LOVE THIGHSELF. Get it? Thighs.

Should we ban the photoshopping of models in advertising?  You can't just boycott a vague concept. There are always deeper implications. 

Don’t fool yourself for a minute into thinking that brands will begin to flock to regular looking people to become models for their products, just because we’ve triumphed in the war on photoshop. Those are some high stakes. What would actually happen is a further narrowing of jobs available to people who fall outside of photogenic perfection.  

People with imperfect skin would not be selected to work, people with scars, tattoos, thin hair, short legs, less than blinding white teeth, abnormally large eyes, wrinkles… you get the picture.  If they don’t possess it naturally, they are not likely getting hired.  Like it or not, this is the industry. Pressure will be put on models to be perfect, like really perfect.  Imaginary. Even if they say they're not doing that, they totally are.  

No Acne?  Check.  Perfect teeth?  Check.  Youthful Glow:  Check.  Rested?  Yep.  Demographic:  Not me. 

Tired this morning?  You’re not working; you have bags under your eyes and we’ve just spent a kazillion dollars on our marketing campaign.  Maybe next time.  Maybe get surgery.  We can’t just airbrush them out anymore because people with bags under their eyes get their feelers broken.   

Got wrinkles?  Find a new career.  

Maybe her hair really IS a doormat, am I right? 

And how then should we presume to regulate this?  What in the case of this ad?  I’d be willing to hazard a guess that his woman’s hair does not naturally occur in the shape of a doormat and it also might not be that thick.  Who can tell?  *chews carrot*  Will stylists have to physically produce this and photograph it, or is the concept artistic enough?  Does it get a pass? By what scale are we deciding?  How do we define creative license when looking for a mood/metaphor? Is it worth it?

Models know what they are getting into, know they will be altered, and I think they like to work.   For the record, if my face were going to be plastered onto a billboard, I hope they’d knock a few zits off. 

Maybe you're saying right now, "But.. but think of the young impressionable girls?  What message does this send to them?  How will they cope?  Ads cause eating disorders!"

You know what I think might be worse for our girls?  If those perfect women in those ads were real.  All of the sudden becoming 1% of the population is somehow more attainable, because she’s not even photoshopped, how is that supposed to make our girls feel?  If we are softening everything for everyone, we need to actually think about this.  Maybe we should ban showing people in ads in general in case someone gets their feelings hurt or someone gets confused. 

Furniture advertisements don't accurately depict the waist-deep pile of paper and toys that I live under as a parent in college, after all.  Are they saying my house isn't beautiful the way it is? Maybe I'll demand they change it all to accurately reflect the mood of the homemade cardboard and string cat hotel sitting on my couch and bowl of assorted batteries, wrappers and chewed pen lid displayed in the 'junk bowl' on my vanity. Why doesn't everyone want to see this stuff? I demand accurate representation. 

This boils back down to that grey paste people want to be fed— people demand to be fed.  Since when is feeling insecure grounds to alert the authorities, or worse.. a committee? Or shut down a magazine? Why can't it be a judgement call.  Overphotoshopping in today's market leads to online ridicule anyway.  So let the advertisers make the good or bad decisions they want to make.  

Remember kids, “If it’s in an ad, and it looks fake, it is fake.  Also, if it’s in an ad and it doesn’t look fake, it is fake.” -Me

Again, it falls to educating people and demanding more diversity from branding use vote numero uno, which is money.  Like Dove's imperfect lady campaign? Great.  Buy their stuff.  Don't like that Vogue airbrushes everything?  Don't buy Vogue.  Don't want your kids to feel sad  about their short necks after seeing a giraffe necked model?  Watch a photoshop tutorial with them.  

There is just no need to boycott, ban, protest or make a new law that we don’t have the means to support, and will possibly squash thousands of livelihoods all because you feel bad about your thighs. You know?  I say eat some cake, learn to use photoshop, remove the cake from said thighs.  Post the photo on facebook and move on with your life, because when the first rule of art is politeness, we are all doomed.  

All that being said, do I love the untouched photo movement?  I do. I think it's a cool facet, and great for its narrow demographic, but that doesn't mean I think photoshopping ought to be illegal.  

This blog brought to you by:  Questions from my professor

A Crowd

A crowd of people.  Ink on paper.  Just a side project from today.

How I felt at the fair, really.

When Picasso Paints Inappropriately, We All Suffer.

If you advertise your burlesque show in a church letter, you’re going to take some heat, and heat is in the form of free advertising and angry ladies.  Further, the consequence of misjudging your demographic and marketing in inappropriate locations will lead to trouble in and of itself. It boils down to proper vs improper market research and the art of manipulating it. 

That being said, I feel that the burden is on the venue to sift through which messages will and will not be advertised.  If the church prints the ad, then it is not the burlesque show at fault for the shocked readers.  I don’t believe censorship is the answer. 

Media is already monitored and steered enough, and introducing further restrictions could have unexpected consequences. If we muzzle ourselves with social diplomacy, we won’t be able to speak out for injustice and what we don’t like, because it will all be hidden. I like the idea of living in a free society where we can be offended and use the brain in our heads to say we disagree or don't like a product, rather than dumbing everything down to the grey, whimpering paste that is palatable to all. If we don't get to be offended, we never learn what we want, what we don't want and what we need, and this ties in directly to advertising.

People need to be offended.  

I've dumbed down a WWF ad to make my point by changing the blood to grape purple. Blood is offensive and hard to look at, so it should be censored, right? 

Miss!  Your booze is spilling!

VS 

Miss, you need to know that your souvenirs are supporting poachers.   

Being offended sobers us and forces us to talk about things. We can go back to the vintage ads featuring heavy misogyny and racism and see that it's a snapshot of a culture in need of a makeover.  What if these ads hadn't shocked people? What if nobody ever discussed why it made them uncomfortable because it was't on the surface? What if they were not there for us to look back on as a gauge of how we are doing?

And what’s more? Being offended is fun. People love yelling about what makes them angry, and if you are marketing something, you want people yelling about it. When someone is yelling about something, someone else can’t wait to come along and disagree with them. This will make your message a talking point, and that is full of win for you.  

In other news, remember when Fox News censored a Picasso and it was the funniest damned thing that happened in centuries?

This blog brought to you by:  Questions from my Professor.  

Late.