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A Mirror of Another Matter

 I am not very fond of mirrors.

Now, this is not a silica phobia. Nor is it a childhood fear of exploding glass shards that’s blossomed into an adult aversion. I just am not crazy about looking at my own reflection. I mentioned to my lovely wife (whose visage I mind not at all looking at, whether in a mirror or otherwise) just the other day that there were people in olden times (and some even now) who might go their entire lives without ever brushing their hair or thinning their eyebrows or scrutinizing their waistline in front of a reflective surface. Ah, that would be the life!

So it’s with that preamble that I confess a great curiosity in the subject of body image. How we process our view of ourselves. How we build ourselves up or tear ourselves down. How we either avoid the subject entirely or obsess over it endlessly.

Enter American Eagle. Not the big bird Benjamin Franklin famously pooh-poohed in favor of the turkey, but the modern mall clothier, loved by millions of teens and quite a few adults who want to look more like teens. American Eagle Outfitters says it will not use retouched photos of its models for a new lingerie campaign. It will preserve for posterity all so-called imperfections (including those of a posterior nature, one would imagine), ranging from stretch marks to tattoos.

That’s great news, right? We’ve all been complaining for so long about the rampant airbrushing, the tweaking, the manic manipulating of glossy photos in magazines and on websites. It’s about time somebody paid attention! Did the right thing! Showed women everywhere (and men too) what real people look like! What we all should look like!

Or, um, well, maybe not?

Despite the company’s apparent good intentions, research psychologist Peggy Drexler says that this new strategy can be just as damaging to young girls’ self-esteem as the old strategy. She wrote for time.com:

By calling attention to the bodies of their unretouched models, American Eagle is doing exactly what it purports to be rallying against: Drawing attention to women’s figures and all their possible “flaws.” A similar hypocrisy occurred recently when website Jezebel offered $10,000 to anyone who could supply unretouched images from Lena Dunham’s Vogue cover shoot. Under the guise of supporting and defending a “normal size” body, they were, in fact, making a spectacle of it. American Eagle is no different.

Drexler goes on to say:

It’s arguably preferable that campaigns continue the practice of airbrushing, and for teens and women to believe that most photos they see in advertisements and in magazines are enhanced, and couldn’t possibly represent the truth. It’s one thing to understand that you can’t live up to a celebrity ideal, or to the picture on the cover of a magazine—it’s not real anyway. But when the teenage girl still doesn’t live up to the unretouched, natural, “real” women in American Eagle’s ads, how will she view herself then?

And now I’m utterly perplexed. I can honestly see both sides of this. It’s easier to dismiss something as unreal that we all know it is as fake as a Blade Runner android. So that seems like the way to go, then. Let’s just keep using the airbrushes and the PhotoShop thinning techniques and we’ll all end up feeling better about our own normal bodies.

But that kind of unreality is exactly why we have so many problems with this sensitive issue already! So I really would like your weigh-in on this. What path through this murky mess hurts you personally the most? Your kids? What’s the answer? Is there one? Can anybody hold a mirror up to this subject and expose it for what it really is?