Skinny Like You: Visual Literacy, Digital Manipulation and Young Women's Drive to be Thin

Numerous studies have established a relationship between thin ideal media content and disordered eating patterns in women. Many of the images viewed in the media that endorse the thin ideal are digitally manipulated or computer-created. This experiment compared college women's visual literacy–defined in terms of their knowledge of digital manipulation in fashion and entertainment images–to their desire to be thin, their desire to look like the model shown and four disordered eating subscales. Visual literacy did not reduce participants' desire to look like the model seen; however, entertainment media was a significant predictor of greater body image distortion across the sample.