Guest post: body image matters

For some context: yesterday, Natalie posted this great piece up at Definatalie.com. Go read it, she’s so right.

Y’all know by now how I feel about Mia Freedman’s potential as a positive body image advocate, and what I perceive as her failure to live up to that potential at present. (If you don’t, you can read about it here and here and here and here.)

It’s become fairly clear that a lot of people who support Freedman view her critics as a posse of scary-angry fatties with sour grapes. But we’re not. There are plenty of people – people who aren’t fat, even! – who feel similarly. One such person is Dr Samantha Thomas, a public health academic who specialises in weight and body image. Dr Thomas feels so strongly about the negative body image messages being pumped out on a website owned by the Chair of the National Body Image Advisory Group that she wrote a formal letter to Minister Kate Ellis as well as the following informal guest post.

Please read it, think about it, share it.

Cross-posted by the lovely FatHeffalump

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Mia Freedman’s appointment as Chair of the Australia’s National Body Image Advisory Group is one of life’s very strange ironies.

Let me pose a question. How does someone that writes a blog like Mamamia become the Chair of Australia’s National Body Image Advisory Group?

How? Does? That? Happen?

For me, this is a fundamentally important question to ask if we are going to take Body Image initiatives seriously in Australia. It is a question which will help us to understand what ‘Body Image’ means, the boundaries that have been set up in the Body Image advocacy space, who is included and more importantly who is being left out.

As an academic, what I deal with, day in, day out is evidence. As dull as that may seem, my life is about facts. Those facts come in different shapes and sizes. The facts I deal with are predominantly qualitative. They are about people’s views, their experiences, their attitudes and opinions. And, as an excellent Professor once told me, academics should always be prepared to change their mind in light of new evidence. Let me tell you that my mind has been changed on more than a few occasions because the evidence was just so compelling (climate change and fat are great examples of this!).

So in thinking this through I have looked in great detail at the Mamamia blog. I’m not going to link the blog here. You can search for it if you like. But I’m not going to proactively encourage you to go there.

For me, this blog, given who it is written by, and the position she also holds as Chair of the National Body Image Advisory Group is supremely problematic. Mamamia (which I’m assuming is a business) creates an interesting dilemma for the National Body Image Advisory Group. Because it is not what Body Image is about. In fact, is probably as far removed from it as you could possibly get.

At the most basic level, this is the definition of Body Image:

“The way a person thinks about his or her body and how it looks to others”

So for me, initiatives which seek to foster positive Body Image (note that this is different from Body Image, and people get them confused all the time which does my head in) should simply be about activities which:

“help all individuals to think positively about their bodies” Full Stop.

Now in light of these definitions, I had a good look at Mamamia, particularly under the Body Image section. And here is my take on what I saw.

• Body image is predominantly framed as being about ‘healthy’ weight. And because of this, there is an abundance of derogatory weight based language that occurs on the site, both in the blog posts and in the comments sections.

There is a convenient assumption that is made throughout the site, that ‘curvy’ is okay (as long as you are also drop dead beautiful see the posts about Layne Bryant and Christina Hendricks). That being a little bit above or below ‘average’ is acceptable too. But being too fat or too thin is not (as are encapsulated in the Gainer and Skinny Girls are Liars posts). And this is where we get into this strange notion that Body Image is about promoting ‘real women’ (who seem to only be a size 10-14). That a few more of these ‘real’ women on catwalks or in magazines are a really helpful thing for creating en masse self esteem in women.

So if we go back to the definitions about Body Image, and how to create positive Body Image, is this a helpful approach? Nope. It’s not even close.

• That ‘being fat’ is still a bad thing, as is gaining weight. That is it associated with a fundamental character flaw of being ‘naughty’ ‘self indulgent’ ‘undisciplined’ (I could go on and on and on…)

And here we get a multitude of damaging posts – like the one where the bloke calls her chubby and she goes into a monumental meltdown and hours of chick debriefing to get over it. Or the one where her kid says that a size 12 fairy at a play was ‘fat’ and she spends a whole angst ridden car trip trying to reassure her kid that the fairy wasn’t fat (because obviously calling someone fat is a REALLY bad thing to do….. because having a quick discussion about the values of people being different shapes and sizes would have been very destructive – my words not hers). Or my favourite one which also appeared in this weekend’s paper – the time when she went on an overseas holiday and OMG had a really awful relationship with food because she put on 11 kilos and 20 years later still seems ridden with guilt about it. Or the one where she says that women are facing a dilemma because a “good ass” requires a low % of body fat but a “good face” requires a high one.

