"Oh Beyonce, I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed."

By JAMILA RIZVI

Oh Beyonce, I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed.

Overnight, singer/dancer/mother/goddess/queen Beyonce, posted this photo on her Instagram account.

 Beyonce. Look at the stairs in between her legs. See how the line isn’t quite straight?

Drag your eyes away from the babein’ shiny fake tattoos Beyonce is wearing and focus on the stairs behind her. Specifically, the stair between her upper thighs. See that uneven diagonal line? Yep, that’s not how that stair is meant to look.

The image has been tampered with; photoshopped. Someone has taken the Adobe Acrobat lasso tool and done their worst to Queen Bey’s inner thighs. Yep, the most famed beauty in the world right now has been given a manufactured box gap.

And it’s not the first time.

Take a look at this photo (also from Instagram), posted from the road during Bey’s On the Run tour last summer:

Beyonce and the mysterious warped iPhone.

I don’t know about you but my iPhone doesn’t look like that, all warped and bendy in the middle. Again, this photo has been digitally altered to make Beyonce’s legs look slimmer than they are.

Let me hit you with one more picture. This is Beyonce golfing (accompanied by ridiculously great hair):

Beyonce. Rocking legs that aren’t her own.

That was the first Beyonce Instagram pic to cause the star’s millions of worldwide fans to call “Photoshop”.

It created major social media chatter and speculation that the star – or one of her charming online entourage – was digitally fiddling with supposedly authentic images of her life.

Now, photoshopping of celebrity photos is nothing new. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as image editing software. But celebrities, or anyone really, photoshopping pics that were supposedly captured in the non-airbrushed, non-studio lit arena of their real lives? That’s now emerging as a trend.

And for me it’s a worrying one.

What I’ve always loved about Instagram is that it allows the public to see female celebrities – or anyone really – as they are naturally. Instead of the cropped, contoured perfection that Hollywood, fashion houses and the advertising industry serve up, Instagram provide a more realistic representation of women’s bodies.

These are the images we want to be seeing from Bey’s Instagram. 

Instagram and other social media sites also allow celebs to wrestle back control of their own images. The value of intrusive paparazzi shots and airbrushed-to-all-hell promotional pics, is decreased when a celeb voluntarily shares candid, honest images of their life.

Here are some unaltered (we hope) Instagram pics of Beyonce’s:

And Bey? Well, I thought being proud of your body as it truly is, was what she was all about.

Beyonce provides some much-needed physical diversity in the cookie-cutter production line of female pop-stars. Her gorgeous body is curvy, brown, strong, rhythmic, powerful and, well, damn hot. Her obvious pride in and acceptance of her body is infectious.

I remember watching Bey on stage at her Sydney concert last year and genuinely feeling okay about my own body for the first time in ages. Here was a truly beautiful woman. A woman whose voice and dance moves were transporting a whole stadium of people. A woman whose confidence and inner glow weren’t some bullshit on a Hallmark card but actual REAL LIFE things.

Here’s one of her amazing live performance from the Superbowl last year:

Beyonce has thighs, and a butt, and even some jiggly bits AND she’s the sexiest woman on the planet, I thought to myself.  Who cares if my thighs splay out over a chair when I sit, or a little tummy juts out above my bikini bottoms. I feel healthy and happy and if that’s enough for Beyonce then it’s enough for me.

But it seems, that isn’t enough for her. Or at least, it’s not enough for her to leave gorgeous real images of herself un-retouched.

And if Beyonce can’t stay strong in the face of a world that continues to value women for their looks above all else, and considers true beauty to be a head on top of some pipe-cleaners – then what hope is there for the rest of us?