One of my requirements as a journalism major is a course in media ethics. Last night, while doing research for a project due later this week, I came across a research paper entitled 'If Looks Could Kill: Digital Manipulation of Fashion Models'. The paper discussed a study that found most women find digital editing in fashion magazines to be highly unethical. The paper framed the issue as a conflict between the artistic freedoms on the part of fashion photographers and editors and the deleterious impact such images have on the self-image of women.

I haven't read a fashion magazine in, like, forever. It's not that I don't like fashion; it's more that I didn't like what fashion magazines did to me. I could feel fine about myself for weeks on end, but then the second I open a magazine, I start doubting myself - I don't have the right shoes, my hair isn't right, my waist isn't teeny enough, I'm too blotchy, my pores are too big. (As if anyone actually cares about the size of my pores.) So I don't bother. Why pay others to make me feel badly about myself?

But I know a lot of women who don't look at it like that. For instance, I spent a year working at a women's health clinic, surrounded by twenty or so women who were my age or a few years older. I hadn't felt that out of place since high school. I, with my black eyeliner and my Hello Kitty scrubs and my ever-changing stream of novels like Lolita and Foucault's Pendulum, had next to nothing in common with the majority of my coworkers, who browsed fashion magazines for plastic surgery ideas and talked endlessly about their diets. Like I said - out of place. The weird thing was that my coworkers were all really cute girls, yet they were all convinced that they were unattractive.

I know a lot of men whose standards are similarly skewed. If a woman has cellulite, a bit of a belly, hair in unexpected places or less than perfect skin, she's not worthy of attention. I imagine that, in both cases, the increasingly unrealistic images presented to us on TV, in movies and in magazines have a lot to do with it. This stuff is our cultural air. It's there when we go grocery shopping, it's there when we watch TV, it's there when we drive past billboards, and short of pulling a Thoreau and living alone in a cabin in the wilderness of New Hampshire, there's pretty much no way to escape it. It's the reason why women inject poisonous bacteria in their foreheads and silicone in their chests.

It's not just women, either. More men are getting plastic surgery and hair plugs, spending hours at the gym and doing steroids. And of course, who can forget the rise of the metrosexual a few years back? What about manscaping?

No one is immune. The power of images is that strong.

About a year ago I came across a link that throws the whole sad mess in high relief: The Art of Retouching. This site is the portfolio of a professional photo retoucher, and consists of a series of photos that, when you roll your mouse over them, shows the original, untouched photos. The retouched photos - some of which feature celebrities like Alicia Keyes, Halle Berry, Beyonce and Erykah Badu - are vibrant, and the women have flawless skin, curvy, glowy bodies and hair and eyes that are practically Technicolor. Roll your mouse over, and voila! - noses become larger, butts sag, bright blue eyes turn brown. In some photos, tattoos are removed, arms are repositioned and cleavage is amped up. The man may have well built an entire person out of scratch.

It's hard to look at these photos without feeling like you've been had. I mean, everyone knows that photo retouching is used in magazines - no one disputes that. I use it myself - I've converted plain brown dirt to a grassy expanse of lawn, removed entire people from photos and pumped up the color so the sky looks more blue than gray. (However, I could never do what this guy does. From a technical perspective, I have no choice but to bow in awe.) I just don't think many realize how extensive the photo retouching is - I know I certainly didn't understand the full extent of photo retouching until I saw it with my own eyes.

The crazy thing is that it's not as if they are working with raw materials in these photos. Each of these women has already been fussed over by stylists for hours. The lighting and camera angles and poses have been adjusted until they were just so. All of them would probably turn your head if you walked past them on the street. And yet it was still considered necessary to change them.

So what's to be done? I agree with the authors of the earlier mentioned research paper, who suggested education over censorship. See, I get why they use retouched photos in some magazines. The entire concept of fashion and makeup is about artifice. It's about making something look different than it really is, and I don't necessarily think that has to be a bad thing. I do think people need to be aware that no one looks like the models in magazines - including the models.