Better laws can help us fight the 'body-image pandemic'

It will not come as a shock if I point out that we all feel a need to belong. People want to be accepted for who they are, as well as see themselves reflected in the other imagery and norms around them. And in the 2020s, this applies as much to the virtual realm as it does “in real life”, as the two are no longer two separate domains but encapsulate our whole lives.

But feeling accepted and happy with oneself is impossible if every image one sees is altered in a way that is impossible to replicate in real life. Anyone who says that people should just ignore images because they are not real is denying the truth about how human beings operate. The range of people visible in popular culture very quickly becomes what is considered the norm. Those people who are celebrated – particularly when it comes to their looks – are the crystallisation of what society deems as the “best” or the “most beautiful”.

The fact that these definitions of best and beautiful change over time and in different cultures (sometimes looks are the polar opposite in one era compared to another!) is almost beside the point. What is relevant is what is happening now. And some of the most prominent images that surround us today, acting as a kind of tyranny on people’s self-perceptions and confidence, are often impossible to attain. This has, for a long time now, been creating a pandemic of mental health breakdown of unprecedented scale.

Of course, many of these images are manipulated. Sometimes they are adjusted by individuals themselves in a bid to “fit in” or reach the impossible just to appear “normal”. Apps facilitate this by offering to adjust or tune your face to be more beautiful. But who has the moral authority to decide what beauty is anyway? This paradigm should be setting off alarm bells when individuals and companies are altering images and making commercial profit from it.

It is no small matter. And it certainly isn’t about women or men feeling worried about their muffin tops or a few crow’s lines. It is far deeper, more scarring and more endemic. There are a lot of numbers illustrating this, and they are all worth examining because they are all shocking.

One in five adults in western countries feels shame about their body. In teenagers, it is one in three, according to a YouGov survey by the Mental Health Foundation in March 2019.

In another survey carried out in the UK a few years ago, more than a third (35 per cent) of seven-to-10-year-old girls agreed women are rated more on their appearance than their abilities. Thirty-six per cent said they were made to feel their looks were their most important attribute. More than two thirds of girls, 69 per cent, aged just seven to 11 felt like they were not good enough. More than half of girls aged six to eight thought their ideal weight was thinner than their actual size at the time. By age seven, one in four children have tried dieting.

Dr Luke Evans, a UK MP, is putting forward a bill to Parliament to introduce legislation requiring social media influencers to display a warning logo on digitally altered photos. A Girlguiding survey has found that 61 per cent of adults and 66 per cent of children feel negative, or very negative, about their body image "most of the time". The same survey says that 51 per cent of seven-to-10-year-old girls feel "very happy" with how they look, but by the ages of 11 to 16, when most start to use social media, this drops to just 16 per cent. In 2017, 88 per cent of girls aged 11 to 21 said they wanted adverts that had been airbrushed to be upfront and say so.

Eating disorders and body dysmorphia have risen during the pandemic after already increasing in the years before, which is the other reason it's become so timely. Women seeking plastic surgery due to the “Zoom effect” of wanting to change how they look based on the face adjustment features of video calling and of seeing themselves on screen a lot more has also risen. Dr Evans is also a GP, and he has seen a rise in eating disorders and use of steroids.

The Body Image Bill is gathering international attention. It proposes that if an image has been edited for commercial purposes, or if somebody with considerable influence has edited an image they are being paid to post, the image should carry a disclaimer.

It is an important stake in the ground. As it focuses on some specific tangible parameters it has a strength in being tangible and enforceable. It is ever more urgent that we tackle the mental health crisis of which digitally altered images is part of.

Of course this is part of wider social toxicity that since essentially the beginning of civilisation has thrived on women’s self-doubt and misery.

It is shocking that people and companies should be profiting financially at the expense of people’s self-esteem, mental health and sense of belonging in society. It is unacceptable, and we should all be pushing for such digitally altered images to be identified so we can be aware up front that this is not how normal human bodies look. They are making money from it. But it is everyone – especially children – who are paying the price.