According to a recent article in The New York Times, Seventeen magazine has announced that it’s going be more transparent about how it re-touches photos of models. In a pledge to be published n the August issue they promise to “never change girls’ body or face shapes” and to published before-and-after images of the photos on the publication’s Tumblr blog. This development is interesting to communication researchers for at least two reasons.
One is that it reflects long-standing concerns about the effects on female audience members of the largely unachievable, highly retouched images of women that are prevalent in the media. Although the effects are by no means universal (meaning that not everyone is affected, all the time), there is a substantive amount of evidence that exposure to what researchers call “ideal body” media can contribute to lower self-esteem, less body satisfaction, and more disordered eating behaviors among some audience members. Recent reviews of the research literature include a 2010 article by Gemma Lopez-Guimera and colleagues in Media Psychology. Examples of relatively research include an experiment described in a 2006 article by Kristen Harrison and colleagues in Communication Research, which found that women who felt that their own bodies differed from what their peers expected of them tended to constrain their eating after being shown ideal-body images. (Current UMSL students have access to the full-text of these articles, and many others, through the library’s databases.)
The other reason that this is of interest has to do what provoked the publication’s initiative. Why, after all these years of concern, is the magazine taking a more visible stance now? They’re responding, at least in part, to a petition started by 14-year-old named Julia Bluhm. She posted a petition on Change.org in April requesting that the magazine publish an unaltered photo in each issue. It garnered over 84 thousand signatures. How great of an impact this will have on Seventeen content remains to be seen. However, the story does illustrate the power of social media to at least get the attention of media outlets.
