After I graduated from "Choose your own Adventure" books, my primary literary involvement was with comic books. I mainly read Marvel, so “Spider-Man”, “X-Men”, etc. I think I bought a "Batman" once, just to say I owned one. They were fun and brainless reads. A part of me even saw comics as an investment; that in thirty years or so I'd be able to sell them all and retire early, assuming the 3000% appreciation of value of the some older comics (I check ebay every once in a while and all those comics now are not even worth the paper they're printed on...but I still have twenty years to go for the price to shoot up!).
I can remember the exact moment when I realized the fallaciousness of what I was reading. It was an issue of X-Men, and I turned to a page featuring a large drawing of Professor X. Professor X is the X-Men's leader...he is an older man who is without the use of his legs and so confined to a wheelchair. The image was of him sitting in some lab wearing a tight shirt. I was immediately struck by the fact that this crippled man had the body of an Olympian. The guy could have modeled for Abercrombie. I find it inspirational that in his immobilized condition he was able to do daily crunches. You could have scrubbed your laundry on those abs. I thought, "Give me a break!" The comic book world with its idealized human bodies was then shattered by the ridiculousness of what I saw. I stopped reading comic books shortly after (though for multiple reasons).
Comic books are an extreme in distorting reality. In superhero comic books, every female has Barbie's measurements and, as I've mentioned, even a cripple could model briefs. Other forms of media are less cartoonish in their exaggerations yet are still deceptive, and the subtlety makes them even more dangerous. Friends of mine pointed out a bad airbrushing job on a Britney Spears poster that, uh, someone must have placed on my dorm wall because it certainly wasn't mine...right, so anyway…that airbrushing was evident, most other paint work isn't, and there’s a lot out there. We're constantly bombarded with images of beautiful people and now it isn't even enough to have the one-in-a-million genes; you'll never be able to compete with a treated/enhanced photo of a swimsuit model. I can understand the pressure on young girls and how they’ve suffered due to their perception of how they believe society wants them to look. Furthermore, I argue that females are not the only victims of this. The effects of males bombarded with images of these Adonises are increasingly being talked about. Guys are relatively more reluctant to discuss their feelings so in that way I think their concerns have taken a back seat to the girls’. I can't say who deserves more sympathy. As time goes on I think more consequences to both sexes will be brought forth, such as the "reverse anorexia" guys are now diagnosed with (obsessively working out because they think they're too skinny). Advertisers have deep pockets, and I'm sure the pictures of the beautiful people will inundate us even more just so we buy a car or some drink. The prudent course of action, in my opinion, is to recognize that many of these images are not even reality, and that even the untouched ones feature people who are the products of genetic miracles. Documentaries on airbrushing I've heard are also very informative. The image facilities that are presented to us everyday are very real and many of us have been dealing with it our whole lives. Remember He-Man? That guy was jacked.
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