"Because to be feminine, today, means to hate your body"

[Ormiriathomimus]

Anyone else read this

It doesn't say anything terribly new to me. I have a 13 year old who inspite of having been told she is pretty damned amazing every day of her life, is just beginning to agonise over hairy legs and fat (she isn't!). And let's face it, I'm not immune either inspite of being brought up by a mother who cared more about being able to dig her garden and shear sheep than scrub up and look glam. And of course my concerns about my looks just provide another weapon for me to beat myself with . I'm now 47 and just beginning to decide i don't give a shit about what other people think - shame it took me that long really.

Where do we start to untangle all this?

I have no idea how we untangle it. I've seen lots of models in real life, and I know that the vast majority of them look slightly freakish - too tall and too skinny, and a lot have very weird faces that just happen to photograph amazingly well. Probably the only model I've seen in real life who I thought was attractive is Kate Moss, she's slender without being boney. I know that the photos in magazines are photoshopped and don't represent reality, but I still crave to look as close to that unreality as possible.

Unless we cut ourselves off from society then there is no way to obtain immunity. What we can do is try and increase our self-confidence so that the good moments outweigh the bad.

It would be good to have more real women photographed too, so we see wrinkles and wobbly bits and can learn to accept them.

true, so true...

though i've just realised (again, i keep forgetting) how good being fit and physical makes me feel about my body.

i'm 'overweight' by BMI measures but stocky and muscular for my short height. my body doesn't change a lot when i'm fit, i've been doing a lot of outdoors exercise the last couple of months for the sake of the big days out in the hills (mountain biking and trail running) i've maybe lost less than half a stone and i probably don't actually look any different but i've just started to realise i'm FEELING i look better. i'm choosing to wear shorts, or skirts more, i'm wearing vest tops and not hiding my arms.. it's great, and something i totally forget when i'm not feeling fit.

next time i feel unfit i'll tell myself that running or whatever will not make a big difference to the scales so 'what's the point?' but i will try next time not to forget that it makes a 100% difference to my head, because it does.

if i have a daughter then i will do everything in my power to help her find something physical she enjoys - whether it's getting muddy in the mountains like me or dancing around in pink sparkles, i don't care as long as she enjoys her body for what it can achieve rather than what it looks like.

maybe - DD loves riding but as we can't afford a horse that is limited. We have just found her a pony that she can help to groom and exercise. She is happy to go on long muddy walks with dog and me. I am sure this particular obsession has held off the interest in make-up and looks a lot longer than some of her friends but it's still creeping in.

"how good being fit and physical makes me feel about my body. "

Totally agree. Somehow it's easier to overlook lump and lines etc when you know what your body can do.

it's not even conscious - it might even be chemical in the brain, i don't know, but i think that the lack of physicality in modern life is linked into this.. and the earlier that kids stop being physical the earlier they see their bodies as a showpiece or aesthetic thing.

I was just thinking about it the other day - when I was growing up, there was no airbrushing as we know it today. Sure, models were still slender and pretty, but they were not perfect and you could see a wide variety of bodies.

Girls nowadays have to grow up with those amazingly perfect women who have been airbrushed so there's nothing natural about them. And will think they are weird when they get a wrinkle when they move their head or a few little skin folds when they sit down - nobody in magazines has those, after all.

Need to explain to girls somehow that they are not weird if they don't look like the girls in magazines - nobody looks like that, not even the models themselves.

There is research to show that teenage girls who do sport regularly tend to feel more positive about their bodies. So I think it is good to encourage our daughters to get involved ins ome type of regular sport.

Yep. I remember with horror that thread about why women don't like exercise. The number of people who said they didn't like getting sweaty and felt self-conscious because of their bodies Vicious circle.

Dieting is a negative - not doing something.
Exercise is a positive - doing something.

But so many women feel better about dieting than exercise, or see exercise as a means to an end - ie to look better or as an adjunct to dieting.

What the article doesn't refer to even once is the fact that obesity (the genuine kind) has increased to the point where it's being treated as a serious public health issue. I don't know how that background affects people's negative feelings about their own bodies: as a subconscious fear of what we're all on the edge of? Articles about body image are very common, but they always seem to concentrate on the unrealistic models in the media as compared with a normal body, but they don't say much about how all too many of us are becoming genuinely unhealthy. I can't believe the thin models and the fat population are just a coincidence.

I don't think it's coincidence either. The unattainable has always been desirable in beauty - in a world where it is harder and harder to stay slim without effort the extremely slim is bound to be more appealing. Hence skeletal models as the acme of perfection.

I agree exercise is positive and makes you feel good. But I don't count gyms in that, gyms seem to be places where people exercise for the sole purpose of looking 'better', just rooms that cost huge amounts of money to enter where you can work on trying get the 'perfect bikini body' I think gyms are part of the problem.

Re the skinny models versus fat public, I think there's an urge to present simple messages instead of complex ones. But what we end up getting is "Fashion models are way too thin" on one side and "We're all way too fat" on the other. If there were an attempt to talk about what really looks good and is worth making an effort for (but without being obsessive over it) then we might be doing something useful.

Agreed krumbum. The research I have read about teenage girls and the positive vale of exercise talks about playing sport with other girls - hockey, netball, football, etc.

The odd thing is that the vast majority of women I know aren't overweight, and certainly not obese, neither are they very slim. Just quite simply 'normal'. But almost all of them at various times are dieting because they think they are fat - but they are only 'fat' according to an absurdly extreme scale.

But it's not just about fat is it?

Gyms can be hothouses of body neurosis IMO. And all those fucking mirrors!

I noted the Fijian study on girls popped up in the article up as offering especially strong evidence. Having read it before I'd also come across an article which critiqued the study. Can't find the original one but found a link to a blog discussing it.

shethought.com/2011/01/24/a-closer-look-at-the-famous-fiji-%E2%80%9Ctv-causes-anorexia%E2%80%9D-study/

'I've seen lots of models in real life, and I know that the vast majority of them look slightly freakish - too tall and too skinny, and a lot have very weird faces that just happen to photograph amazingly well.'

You'd consider me too tall. I do it on purpose you know. I'm deliberately being 'too tall.'

Please stop judging other women based on their appearance.

vashti - I am also very tall - 5'11. And most of my life I have been very insecure about it. I totally take your point. But that is also the point of the article. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - not the fashion designer nor the marketing dept.

Well said vashti. To add to that, I don't like the language you see in the media of 'real women', like other women are unreal (and it's especially nasty language in the context of 'curves').

It's all about finding a stick to beat the largest number of women with the most profit can be made 'fixing' us.

I think just questioning it and talking about it is starting the untangling process, and for me consciously avoiding buying stuff like Grazia, Vogue, whatever is good too.

I think visual memory is the basic thing: get our eyes used to seeing all different shapes and sizes and colours and we will adjust accordingly. I'm really sure it's that simple - the problem is it's quite boringly incremental work to do as individuals and pretty slow as a group, even.