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Photoshop is not that new a piece of software, and even BEFORE Macintoshes and Photoshop, advertising art directors used photo retouching to do pretty much the same things -- create images of female beauty that are artificial and pretty much unobtainable....and then use these images to make us feel bad and egg us on to buy more stuff, i.e., moisturerizers or diet pills or girdles or what have you.
It's not entirely the patriarchy either -- magazines like Vogue have long had female editors-in-chief, like Diana Vreeland or Anna Wintour. Often I feel that it is women ourselves who are our own worst enemies. I personally know female fashion photographers (who would readily call themselves "feminists") and when I ask why they don't try, even subtlely, to effect some kind of changes -- to photograph more realistic looking models, for example -- they shrug and say "you just can't do that, it won't sell."
I don't think this is a trivial problem, because the same kind of standards are not lobbed at young men, and studies clearly show that young men and boys do not have the same kind of deadly self-esteem problems that young women and girls (really, all women) share. They certainly have not bought into the whole "dieting scam" mentality that dogs even women of great intellect and achievement in other areas of their lives.
The only bit of interest here is that what HP seems to have developed is an "automatic filter" for Photoshop, that instantly applies a "standard correction of thinness" to photographs of women (as opposed to the old hands-on approach). The implication is that ALL women need to be slimmed down, image-wise -- that even skinny models and actresses are "too fat".
This won't change until large masses of women stop buying into it.
