MySpace Archive - Get Naked

Do you like the attention grapping title?

It’s time for one of those late night blogs, when I really should just go to sleep, but see something I connect with and need to highlight it. Having just completed the first of 4 essays I decided to wind down with some late night viewing. A programme 'Dawn gets Naked' caught my attention on the BBCi player, think it’s being repeated several times if you’re interested…

I’m not saying that I’m ready to strip off naked and drive around London on a bus (you have to watch it), but it caught my attention. I think I’m lucky in that I’ve never been particularly self-conscious about my body, yes there are bits I don’t like, in fact I could give you a list. But I’ve never been scared about running around the beach in a bikini or wearing skimpy summer clothes, I don’t feel the need to get a fake tan and spend months on a gruelling diet and exercise regime to get the 'beach body', which you know you’ll only give up after a week and just buy one of those swim suits that holds your stomach in. One bit of the program that really struck was a part on the air brushing of photos. I read a book once, think it was called ’On Beauty’, it was crap mostly but I remember one bit stuck out. One of the main characters, the mother, was portrayed as beautiful, overweight but beautiful, she had tried to protect her daughter by not allowing magazines in the house, but that it had seeped in anyway, through the crack in the door, under the floor and through the skin and had made her daughter hate her body. We all know that photos in magazines are air brushed but we aspire to them anyway, we might think we look good, but then you only need to pick up a magazine to think 'but I’ll never look like that'. Thing is the models don’t look like that either. I hardly buy magazines anymore, mostly because they made me want clothes I couldn’t afford, but now I have another reason, almost every photo in every magazine has been touched up. It makes us aspire to something that isn’t real. Why do we do this to ourselves? Okay just thought, total hypocrite, my profile picture is one that I edited, made it lighter to make my skin look better – changing it.

We’ve probably all seen this video of the Dove advert before, but I think it makes my point better than I do