I am completely and utterly beautiful, body wise.

My body is not beautiful by the standards of popular media. I am missing a leg. What my body has done for me far exceeds beauty. It has been battered and torn but has managed to carry three children within it. My body can dance, swim, ski and make love. My body is missing symmetry but has strength.

Also, just to be clear, nowhere in any of my posts...

Sorry Penguins, my first response was a mix between what you wrote and thoughts derived from feedback left by women from the site fuckwittery linked earlier in the thread, it blended together too much and came out as purely springing from what you wrote.

Except that you have to go the extra mile and askwhymen have that filter....

I think its a broader issue for men, if women carry the societal baggage of 'beauty' men carry a broader baggage of 'performance', of which physical self image is a part. My personal opinion is that people always tend to carry the same weight of suitcases, but they swap suitcases. I think over decades the burden of 'performance' has been diminishing for men but they have been swapping suitcases for more critical body self image. Its a personal opinion I formed that may be totally incorrect. I think the media and society in general contributed to that shift, absolutely, but I don’t think they so much 'created' the problem as they encouraged a change of suitcases.

But what if an accurate assessment simply is that you aren't that attractive?

I guess I could take your question and give an abstract answer like 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' or 'everyone is beautiful in their own way'- or some such- but I will give you a more down to earth opinion. You asked earlier where I got the 25% figure from, the 25% represents what I think is the upper limit of the percentage of women who seem to make a fair and reasonable assessment of their own physical attractiveness in relation to other women. In my opinion only 25% of women who feel unattractive have to deal with the 'reality' of being unattractive and 75% are needlessly harsh on themselves. Women seem to compartmentalise themselves into 'ugly bits' they don’t like and give them defining importance and yet can even mistake those 'very worst' bits as being unattractive. The percentages my vary but my opinion is hardly unique, I am far from the only man/husband/lover ever driven to distraction by a woman who cant seem to see her own physical beauty.

So your question, IMO, is relevant to only 25% of women who feel the way they do. That proportion need to find some way of dealing with the cards life and circumstance has dealt them, and life can have many sad and cruel twists. But against that- 75% do not need to come to terms with anything more than realising they were not looking at their cards clearly. The problem is all 100% believe they are that 25% and having to confront the validity of self opinion on self is something people are loath to do, invalidating body image is safer than invalidating self. Its far easier and in some ways safer to judge badly than it is to question your own judgements, doubly so when your the judge of yourself. Umm... does that make sense?

This is a lovely thread.

I used to be anorexic as a teenager, but in my mid 30s I now have a much better relationship with my body. I do actually still try not to look at it to be honest , but I am broadly happy that I am now a 'normal' weight and I am happy with my body shape. I do admire my body in new ways since having children - I was ill before dc3 was born but my body kept her going until the birth, and then when I became very ill immediately after that birth my body managed to recover itself ok (following medical treatment, but it still did pretty well). Also breastfeeding is quite impressive in it's own way (though odd that I lived in my body for such a long time before discovering I could actually breastfeed a baby!).

I have to wonder if these brief moments that women report in this thread (and I have read of it elsewhere) when they look in the mirror and recognise they are beautiful, I wonder if they are not transient moments of proper clarity? Many higher order animals that see a reflection of themselves mistake it as being another living creature. Only humans, some species of ape and an elephant or two can make the higher order distinction the reflection is 'self'. Perhaps one part of the human brain sees the reflection momentarily as another person and judges that person/image on that basis, as another person entirely disconnected from self image. Then higher order brain functions kick in, resulting in an initial connection to 'self' and therefore a positive response reaction that, unfortunately, is eventually pushed aside by complex/deeper connections to internalised self-image. Hmmm- I am sure fields of research could test for something like that- response reactions to momentary exposure to your own image Vs the images of others. Sorry... kind of went off the beaten path there.

Not just have our bodies done all these great things, they've hopefully given us all a lot of pleasure along the way (and a few men and/or women we've shared them with too).

It's strange how conditioning makes us seek out and see negatives a lot of the time. I had huge (warning, stealth boast here) positives after a couple of children because I had zero stretch marks, tummy flab or droopy breasts.* But did it make me love my body? No - because I couldn't get past the fact that I have short legs and thunder thighs in an era when women were supposed to be stick thin with legs up to their armpits. Gazing at all the wonderful jeans and trousers and knowing that even if I could get the bastards past my knees I would have to lop four inches off the bottoms. I kept trying these things on under the illusion that my legs would have stretched vertically and shrunk horizontally overnight. Nah, never happened.

