Photoshop woman, stay away from me

My position on the use of Photoshop to enhance glamor photos is well known: It’s wrong. It should never be used, unless I’m the subject and I’ve been asked by Men’s Health magazine to explain my six secrets for rock-hard abs (Secret 1: You will never have rock-hard abs).

Poor Adele. I thought she looked pretty good at the Grammies. Yes, she’s a little more chunky than Heidi Klum, but I’d like to see Heidi Klum get through “Rolling in the Deep” without major embarrassment. And afterward everybody except Lady Gaga was so giddy about how somebody with a little meat on their bones could actually be popular! Yes! It’s morning in American high schools!

Then came that stupid Vogue cover. People are still going on about how great Adele looks (above), even though the image on the right is actually Adele, and the image on the left is the standard Vogue simulacrum, which contains only slight suggestions of the real person: The chin, maybe. The eyebrows and part of a nose. And perhaps the cleavage — vive le decolletage!

The rest … whatever. That woman and her tawny mane appear in every issue of Vogue, and Glamour, and Cosmo, and all the other magazines that focus mostly on clothes and orgasms. She’s real to the extent that she’s a Photoshop action, the template by which good-looking women are rendered impossibly good-looking — and, invariably, quite a bit thinner.

I don’t like it. Fortunately I don’t subscribe to any of those magazines. The one magazine I do subscribe to, The New Yorker, is generally immune to Photoshop enhancements. Give me a real cartoon over a fake one any day.