On the popular blog website Cheezburger.com there is an article posted titled, Target’s Photoshop Disaster Accidentally Makes Crotchless Swimwear, for “Juniors.” There is an ad posted from Target’s junior’s swimwear section in which the model shown has been Photoshopped very poorly.
We all know that they touch up models. This picture addresses a growing issue in body image among teenage girls known as “thigh gap.”
A thigh gap is a space between your inner thighs when you stand with your feet together. Although many women consider an inner-thigh gap an attractive and coveted feature, serious health problems can arise if you try to achieve a thigh gap by not eating or by over-exercising. You can’t really change your genetics or bone structure. According to The Times of India, few women are able to form thigh gaps naturally and attempts to develop one typically involve unhealthy diets.
Images of thigh gaps started appearing across social networking sites and phrase and subject became a topic of widespread news coverage in December 2012 after the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. As a result, hundreds of blogs, Twitter accounts and memes in the West were created, and images of thigh gaps featured in ‘thinspiration’ blogs.
Reportedly, some teenage girls have taken the view that the bigger the gap, the more beautiful the girl and have resorted to starving themselves in order to obtain it. The Times of India called it “mania”.
Robyn Lawley, an Australian plus-size model has hit out at the thigh gap trend, denouncing it as “just another tool of manipulation that other people are trying to use to keep me from loving my body”.
A psychologist and director of the Media Psychology Research Center, Pamela Rutledge says, “Social norms are enforced by community, and that’s true in a club, in a church, or society wide; and now society, because of the Internet, is very broad. And there’s a lot of sensitivity for stuff like this.” The product has since been removed from Target’s webpage.
Image credit: www.today.com
