Candice Swanepoel recently hit back at internet trolls who decided to body-shame her online for her post-pregnancy body.

There’s a lot of pressure on women to imitate the ‘ideal body’ and project the ‘perfect image’ – ideas that are constructed by the media, the fashion industry, and patriarchy more generally.

Then the trolls get involved to reinforce the whole thing, because living in your parent’s basement makes you hateful.

Now the supposed ‘ideal’ has gotten so out of control that some companies don’t even use real people in their campaigns anymore.

Check this via NewsAU:

In February a make-up brand owned by pop megastar Rihanna shared an image on social media of a gorgeous dark skinned model wearing the company’s lipstick.

The mysterious model, who went by Shudu was quickly becoming a social media sensation and as the photo went viral, it added to her growing number of followers.

By April she had more than 90,000 people following her on Instagram but there was just one problem.

She wasn’t real.

Shudu was a digital forgery, described by the man who created her as “an art piece paying homage to beautiful, dark-skinned women”.

British photographer Cameron-James Wilson was responsible for the virtual model, and initially he kept her fraudulent nature under wraps, even replying to messages as her on Instagram.

Shudu’s account is full of trendy-looking model shoots with a single image purportedly taking several days to create.

Nowadays nothing is posted online without filters, photoshop and airbrushing in the mix, making it hard to distinguish real humans from digital constructs. Shudu certainly looked like the “real” thing.

We can’t trust the eyes anymore…

In February, Wilson decided that pretending to be a female model online wasn’t working for him anymore, so he decided to out Shudu as a fake. The reactions were mixed:

Fatou Suri is a London-based model who was one of the many Instagram users who followed Shudu and said “it was a weird feeling” finding out she wasn’t real.

“As a model, I’ve had my image perfected. I sometimes look CGI’d to the point where it changes how I look, so it’s kind of similar,” she told the BBC.

Some of the comments on Shudu’s social media page now lament the perceived trickery of her virtual status.

“Can you believe this is just digital?” wrote one user, tagging their friend.

“Don’t like this ‘replacement’ of real people when so many girls don’t feel pretty the way they are. What does it (do) to them?” wrote another users on a separate photo.

The scary thing is that virtual models and celebrities are starting to become a thing. Shudu gathered tens of thousands of followers. Social media has also introduced ‘influencers’ to the world of marketing (Kim Kardashian, despite having achieved nothing, gets paid  $600 000 for a single Instagram post), and not all of them are human, either.

Take Miquela (below), for example, who has actually been posting on Instagram since 2016.

She looks decidedly more digital, but her fans don’t seem to mind. She is closing in on a million Instagram followers, has released a single that went viral on Spotify called Not Mine, and supports social causes like Black Lives Matter and champions an organisation called Black Girls Code.

Prominent fashion brand Prada recently teamed up with the team behind Miquela to launch its exclusive “sticker pack” of images and gifs that can be shared on people’s Instagram stories. If that doesn’t make much sense to you, I wouldn’t worry — it just means you’re probably not the type to follow computer-generated personalities on social media.

While her creators have done a good job of staying in the background, according to the BBC Miquela’s Instagram account has been linked to a Los Angeles company called Brud, which claims to specialise in robotics and artificial intelligence and the applications of such technologies to media businesses.

The fact that such a company is likely linked with Miquela is hardly a surprise.

Advances in technology, particularly in the realm of video production and digital imagery stand to make it increasingly difficult to distinguish the real from the fake when navigating the online world.

This really amounts to two things:

One, those ‘ideals’ that women are encouraged to subscribe to are going to get harder and harder to attain when you’re competing with fake people, so it’s probably best to pack it all in and focus your energy on smashing the patriarchy.

Two, now anyone can be an internet model! All you need is a degree in animation, or computer science, and you’re on your way.

[source:newsau]