False Advertising: Why Kim K Photos Should Come With A Warning Label

Kim Kardashian needs to be stopped.

For a long time, we just thought that Kim was a mild annoyance. We weren’t particularly surprised that she decided to take off her clothes in front of a camera again.

In fact, we would have been more shocked if she was photographed reading a book. But, we have now crossed the point of no return and it's time to push back.

Though we aren't Kimye haters, we certainly hate the dangerous pusher that she, and everyone else like her, is. And make no mistake, that’s what people in this industry are: pushers of harmful, dangerous products.

Listen very carefully, Kim (we say listen, because we’re not totally sure you can read this), you are not "breaking the Internet" with your behavior, you’re breaking young women. Stop it.

For years, we allowed Big Tobacco to peddle its harmful products to us without any recourse, until, as a society, we woke up and realized the immense harm smoking had on our population. The fact is, we are in a body-image crisis, and it’s time that, as a society, we owned up to it and faced it head on.

Our society is being made mentally and physically sick by a media industry that is intent on peddling dangerous, cartoonish images (they’re not "photos") of celebrities.

If the celebrity industry will not show us humans in human form, then they need to tell us what they're doing. Just like cigarettes, all photoshopped images must be prominently labeled: "Warning: Digitally-Altered Image." It's simple.

Don’t believe us? Here are some sobering facts:

• Approximately 91 percent of women are unhappy with their bodies and resort to dieting to achieve their ideal body shape.

• 95 percent of people with eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25.

• Approximately 15 percent of women experience an eating disorder at some point during their lives.

Don’t blame those who watch and consume it all; they’re the addicts.

So, what’s driving this? Well, we aren’t experts, but digitally-altered images that showcase unattainable physical perfection can’t be helping.

At least with smoking, you can choose to avoid it. Photoshopped curves, faces and silhouettes all smile down on us, daring us to be different, daring us to be imperfectly human or, at the very least, daring us not to have asses that double as trashy bars.

Add in social media in our hyper-connected, technological world, which increasingly fetishizes youth and beauty, and there is literally no escape. And, with something so pervasive and that unambiguously dangerous, it simply has to be stopped.

To be completely honest, as young men, body image has never been an issue for us, specifically.

Sure, when we see Hugh Jackman on screen, we kind of wish we had bigger guns and better abs (not to mention super powers), but we’ve been lucky enough to be able to put it out of our minds, for the most part.

We are ashamed to say that we’ve never really understood all the fuss about female body image. For our past sins, we can only assume the gods will give us daughters and frankly, we worry about what sort of pressures they will feel.

And our sons won’t be immune, either, as evidence points to the rise of eating disorders in men.

We’re prepared to put our hands up and say we were wrong. We're supposed to say this stuff simply has to stop.

It would be different if the big celebrity media peddled actual photos of the very rare breed of good-looking people on the planet in their unedited form. Those people exist, and we all grudgingly need to deal with the fact they’ve won the genetic lottery.

But, the reality is that no person on this planet, no matter how genetically blessed he or she may be, is devoid of physical imperfection. Yet, through unrealistic imagery, we constantly benchmark our standards of beauty to a standard that can literally never be achieved.

If we are to find a solution, we must first acknowledge that people don’t look like this and never will. If you want to bombard us with dangerous products, it’s time you start putting a warning label on them.

Photoshopping is misrepresentation and it is bad for society. Photoshopping is dangerous for individuals; like any misrepresentative, unhealthy and dangerous product, it should come with a warning label.