films - The Independent. The blogosphere is of course going crazy with the craziness of the proposal, but what if the Liberal Dems are right even though they're so clearly wrong? The wrong part is obvious:  the government trying to control advertising could not possibly be a good idea.  If ice cream is made to look creamier, does that count?  Are we just talking bodies?  If so, what's "unrealistic" airbrushing and what's "necessary"?  If I have a photo taken and there's a large, visible zit on my chin, can I ask the photographer to take it off?  Truth be told, I am certain my head shot on this site has had a fair amount of photoshopping. But, I'm going to say something that is increasingly unpopular in both academic and activist circles: advertising is controlling our minds and our bodies and it controls them so it can sell us more stuff. That's how consumer capitalism works.  We see these ideal types, these icons of beauty and desire, and we want to be them.  We look in the mirror.  We are clearly not at all like these ideal types.  We feel bad about: our wrinkles, our cellulite, our small breasts, everything about ourselves.  We remember that the ads said if we just bought this toothpaste/car/pair of shoes/mascara, then we would be more like the images floating in the space of ads. Reductive?  Maybe, but the desire to imitate those people with the most status is a nearly universal impulse.  Anthropologists call it prestigious imitation.  Now think about how radically prestige changed with the birth of photography.  Previously we might have looked to our parents or older siblings, village elders, or even the Queen as the most prestigious and therefore worthy of imitation, but with the invention of cinema and the creation of movie stars, all that changed.    Early on in the cinematic era, anthropologist Marcel Maus, understood we were starting to shape our very bodies in an effort to imitate matinee idols. Writing in 1934, Maus had a “revelation” while lying in a hospital bed in New York.

I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realized that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema.

More recently, philosopher Jean Baudrillard pointed out that it is not the actual people, but rather representations of people, copies without an original, that we imitate when we try to become like movie stars.   In other words, I may want to look like Jennifer Lopez, but chances are that I will never see the actual Jennifer Lopez and if I did, I probably wouldn’t recognize her.  What I want to be is like the images of J-Lo that saturate our culture and my imagination.

Not just advertising, but the film and TV industries have learned to deploy an entire array of technologies that make us want to look like people who do not exist in the real world. Coupled with this is a cosmetic surgery industry that promises to reshape our real bodies to make them look more like the two-dimensional ones we see on screen and on billboards.  The result is a culture where many of us (and most women and girls) feel ugly.

But what to do?  Have the state censor it all? Mandate cellulite, wrinkles and stray hairs?  Probably not.  How about the other plan of the Liberal Dems to create Media Literacy classes?  It's a start.  I'd hate to think anyone thought of these images as real people any more than we think Barbie represents a realistic version of a female body.  Perhaps we could even take a lesson from Christian Orthodoxy for our postmodern, secular cultures and apply iconography to contemporary media.  Within Christian Orthodoxy, images in icons are purposefully made skinnier and elongated to give them a more spiritual and less fleshy quality.  The same is true with icons of our consumer culture.  We want bodies, especially female bodies, that are elongated and very nearly inhuman.  We long to escape emodiment for the purely pleasurable realm of heavenly consumermism: always looking perfect in the designer clothes we wear, always looking skinny even in bikinis, always looking young and desirable.  It is a fantasy, a desire, an unreal representation of real bodies.  In the same way that Orthodox Christians look at an icon of Jesus and know it has been altered, we ought to be able to look at an ad or a movie star and see that what is represented can only exist in the spiritual plane.  Here in our fleshy real lives, bodies don't look anything like the ones we see in the iconography of film and fashion.