Step in the right direction: U.S. ad group bans cosmetic photoshopping

By David McElroy · December 18, 2011

I detest the “beauty industry.” Some of the most attractive women who’ve ever been in my life have been terribly insecure about their looks, and I put a large portion of the blame on companies who peddle images of impossible-to-attain perfection in hopes of selling products that can never deliver.

I understand the companies’ motivation. I don’t want to legally ban them from selling what they’re selling. I don’t even want to ban the methods they use to sell their products. But I am happy with a small step in the right direction which came this week, when the advertising industry’s self-regulating group issued a ban on the use of Photoshop in ads for cosmetic products.

This won’t stop many abuses. You’ll still be seeing impossibly perfect men and women in fashion photos and in every other kind of ad. And you’ll still be seeing hideously thin models who can’t be real and would be dead if they were. But at least in the field of cosmetics, if a product is shown a certain way, you can be reasonably sure that it’s at least theoretically possible that it can do what’s shown.

In many of the “before and after” shots I see of models, I recognize the “perfection” in the “after” shots, but I’m still drawn to the “before” shots. There’s something plastic and fake — like a Barbie doll — about the image that’s being sold to society today as beauty. Even though the damage is self-inflicted by people who believe the image, it’s hard not to fall victim to it, because those plastic images are pushed at us as reality in every form of media imaginable. Take a look at this video report in which a reporter for a diet publication allows herself to be photographed and photoshopped.

The most beautiful woman I’ve ever known had minor physical flaws that she was horribly self-conscious about. A tiny spot on her face caused her to learn to pose in ways that hid that little “imperfection.” Her weight was a bit higher than what the “beauty myth” says is ideal. In other words, she was a very normal human being in those ways — who happened to be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. But she couldn’t see that. All she saw were the flaws, not the perfect beauty that made her real.

The world today is filled with women like that. Some of them are stunningly beautiful, like the woman I just mentioned. Others are more plain or moderately attractive, but still attractive in their own right. They’ve been made to feel that they’re defective, because they’re held up to a standard that only exists in the minds of fantasy artists manipulating pictures inside of a computer.

Most real women have curves and “padding.” Most real women have flaws and imperfections. I wish we as a society could learn to accept and appreciate what reality can actually deliver in the flesh and blood. I don’t object to makeup, simply because it’s something that makes most women feel better about themselves. But I do object to showing them a standard that they can’t possibly attain.

The beauty products brand Dove created a groundbreaking marketing campaign about five years ago that played on this theme. Take a look at the 60-second video below that shows the evolution a model goes through from entering a studio until her face is on a billboard.

Personally, I’d take the original version of the woman any day. She seems real. The face on the billboard looks fake. Women like that don’t exist. It’s time to accept that — and embrace the natural beauty of the women in our lives. They’ll be happier and so will we.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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