Photoshop: Our Generations Murderer

When will we stop expecting every girl to embody a perfect blend of sporty, popular, smart and pretty? Photoshop is a method of distorting images displayed in advertising. It gives teenage girls a perception of what one has to look like to be categorised as being beautiful in today’s society. Teenager’s struggles of body self esteem, self-worth, and acceptance is brought out when they look at how perfect and flawless women look in things such as magazines, on television and on billboards and posters. All of the perfection that they see in these elements of the media is photoshopped. It has been giving off a compelling force of pressure against our teenagers to be dangerously skinny and model-like for over 30 long years. The media is mentally and physically killing our children with photoshopped images, and this is why it should be criminalised.

Is true that freedom of speech is important and it is true that the advertising companies have the authority to edit the photos in whichever way they want. However, with authority comes responsibility; therefore the advertising companies have the responsibility to care for their readers health. Freedom of speech is important, but rather than the lives of our precious teenagers? Obviously they are determined enough to ignore the health and wellbeings of teenagers all over the world, for their own greed. They need to wake up and realise that while they are counting their profits, they are actually killing hundreds of millions of teenagers across the world.

After criminalizing photoshop of models and women in advertising, the self-worth of teenage girls and women would sky rocket. According to the Mental Health Foundation's report, "A Generation Under Stress," two in five girls felt worse about themselves after viewing images of models and celebrities in magazines. You’d be a liar to say that you can’t relate to this. Hinshaw, chair of the UC Berkeley psychology department and an expert on child and teenage