If we may reflect further on the Great Kim Kardashina Nude Photos Incident of 2014, there's one lingering issue it seems no one is really addressing: The picture is blatantly Photoshopped.
All it takes is a brief closer look to recognize that the most famous/infamous shot of the bunch—the one featuring that remarkable derriere in all its glory—has been hacked into oblivion. There are no tanlines, traces of cellulite, or any indication that anything at all has been affected by gravity. And as for Kim's teensy waist? Smoke and mirrors.
How do I know? Evidence. And, as a model myself, I can read the signs.
Let's take a look at the shot in question, for likely the zillionth time:
Other pictures from the same photo shoot reveal that Kim's waist is not that abnormally small:
If we look at other pictures of Kim, we can also see that her waist is much wider—read: normal looking—than it appears in that notorious picture, even when wearing a wait-cinching jacket in ultra-slimming black.
Just in case I haven't made my point clear, I took a pic of myself as well. Let's compare:
It's safe to say that my waist is nearly as small as it gets; size zero is too big for me. How is it possible that Kim's looks even narrower than mine? Where are her intestines?
The ubiquity of Photoshopping is hardly a secret—but every time we celebrate how a woman looks in a photo without acknowledging the doctoring that's gone on behind the scenes, we perpetuate the false notion that other women can look like that too, if only they try hard enough.
One of the more high-profile reactions to the whole affair came courtesy of Naya Rivera, most famous for playing Santana, aka the second-best character on Glee (the first being Kurt's dad, obviously). Rivera commented on Kim's Instagram of the picture, writing: "I normally don't. But . . . you're someone's mother . . ." Many responded with outrage, citing the response as slut-shaming. But while I agree that it's wrong to shame a woman for appearing in the flesh, Rivera does have a point—in the sense that Kim should be setting a better body-image example for her daughter.
This could have been an amazing opportunity to highlight a beautiful woman in a more realistic way, yet Paper reduced the gorgeous Kim to Barbie dimensions. Granted, it's not necessarily Kim's fault that the photos were messed with, but she was complicit in the suggestion that the photos are real and therefore attainable.
Feigning impossible dimensions sends a dangerous message to little girls like, yes, Kim's own impressionable daughter. How are we supposed to teach our kids to love their bodies, if we can't accept the truth about our own?
