So the American Medical Association isn’t exactly saying that Photoshop is evil, but they are condemning it as a very unhealthy practice that should be avoided at all costs. They cite studies about how bad photoshopping images is to women and girls especially, and maintain that it fosters a poor body image and poor health altogether.

AMA, I’m sure I speak for the majority of females when I say that we could not agree more—and that this published opinion is long due. Sure, you can’t make magazines stop doing it—just as you can’t make kids stop watching TV all day or teens stop tanning—but when you do advise against it, at least you are emphasizing that it is wrong, that it is unhealthy, and that it can cause actual harm to those who engage in it as well as those who view it.

Unfortunately, unlike kids watching cartoons as substitute babysitters and teens tanning with permission slips from mom, magazines and movies and other forms of media altering images to make them “perfect” doesn’t just affect the person who commits the act and his or her surrounding family and friends, but pretty much the entire world. And when something like that is affecting millions of people, an actual ban should be enforced rather than a simple suggestion against it. Of course, we know how far that goes; everything from cigarettes to fast food to pesticides and plenty of other crap that is perfectly legal continues to harm us despite what we know—and, like good Americans, we continue to consume it into oblivion.

And sure, we can choose not to buy a magazine or watch a movie, but we can’t choose whether or not the people we see on everything from book covers to billboards are photoshopped or not—or whether or not our children are exposed to these advertisements. On the contrary, many schools shove them down the children’s throats in order to gain sponsors for money they can’t get from the government that mandates they exist in the first place, and the children can’t help but see these smiling, sexified faces on Channel One or products or book covers.

The very place that mandates health education classes also provides children with plenty of unhealthy examples to choose from, plenty of unhealthy role models and images portraying what the media deems “beauty.” Creating this standard from early on—along with the various films and other media consumed at home with mothers and fathers who also grew up on this media, and also hold these grotesque views about what being pretty means—pretty much dooms kids from the get-go.

If only the AMA had some actual clout when it comes to making and enforcing laws. Then maybe we could see poor body image fade out—not to nothing, not yet, but at least to levels where six-year-olds aren’t calling themselves fat or wanting to diet to be pretty. As it stands, I suppose we’ll have to be happy knowing that at least we aren’t alone in thinking that something is wrong with the way we are portrayed in the media, and that there are facts to cite when complaining about this important issue.