On Photoshopping, Beauty Standards, and Anatomy

People have gone on at great length about the part that photo-editing plays in shaping our cultural definition of beauty, and I imagine they will continue to do so for some time. This subject recently had a new surge of popularity, when a young girl organized a protest against Seventeen magazine asking them to include non-edited photos of average girls. This protest has been covered to death, and the girl is every bit as inspirational as she sounds, but she's not what I want to talk about. 

Something I picked up from my dad when I was a kid is the art of hyperbole. In conversation with him, everything becomes either The Very Best or The Very Worst. It's a silly habit, but I find it can also be a valuable skill, in rare circumstances. I think the discourse on photo-editing is one of those circumstances. I've heard over and over again that this practice sets "unrealistic standards" and creates an "unattainable ideal," but I honestly don't think these arguments go far enough. So far, I've only seen one argument that gets it right. 

Greta Christina wrote a phenomenal piece on the pressures our culture puts on men. She focuses on how utterly absurd some of the standards to which we hold men are, and how many of these ideas actually conflict with one another. For example, just as we pressure women to be simultaneously "sexy and chaste," we also expect men to both be rugged and clean. But she doesn't leave it there, she wants you to know just how unreal these expectations are. She explains that the world isn't asking you to be prettier, fitter, thinner, what-have-you. The world is asking you to "turn yourself into a unicorn and start shitting diamonds." And that's where I want to pick this conversation up. 

Because Greta Christina is right. Look closely at the images below. As a photo-editor, it's so easy just to move a little line because it creates a shape that's more "pleasing," but when the image being manipulated is of a person, this can have drastic implications. This isn't just fat that's being erased, bone structure is being changed, organs shifted or removed entirely.

In this photo, Faith Hill's entire posture is changed. Her jawline is reshaped, her nose is narrowed, The curvature of her shoulder and back have been completely remolded. The amount of surgery this kind of photoshopping represents is not only drastic, it's dangerous and pointless.

I find this type of skeletal changes to be the most drastic in the area of the ribcage. Magazines always want to show slim, smooth waistlines, but when they remove mass in this area, it represents a fundamental change in the torso; look at the changes made in this Ann Taylor model's waistline. Where exactly are her lungs supposed to go? How does she breath?

Lungs, heart and stomach are all condensed or removed when this line is shifted. The architecture of the ribcage changes drastically. In essence, the photo on the right is no longer a human.

And this is the hyperbole I've been coming to: These photoshopped images are no longer pictures of humans. No person can look like this, not even the person in the photo. The bottom line is, we need lungs to live. 

What's even more interesting is that if the same model took another photo from a different angle, they would photoshop her differently, possibly creating a shape that is not physically compatible with the first. This means that, depending on what angle a person views you from, depending on the lighting conditions and your attire, you would need to shape-shift constantly in order to maintain a continued "pleasing" shape at all times. Not all of these shapes would be compatible with sustained life, and god forbid two people view you from two different angles simultaneously. How, then, would you please everyone? 

So essentially, these popular magazines have left the realm of reality and now are dabbling in obscure art. And while it was all well and good for Picasso to move body parts around in his paintings, this sort of photo-editing does real, tangible harm. If our cultural beauty standard is based on a fictional alien race of non-humans, then we'll all keep harming and killing ourselves to achieve something pointless, vapid and imaginary. 

If I could change the dialog about beauty, I would challenge people to view the images they see in magazines and advertising as those of an alien race. Those people don't exist, not in the real world. And we shouldn't allow ourselves to be influenced by them. This mindset serves to lift a massive filter that hangs over all of us; you start seeing the images in beauty magazines for the forgeries they are. 

This philosophy can at times feel forced. But after a few years of ignoring this beauty-culture entirely, I started leafing through the magazines at the grocery store again to see if things had changed (they hadn't.) When I looked at them, the only question that was left hanging in my mind was this: Is it really hyperbole if it's true? 

