I was having a conversation with Rebecca a few weeks ago. We were talking about the influence of media on how women perceive themselves. She had one view and I had the opposite. Now, seeing that she’s a woman and I’m a man we come at it from slightly different sides.  As much as I can understand what she’s saying I will never truly realize what it’s like to be a woman, and vice versa.

She, and many people would agree with her, is of the opinion that the Media and society in general is responsible for how women perceive themselves.  We are bombarded with images and video’s of models and celebrities, this leads women of all ages to believe that the images they see are what they should be.  That the major players in the media have set up some kind of conspiracy to get women to feel bad about themselves.  That if we would only watch the video below enough times everything would be okay.

I have a slightly different take.  And it’s my own original idea as well.  It came to me one night as I was falling asleep, and I haven’t seen anyone else with something similar.  Three things you need to know for background.

One:  I believe that women have been comparing themselves to other women since before we were even human.  It’s a natural part of who we are to compete with each other.  Sometimes that competition is between nations, or teams, but most often it’s between individuals.  Women compete with other women.  When women get dressed up to go out, they don’t do it for the guys benefit, they do it so they look better than the other women.  Let’s face it it doesn’t matter what a woman is wearing a guy will look at her.  By showing her best, by downplaying the negative, she’s making herself look better than other women that may be around.

Two:  During pre-history humans lived in bands of no more than 150-200 people.  Assuming a standard 50/50 sex ratio, and only half of the women being of child bearing age women would only need to compete with 25-50 other females.  Genetically there would not be much variety so many would look very similar to each other.  Even as cities started to form in the last few thousand years most of the population would not have moved very far from their birthplace.  Even today only 3.7% (source) of people move out of the county (County, not Country) they currently live in.  And they would not have met more than a few hundred people their entire lives.

Three:  Photography did not exist until 1839.  Good color photography wasn’t developed until the early part of the 20th century.  Movies are only slightly younger.  Prior to these inventions anything that you saw was either reality, or obviously created by a human.   Even the most realistic paintings and sculptures can be easily identified as not being real.  With current photo and video technology those images that are created look real.

You may be asking, “What does this have to do with the media?”, here’s your answer.  What the media does is make our world smaller.  Instead of bands of 150-200 that we evolved in, or even the few hundred to few thousand of people we might know or see each day, our bands are now are the entire world.  There have always been extremely good looking men and women.  Some people are born naturally more attractive than others.  But it’s only been in the last 100 or so years that those naturally attractive people have had any effect outside of the small group of people they personally know.

A perfect example of this is Cindy Crawford.  She was born in Dekalb, IL in 1966.  If she had been born 100 years earlier, or even 50, no one would know who she is.  But current technologies allow the media to show her all over the world.  There are probably girls in China who know who Cindy Crawford is.  Women are already driven to look their best.  But now instead of competing with the 25-50 women that evolution has built them to compete with, they’re competing with over 3.3 Billion other women all over the world.  And most women will lose that fight.  Most women are average.

It may sound like I am blaming the media.  I’m not, I’m blaming women.  You can’t change the need to compete in only a century, even if you wanted to.  It’s tied to our need to reproduce.  It would be like trying to change our need to eat.  Those people that point to the video above and say “But look how much she was changed!”  need to ask themselves “Why?”  Why was she changed that much?  Answer:  Because humans find the changed image more attractive than the “real” one.  We don’t change things to make them ugly.  Would the model get a longer neck and bigger eyes if we found those features unattractive?  Would we spend billions and billions of dollars on make up, moisturizers and acne cream if smooth, blemish free skin was a turn off?  Do women spend $88 to buy a bra that gives them “more cleavage than ever before” to keep men away?

The media, the fashion industry, personal care product manufacturers are not creating this need.  They’re responding to it.