The American Medical Association voted, at its annual meeting on June 21st, to support ad-industry policies discouraging altered, unrealistic body images in advertising.

The association says: “Advertisers commonly alter photographs to enhance the appearance of models’ bodies, and such alterations can contribute to unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image — especially among impressionable children and adolescents.” The statement continues saying there exists a link between the kind of images they would like to outlaw and eating disorders and other health problems in the young and impressionable.

It seems reasonable and the right thing to do. The latest in a long chain of right and reasonable rules and regulations attempting to make our society better and safer that, in my opinion, are having the opposite effect. I fear we are regulating ourselves towards mass ignorance.

The more rules and regulations we create for our world, the less each individual feels responsible and the less attentive they become in their choices. A healthy and safe society is a society with values, comprised of people who are attentive, able to analyze and criticize. People who think.

Just as the sharp rise in prevalence of allergies seems to be linked to the extremely hygienic conditions that many people live in, the over-sanitization of our society will produce generations of undiscerning individuals.

Because it started a conversation and raised awareness with the general public, the famous Dove “Evolution” campaign has had a more positive effect than the proposed regulations ever could (at the time of writing the film on YouTube had been viewed 13,308,630 times). Our goal should be to help children understand that perfection is merely an ideal, exalted in movies, TV, magazines and the advertising within them, an ideal that doesn’t exist in reality; every individual is beautiful, and flawed.

Celebrating real people and setting realistic expectations shouldn’t mean eliminating fantasy and fiction from our world. Because if you ban manipulated images in advertising you will have to extend the ban to editorial content and all published images.Then you will find that an un-manipulated photo of an anorexic model is equally damaging and you will have to establish a table of minimum required proportions between height, weight, and waist/hip measurements for all models used in published photography. At that point you will have created an official standard of what a healthy and beautiful body is and it will still be tragically unattainable for the majority.

I completely support the American Medical Associations ultimate goal which is to prevent eating disorders and health problems in children and adolescents. I just believe that their approach of censoring images will not be effective. Promoting the development of the personal skills required to navigate successfully through life is the real solution.