Accepting of people for who they are? A healthy approach to encouraging EVERYONE to feel good about their bodies? I don’t think so.

• That it is still okay to judge people for what they choose to wear, or choose to have done to their bodies (aka tattoos and plastic surgery).

Obviously this blog represents some pretty mainstream fashion views. That’s okay and there is nothing particularly wrong with that. This probably is as good a place as any to declare that I love a bit of Saturday morning mummy fashion from Country Road. But the problem is that the blog posts constantly compares what is ‘hot’ with what is ‘not’. The ‘best’ with the ‘worst’. And it is that comparison that is extremely dangerous in a Body Image context. It’s even dangerous when you put up fashion posts which are all about how a colour makes you look (like the black doesn’t make you look skinny but it can make you look older post). Or her video blogs about what fashions we should be buying this winter. Or denigrating people for having plastic surgery. The positive Body Image take on plastic surgery would be to look at why women feel pressured to have boob jobs, botox, whatever. Not to write OMG YOU IDIOT posts about women who make choices about what they do with their own bodies. There is a big difference.

Because that DOES NOT encourage all individuals to feel positively about their bodies – which includes being able to wear things that they love and that they personally feel good in. Because it creates a sense that you should worry about what others think of you. Which is really really wrong!

Let me share a little secret with you.

Positive Body Image is not about creating an acceptable body ‘norm’ or about trying to make yourself look thinner, more beautiful, younger, or whatever. It’s not about trying to ‘hide’ or ‘make the best of’ who you are. That is called “Marketing”.

Because where bodies are concerned, there is no norm. Because we ARE ALL DIFFERENT! Which is what makes us REAL. And celebrating that difference is what positive Body Image is about.

The sad thing is that the content on Mamamia probably represents the views of sizable minority of people in Australia. And it means that the blog also provides a voice for that sizable minority. And that voice has at sometimes been very critical of people who have tried to raise some sensible debate about Body Image and what it means. That’s a shame. Because it doesn’t help to create a space which is about promoting positive Body Image for all Australians (and that includes our blokes too!). Or in creating an important cultural change in the way we perceive beauty, self worth or body acceptance.

I know some people who read this will disagree with what I have written. That is important, and I really welcome the feedback. Because it is through these very discussions that we will hopefully create change, and end up in a place where we come together to listen to and understand each other’s perspectives about this important issue.

History has shown us that popularity doesn’t necessarily make for the most fair, just and sensible leaders. Maybe this is just a case of history repeating itself (again). But I know that there is an amazing positive Body Image revolution on its way! It’s coming from the grassroots. And it will have a bigger impact than any government taskforce could ever have.

And that is just too exciting for words!

Dear Ms Freedman

Yesterday I received a comment on my blog from Mia Freedman. I wanted to respond properly, and at length, so it has taken me a while. Unlike Ms Freedman, I don’t make any coin from my blogging, and as someone with parenting, study and some paid work to do as well, there was no question that I could do that immediately. This delay has been to the detriment of my already tarnished standing as far as Freedman and her supporters are concerned (it has not gone without comment on her blog) but that, I’m afraid, was out of my hands.

Freedman’s comment is below:

Hi Spilt Milk,
If you ever wanted to write a post explaining fat acceptance (FA?) then I would certainly consider publishing it on Mamamia.
It’s a movement I know little about and would be interested to understand it better.
My intention on yesterday’s post – as I repeatedly tried to explain – was never to generalise about overweight people but to highlight a newsworthy phenomenon of gainer blogs and Donna Simpson in particular.
You can contact me at info@mamamia.com.au if you’re interested.
Peace out.

What those of us who responded critically to her post Fat, fatter, fattest: meet the people who think bigger is better initially asked for was meaningful engagement, so I was pleased to see that she had stopped by Spilt Milk. (Incidentally, Freedman has since changed the title of her post to the far less inflammatory Gainer Blogs, which is a speedy back pedal if ever I saw one.)  Subsequent exchanges, however, have led me to doubt whether what she sought here was meaningful engagement at all.

To be totally honest, I am disappointed. I think, if done in an appropriate way, a post and discussion about Fat Acceptance on Mamamia would be very helpful. Clearly, despite being a growing movement and closely aligned to body image advocacy, FA is a concept of which Freedman and many of her readers remain largely ignorant. Obviously, an opportunity to change that would be a positive thing.  I felt immediately ambivalent about being the one to do a guest post, however, both because of my reservations about Mamamia, which I’ve discussed before, and my need to ration sanity points. In other words, there were commenters there who were rude to me personally and showed enormous prejudice against fat people generally, and I’m not sure that’s an environment I would want to contribute to. I did, nevertheless, keep an open mind. Open-mindedness is a position that has generally served me well.

