I usually try to steer clear of topics that you hear about too often. The ones that just straight preach the whole argument/point/social commentary over and over again, one of those being the concept of body image and the unrealistic goals the media sets for society.
But yesterday I was doing something that I rarely do, which was look at the “#trending” box on Facebook (you really can find out some interesting stuff there, by the way--who knew?) and I saw a social media blurb that read something along the lines of “photoshop,” “magazine cover,” and “called out.” So, I clicked on it, because I love looking at ridiculous photoshop fails and laughing about how stupid people can be sometimes thinking they can get away with that kinda thing.
Turns out Zendaya had recently appeared on the front cover of a magazine, photoshopped. You think, yeah that’s normal, magazines photoshop stuff all the time and screw up, what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that Zendaya said something about it. Imagine being her, the 19 year-old up-and-coming superstar that has the body of a very thin Hollywood youngster. Nothing can get much better about her figure because it’s probably the closest thing to the epitome of #bodygoals that most people dream to obtain. So imagine having her body, which, again, has less than nothing wrong with it, and picking up the magazine that you’re featured on the cover on. Super exciting! Woohoo...I’m on a cover of a magazine!
And then you realize that’s not you at all, that that can’t be you because that’s not your body. You promptly get really confused because, there you are, but at the same, there you aren’t. That’s your face, right, but it looks like they stuck your head on a different body.
Now the “body” they stuck her on is really funny. Here’s why: if you take a close look, you’ll notice that the width of her hips is smaller than the width of her head. The black jacket that she has on is perfectly straight along her right side with hardly any wrinkles or lumps in the apparent leather. The humor in that is that both of those things are impossible.
When was the last time that you wore any piece of clothing and it was spotlessly smooth and fit your body in such a way that laid out nice and flat and perfect? The answer is never, people, you can’t try and argue that with me. It’s physics. It’s probably not (I’m not a science major) but you get the point. And the whole thing about her hips being smaller than her head? That’s definitely not possible. And that’s just plain biology, I know that for a fact.
Zendaya took it upon herself to post the original, untouched picture of the cover on her instagram. Wouldn’t you know, it looks better than the Photoshopped version. She actually looks like a real person!
This is what’s wrong with the portrayal of bodies these days; they are changed and manipulated in such a way that they become unreal. Not just unrealistic, altogether not real. We’re left desiring things that flat out do not exist because they are physically impossible. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we exercise, no matter how healthy we eat, how vegan we go, how much we try and starve ourselves even, we will not ever get our hips to be narrower than our own skulls. And that is why this whole operation is a scam and needs to be stopped.
A large media struggle today is whether to depict reality or to create reality. Because both can happen. But to a certain extent, the creation of reality becomes dangerous because ultimately it really isn’t reality; it can’t really happen in real life, to real people. There’s a difference between altering reality and noting it as an altercation, and altering reality and claiming it to be reality.
We as a society are heading in the right direction here, though. The entire body image movement that is taking place right now is a sign of that; the fact that Zendaya posted the original image of herself is a sign of that.
What we need to remember, however, is that we are the ones who call the shots. It’s the people that determine what is beautiful. Somehow we’ve gotten ourselves into the mess of beauty by Photoshop, but because we got ourselves in it, we can get ourselves out of it. We define beauty, beauty doesn’t define us.