It is only since I reached the age of invisibility that I don't give a monkey's and think OK - I will always be pear shaped: dieting would only turn me from a Williams Pear into a Conference Pear and you know what? These stumpy legs have served me well. I've run marathons on them, played hours of sport, cycled more miles than I care to remember, so they may not be pretty but they are damn useful.

I think I must have been at least 60 before I got to that point, so given that most of you are way younger than me and have already picked up on the important things you are clearly a heck of lot smarter than I was.

*By the way, the post baby look was sheer genetic luck on the part of my skin - I've had three knee ops and the scars are so fine they are practically invisible.

Sorry if I appear a bit frivolous but as I get older I find I take things less seriously than I used to, so no good looking at me for deep and thoughtful feminist musings on the body

I am enjoying this thread though. And Murder - you are so right about priorities.

absolutely. i'm 35 +3 with dc3, & most of all i'm amazed that oncee more my body has gone from fairly standard, if on the short side, to round all over with a huuuge bump! How fricking amazing is that?! & what's more, inside is a person i'm going to adore just as much as dds 1 & 2!

This is a lovely thread. But I think I would need to be on mescalin to look in the mirror and think I looked beautiful.

I am lucky in that my body functions well, and I am now (after a horrible chronic disease which has now gone away) fit and healthy.

And I am extremely tall, which I have always loved. I like my great big gangly orangutan arms.

So, happy that it functions, but beauty, no.

Yes, absolutely. Women are taught to analyse each bit of the body for flaws. To break it apart into chunks of meat to be scrutinised and found wanting.

Some women are better than others at seeing 'face' as a whole (I, for example, generally think of my face as one 'bit' of me. Though I wouldn't have done as a teen, when I hated my ears and my nose). But I think you'd struggle to find many women who don't pull their bodies apart. I know that when I get out of the shower and am faced with a massive mirror I don't see 'my body', I see 'my bum' and 'my thighs' (my least liked body parts, original me).

Yes, our self image is very fragmented. Not helped by the commercial obsession with products for fixing 'problem' areas and those dire surveys that say we all want Jennifer Anniston's arms, JLo's bum, etc, etc.

It is frightening. When I first became aware that I thought like that I tried to focus really hard to see some sort of whole figure and face in the mirror, it was surprisingly difficult and still is. I also recon most women have this problem. You can see it when people post in S&B for example - things like, "can you recommend me a dress please I have naice boobs but crap legs and flabby arms" instead of describing their overall shape and taste.

Just going back to something you said earlier, Penguins - It seems to me that women are trained, from a very early age, to see themselves as a collection of parts. It's hard for us to see "pretty face" in our reflection or photos, because we don't really see the whole face. We see a series of facial components, each of which is compared (and found wanting) to those in our 'ideal' face ... and that face isn't a whole face, either; it's a set of components.

I'm not altogether sure how prevalent this phenomenon is, but it always comes up in group talk about beauty ideals, so I reckon it's 'most' women at least. Given that we do it to our whole bodies - which we never see as whole - it's quite frightening, isn't it? Our self-images are not only tarnished, they are broken - fragmented.

Just realised there's lots about this in one of the classic books: could have been The Beauty Myth?

Yes, agreed, but I think we may as well learn to love ourselves as wonderful while we're at it :)

Yoni, I'd love to talk about it more but that post could out me - and I plan to keep my vampire costume on until Hallowe'en!

^"what if an accurate assessment simply is that you aren't that attractive?

What if "attractive" were a subjective quality?

... wait a minute, it is, isn't it?

What would you think of a parent who says their child is ugly (or unattractive)? Most would agree this is damaging to the child, and shows a worry lack of parental bias. Lack of bias might indicate a lack of love, yes? So why on earth should we love ourselves any less than we think a child should be loved by its parent?"^

Yes, I totally agree. We should all love ourselves with the unconditional love we would show our children - and basically everyone thinks that their children are gorgeous. But I was responding directly to the point DadWasHere was making about women realising that they are underrating themselves, which by necessity I think must refer to societal judgements of conventional attractiveness (his example was how a woman saw her breasts after child rearing). I think that there is a difference between learning to love ourselves because we see ourselves as wonderful and learning to love ourselves because we realise we have been 'underrating' our appearance.

I once lived in a country famed for the beauty of its people. On arrival, I felt overwhelmed - and grotesquely ugly by comparison. Over time, I realised that what makes these people beautiful is their confidence and self-love. They constantly tell all their children, boys and girls, that they're amazingly beautiful. As adults, they continue to tell one another.

