I have little use for the fashion/style/glamor industry. Aside from our military endeavors, there’s no bigger waste of time and resources … people starve while superficial assholes dream of the right body shape/color with complementary accessories. Cosmetics stores alone do $7B a year.
This narcissistic frenzy is fueled by Photoshop visions of better than perfect humans as the ideal. I think this woman has the right idea.
I think she has a good idea. Newspaper photos lose a lot of credence if they’re altered. Make-up, lighting, and the like are fine, but actually changing someone’s shape? I’d like impressionable people to be clearly told that what they’re seeing is a fiction.
I think this is an excellent idea and would whole-heartedly back such a proposal in the US.
I can’t think of any argument against this that would carry any weight with me whatsoever.
It’s an interesting idea, but I suspect that the disclaimer on retouched photos would become like the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarettes, so ubiquitous that it’s practically invisible.
So is there some other way to accomplish the same goal? Instead of a disclaimer on retouched photos, could they be subjected to the same standards as other truth-in-advertising laws?
It’s an asinine solution to a made up problem.
sorry, anorexia resulting from body dysmorphia triggered by all the heroin chic models used in advertising and entertainment is not a made up problem. I can remember being a very healthy 135 lbs of solid muscle [at 5’7"] and some fat guy telling me I was fat because I wasn’t under 110 lbs and flat as a board, and I should not be wearing a bathing suit on the beach.
Look, advertising is telling women they need to be 0% body fat, skinny with bones pretty much showing and humongous silicon tits. If an actress has the temerity to appear NORMAL in size, they get called fat. What the hell is wrong with Jessica Simpson in this picture other than she has a realistic human body. This is hardly sexy.
What’s wrong with Jessica in that picture is that the outfit is horrible. 
Posting “Objects in photo may be fatter than they appear” on every magazine ad is not going to do anything to correct your body image issues or your need for male validation.
Her clothes.
This is tantamount to suggesting that many women are near-mindless gawping drones easily brainwashed by photographic images into thinking things that aren’t true. As a man if I even hinted at such empty-headedness, I’d probably be taken out and shot. I prefer to give women more credit for being able to think for themselves and see the fashion images for what they are: slices of advertising froth featuring freakish women whose proportions are deemed (by some) to make the clothes look better, and not a target for mimicry.
As a corollary, I think you are assuming a causal relationship exists by being very selective with the data. There have always been people with eating disorders who may or may not feel happy with their size and appearance. I’m not sure there’s any direct link to skinny models and contemporary fashion imagery. For all we know, the disorders and unhappy feelings would exist even if the entire fashion industry vanished tomorrow. For all we know, many of the women who adore fashion magazines have few problems, and many of those with problems have hardly glanced at a fashion mag in their lives.
If you look at all the violent prisoners on Death Row, you’ll find most of them ate potatoes as a child. Therefore, eating potatoes causes violent criminal tendencies. Dumb, right? If you look at the girls who suffer from anorexia and bulimia and body dysmorphia, you’ll find many of them have seen images in the media of skinny, stick-thin models. Same argument.
Yes, wearing makeup to smooth the complexion or skin toned hosiery to hide spider veins should carry the same warnings.
Women who extend the lipstick edge beyond their actual lip boundaries to make them fuller? A law should be made to make them put a label on their cheek that points an arrow at those fake plump lips. To permit this without disclosure is to allow fraudulent deception.
Men who have hair transplants or wear 2" high shoes? More stickers with arrows on their pants and neck pointing out the illusion.
The Renaissance painters who painted royalties and upper class patrons were deft at hiding blemishes, shrinking waistlines. All paintings at the Louvre and New York met need new labels to educate the masses. Women everywhere since the 16th century have been deceived into thinking they can smile like Mona Lisa and we need laws to protect them from this trickery.
meh, beats some of the crap that gets out on runways … and is at least comfortable looking.
I dont get butt floss [thongs] I do the wedgie dance trying to excavate my panties out of my asscrack, some people wedge a thong in and wander off 
This is not something folks in government should be worried about. You really can’t save everyone from the marketing industry. If the marketing industry has any power over people it’s really the fault of the people.
This sounds like a problem that upper middle class people worry about. Once you have all the money you need to live comfortably you start to worry about your body image and blame it on the ad industry. The same industry that allows you to have all your money in the first place (because spending drives the economy, even if your the one spending).
If we start legislating for the most insecure among us, where will it stop? Should there be a disclaimer for violent movies? Porn videos? Porn might cause a lot of unhealthy sex.
I say fuck disclaimers. If you can’t handle an ad for lipstick you have serious problems.
But reality intruded in the end. Just ask Cromwell and Henry VIII and the Flanders Mare. Further, photorealism was not an option in those days; it is now.
There are worse things, but the jeans look awful and that belt is really bad.
It’s crazy, isn’t it? I call it the self-esteem industry, and it’s all about women. We used to say, “think of the children!” but now it’s “protect women and girls’ self-esteems!!!” I’m convinced, thanks to media’s sufficiently dumbing it down for me to understand, that women are born with this little dial on their forehead, and the needle on the dial goes from low self-esteem to really dangerously low self-esteem, and the needle spends all day going up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down as women move their eyeballs.
But this is. And while she may be abnormal, especially in this society, she is also perfectly natural, and is what many young women in really good shape look like. Which is also not too dissimilar to what many young models look like, because they too are in really good shape, and naturally beautiful.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those advertisements with a woman who is too unnaturally beautiful, because they don’t want the model to look unnatural. They just want her to look more beautiful, which they accomplish much of the time. It may be a bit of a lie because that particular model doesn’t look that good, but not much of one… Its not like women that beautiful don’t exist.
And the winner is…
I came to that conclusion myself. I realized that the OP is merely a polite disguise for a rant about superficiality in general which I don’t have the time or energy for.
Any legislation regulating human Photoshopping will simply foster the illusion of consumer control of the market.
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