"Perfection" according to magazines

Another great piece from Feminine Genius (cartoon from Neocitrus).

An excerpt:

This article from the Telegraph is so utterly depressing:

The average British woman worries about the size and shape of her body every 15 minutes ... Research among 5,000 women with an average age of 34 found that just two per cent were happy with their body.

I suppose with the constant media glare on glamour and how one looks, what else are women to be thinking of?

Many respondents were dissatisfied with every part of their own appearance - 87 per cent hated their "podgy thighs", 79 per cent were unhappy with their waist, 65 per cent were disappointed with the size and shape of their breasts, the same number were unhappy with their feet (65 per cent), and 59 per cent were unhappy with their face. More than half of those polled were even disappointed with their hands and fingers.

Obviously, a huge part of this is the fault of contemporary fashion. If women weren't expected to show virtually all their flesh (and the actual shape of what little remains hidden) then these minutiae wouldn't matter -- to anyone, least of all women. Try using extra fabric, try buying a size larger, try draping horizontally -- and then for heaven's sake stop obsessing!

The last statement says it all:

Women, you are made for so much more than this.

Read the whole piece here

And here's something from the CBS News archives about the retouching that is done to practically every photo of models on magazine pages -- thanks to technology's magic.

[More cover girl Jamie Lee Curtis] says the fraud is perpetrated by magazine editors who rely too heavily on photo retouching - which gives models and actresses a “digital diet” long after the photo shoot is over.

Kate Betts, former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, says most fashion pictures are retouched nowadays. But what can a good retoucher do?

“A good retoucher can basically make the person in the picture look better, enhance the way they look,” says Betts, who was also a former top fashion editor at Vogue. “They can do anything. They can open eyes wider, make them brighter, change the shape, contour the face a lot.”

Read "Re-modeling for Perfection" here