Glitch Art: The “perfect” woman does not exist
Too fat? Big nose? Frizzy fair? Lips too small? Hips too wide? Unfortunately, in our culture looks matter. We see models who look too perfect. Why? Because they’re not actually real.
Most models are Photoshopped in some way. They’re shown in advertisements, not in their natural form, but edited to where the shape of their body is actually changed to look thinner, or have bigger lips, and other things like that. If you look at photos of before and after Photoshopped advertisements, that are revealed like this one:
Even small changes like shown above, make women feel insecure. Allowing us to think these women presented in magazines have no imperfections themselves, which even further leads the common woman to believe she shouldn’t have any either. One Dove advertisement, eight years ago, revealed to many what really happens to some photos in advertisements. The video goes through one models photo shoot. When the photo is chosen the editor elongates her neck, makes her lips and eyes bigger, and makes her jaw lines more pronounced. This happens to photographs of models constantly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
After we are bombarded by photos of women who are literally too good to be true, many women believe that they should be this impossible version of perfect too.
Lets look back. Marilyn Monroe, as famously known, was an actress and sex symbol of her time. Her voluptuous figure was, and still is, criticized even though she only weighed about 118 to 140 lbs, according to Monroe’s dressmaker. If you examine measurements of her body, one can clearly picture her beautiful hourglass figure, with her bust size (35–37inches), waist (22–23 inches) and hips (35–36 inches).
However, some think her natural figure was “fat.” English Actress and model , Elizabeth Hurley, said, “I’ve always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that fat,” after looking at the exhibit of Monroe’s wardrobe. She also said, “I went to see her clothes in the exhibition, and I wanted to take a tape measure and measure what her hips were. (laughter) She was very big,” she finished saying to Allure magazine.
Many people wrongly say Monroe was a size 12 or 16, but she obviously was not. So why do so many people think this way? That’s because our eyes cannot avoid the constant size 0’s and 2’s that are in Victoria Secret ads, commercials, and advertisements on buses, to the point of where we think that those sizes are quote-on-quote normal.
So does this overload of thin and “perfect” models alter the way we look at size? In my own opinion, yes, it has to. If we constantly see these extremely thin bodies and airbrushed faces, how can we avoid feeling “fat” if you’re only a size 12 or 16?
We must realize that no matter what your size (as long as it is a healthy size) or what you look like, you are beautiful. Everyone has different features which makes us all unique, and beautiful; no Photoshop needed.
For a class, I was assigned to make a glitch art, which is purposefully changing an image, video, or sound to make it seem like it has a coding error, bug, or glitch. For my glitch assignment, I decided to manipulate a picture of Marilyn Monroe. What this represents is that even a woman, with the perfect hourglass figure was seen as not “perfect” enough to be a model. If in our time, Monroe probably would have been manipulated, waist slimmed down, thighs trimmed, and most likely other things to give her the “model” body too.
