Who's with me?
Why is Rachael Leigh Cook up in (flabby) arms? In defense of airbrushing
Rachael Leigh Cook likens air brushing to a crime.
And Geena Davis is on board.
But is making life better looking in the supermarket checkout line really sobad?
The Creative Coalition is taking dead aim at air brushing.
Shouldn't parents and not magazines be teaching young girls about body image?
Grocery shopping is hard: the bright lights, overeager air conditioning, rules prohibiting sampling jelly beans. So the last thing we need is to see too much junk in the trunk on a magazine cover in the checkout aisle.
The bangin' bods, brushed up boobs and beautiful brows are a breath of fresh air during the daily grind of self-checkout loneliness.
All that would change if Rachael Leigh Cook has her way. Cook recently joined Geena Davis at the 2010 Healthy Media for the Youth Summit in Washington D.C. for the Girls Scouts of the USA and The Creative Coalition to address body image issues for young girls.
"I think it's an absolute travesty that young women are seeing what the media is feeding them," Cook told Fox News on the subject of airbrushing. She continued:
It breaks my heart to be part of an industry and part of a machine that really pushes out these images and propagates these really terrible standards that are false. Nothing that you see is real, even if you look at what looks like a candid photo of someone, anything can be done. It is false advertising and false advertising is a crime, so why isn't this a crime? I'm just up in arms about it."
I hear that girls go through a lot of trouble reconciling media's idealized portrayal of women with their own bodies' self-worth. But on a basic level, it's a parent's responsibility to educate children about the reality of celebrities depicted on magazines. Any adolescent is capable of understanding that the covers of Cosmopolitan and People are edited to resemble an unattainable level of beauty.
If we have the technology to create a more effective piece of advertising, the entertainment industry should capitalize on it. Would you not use a navigation device because it compromises your ability to learn how to read a paper map?
Utilizing airbrushed images can help an actor or model professionally, and the product in itself can be considered a craft — a point which Cook admits: "It's just all a complete illusion and maybe it should be viewed as art, the way art isn't real. The way that a picture of a rose can be beautiful, but it's not a real rose."
Artists have been idealizing the human form since antiquity. Did glorified visions of goddesses make young ancient Greek girls feel sorry for themselves?
That Cook suggests airbrushing is an absolute crime even infringes on the notion of freedom of speech. Bust most importantly, should we be taking advice from a person who's career peaked with The Babysitter's Club and She's All That?
