France has introduced new legislation banning excessively thin models, saying they require medical certificates to prove that they are healthy. Another measure, due in the autumn, requires the labelling of retouched images in magazines, adverts and websites (with the words photographie retouchée). Failure to comply would incur fines and jail sentences.
These measures follow examples set by Italy, Spain and Israel (not the UK), to prevent the promotion of unrealistic ideas of beauty and could only be viewed as a positive development, not least because Paris is one of the leading fashion capitals. However, while protection for models and other young females is always welcome, it serves us well to remember that this is one area that never stops finding new ways to be complicated.
Pressure on girls and young women doesn’t just emanate from the fashion or magazine industries, but from myriad sources, including home (for instance, a hypercritical or perma-dieting parent), powerful role models (the usually top-value Kate Moss spouting the drivel: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”), and the eternal teen cluster-bomb of self-doubt and peer-pressure.
Even with the new French legislation there appears to be two separate issues. The thinness/health of actual working models and the altering/faking of images for public consumption. Where modelling medical certificates are concerned, it would need constant monitoring (guarding against, say, medics being paid to churn them out). As for labelling retouched images, it seems to be both a good idea but also ludicrously out of date. By all means, have them marked (if only to force the industries to self-regulate), but most people are aware of digital retouching. In fact, not only are people aware, they’re doing it for themselves.
Pretty much everyone has access to Photoshop-style tools on computers and phones. They’re considered toys; even small children play with filters for fun. Barely a week goes by without widespread mockery of some celebrity’s “Photoshop-fail” (an over-thinned limb or the tell-tale sign of a distorted background). With public access to previously hush-hush industry tools, the “fiction of perfection” has been demystified. While photo-manipulation remains an important concern, it feels like something of a anxiety from the past – people are less fooled now. Basically, young people are still bombarded with images of others looking “perfect”, but most of them know why.
We’ve all wised up, which is good news, right? Certainly, this development seems as helpful and positive as any amount of legislation. Not that it solves all body issues, and not only among young females – new statistics say that food disorders among boys have risen by a third. The bombardment of idealised images is still going to work its way through and make its mark. Nor does pressure about the “impossible body” always concern thinness. Young males wanting to be gym-buff could feel an opposite pressure to bulk up.
Then there are lesser known food disorders, such as orthorexia or anorexia athletica, where people unhealthily obsess over weight under the guise of health and fitness. While people are entitled to monitor their fitness progress, increasingly I notice female celebrities and ordinary women fixated by becoming as tiny as possible, as much as they ever did on fad-diets, presumably thinking that wearing gym bras or running shorts disguises their obvious obsession with their weight. There’s also the rise in plastic surgery procedures even among people far too young to worry about ageing.
All of which makes me wonder: in an era when digital fakery isn’t enough anymore and is considered old hat, are people going to feel even more pressure to do it (Be thin! Be perfect!) for real? Maybe not, but, ultimately, everybody needs to remember that, while the pressures that affect body image are never simple, nor are they constant.