Art Issues Essay Digital photo manipulation has come a long way.

But this manipulation is not always for the better. Recently, H&M Clothing created some controversy because they admitted to putting real models heads on computer-generated bodies in order to advertise their clothing, according to Chen. The computer-generated body model was uniform, making alterations only to the bodys skin tone, as opposed to attempting to be close to the actual figure of the model. This was an observation on how women are becoming more unreal in advertisements. Controversy about digital manipulations, especially in the case of female models in advertisements, has been around for quite a while. While some may argue that airbrushing models is not a bad thing, the damage is definitely there for many women. Because of advancements in photo manipulation of female models in advertisements, women have lost confidence and admiration in the society of the developed world. The painful lengths that women go to in order to achieve beauty is nothing new. The demeaning use of female models in modern and contemporary advertisements has occurred for over a century now. Earlier female models were, of course, the standard of striking beauty for their time. Their beauty would help an advertiser catch the attention of a potential customer. But ads offered more than products: they offered ideas. According to Wood, these female models maintained the perfect figure, applied a heavy amount of make-up, and made sure that they looked absolutely enviable. These ads have put a strong emphasis on a womans physical beauty. In turn, these advertisements gave women a nearly-unobtainable standard that women still desired to chase towards. The beauty standard today, on the other hand, is nearly impossible. Even as several major feminist movements have gone by, a womans role in advertising has not improved. Feminist

speaker Jean Kilbourne, who has been examining the role of women in advertising since the 1970s, states in her documentary Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women that she believes that sexism in advertisements have gotten worse than when she first started analyzing the use of women in advertisements. Most fashion models today are much skinnier than they were just a few decades ago. According to Rowles, the majority of runway models today meet the physical criteria for anorexia. Most modeling agencies consider a plus-size model to be between size 6 and size 14. To put this in perspective, Piepkorn says that the average American woman is a size 14. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American woman is classified as overweight. While it is not physically healthy for anyone to be overweight, it is not mentally healthy to tell the average American woman that anorexia is the ideal. Not to mention, with the advancements in image manipulation software products such as Adobe Photoshop, female models today are given images of standards absolutely impossible to achieve. Eyes are made larger, pores are removed, leg fat is cut off, and waists are made smaller. Models are almost exaggerated into caricatures of desirable bodies. Sometimes, several different women can be pieced together into one perfect woman. In the documentary Wet Dreams and False Images, Lucky Magazine photo retoucher Domenic Demasi talks about how he and staff members had pieced together a new girl using different images. Exaggeration is not bad if all viewers can easily realize that the exaggeration is there. But these photos are treated as reality. Its an exaggeration that standardizes fantasy, which can easily affect a womans body image. Photo manipulation has not only been used to enhance the model, but also to blend women with that of advertised objects. Killing Us Softly 4 cites one advertisement for the beer Michelob, which blended a woman with a bottle of beer, as if to say that the two are meant to go

hand-in-hand as simple pleasures. Killing Us Softly 4 mentions another ad for Ch that showed a woman with a video game controller coming out of her belly button, implying that women and video games are comparable pleasures. The blending of women with objects becomes a very literal and metaphorical objectification of women. In these tailored ads, they are not treated as human beings, but as objects of amusement similar to beer and video games. While the use of digitally-airbrushed female beauty in advertisements is easily noticeable in society, many people are not aware of how strongly these ads engulf us, especially in the contemporary period. People insist that they tune out advertisements and ignore the product that some particular company was trying to sell. On the contrary, people do not tune commercials out. A majority of a commercial is subconsciously perceived. According to Jean Kilbourne in her documentary Killing Us Softly 4, only 8 percent of an advertisement is perceived by the conscious mind. The rest is understood subconsciously. And because advertising images sell ideas, its very easy for an advertisement viewer to subconsciously accept the principles that advertisements give to them. But while most people are aware of the fact that many of the women in these advertisements are not real, many simply do not care. These people believe that while these perceptions of beauty have a negative effect on society, they also believe that the advertising does not personally affect them. However, there are sadly many consequences that digital photo manipulation has had on women in society and how they are perceived. One of the most notable results of the contemporary advertising practice is low self-esteem. People cannot deny the effect that advertising has had on the female self-image. Because many females of all ages view airbrushed models that are impossible to replicate in reality, these female viewers become self-

