We have blamed women's body image issues on media, and called on all women to get online, speak out and resist the digitally enhanced, cookie-cutter fantasy images that so many of us feel we have to aspire to in order to be socially accepted.

Women's Forum Australia has taken this issue head on. It has completed a major research project that looks at studies from around the world that answers such questions as:

* What really goes on when young women pick up a glossy women's lifestyle magazine?
* What have psychologists, sociologists and other researchers found out about how they affect women's health and wellbeing?
* What messages are *really being sent through these magazines?
* How do advertising images affect us?
* What do magazines have to do with eating disorders?

The forum has published its findings in a very readable, appealing magazine called Faking It: The Female Image in Young Women's Magazines. Everyone should take a look at the website, which offers a sample chapter, "Hate your body: we show you how!" Here's the opening paragraph:

"Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful. She also knows that whatever beauty she has is leaving her, stealthily, day by day. Even if she is as freakishly beautiful as the supermodels whose images she sees replicated all around her until they are more familiar than the features of her own mother, she cannot be beautiful enough. There must be bits of her that will not do, her knees, her feet, her buttocks, her breasts...She is human, not a goddess or an angel. However much body hair she has, it is too much. However little and sweetly she sweats, it is too much. Left to her own devices she is sure to smell bad. If her body is thin enough, her breasts are sad. If her breasts are full, her arse is surely too big."

And if this isn't enough to convince you to buy it, here's the mini-documentary available on YouTube:

Continued at Beauty and the Breast.