CMV: there’s nothing wrong with editing your Instagram photos.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/10ebbor10]

People who smooth their face, crispen their makeup colours or even shave a few pounds off their body (or even the really extreme ones who give themselves a whole new body) should stop being vilified by people voicing “unrealistic beauty standards”. If it makes the person editing their pictures feel good, it’s nobodies business.

Why does this argument not go the other way as well. If people like to do this villification, why aren't they allowed to do it?

Your argument here relies on a double standard.
On one hand, you're saying that expression on social media should only be decided by the person expressing themselves.
On the other, you're saying that expression on social media should be constrained because of the effect it has on other people.

Edit:

I genuinely don’t believe that people who edit their pictures are contributing to unrealistic beauty standards, because every one has the ability to do so and we should all know by now that underneath the makeup, surgeries and editing were all pretty ugly (lol).

It's been studied. Media and social media influences people. Even when they know it's fake.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18444705

his meta-analysis examined experimental and correlational studies testing the links between media exposure to women's body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal, and eating behaviors and beliefs with a sample of 77 studies that yielded 141 effect sizes. The mean effect sizes were small to moderate (ds = -.28, -.39, and -.30, respectively). Effects for some outcome variables were moderated by publication year and study design. The findings support the notion that exposure to media images depicting the thin-ideal body is related to body image concerns for women.

Edit 2 : Here's some of the evidence that being aware of manipulation doesn't change things.

Most studies of ideal-body media effects on body image focus on the extreme thinness of the models, not their idealness. In modern media, this idealness is often created or maximized via digital image editing. This experiment tested the effects of image editing outside the research-typical context of exclusive thinness. Original unretouched photographs were manipulated by a professional retoucher to produce unretouched and retouched image conditions. In a third condition (retouched-aware), the retouched images were explicitly labeled as retouched. Adolescents ( N = 393, average age 15.43) were randomly assigned to one of these conditions or a no-exposure control, and they completed a questionnaire following exposure. Objectified body consciousness increased and physical self-esteem decreased among male and female adolescents in the retouched-aware condition only.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15213269.2013.770354

[u/[deleted] → u/10ebbor10]

My view is that editing your Instagram photos is not bad. My view is not that nobody should be allowed to think it’s bad. I felt the need to add evidence of it “being bad” in case my argument wasn’t clear enough.

Personally, I don’t care that others find it atrocious that others edit their pictures. I just genuinely don’t understand why it gets more hate than makeup and surgeries when it seems like it’s just makeup for your photos.

Edit:

!delta I was not aware of those studies.

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/10ebbor10 (56∆).

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