conscious and take frustration out on themselves for not being able to replicate airbrushed beauty. They can never be perfect. Another consequence of digital manipulation is the lowered self-esteem of women. Lowered-self-esteem has strongly contributed to the rise of eating disorders. According to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, the third most common chronic illness for adolescents is anorexia. Seven million American women suffer from an eating disorder. This tragic disease is caused by a lack of self-esteem or control. Advertisements show an unobtainable image of women, which could be a strong reason why women view themselves in a negative light. Eating disorders have claimed many lives. Twenty percent of people suffering from anorexia will die from the disease. The self-esteem of American women has reached lows that have put their very lives at risk. But women are not only critical of their own image. Digital enhancement has lowered the respect that women are viewed with. Women become increasingly judged by their appearance. Even after various feminist revolutions of the 20th century, digital manipulation has brought women back down to size. A womans partner still places much more emphasis on her outer beauty than she does on his. Johnson states that in a poll of 70,000 people, almost 50 percent of men admitted that they would leave their partners if their partners gained weight, while only 20 percent of women said that they would do the same if their partners gained weight. Women must spend much more time to make sure that they look acceptable. However, emotional issues are not the only thing that women have to worry about in the era of digital manipulation. These enhanced ads have dehumanized and objectified a group of people. Dehumanization is a common practice of prejudice. If a group is presented as less dignified, then actions against them become more justified. This has been seen throughout

history with subjects like racism and homophobia. In many advertisements, women are altered into looking more like the single perfect woman. With photo editing, women are suddenly more uniformly sexualized, and less dignified. While men are almost never given this kind of treatment, women are treated to an image manipulation that that removes their individuality. When an entire groups individuality is removed, that group is treated to less dignity. When a group is treated to less dignity, hostility against that group can follow. Perhaps its too rash to suggest that a digitally enhanced woman in a beer advertisement promotes violence against women. But in truth, the values that advertisements have been selling for years have stifled the well-being of many women in the developed world. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2003, murder of women by their intimate partners is higher than the murder of men by their intimate partners. This should come as no shock. However, as domestic violence has declined, the statistics suggest that the homicide against women as the result of domestic abuse has not decreased as dramatically as homicide against men as the result of domestic abuse. This has widened the gender gap in a way that makes it far more dangerous to be an American woman than an American man. Although I cannot blame the slower decline of female domestic abuse homicides on digital airbrushing, image alteration has certainly encouraged the objectification of women, which has dangerously led to a slower advancement of women in society. These advertisements create a hole that women cannot easily climb out of. However, with all the serious problems that come with digital manipulation, people are starting to grow more aware of the damage that digital manipulation has done to women. Several European industries have developed standards in order to raise media awareness for viewers. For instance, a BBC News article stated that the Spanish Association of Fashion Designers banned models that have a BMI of less than 18. According to Pfanner, countries like France, Britain and

Norway have legislators pushing for laws that would require digitally-altered advertisement photos to be labeled. Lohr states that as the idea for labeling has developed, people like Dr. Hany Farid have proposed to require ranking digitally-altered advertisements on a 1-to-5 scale, with 1 being minimal alteration, and 5 being significant alteration. In an age where it is an absolute necessity to understand the types of messages that advertisements are sending viewers, it is unfortunate that many Americans do not have a full understanding of just how much photo manipulation goes into advertisement images, especially for images of women. Americans, and developed societies in general, need to know that many advertising images of women are simply illusion. The advancement of photo manipulation has led to an entire new industry in advertisement. But this advancement has been to the disadvantage of women. Women now have more expected of them in terms of beauty. They are given impossible standards that they will ultimately fail at, lowering their own self-worth. They are locked within an undignified role that has slowed potential progress for women in society. But many people do not realize the hazards that this photo editing imposes. Because advertisements present ideas to viewers, viewers pick up on these ideas in a way that reshapes an entire society for the worse. Although, if people were to gain an awareness of how much photo manipulation goes into female bodies and just how much ideas these ads are subconsciously selling to them, then perhaps society can combat the indignity that women have received from these manipulations and preserve society for the better.

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