Girls' body confidence - what do you think could improve it?

[KateMumsnet]

Hello everyone!

Lynne Featherstone, the Minister for Equalities, is chairing a Roundtable on Body Confidence at the House of Commons. She wants to get up to speed on the work that various independent groups are doing in this area, in order to champion them within government and get as much support for their work as possible.

One of the topics under consideration is sexualisation, and following our Let Girls Be Girls campaign we've been asked to come up with some proposals. We're going to push for the government to get behind our Lads' Mags campaign - but we also thought it was a good moment to ask for your thoughts more generally about body confidence issues and what, if anything, you'd like to see policy-makers doing.

So do please fire away - what else do you think could be done generally to improve the body confidence of young girls?

Reintroducing single sex secondary schools would allow girls and boys to concentrate on the important things in life rather than the reactions of the opposite sex.

Girls would be more confident without having boys around them all day and boys might be more inclined to get some work done rather than spend time impressing the girls.

I have 2 boys by the way.

Absolutely, Alouiseg. (And I have children of both genders, all at single-sex schools).

Alouiseg - our two boys are going to single sex secondary day school (we have no choice) but I went to a single sex boys boarding school and am not sure its so good for boys.

I think it is well accepted girls do better upto 5th form in a single sex environment but there are advantages to mixing at 6th form.

I wonder about it too BeenBeta...I know that at the moment my DD loves playing with boys..I don't want that to change...

I'd like to get back to what morningpaper said: I think perhaps it would be interesting to know "What gave YOU body confidence?"

Good point. For me it was dance and doing school plays, moving to a different school and realising I wasn't stupid, realising that while I was a flat-chested beanpole I could make people laugh...and later, gaining respect for being good at my job.

I'm in my 50's - so was a teenager at a time where sexism in advertising, etc was rife - but those lovely bra-burning 'women's libbers' were causing a ruck, shaming the boys in power, protesting at Miss World contests until they were seen as a bit naff and no longer televised.

I feel like a stuck record sometimes, but, it's like it never happened.

Yes, MP's question is a good one.

I have unlimited body confidence. Why?

Because my mother 'set a good example' (didn't flap about her weight or her appearance).

Because I had a very good relationship with my father. I think this plays a big role in confidence generally.

Because there was nobody banging on about healthy eating. We ate reasonable sized portions of pretty much everything (including puddings, chocolate and Coke), and took the dog for lots of walks so were reasonably healthy anyway. I think making an issue of healthy eating gives girls in particular all kinds of ideas about food being 'bad for them'.

Because my experience at home and at school was that being kind, polite, thoughtful, considerate and so on was the ultimate goal in life. (Well, school also thought that being a doctor or lawyer was the be-all and end-all once you'd mastered the thoughtful thing - but there you go.)

I think one thing that affects body confidence (because it affects confidence in general, and that tends to be carried over to body image in the case of girls) is how much you feel cared for, valued, respected by your parents. My mum was distinctly strict, but my sisters and I always knew that we were the most important and marvellous creatures in the universe because our mother essentially devoted all her time to us. She was there to pick us up from school every day; she was there to look after us when we were ill; in fact, she was 'there for us' (ugh) all the time. Not in an interfering kind of way - just there in the background, waiting for those moments when one of us had something significant to say amidst all the normal childish/teenage burble.

I think what you say Grace is very true, parents hold a large part of the responsibility but the experience of many girls in the outside world is at odds with their experience at home.

I too came from a very loving and supportive home with wonderful role models in both parents.

Unfortunately that did not carry on outside the home...men were shouting filth at me as they drove past me from the age of around 12 or 13.

And again, school was a living nightmare in many ways.

We cannot bring it all back to the parents in every case..yes...they have the lions share of responsibility for ensuring girls hae a positive view of themselves but if this is not reinforced outside the home (for you it luckily was)and in the wider community then that hard-won confidence is slowly eaten away.

I have been thinking further about MP's comment. I disagree about girls needing to feel validated by admiring comments from peers/boys/whoever. I had no experience of boys at all while I was at school, and when I did finally encounter boys at university, I thought they were going to have to work extremely hard to be worthy of someone as great as me. They were falling over themselves to ask me out (because I was very pretty - am still quite pretty now, but in an older sort of way), but I was very picky. I used to feel sorry for the girls who seemed to base their whole sense of personal worth/attractiveness on whether some boy was interested in them.

Oracle of Delphinium on Page 2 said all I wanted to say on this.

As a mother, focus on being fit and healthy, not obsessing about diets and specific aspects of your body.

Don't buy (or at least hide) all those shite celebrity magazines

'I thought they were going to have to work extremely hard to be worthy of someone as great as me.'

I heard pretty early on that people tend to pair up with people of a similar level of attractiveness to themselves so I never worried about whether I was pretty or not, I just assumed that if I was ugly I would find some nice ugly man to marry and so on.

I'm with you Oracle...I remember deciding I was attractive aged about 15 or 16...nothing to do with the boys at school. They'd always told me a was a freak.

I think not allowing a sexist BBC would be good.

