Sex, Lies and Photoshop

**Marko** · 03-10-2009, 07:29 PM

It is about retouching and a law that they are considering in France.

That is supremely interesting, that law. I'm not sure how i feel about the whole thing. I'm all for crediting the retoucher; but the rest of the law suggests banning websites and make it illegal to promote negative body sterotypes. In theory yahoo, sounds like a good thing -...but putting this in practice brings up some civil liberty issues for me in terms of policing or enforcing anything. If I am a website owner they could take me down for showing a retouched image..that's what it's sayin'.

Personally I think I'm fairly unaffected (in terms of my own body image) by the stuff, but I can easily see the effects on today's kids. Really, when I was a kid it wasn't that bad; retouching was done but it wasn't as extreme. They would retouch the prints and the negs to fix up blemishes - but they didn't have the today's easy peasy tools. They could not pull in a woman's waistline to absurd porportions as easily. This can be done in less than 1 minute in P.Shop and it is done to all the images we see (or the vast vast majority of them)

If every picture we see is indeed fake and indeed affects our self image, it's a problem, No? Some parents are busy. Some kids are stubborn, it's hard for parents to be totally on top of something as pernicious as glamour marketing. It's everywhere on 10 different levels; all fake, all motivated to do only one thing - separate you from your money via the deceit in the marketing. The problem, is the way it's done - unfortunately it does imo bash many a young person's self image. So for me it can be seen as a health issue or a mental health issue. And because of that, the government can get involved and maybe they should.

I'd be looking to get better answers than banning websites though - I think I'd be for 'mandatory credit of the retoucher' as a first step.

Thx for listenin' lol - Marko