The Roeper School and Thoughts on Educational Theory

This week, an important figure in my family's life passed away. Her name was Annemarie Roeper. She was 92 years old, and she was cofounder of the phenomenal private school that my brother Max attended from 2nd through 12th grade. News of her passing quickly filled up my Facebook news feed (as I have a handful of my brother's school friends on there) and it gave me some pause. I found myself reading up on the Roeper Philosophy and reflecting on the part it played in my upbringing, despite my never having attended the school. I thought I'd take this as an opportunity to share some of my thoughts on child psychology and education, as I am beginning to suspect many of them were more heavily influenced by this remarkable woman than I ever realized.

For your reference, here is her obituary on the Roeper school website, here is a rather lengthy piece detailing the Roeper Philosophy, and here is something Max's friend Dan wrote up in his sociology blog on her passing(Dan also attended Roeper). They're all worthwhile reads, and will inform what I'm about to go on about.

The Roeper experience; the culture, the community, the philosophy and the educational structure all remained something of a mystery to me for several years. I was young at the time, and I only interacted with it in minimal, brief ways. But over time, the holes began to fill in and I started to see why this school played such a central role in my brother's life and upbringing.

There are a lot of noteworthy, fascinating and unique features to the Roeper Philosophy, but there's one in particular that I'd like to focus on. It's something that, in recent years, I've begun to praise my parents for; they have the ability to be simply, plainly honest with a young child. So many parents think that children require sugarcoating, metaphor, and little-white-lies in order to digest what we consider to be "adult" or "difficult" concepts. But, at the end of the day, children can comprehend far more advanced ideas than we tend to give them credit for. When I was young, if I asked a question and the answer was "maybe," then my parents said "maybe." they didn't force a "yes/no" dichotomy into a naturally grey situation. When parents do this, it breaks down trust, as the answer may later turn out to be false, and the child feels lied to. There is a certain confidence that you instill in a child when you give them the full truth, no matter how difficult you may perceive it to be.

This was always a central element in Max's experience at Roeper. Students at that school are given more control over their education than children who attend public school. I don't remember Max ever telling me that an authority figure had given him a "because I said so" or "because those are the rules" answer, even when he asked particularly challenging questions. Some of the pieces fell in place for me when I read Annemarie's obituary and saw that her mother studied with Sigmund Freud. Freud was the first major psychologist to suggest that experiences during childhood have any weight on adult development. It may sound obvious now, but at the time it was a radical and new idea that challenged everything people knew about parenting.

Plain honesty was one of the primary elements that smoothed the transition in my family during my parents' divorce. My parents never lied to me about the situation, and knowing that I could trust my parents to give me the truth gave me a solid grounding; something to hang onto when everything else was scary. Not only did this create a sense of confidence and control in me, but it reinforced my relationship with my parents - something that is desperately necessary during a divorce.

I also think this idea has begun to inform children's fiction, which is an exciting trend. One of the reasons I fell so head-over-heels in love with the Harry Potter series (along with the rest of the planet) was that it never lied to the reader. (spoilers!) Yes, in book 6, Dumbledore dies, but why? Because your parents won't be around to protect you forever. Yes, at times, evil triumphs, but why? Because life is often unfair and you can't control everything. I think that laying out difficult universal truths for children in a safe context like fiction is a healthy way to expose them to harsh ideas without frightening them. It's all part of preparing children for the real world - which, oddly enough, is another central feature of the Roeper Philosophy. A part, I think, born out of Annemarie's experiences in WWII. Terrible things happen. Lying to our children about it won't protect them.

Annemarie Roeper was obviously an extraordinary woman who had a profound effect on not only the community at her school, but on educational philosophy worldwide. I count myself very lucky to have felt the influence of her philosophy in my life. I'm sure I will continue to discover other elements of that culture that have crept their way into my personal thinking, and I will happily carry those lessons into my adulthood and eventual parenting experiences.