Did the Cindy Crawford Leak Jolt Millennials Out of Their Subconscious Self-Loathing?
Until last weekend, I thought of myself as the kind of woman who wasn’t affected by how the media portrays women. I thought I was too aware and too savvy to hold myself to standards of beauty that are unreal. Magazines Photoshop everybody and everything. Everyone knows that.
I now realize how stupid it was—and the hubris it took—to imagine that I was above the influence.
It was the leaked, unretouched photo of Cindy Crawford last weekend that shocked me and many others out of our delusion. The photo isn’t the first of its kind, and Crawford didn’t leak it in an attempt to start conversations about body image. Charlene White, a British TV news anchor for ITV News, did.
Intentional or not, the photo went viral. Media outlet after media outlet wrote about how amazing Crawford looked sans Photoshop.
There have been many attempts to end the over-editing of women in media. Jamie Lee Curtis famously appeared in More magazine in 2002 without any retouching. The Dove Real Beauty ad campaign launched in 2004.
For the self-educated in image-retouching commentary, it’s easy to think you’re above the conversation, believing instead how great it is for other women to see positive examples of real bodies. But the Crawford leak was raw and immediate.
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Many members of my generation who grew up in the 90s were surrounded by inspirational posters taped to the cinderblock walls of their elementary school that told them to “Reach for the stars!’’ and “Be Yourself, Because You’re The Best!’’ We are members of the “everyone’s a winner’’ generation: Every girl on her third grade soccer team got a trophy even though they rarely won and she hardly played. We were raised with self-esteem in mind.
Many a well-informed millennial read the American Girl “Body Book’’—The Care and Keeping of You—when she was going through puberty. It reminded her she was beautiful. Some health classes taught segments on the media as it relates to eating disorders. Some teachers preached the importance of positive body image. The more progressive schools held assemblies and brought in speakers to talk about how the media portrays women.
Still, through all of this, these same girls read magazines. They made collages from their mother’s copies of Vogue ; they attached women’s endlessly long legs to pieces of computer paper with Elmer’s glue. They (and the generation before them) brought Cosmo, Elle, Marie Claire, Allure, Lucky, and Teen Vogue to sleepovers.
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The Crawford photo jolted many out of complacent self-judgement. In the picture, Crawford’s stomach isn’t as flat as an ironing board (read: there’s a healthy, small amount of fat on her very strong-looking abs) and her thighs are not the size of toothpicks. They show some cellulite. Her skin tone doesn’t look like a plastic doll’s. And she is radiant.
Marie Claire never printed the photo of Crawford, but this image proved how different a raw image and a Photoshopped version can be. It continued to make the case for how far many of us have fallen down the rabbit hole, comparing ourselves to women who don’t even look like their pictures in real life.
Retouching images of women in magazines and ads sends an insidious message. Despite being raised with an acute awareness of body image, with positive posters on the walls and in their textbooks, many women of Generation Y still internalize the expectations of distorted images.
The fact that this photo of a naturally beautiful woman went viral in such a positive way proves how many had (consciously or not) accepted the idea that they should be pulled as tight as Hannah Davis on the cover of this year’s Sport’s Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.
I, for one, have bookmarked the photo of Crawford. Anytime I find myself slipping down the slide of “why don’t you look like this model in this magazine?’’ I’ll look at it. So thanks, Cindy. Even if you didn’t mean to, you helped.
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