Digital Manipulation of Images of Models' Appearance in Advertising: Strategies for Action Through Law and Corporate Social Responsibility Incentives to Protect Public Health.

CONTEXT: Widespread digital retouching of advertising imagery in the fashion, beauty, and other consumer industries promotes unrealistic beauty standards that have harmful effects on public health. In particular, exposure to misleading beauty imagery is linked with greater body dissatisfaction, worse mood, poorer self-esteem, and increased risk for disordered eating behaviors. Moreover, given the social, psychological, medical, and economic burden of eating disorders, there is an urgent need to address environmental risk factors and to scale up prevention efforts by increasing the regulation of digitally altered advertising imagery. METHODS: This manuscript summarizes the health research literature linking digital retouching of advertising to increased risk of eating disorders, disordered weight and appearance control behaviors, and body dissatisfaction in consumers, followed by a review of global policy initiatives designed to regulate digital retouching to reduce health harms to consumers. Next, we turn to the US legal context, reporting on findings generated through legal research via Westlaw and LexisNexis, congressional records, federal agency websites, law review articles, and Supreme Court opinions, in addition to consulting legal experts on both tax law and the First Amendment, to evaluate the viability of various policy initiatives proposed to strengthen regulation on digital retouching in the United States. FINDINGS: Influencing advertising practices via tax incentives combined with corporate social responsibility initiatives may be the most constitutionally feasible options for the US legal context to reduce the use of digitally alternated images of models' bodies in advertising. CONCLUSIONS: Policy and corporate initiatives to curtail use of digitally altered images found to be harmful to mental and behavioral health of consumers could reduce the burden of eating disorders, disordered weight and appearance control behaviors, and body dissatisfaction and thereby improve population health in the United States.

Framing the new midwifery: media narratives in Ontario and Quebec during the 1980s and 1990s.

After long periods of activism and policy debate, Ontario and Quebec were the first two provinces to integrate midwifery into their health-care services. Despite its success and growing popularity in the post-legislative era, midwifery was a highly contentious policy issue, with debates emerging at every level of policy development. In this essay, the authors explore how these debates played out in media. Specifically, the authors suggest that the frames produced by newspapers during this period served to align midwifery with broader provincial socio-political discourses, which in turn legitimized state intervention in the area of reproductive health. At the same time, however, the authors demonstrate that where Ontario media representations muted differences between midwives and physicians, representations in Quebec emphasized them. Thus, the authors show that in very different ways, media representations of midwifery in Ontario and Quebec both established a discursive context in which the state had to "act on" midwifery and midwives, and also challenged the potential of midwifery to transform women's birth experiences.

Opiate addiction and the entanglements of imperialism and patriarchy in Manchukuo, 1932-45.

In the Japanese colonial state of Manchukuo, opiate addiction was condemned by officials and critics alike. But the state-sponsored creation of a monopoly, opium laws, and rehabilitation programs failed to reduce rates of addiction. Further, official media condemnation of opiate addiction melded with local Chinese-language literature to stigmatise addiction, casing a negative light over the state's failure to realise its own anti-opiate agenda. Chinese writers were thus transfixed in a complex colonial environment in which they applauded measures to reduce harm to the local population while levelling critiques of Japanese colonial rule. This paper demonstrates how the Chinese-language literature of Manchukuo did not simply parrot official politics. It also delegitimised Japanese rule through opiate narratives that are gendered, consistently negative, and more critical of the state than might be expected in a colonial literature.