Interesting, which country was that garlicvampire?

what if an accurate assessment simply is that you aren't that attractive?

What if "attractive" were a subjective quality?

... wait a minute, it is, isn't it?

What would you think of a parent who says their child is ugly (or unattractive)? Most would agree this is damaging to the child, and shows a worry lack of parental bias. Lack of bias might indicate a lack of love, yes? So why on earth should we love ourselves any less than we think a child should be loved by its parent?

Thank you, Reality.

The Cindy Crawford thing isn't about self perception actually. She means it literally:

"I always say even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford! What people see on magazine covers is one moment that was perfect — the wind, the light, the hair, the makeup. That's a two-hour process. " (quoted on Redbook.com)

She's not saying she doesn't look like Cindy Crawford to herself. She's saying that the Cindy Crawford you see in magazines is an illusion.

Also, just to be clear, nowhere in any of my posts have I talked about this as a process of coming to terms with your own flaws. You seem to have extrapolated that from my reference to seeing your body for what it can do , where one of the things I referenced was bearing children. I also referenced giving someone a hug after a bad day, if that example resonates more without the connotations of 'ruin'.

I think that the point about self perception is a good one. Except that you have to go the extra mile and ask why men have that filter. I think in large part it is because men have not been taught to look in the mirror and take their body apart piece by piece. They don't examine (on the whole, and recognising that society is sadly shifting this way even for men) the thighs, the stomach, the arms, the hairline, the jaw..... They are much more likely to take a look at themselves overall and reach an assessment. Which is far more likely to be an accurate representation of what others see.

As to why men overestimate attractiveness. I suspect that this has a lot to do with social conditioning generally. Men are encouraged to be confident (female equivalent - boastful, pushy), men are encouraged to be ambitious (female equivalent - grabby, pushy), etc. It would be odd if that didn't translate into areas like self image too.

Yes, I agree, it would be a great step forward if women could realise how much they under rate themselves. But what if an accurate assessment simply is that you aren't that attractive? What if an accurate assessment is that, due to disability or illness, your body is letting you down? I think that self-love (in the non-masturbatory sense for the purposes of this discussion!) is a great thing. But I also think that women need to learn to put it all back in perspective. That's what I personally am working on at the moment.

As an unrelated aside I know that over several decades in the western world the broad body positive image men have for themselves has been steadily eroding.

I don't think it's unrelated at all. Since the mid-nineties, men have been subjected to an increasing amount of the same undermining media messages that have been assaulting women's self-confidence & self-perceptions since the 1920s (approx.) I know it started in the mid-nineties because I worked on the first UK campaign deliberately launched to produce this effect

It's not as bad - yet - for men as for women, and we had a three-generation head start on being fucked up like this. I agree that self-love is a great improvement on self-acceptance and, as I posted, I am working on that from today!

I once lived in a country famed for the beauty of its people. On arrival, I felt overwhelmed - and grotesquely ugly by comparison. Over time, I realised that what makes these people beautiful is their confidence and self-love. They constantly tell all their children, boys and girls, that they're amazingly beautiful. As adults, they continue to tell one another. I watched & learned, and got it for myself. (Interestingly, I lost weight as soon as I'd stopped finding myself fat. Go figure ) I'm quite shocked to realise how thoroughly I've been re-britished! For me, this stops NOW!

Penguins what you talk about makes perfect sense, its quite accurate and I understand the points. Whatever works in restoring positivity is a good thing, and restoring the body to its proper place as being a part of a whole person rather than the definition of the person is a huge step and a vital one that must be realised as we age.

Though in terms of body image alone I have seen it expressed time and again by women that they wish they had the body image confidence of their male partner. Of course, like almost anything, its a range of behaviours that overlap gender boundaries but IMO men do not so much possess body confidence as they posses a positive perceptual filter. Many men look in the mirror and see something better and many women look in the mirror and see something worse. (As an unrelated aside I know that over several decades in the western world the broad body positive image men have for themselves has been steadily eroding.)

But baseline body self image for women seems to be quite skewed. Some in feminism would seem to put that down to women being/choosing to be oppressed by social expectations of unobtainable levels of beauty. I am not wholly convinced. While I recognise its a contributor I don’t think it addresses the problem in totality. As you wrote, 'Cindy Crawford doesn't look like Cindy Crawford (to Cindy Crawford)'.

