Almost exactly a year ago, Lib Dem MPs Jo Swinson and Lynne Featherstone were among those in the party’s Real Women group leading the campaign to “Ban airbrushing in children’s adverts”, a view later endorsed by an independent Home Office report.
They’ve been joined in their campaign now by Girlguiding UK, which is today launching a petition to introduce compulsory labelling on airbrushed images.
Jo comments:
I am delighted that Girlguiding UK is taking up this issue. I co-founded the Campaign for Body Confidence out of concern that people of all ages are feeling so much pressure over their body image – especially young girls.
“There is plenty of scientific evidence that being exposed to so many unrealistic images in the media can be harmful to people’s health and wellbeing. We need to make girls feel confident about their own body and to help them realise that manipulated images are unrealistic and untrue. Girls need to stop being encouraged to aspire to the unreachable as they will only become more and more unhappy in the process.”
And Lynne, who is now Liberal Democrat Equalities Minister, added:
The Girl Guides have done an incredible amount of work over recent years with their annual ‘attitude surveys’ and their most recent survey showed that girls as young as ten are worried about their weight. I have sent them a message of support.”
You can read Lynne’s blog-post, ‘Body Confidence – Girl Guides’, here.
19 Comments
Good on them.
Seconded. Real Women was one of the best, overarching policies we have ever passed, and like our consumer-rights papers, seemed to be unique to us in really understanding what is going on, and what is important for freedom.
I thnk airbrushing pictures is the least of these womans worries.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/04/government-shelves-domestic-violence-scheme
‘ . . own bodies . . ‘ NOT ‘own body’ – each girl has a separate body!
I think that this (and other articles I’ve read elswhere) unfairly place all the emphasis on the individual girl’s view of their own body. This seems to be ignoring the fact that society in general, male and female, are having their views of normality and beauty distorted, and that it is more their opinions and attitudes to women and girls that affects teir view of themselves than seeing a picture in a magazine.
Just my opinion.
hmm, excuse the poor grammar and typo’s in the above post 😉
This campaign is foolish and, perhaps more to the point, illiberal. If Labour had come up with something like this it would be condemned out of hand as authoritarian lunacy.
I know people who are anxious about their body image because they feel they are *too thin*, and quite frankly all this “real women” nonsense we hear these days is guilty of the very thing it claims to oppose – it’s usually more concerned with abusing thin or beautiful women than offering positive images of other women.
Such a law would do very little for the “body image” of the models concerned, who would likely find the government-imposed captions humiliating.
The freezing of child benefit is a bigger worry to most women than a magazine telling them to be a size 8.
While the media obsession with zero sized women needs to be counted there is a much more pressing issue that Featherstone isn’t saying much about; domestic abuse and the coalitions regressive, pro-abuser policies. Didn’t Clegg describe her as “thick” during his infamous easyjet flight? She certainly sounded it when she said praised Christina Hendricks character, Joan Holloway, in mad men as the idea shape as Hendricks only achieved her shape through corsets and padding.
Excellent campaign. I long for the day when top fashion designers no longer regard a size 14 as fat.
So boys are allowed to be fat? No gender inequality there, then
When she was trying to take the Hornsey and Wood Green seat, Ms Featherstone regularly distributed her four-page tabloid. So far, so good. It was, of course, nominally News from the Liberal Democrats”, or Focus, or whatever.
I once went through a copy and found that images of or naming of Ms Featherstone exceeded (by a fair handful and a bit) those of “Jesus Christ” in the Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles combined. So, no “airbrushing” of “advertising” there, either.
Meanwhile, in her own blog, Ms Featherstone has referred to her weight problems. So, still no possible self-flagellation or image problem yet.
I shall now await these factual statements being censored on grounds of being “personally abusive”, unlike the snide corrections of grammar above. Anyway make each/any [delete as appropriate] girl feel confident about her own body might be neater.
This idea of banning “airbrushing” in advertisements targeted at under 16 year-olds and the compulsory labelling of airbrushed images is, in a word, insane. I don’t really know where to start with the idea… have many things to say, so I apologise if I go on a bit… 🙂
First off, these days the technique is called digital-retouching. Airbrushing is an old, outdated term that hasn’t been used in the digital industry for over 15 years. This should tell you that airbrushing has been going on for years – without any complaint that I can recall. Yes, the concept did exist before photoshop! 🙂 But I suppose in those days it was more of a learned skill and not done by someone who thinks they know what they’re doing just because they have managed to download a dodgy copy of Adobe Creative Suite.
