Kerry Washington joined the ranks of female celebrities calling out Photoshopped cover images in her criticism of the April 4th edition of AdWeek. She’s not the first to have called a publication out on changing what she actually looks like (she talks about how “weary” she felt about seeing an image that “looks so different from what [she looks] like when [she looks] in the mirror” on the Instagram post about it), and for all of our sakes, I hope that the trend of women calling out bad Photoshop jobs continues.
In the past, celebs such as Zendaya, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Keira Knightly, and Kate Winslet have all talked about dissatisfaction with retouched photos: We don’t look like this, they say, nor do we want to.
Women of all ages are subject to the messages that fashion and lifestyle magazines send out about what they should and should not look like. When the women in those magazines aren’t allowed “imperfections”—that is, aren’t allowed freckles or stretch marks or large thighs (and who ever said these things were imperfect in the first place?)—what message is that sending to the women who don’t have access to Photoshop, or the women who might be trying to find an image of themselves in the spread of a magazine? It’s one thing to have thin runway models—there are women who are naturally tall and thin, and besides, an article of clothing on a model isn’t the same as an article of clothing that someone is actually going to buy and wear—but Kerry Washington and Kate Winslet aren’t models: They’re actresses.
On the one hand, we can’t compare ourselves to celebrities or to anyone else, for that matter, but on the other, if they’re complaining about what is being done to their bodies without their permission, what does that tell us? There are plenty of girls and young women in the world who don’t know what they’re going to look like when they’ve finished developing, and when we celebrate only a few body types (and warp others so they fit into that “acceptable” mold), they might not automatically be aware that every image in a magazine has been retouched. They might not be aware that they can’t expect to look like Jennifer Lawrence—even Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t look like the Jennifer Lawrence on a magazine cover.
This isn’t to say that it’s solely a women’s issue, either: Men suffer from body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders related to body image too, and if you look at the cover of a magazine like Men’s Health, you’ll immediately understand why. There are unrealistic expectations being placed on everybody, and while we can’t call a magazine cover and Photoshop the only culprits (often times, eating disorders stem from other health issues relating to anxiety—we can’t blame society for everything), we can certainly ask them to do better.
If someone is dissatisfied with the way their body is being portrayed—especially to the extent that it doesn’t seem like their body at all anymore—why shouldn’t they say something against whoever’s done the editing?