Forget the fakery! Teens tell us they’re not cool with Photoshop

TODAY:

They say comparison is the thief of joy, and there is maybe no place this is truer than inside the minds of teenage girls. The TODAY/AOL Body Image survey asked teen girls about how images in the media make them feel about themselves. The answer: Not great!

Eighty percent of the teenage girls we surveyed said they compare themselves to the images they see of celebrities, and almost half of those girls said it makes them feel dissatisfied with their own appearance. Also: Teenage girls are wise to Photoshopping shenanigans, and they’re not into it: The majority of the girls surveyed said they want the practice to stop entirely.

However, nothing is going to stop teenage girls—or boys, or grownups of either gender, for that matter—from comparing themselves to celebrities, models, athletes, or even each other. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, experts say.

“Automatically, we compare ourselves to those around us, whether it’s the in media or real life,” says Pamela Rutledge, a psychologist and director of the Media Psychology Research Center. “And that’s a biological instinct, because we need to know how to navigate our social world. We don’t just compare our bodies; we compare all sorts of things.

Read the whole story: TODAY