Jameela Jamil, AKA Tahani on The Good Place, wrote an opinion piece for the BBC over the weekend in which she explained why she thinks airbrushing, particularly in ads, should be made illegal.
Airbrushing of people in magazines and especially in advertisements shouldn’t be legal. Here I make my case for why I feel so strongly about this. Thanks for the space @bbc https://t.co/LFlDLaQQ3a
— Jameela Jamil ? (@jameelajamil) December 2, 2018
She writes,
“I think it’s a disgusting tool that has been weaponised, predominantly against women, and is responsible for so many more problems than we realise because we are blinded by the media, our culture and our society.”
Her reasons for banning airbrushing are:
- It misleads consumers – if you buy a product because the person in the ad supposedly looks the way they do because of the product, you’re bound to be disappointed when you realise they’ve been airbrushed
- It’s bad for the person being photographed – she explains, “If you see a digitally ‘enhanced’ picture of yourself, you run the risk of becoming acclimatised to that level of flawlessness and it makes it harder for you to accept your actual image”
- It’s bad for the public, especially young women, who are vulnerable to body image issues and things like eating and body image disorders
In a follow-up tweet, Jamil highlights the double standards discussed in her article. Men’s flaws are less likely to be airbrushed away, while women are airbrushed within an inch of their lives to look as young and flawless as possible.
An example of Photoshop being weaponised against women: This is how we portray men in their 50s on magazine covers and women in their 50s. Look at the difference. Men who age are sexy in HD. Women mostly just shouldn’t dare age. Men can celebrate the inevitable, we must fear it. pic.twitter.com/XKykaZuiYf
— Jameela Jamil ? (@jameelajamil) December 2, 2018
There have been many memorable airbrushing fails over the years, including the time GQ Mexico airbrushed out Chrissy Teigen’s nipples:
I have no nipples. I draw them on with sharpies each morning and sometimes I forget. pic.twitter.com/PrwBeM6xNy
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) June 28, 2014
Or the time a magazine gifted Oprah with an extra hand:
Or the time Jezebel acquired unretouched photos of Lena Dunham from her shoot for Vogue:
(If you’re obsessed with celebrity retouching disasters, follow CelebFace on Instagram.)
The worst thing about airbrushing photos of celebrities is that they’re already thinner and more beautiful than the average person, so what message does it send when even their natural looks aren’t deemed ‘good enough’?
Jamil makes a pretty standard feminist argument against airbrushing, and she raises some good points. What she doesn’t do is explain why she feels this is something the law needs to be involved with – criminalisation is a pretty extreme response to something that could probably be dealt with through proper media regulations, and requirements for disclaimers when advertisements and magazines do use airbrushing.
It also only addresses one part of the issue. Young girls can be affected by what they see in magazines and on television, but airbrushing isn’t the only thing that has negative effects. Constantly and exclusively seeing depictions of incredibly thin and gorgeous women (like Jamil herself) who have a team of hair and makeup artists to make them look as good as possible before they leave the house can’t be good for anyone’s self-esteem, either.
Nor can things like the Victoria’s Secret fashion show that celebrate a very narrow body ideal and deliberately exclude anyone who falls outside of that. Or jokes made at the expense of fat people that crop up in almost every single comedy show, because they’re so normalised that nobody thinks twice about making them.
Letting female celebrities look more like themselves in photoshoots and on magazine covers would be a great start to combatting the plethora of problems contributing to young women’s body image issues. But the buck doesn’t stop with photo retouchers: it should include makeup artists, facialists, dermatologists, personal trainers, and plastic surgeons, too.
Nothing in the past18 months since I finally had the clout to refuse
— Jameela Jamil ? (@jameelajamil) December 2, 2018
Entire industries rely on women hating their bodies, and the women of Hollywood (and, indeed, any women with influence) could and should be doing more to challenge those industries and the power they have over vulnerable young women.
Jamil’s article, and the fact that she hasn’t allowed photos of herself to be airbrushed since she “finally [got] the clout to refuse” are a good first step, but airbrushing is only one facet of a much larger problem.
Banning airbrushing, but not improving representation of diverse people and bodies, and not challenging how society talks about things like dieting, weight loss, and thinness, is like cutting off one of the Hydra’s heads only to watch ten more grow back in its place.