Hello Photoshop! Faith Hill Redbook Drama

On Friday, I posted a picture of Faith Hill that was taken for the cover of Redbook. Next to that picture, was the actual cover that was published. First posted on the internet by Jezebel.com (a site I had never been to). It started quite a stir and was featured on The Today Show on NBC this morning.

Many of us understand that most womens magazine covers are airbrushed. Why did it take a 39-year-old mother of three, and accomplished country singer start the rage?

Hill has yet to make a comment, but she really doesn't owe us one in my opinion. Most of the time, these celebrities have no control over what is done to their image. I would be irate at Redbook if I was Faith.

Since I appreciate a good opinion with backup, instead of writing my own rant, I think you will enjoy why Jezebel.com chose to post the photos, and wanted to cause drama. She is pretty good at sounding off and making sense.

"Imagine a scenario in which a powerful, self-made, self-possessed woman deigns to follow the orders of a much-less powerful, egomaniacal foreigner and crash-diets herself to aesthetic "acceptability" so she can appear on the cover of an American magazine available to the public for, at most, 4 weeks. That scenario is exactly what happened when Oprah Winfrey was asked -- and agreed -- to appear on the cover of Vogue's October 1998 issue. As the story goes, Winfrey spent months whittling herself to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour's exacting standards so that she would look acceptable in a Steven Meisel-photograph for the cover. "If you want to be on the cover of Vogue and Anna Wintour says you have to be down to 150lbs - that's what you gotta do," Winfrey told the BBC, adding, tellingly, "I didn't think for one moment 'Now I am going to be a Vogue model' nor even did I think I could hold that weight."

The Vogue cover turned out well, as many remember: Oprah looked hot. But there was something spooky beneath the Vogue image's Meisel-perfect, glossy veneer; namely, the idea that even a woman who had made her fortune validating women's strengths, hopes and dreams -- and becoming one of the most powerful people on the planet in the process -- would so eagerly and willingly help to perpetuate the "cover lie" of a medium that has made its mark by invalidating women's strengths, hopes and dreams with an endless parade of stories on how to be thinner, sexier, trendier, and -- ugh -- better in bed."

In a world where lying, deception, and the fudging of facts has become endemic in everything, all the way up to the highest levels of government, this is yet another example of a fraud being perpetrated on the public... and the public, for the most part, is not yet in on the joke. Magazine-retouching may not be a lie on par with, you know, "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," but in a world where girls as young as eight are going on the South Beach Diet, teenagers are getting breast implants as graduation gifts, professional women are almost required to fetishize handbags, and everyone is spending way too much time figuring out how to pose in a way that will look as good as that friend with the really popular MySpace profile, it's wrong. And we're glad you agreed.
-Jezebel.com