Over the next few weeks on 60 in 3, I’m going to write a series of articles about body image, what it means, how important it is, the kind of problems it can lead to if badly handled and my own struggles with it. I wanted to start out this series with the following video:
It’s from the Dove evolution campaign and it’s a bit old (2006) but I think it makes an amazing point. What we see today as the “ideal” body image is nothing but a manufactured illusion. Take a look at this video and see the transformation this woman undergoes.
Some of this transformation was done through makeup, some through technology. Either way, she is made into something that is impossible for her to achieve on her own. This is a model, someone picked for beauty, and yet even she must be artificially transformed into something she could never be. This is what we’re sold every day. This is what our children see every evening. This is what we’re told we should look like. Women get more of this than men, but men get enough of it too. One look at some recent action movies (300 anyone?) and we can easily see that men too are bombarded with artificially enhanced images of the “ideal” male physique that they must aspire to but can never achieve.
I’ve always said that looking good is a perfectly fine goal to use as motivation for being healthy. However, like many things, this can be taken to an extreme which is both unhealthy and unrealistic. That’s what I’d like to talk to you about in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, check out that video.
This is a great topic Gal. Please work hard to serve it well in your future writings.
I know of few people who have a good body image. Most people who open up to me abut this have a profoundly negative body image — myself included. I try hard to encourage others to remember (and to remember myself) that in the end it will not matter the shape of our abs or how we look in jeans. It will matter, and does matter much more, who we are to one another.
I feel always like I am fighting a losing battle here. So long as Madison Ave. and Hollywood exist, our national body image will weaken further and further — depleting our pocketbooks along the way. I look forward to your future thoughts.
My before/afters website is dedicated to before and after pictures. One of the categories in the site is ‘photoshopped’. If you notice, a lot of the photoshopped pictures are of people because they don’t look the way the media wants them to for magazine covers, ads, etc.
I think it’s really unfortunate that people are subjected to seeing these photoshopped, unrealistic versions of people everyday without ever really knowing that they’re looking at an edited image.