Let's be real for a minute here - I am a 22 year old girl and I can honestly say that I have never met a single female, of almost any age, who hasn't worried about their weight or how they looked. I have met grandmother's who've told me to watch what I eat because once I turn 50 or I will "grow out" as is "prone to our race". I've met six year old ballerinas who watch their diet with more self-control than a vicar in a strip club. I do not have a single female friend who hasn't called themselves fat, or admitted that they are self-conscious about how they look. And why? Because we live in a world where we are consistently told we aren't pretty enough or thin enough.

 

Advertising employs the same kind of method as the sleazy men who refer to themselves as "pick-up artists". Negging. Many of you will still be young enough so as not to have actively encountered this in your day-to-day life yet, but is essentially boils down to this - tear down a girl's self-esteem until she feels so bad about herself that she'll do whatever you want. And oh boy, is advertising the grand master of negging.

 

"What does advertising tell us today, about women? It tells us, just as it did 10 and 20 and 30 years ago, that is what's most important about women is how we look," says Jean Kilbourne, a woman who is internationally recognised for her work looking at the image of women in advertising, in her series Killing Us Softly. "Women learn from a very early age that we must spend enormous amounts of time, energy and, above all, money striving to achieve [the] ideal and feeling ashamed and guilty when we fail. And failure is inevitable, because the ideal is based on absolute flawlessness."

 

So while Photoshop is the ultimate makeup tool, even the women in the pictures aren't able to look like the 'ideal'. And if you thought it was just print advertisements that were the problem then you'd be horribly wrong. While it's estimated that almost 75% of women on your television screen are already under weight, there exists technology able to edit moving media such music videos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don't you feel lied to? Doesn't that make you feel angry? Because it should. The UK has the highest rate of eating disorders in all of Europe with figures showing 1 in every 100 women has a clinically diagnosed one, but 1 in every 6 women regularly skip meals in an effort to control their weight. In the last decade alone the number of women with a diagnosed eating disorder has increased by 15% and the number of males increased by 27%. Because of things like this there was a global proposal created in December of 2011, to encourage mandatory disclaimers when bodies were manipulated in media.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It would be easy to blame the rise of eating disorders over the last few decades on the difference between the "ideal" woman of the 1950's, how that changed, and the what is considered the height of female beauty now, but you'd have to overlook some pretty glaring facts. Marilyn Monroe, for all her old school glamour, is generally used as an example of how "real women" can still be beautiful at an average size, but if Monroe were alive today she'd be about a size 8 in UK clothes. Other than being a bit shorter, she has similar measurements to actress Liz Hurley, a woman who while technically does not have an eating disorder has arguably an obsessive and dysfunctional relationship with food. The women used to sell us things today aren't getting any smaller, they are just getting edited away into scary barbie-human hybrids and multiplying in number.

 

The girl to the right is just another example of this. Let's call her Jessica. Jessica is very pretty and has the kind of body that would see her used in advertisements that you wouldn't consider sexy because she looks quite young, can pass for a normal person, and is not blatantly a model. Think tween products. But unlike actual human beings Jessica is in fact, five different people. Photographer Danielle Helm took the bits and pieces of five different girls, mixed in a splash of Photoshop as the magical cover-up that can turn even an ugly stepsister into a Cinderella, and presented us with one of the Frankenstien's monster of "ideal" women. And the most messed up thing is that when shown this picture the majority of us will still think she is "OK" looking.

 

The largest group of people with eating disorders are young girls, specifically those of you aged between 15 and 19 years old. And 6 out of 10 of all of us women can't stand out bodies. It's not even that we don't like them or are slightly unhappy with how we look, it's that we actively hate them for not looking like we are told they are meant to.The media will trick you into thinking that you aren't good enough, and encourage you to take up less space in the world. It's an emotionally abusive relationship.

 

The sad truth of it is that this isn't going to change any time soon because billions of dollars depend on us hating ourselves. So you need to look out for you. Make sure you eat enough, and make sure you eat healthy, and every now and then have a cookie the size of your face because really you should live to eat, not eat to live. Give yourself a break, you'll be much happier in the long run for it.