In a dramatic piece of breaking
news, a link has been found between the over-sexualisation of females in the media and countless millions of insecure and unhappy girls. I'm sure I'm not alone in struggling to see how this is new knowledge.
For the past several centuries, certain types have been idealised and then idolised, from Cleopatra to Casanova, Grace Kelly to Kelly Brook (but, interestingly, not Henry Kelly). People’s self-images have always been affected by the portrayal of others – whether in novels, on TV, in films, advertisements or in the music industry. Primitive make-up used by beauty-seekers centuries ago led to skin poisoning and death.
Victorian women squeezed into corsets so tight that they damaged their internal organs. And in the Fifties, female stars were regularly described by their measurements (34-24-34) – and ‘normal’ women whose figure didn’t conform to the Barbie girl ideal felt overweight and unhappy with themselves.
Of course, modern technologies have allowed far more unrealistic ideals to emerge – see
this film for proof. But whether our beauty idols are genuinely fictional (e.g. Jessica Rabbit), or fictionally genuine in the sense that their beauty is not as it appears (e.g. every celebrity female), is strangely irrelevant to most of us.
Most of us are well aware of modern airbrushing techniques (see left for more evidence). We know celebrities put themselves under insane pressure to look good – and that it can involve impossible fitness and diet regimes, 24-hour make-up assistance or drastic surgery. But sadly, despite our own fulfilling lives, and our limited time and money resources, we often chastise ourselves for our inability to compete with these racehorses.
In the UK, most women desire to be thin, toned, tanned and facially beautiful. In Southern India, women should be plump and dark skinned, whereas in Northern India, they should be thin and pale skinned. The fact is, whatever the individual criteria set by your society, there will be criteria, and either you fit the bill or you don’t.
My own childhood was utterly devoid of anything cool. At the boarding school I attended, fashion was a bizarre combination of comfort garments for the critically obese and ethnic skirts from Kensington Market. For several years, I rarely deviated from my unofficial uniform of a deeply unflattering men’s rugby shirt teamed with a long, shapeless skirt and a pair of elephantine Doc Marten loafers. My hair was long, straight and a non-shade of dark mouse for nearly a decade. I remained untouched by any glimmer of fashion sense until my twenties – and I would say that most of my friends were similarly unfussed.
Yet this lack of external pressure did not protect me from insecurities. There weren’t any teenage popstars to taunt me and I had little interest in boys at the time, but I was still painfully aware that I was on the porky side of slender. I felt overweight from around the age of seven, and was massively under-confident about my appearance until relatively recently – and shamefully, I expect a good deal of my current confidence has to do with being fancied by boys (even if it’s only one or two every few years).
Sure, since Britney donned the school uniform and started a new craze, the pressure on girls to emulate and conform – largely in order to win the interest of the opposite sex – has certainly entered a younger domain. Primark is selling thongs for young girls (since when has a primary school kid worried about VPL?) and last year I saw a nine-year-old wearing high heeled boots and a pair of jeans that said ‘SEXY’ on her ass. And don’t even get me started on the outrageous, whore-like Bratz dolls with their transvestite make-up and penchant for burlesque accessories.
The modern world is chock-full of reasons for young people to develop insecurities – only a fool would need the news to tell them that. The solution – as ever – lies in better education, improved facilities for young people, rock-solid family units and positive role models. But while we’re waiting for that nirvana, if a report can make a drop in the ocean, I’m all for it.
In decades gone by, a sign of mental decrepitude was the sight of an absent-minded individual searching for the pair of spectacles they were already wearing. In a modern take on an age-old problem, I am now confronting a new embarrassment. As I sit on the tube or walk along the busy London streets, I am regularly plagued by a panicked conviction that my iPod has been stolen and have to pat my pockets frantically and search my cavernous bag until I find it. Given the metropolis' reputation for petty crime and white-wire targeting, such behaviour could perhaps be seen as sensible caution were it not for the fact that, during these frenzied searching sessions, my headphones are always sitting comfortably in my ears and beautiful music is wending its way down the wires into my mind. Looking for an iPod while wearing it and hearing its music: absurd when it happens the first time, worrying when it happens every few minutes.
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