Today Miriam O'Reilly has won her case against the BBC for age discrimination though she has lost on sex discrimination (wtf?). This comment from the Daily Mail comments on the story is shocking:

'The only women that have a "secure" job at the BBC are the secretaries. Those of us with degrees who were producers and made the great programmes all find their one year contracts unrenewed due to lack or work when you get to an age where you have any obligations. This has been going on for years. Try googling the fabulous women producers from any series of the 1990's and see how many got sloughed off in favour of older retirement aged men. I'm not bitter - I still work but I don't see this story being told anywhere. The BBC should take a good look at itself. When we have the time, the women of the Natural History Unit will revolt. Print this if you dare - or maybe find a real story and investgigate it yourself?'

If the national broadcaster has an endemic culture of sexism, what hope is there for girls? The sacking of the Countryfile women as with Arlene Phillips is part of the drip-drip effect that sends out a very clear message to girls that they are only to be valued for the way they look, not for what they can do.

an institutionally sexist BBC should not be tolerated.

Don't forget Moira!

Sport - more imaginative sports at school. I was shite at team sports but now love yoga for example. But took me years to get over the ritual humiliation of being crap at netball etc.

Ban shampoo etc ads like the nonsense with Cheryl Cole etc (in tiny print saying 'styled with natural hair extensions') So basically saying 'Whatever shampoo you use, to get a style like this you need to have other people's hair glued to your head.'

What gave me body confidence? I think being in an all girl school where looks and appearance were just not important, academic achievement was and sport for those who were competitive (those of us who weren't were simply marginalised viz sports, but if you were clever and got good academic results, that didn't matter. You were fucked if you were neither sporty nor clever though. You were almost a goddess if you were both.)

Also being in an all girl school, enabled us to make really important, passionate, good friendships with other girls. We talked about everything, we shared everything, our friendships were the most important thing in our lives. Boys just didn't figure. Even when we became sexually active, boys were not our primary relationships - our girly friendships were. That was really important IMO.

Kitty , I agree about school sports as they seem to be dedicated to team sports and not investigate solo sports which are completed in groups, like yogo, running/cross country, aerobics/dance/salsa

I remember having a time in my (crap) secondary school where they seperated girls from boys..we were about 13 or 14...and whilst we did dance in the leisure centre the boys went off and did soccer...(I know some girls love soccer though) I remember these lessons as far and away the most enjoyable ones..they're actually my clearest memories of secondary and my happiest.

No competitive rubbish...no self conscious feelings...just girls having a lot of fun. I'm not suggesting this happens for ALL sports..but perhaps once a week it could. Both sexes would benefit.

HerB - your school sounds like mine re. the veneration of sporty and/or clever girls (all were pretty clever, as it was an academically selective school, but some were decidedly more clever than others).

Sadly, though, there was far too much emphasis on looks among the girls, especially in the sixth form. That said, the girls who were obsessed with their appearance also tended to be among the less clever lot. Boys started to figure to a (to my mind) revolting degree in the sixth form too: 'who knew a boy' was a really big thing, pathetically enough.

I read an article in Psychologies Magazine over Christmas (I was ill all through Christmas and only got up to cook) It was really startling to see an illustration of women who had been considered 'beautiful' in the last couple of decades and to see how different they all looked then to turn the page and see a photomontage of women now considered beautiful who looked so totally alike it was almost frightening. They looked like a cloning advertisement. It wasn't hair colour or eye colour it was body and face shape. They all looked EXACTLY like Cheryl Cole.

So - I think we need to try, somehow, to emphasise and celebrate diversity of beauty. At the moment it is almost a 'platonic form'.

I don't know how to do this - but that is what I think would help.

"morning paper...maybe you never were unfortunate enough to have sexual bullying levelled at you. And maybe not all girls need the approval of the opposite sex to have love for their bodies."

Bullying didn't bother me TBH

Not necessarily opposite sex - just the fact that I realised that people found me sexually desirable despite the fact that I was not X, Y or Z - struck me like a huge revelation in my early 20s and gave me enormous confidence. I think as others have said, if teenagers say 'yuck!' when confronted with images of normal bodies i.e. themselves, then that takes a lot of getting over...

LOL I've just had a vision of that Dr Who episode where the Master makes everyone on earth clones of himself.

Maybe we should just make ALL women everywhere clones of Cheryl Cole?

Would this be a way to promote self-esteem?

Imagine how depressed men would be.

I have body confidence - and I've always thought because:
a mum who never dieted or disparaged her body in front of me
and parents who always said I was stunning
e.g. how fantastic my shoulders were (I was nearly 40 before I realised that broad shoulders are a mixed blessing)
and I was born with the skinny genes and cheekbones - I'm not skinny now post-dd but I am in my head really!

Also what I thought as a child was a beautiful woman (tallish, small boobs) was pretty much how I ended up. I feel very lucky about that one.

I wasn't considered attractive by my peer-group boys growing up - tho' once I left school I had no trouble getting boyfriends, I think at school you get labelled aged 11 and that's it basically!

Oddly Beatitude I think men would be depressed. I think the whole Cheryl Cole thing is a girlie invention (or a media invention). It's somehow got into women's heads -WHERE FROM?

I think men do have a broader definition of beautiful. Maybe WE are all doing this to our daughters and ourselves.

I still don't know what to do about it though.