When I was in college, I loved “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” One of my favorite games to play was “Buffy/Not Buffy,” wherein we’d scream at the TV every time Sarah Michelle Gellar’s stunt double was obviously onscreen. It was easy to tell because the stunt double might have found her way onto Sir Mix-a-Lot’s radar, if you know what I mean, and let’s face it, SMG isn’t exactly known for taking up copious amounts of space. Occasionally, sly camera angles could hide this indiscretion, but generally it was as obvious as the sky is blue.

Despite our little game, in the context of the show, we still accepted that Gellar and her more gymnastically inclined counterpart created the whole character of Buffy. We’d suspend our disbelief week in and week out for the sake of the greater story, and while such concepts work perfectly in the media, are we allowing them to take over our everyday lives?

Ralph Lauren (a brand that I’ve never really been able to afford anyway) faced potentially insurmountable scrutiny recently with an ad so grossly overairbrushed that the company was forced to issue an official statement to the bastion of high-end journalism, Extra. The short version reads something like what I tried to say to my mom when I was 5 and she caught me red-handedly riding the family cat like a pony. (He was really big, OK?)

“But Mooooom,” I said. “I never do anything bad. This is the first time I’ve ever tried to ride Zebulon. I won’t do it again, ever.”

She didn’t believe me, and I certainly don’t believe the PR gurus at Ralph Lauren. Yet we, as a society of consumers, will suspend our disbelief when it comes to impossibly sized women and their scraps of denim passed off as jeans. Why do we continue to let such egregious misrepresentations slide? (Just this week, W's cover shows Demi Moore with a chunk of her hip missing — the magazine's website is still displaying the obvious photoshop hackjob.)

Because it’s what we are used to; we are so caught up in the notion that the women we see in magazines and on television are endlessly doctored, photoshopped and airbrushed, that we forget the images are, in fact, not real.

Take a minute to wrap your head around such an idea. We know in their purest form that these actresses and models are tangible, but we also know that they are packaged and presented to us in ways that are as fantastical as dragons and unicorns. The conspiracy of photo retouching and digital aftereffects has long been accepted as true and commonplace — moreso than anything we’ve heard about Area 51 or Bigfoot. “They” are taking reality and skewing it so that we will buy it, and even though we protest and kick and scream, we still do.

When a friend comes to me complaining that her size 14 jeans are mysteriously smaller yet she hasn’t gained a pound, she fails to recall that “normal” has been shrinking for years at the hands of graphic designers and wily advertising executives. In the same shopping excursion, I could show her a magazine cover and she’d embark on a tirade about how airbrushed the photos are. The connection is mysteriously absent.

You know that the ad isn’t “real,” but you still want those jeans anyway. It’s kind of like how when you are a kid, you think coffee or beer tastes gross, but over the years those notions are eroded by promises of productivity, necessity and fun times. It’s that subconscious imprint that causes us to suspend our disbelief in real life, making day in, day out a kind of actualization of “The Real World.” We want the jeans, but according to that artfully indulged photograph, we forget to connect the dots that we’ll never be able to fit in them. Is it art? Is it fantasy? Or is it an idea that has become so widespread — so intensely common — that it’s started to lose the target on its proverbial back?

Pick up a magazine that is unaltered. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. The average reader has become as good at spotting alterations as a 10-year design veteran. We’re all armchair art directors, aren’t we? Yet we can’t really direct the art. We can identify it and mock it and consciously choose not to subscribe to it, but no matter what, it’s become a part of our everyday lives. Suspension of disbelief has crossed the fourth wall and landed squarely in the reality that existed long before “Survivor” and “The Real World.”

The daunting task, or better yet, question, is what can we do about it? A generation raised on the falsehoods of media portrayal is so enmeshed in the art of lies and deception that it seems impossible to overcome. Perhaps it is. Do we just throw up our hands and give up the idea of trying to maintain our intelligence in the eyes of the marketing Jedi?

You tell me. I’m just going to play another rousing game of Buffy/Not-Buffy.