One thing that make me wonder about the apparent link between retouched image and girls’ health and well-being, is the fact that obesity rates – especially children – have shot up over the past decade. So if girls are striving to be so ‘perfect’ then why are so many getting fat? I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea that the obsession to be perfect (caused by retouched images) leads to low self-esteem, which leads to depression which causes people to over-eat and end up becoming overweight. As I am sure most people understand that there are many, many factors and circumstances that can lead to such a situation.
Additionally, why have so many girls got in it into their heads that they have to be perfect anyway? Surely, if there is an issue, then this is it – not the thing they are seeing as the definition of perfection? You could argue that, from a very early age, young girls are conditioned into being pretty and beautiful. Is it now immoral to dress a girl up as a princess because it is impossible for her to attain that? Furthermore, you have cartoons and movies such as Snow White and most other sickly-sweet Disney crap that must – if retouching is so harmful – also have a negative influence on the expectations and perceptions of how a woman should look.
I suppose at this stage I should come clean and admit retouching is a big part of my job. I deal with hundreds of images every week and I can assure you that every single image we get from the photographer is digitally altered in some way – either for colour, content, or both. Some are massively altered, while some are only tweaked.
Most images I work on are of inanimate objects but a number are of humans – some even females! Retouching and alterations aren’t done for any sinister, nefarious reason – it is merely to make an image more suitable to the purpose it is meant for. As you can imagine, a design can change many, many times during the course of its development, so having the ability to change an image without a re-shoot is totally necessary. Another important use of retouching, especially in these days of efficiency and cost-cutting, is to be able to take one photo and alter it to have many versions.
Anyway, I digress… so how are they going to implement this ‘law’? There are millions and millions of images already in circulation that design agencies, printers, etc. have access to – whether in their archives or via stock image libraries. How will anyone know if these images have been altered? The whole logistics of enforcing this are totally unworkable.
Also – as I am sure other people will mention, where does it stop? Make-up? Lighting? What about images of woman who have had cosmetic surgery? Does that give girls an unattainable ideal to live up to? I could go on…
Lastly, for now anyway, I have to say that the whole idea of banning things in such an punitive manner is against the idea of Liberalism. Obviously everyone has their own ideas an opinions of what it stands for, but I have always though of it as freedom, not only to make your own choices but also to be responsible for them. Blaming retouching for this problem can be seen as a part of the ‘not my fault – X made me do it’ attitude that seems to have poisoned the minds of most people. Liberty isn’t a one-way door…
Touchy-feely, Mickey Mouse, nanny- state, something-must-be-done horse-shit. Legislating for the happiness of little fat girls? Really?
Swinson and Featherstone should have joined New Labour. They’d have been much more at home there.
IainM: “Swinson and Featherstone should have joined New Labour.”
Come off it, New Labour were never this bad.
Coming in the same week that Bob Russell appointed himself as the Job Centres’ answer to Mary Whitehouse, I’m starting to wonder exactly what sort of “libertarianism” it is that Lib Dem MPs subscribe to.
I welcome this move and do not consider it illiberal at all. A ban on airbrushing / retouching children’s advertisements (and compulsory labelling for other advertisements) would merely complement the existing stringent laws against misleading advertising. I used to work in this area as a consumer lawyer at the OFT and (even though it is accepted market practice and has not been subject to regulatory challenge) there is a good argument that any retouching of a model’s image in an advertisement is unlawful. Using Snow-White in an advert would not be misleading, as she is clearly a cartoon character, but using a manipulated image of a person is likely to be misleading unless the retouching would be obvious to the average member of the target audience (e.g. the average girl aged 10-14).
And on a moral level, what is the social harm in insisting that advertisers use unmanipulated images in children’s advertisements? I can see that this may lead to the adverts being very slightly less effective but surely this commercial interest would be strongly outweighed by the public interest.
“We need to make girls feel confident about their own body…”
…whether they like it or not!
“I welcome this move and do not consider it illiberal at all.”
Any form of censorship is surely illiberal, and ought to have a very strong reason for it. In this case, it’s highly debatable whether this “airbrushing” is the cause of any problem at all, let alone a problem big enough to warrant legislation.
“And on a moral level, what is the social harm in insisting that advertisers use unmanipulated images in children’s advertisements?”
Well one consequence of such a move would be that girls with blemishes or any other kind of physical imperfection would immediately find it very difficult to get modelling work – which is kind of the opposite effect to the one intended.
Besides, any unnecessary censorship is certainly “social harm” in my eyes.
It isn’t illiberal to legislate against businesses misleading their customers in the pursuit of profit. It’s in everyones interest to reduce as much as is feasible any distortion of price signals.
James S: “It isn’t illiberal to legislate against businesses misleading their customers in the pursuit of profit.”
No, but then that isn’t what this story is about…