Its great to reclaim body positivity by taking a different look at yourself in a different light but why should a woman have to go as deep as coming to terms with the perceived flaws of her body when it seems (to me anyway) often more about the validity of her perception itself? If a 35 year old woman thinks she has ended up with the breasts of a 65 year old after raising her child she will have to come to terms with that view of herself, one way or another. That may mean she 'accepts herself' or it may mean she comes to realise she drastically underrated herself. I think the later is a preferable way to think to the former and I think its also more commonly accurate, women seem to focus on overstating their perceived physical flaws to themselves far more commonly than men.

Oh, wow, what a FABULOUS thread!

My body's managed to look all saggy & collapsey without having children. It never did work properly, and certainly doesn't at the moment. I am 'comfortable' with it, though I still have to catch myself putting me down a dozen times a day. You've made me think. There has only ever been ONE day when I actually found my body completely and utterly beautiful. I had been working out, two hours a day, seven days a week, for two or three years. I took myself so much by surprise, I went back & looked in the mirror again, thinking "Goodness me! That's me!"

I can treat myself better than this. Affirmations do work, and I'm starting some NOW, for this :) Thanks, Reality!

"It's an additional layer of pain that should't exist."

Absolutely. And in a weird way you notice that actually society places more worth on your body if it looks right over if it works right. So if I were slim/sexy/toned but still disabled, that'd be ok. But if I were able bodied but overweight/flabby/scarred that wouldn't.

Priorities are all wrong.

Murder - Sorry to hear about your ill health. I think you mentioned it on another thread I was on with you and the conversation sort of moved on before I commented. It sounds really difficult and I really feel for you.

I think what I would say about your point (recognising that I am by no means an expert and am no longer summarising one!) is that, logically, it makes sense to be angry at your body for what it cannot do. To take the example of a friend, it makes total sense that she is angry at her body that her arthritis means she sometimes can't pick up her baby when he cries. I would be angry. It's unfair and it's random and it would take a very zen type of person not to feel anger at their body for letting them down in that way.

What makes no sense at all is that societal influence then means that we beat the same body up for having thighs that don't look good in skinny jeans, hair that frizzes in the rain and a wobbly bottom. It's an additional layer of pain that should't exist.

And although it is wonderful, utterly wonderful, to have those moments when you catch sight of yourself and think "damn I look gooood", as most people have said those moments tend to be fleeting. Because even Cindy Crawford doesn't look like Cindy Crawford (she was the one who said that wasn't she?). And seeking external validation (by seeing that others see you as attractive or sexy) is unlikely to lead to long term balance. As Dadwashere pointed out, you find reasons to doubt that person's opinion. Or you get older, or fatter, or whatever, and realise that that hot bloke actually now probably wouldn't fancy you based on societal standards and your self esteem plummets again. I really think that there was a lot of sense in what was said at this talk - that we need to try to consciously move to place where the aesthetics of our body become a smaller part of our whole.

MurderofBanshees - I'm sorry for your trouble, it must be extra difficult to deal with ridiculous society norms without being able bodied too.

for you.

But you are witty, intelligent and kind from what i have read on here, promise I'm not a stalker

That is worth so much more than a "smoking hot body"

"There were a few things that stood out for me. The first was what you were talking about on this thread. Thinking about your body for what it can do, not just how it looks. Not analysing it as a piece of meat with good bits and bad bits. But thinking, as people on this thread have said "This body can birth children. This body is meet the physical demands of looking after young children. This body gives my husband a hug after a long day....""

That's a good way of looking at it.

I know I find it actually makes it harder for me right now though, as my body is currently disabled, so it's hard to focus on what it can do rather than what it can't.

I look in the mirror now and see a body that not only doesn't work like it should, but that also doesn't look how it should (by society's terms).

Dadwashere- I am afraid you have totally misunderstood my point. Where did I say women should 'glory in ruin' or wear battle scars proudly? What did you base your 25% on by the way?

What I was saying is that, for most women, part of coming to terms with their body is likely to be a process which is wider than simply 'learning to see themselves as beautiful' or 'learning to love their body'.

This was the opinion of the director of an eating disorder charity. What she was saying that, in her opinion, whilst there was some value in women learning to see the beauty in their bodies, truly moving past these types of issues often requires something deeper:

• learning to see your body as more than the aesthetics. Learning to put the appearance of your body in the context of your body; and

• learning to put your body in the context of your life as a whole. so that the importance of your body has proper perspective. She talked about how body issues could expand to fill most of your self perspective and it was very hard to reduce that, but what you could do is grow the other areas until body image got pushed back into a more manageable chunk.