I attended a 'Body Image Workshop' yesterday, thinking that it would be pertinent to my dissertation. The session took time to define what the term body image meant, walked through the history (take a look at the timeline!) of what society deemed a beautiful body from the ancient greeks till now, and explored how society toys with the concept of the body image via sexualization of young girls.
At the beginning of the workshop, the participants were asked to write three things we loved about our body, a task I found more difficult than I thought it would be; the natural instinct was to compare myself to others and try to figure out what components of my body out-excelled in an objective sense. I realized that my perception and judgment of my own body depended wholly on placing myself on a spectrum of the girls around me as well as the heavily digitally-altered images of celebrities I see in the media.
Seventeen Magazine did good when it agreed not to photoshop images of girls in their contents in response to an online petition initiated by a 14 year-old girl. Some people argue that when ads/magazines do photoshop images of bodies and faces, the images should be marked with a 'photoshopped' symbol, perhaps with a rate of how much they have been tweaked.
With the rave surrounding the before-and-afters of Miss Koreas of 2013, the discussion on body image and digital alteration is very unsettling and difficult to dismiss because we the girls are the victims as well as culprits of it all.
