Progress being made...

I just found this link from Britain's Daily Mail.  Apparently the magazine Grazia published a picture of Kate Middleton from her wedding which has caused a bit of an uproar.  The photo was created from one where she was actually holding William's arm but was photoshopped to make it look as if she were alone.  In the process of photoshopping it, Kate became much skinnier than she already was.  People are expressing outrage that the already (unhealthily?) slender princess was made even skinner, showing how voracious the press is for  unrealistically painfully skinny women.

In one of the comments about the article, a reader explained how the photo was probably manipulated.  Apparently, the photoshop magician copied the right side of her gown, flipped it, and pasted it to the left to make the image symmetrical and so she would be standing by herself.  In the process of doing so, the left side became a lot thinner, due to the angle at which she was standing in the original photo.  That appears to be the correct explanation.

What I like about this uproar is that people are paying attention!  They are noticing that photos are being manipulated to make women look thinner, and they are complaining.  They are no longer accepting that women should be impossibly skinny. 

Here's the picture which may have caused the shift and gotten people  noticing.  In 2009, Filippa Hamilton appeared in this ad.  It had been photoshopped so grotesquely that her waist appears to be smaller than her head - an anatomical impossibility unless there is a major physical defect.  The link I included above has an excellent article about big photoshopping gaffes.

So here's what I suggest we can do - if you notice in any media a photo of a woman (or man, for that matter) which appears to have been manipulated to make him or her impossibly unrealistic, contact the publisher and inform him or her that you don't like it and don't want to see it happen again, that you prefer real people in the photos.  If enough of us complain, things will change.  The excuse now is that this is how people want to see models, it's what we expect, it's what we think is beautiful.  That argument will be difficult to sustain if we continuously insist that it is not, in fact, what we want. 

If you write any publishers, let me know and I'll post it here.  Let's keep track of what sort of a ruckus we can cause, and see if we can begin to make a difference!  It wouldn't take long for things to shift if this went viral!  Can we do it??!!

News Flash!!! 

Just today I saw an article that Hillary Clinton was edited out of the Situation Room photo when they were all watching Osama bin Laden being killed.  The Hasidic newspaper apparently couldn't handle having a woman (2 actually, Counterterrorism Director Audrey Tomason was in the photo too) in the picture because it might turn on all the men reading their paper.  Could it be that now women are being made SO skinny that they're disappearing altogether??