+ Look But Don’t Touch
Alesha Dixon of Mis-Teeq fame’s documentary about the perils of retouching in the media and its influence on contemporary perceptions of beauty aired as part of BBC3’s Beauty Season this Monday. Her persistence in investigating the increasingly narrow ‘acceptable’ norms of ideal female beauty highlighted just how artificial the images we see every day the media are. Declaring it as her ‘mission’ to convince a glossy magazine to put her on the cover without a single Photoshop trick, I couldn’t help thinking that discussion of female beauty needs a ruthless debate that exceeds Alesha’s focus on the industry’s airbrushing of pimples and skimming of thighs and bingo arms. Take a look at most television shows and magazines and you will see a wave of identikit female presenters and models who are often hard to distinguish between.
How many TV shows aimed at young women can you think of that are hosted by women size12+ and that challenge conventional norms of beauty? The females in the public eye that appear to excel in their careers are mostly blonde-haired, waif-like and do very little to represent more than 5% of the female population… While documentaries such as Look But Don’t Touch should be commended in their exploration of representations of female beauty, there are several points about the show that reveal the British audience are once again crying out for a show that truly delves into this issue. 
Cheryl Cole, the stick-thin Girls Aloud member (who, it must be mentioned, seems to have gained an exponential amount of tabloid inches in proportion to the number of inches her waist shrinks to) was interviewed by Alesha about the unrealistic expectations that the media places on young girls. Stuart Jeffries, on the Guardian’s TV & Radio Blog, remarked that:
Yesterday, incidentally, Cole topped a poll by a slimming-aid firm to find Britain’s “ultimate fantasy body”.
Surely I’m not alone in finding the documentary rather hypocritical in choosing the very stunning Cheryl to voice her concerns over the perils of airbrushing in adverts?! Firstly, the camera quite clearly captures Cheryl as a flawless beauty whose tiny frame quite evidently fails to represent an average teenage woman’s body?
Time and time again it appears that the majority of men surveyed in various questionnaires about the ideal woman favour curvier women over the boyish frames of supermodels and the like. It is interesting then that women nevertheless feel that to be attractive and sexy they must undergo a never-ending battle to lose weight and tone themselves to perfection… I am not damning skinny women seeing as I myself am a size 8, but it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that the real reason women such as Victoria Beckham are (seemingly) adored by young females is because of the power that becoming skinny has endowed upon such public figures. When in the Spice Girls Victoria Beckham was arguably never the centre of attention, but the second she bagged a famous footballer and her body started to shrink she was worshipped by the tabloids.
Can our society’s ideals of female beauty ever shift back to some degree of normality? Liz Jones, ex-editor of a glossy fashion magazine, ended up having to leave her job because of her attempt to inject some normality into magazine covers again.
When did you last see someone bright on the cover of a magazine? When did you last see Zadie Smith on a magazine? [...] They’re all vacuous and vacant.
If the publishing companies in charge of women’s magazines are so desperate to maintain high sales figures, why are they continually attempting to sell a product which on the whole results in lowering the inner happiness and satisfaction of its impressionable young female readers? It intrigues me to think that those in charge won’t attempt to market a product that holistically promotes well-being in its readers and embraces the reality of women’s bodies. Sadly, maybe it’s because most young women truly buy into the idea that the answer to a successful life (both professionally and privately) lies in trying to fit into a very narrow set of parameters of beauty.