Perhaps because of that, it has struck me that Mia Freedman is quite obviously not approaching Fat Acceptance with an open mind.

I accept that Freedman did not post her piece about Donna Simpson with the explicit intention of drawing fat-hating comments. And as I and others have repeatedly said: feederism is not something I condone, nor is it aligned with Fat Acceptance. But the reality is that hateful fat stereotypes applied to Donna Simpson are the same stereotypes applied to other fat people – people who are fat for a whole range of reasons. And beyond that, some commenters on her post did make generalised statements about fat people and obesity, a few engaging in quite lengthy justifications of this hatred along the lines of ‘tax payers dollars’ or ‘health care workers dread obese patients.’  That Mia Freedman, with all her years of experience in writing and publishing and all of her years of speaking about body image could read such comments and see no fat hatred at all is astounding to me. I know she’s an intelligent woman with critical thinking faculties so I am, literally, flummoxed by such a denial. It would have cost her nothing to accept that some of those comments were hurtful and denigrated fat in general, and to condemn the prejudices underpinning them, and thus forcefully distance herself from such attitudes.

Such an action: a display of empathy with those who feel maligned by the proliferation of fat-hatred all over the place, but especially at Mamamia, would have been powerful. Mia Freedman is the kind of role model that young women might look up to: she’s successful, smart and has an interesting career. As a body image advocate and someone concerned about the welfare of teenagers,  she must know the hurtful impact that words can have. She must know that the fat girls reading her blog are vulnerable — painfully, dangerously vulnerable — to hating themselves when they read hatred directed towards obese people.  I would be extremely surprised if Freedman didn’t care about those girls, but I am thoroughly convinced that she has done a very poor job of conveying that care.

And it is blatantly obvious that she cares not a jot about me, or about the Fat Acceptance movement that she claimed to be interested to “understand better.” Fat Acceptance is not three women sitting in a room plotting to bring down Mamamia: it is a huge, diverse, international movement. Within the movement are people of all sizes – but yes, a lot of us have in common that we are fat. We are fat, we are accustomed to very real discrimination on the grounds of our weight; we recognise that such discrimination is fed by myths and misconceptions about fat and health, and that underpinning it is a lot of fear and hatred. The movement includes successful and prolific writers like Kate Harding, health experts like Dr Linda Bacon, bloggers like Marianne Kirby (who has just featured on a Dr. Phil episode which is yet to air in Australia) and concerned members of the public, like me. Information about Fat Acceptance and the related concept of Health At Every Size is all over the internet and there’s a big ol’ shelf of books dedicated to it. For the Chair of the Body Image Advisory Group to be openly ignorant of the size acceptance movement is in itself a concern.  In Freedman’s latest blog post, she distances herself even further from FA by calling those who have been critical of her recent work simply ‘the fat activists’ and also in centering her response around the misguided notion that our intention was mainly to defend feederism. I have personally made it perfectly clear to Freedman, over twitter, on her blog, and on my blog, that I am not in support of feederism (beyond an acceptance that people have a right to bodily autonomy). In continually reframing the discussion as one purely about Donna Simpson, I feel she’s being obtuse.

Freedman obviously feels attacked. That’s understandable. My intention was never to attack her, and I’ve no desire to cast aspersions on her personal character. I’m not surprised that she felt the Today, Tonight story was unbalanced — that’s to be expected from that type of programme. But her reporting on Donna Simpson and gainer blogs was hardly responsible or balanced! She didn’t do her research (admitting she knew ‘nothing’ about the gainer phenomenon, despite quite balanced articles like this being easily found with the magic of google) and she didn’t – despite her media experience – predict that her post might be interpreted as an invitation to hate on fatties. Perhaps that was a simple mistake. And perhaps, had she simply admitted that the “Fat, Fatter, Fattest” post displayed some poor judgement instead of nastily attacking those who criticised it, this would be a very different story.

I seriously doubt that Freedman’s offer of a potential guest posting spot on her blog still stands. Frankly, she’d probably be equally surprised if I still wanted to take it up.

This is a woman – a powerful and influential woman – who called me crazy. She also implied that I am dishonest, repeatedly claiming on her blog that only one or two of ‘the fat activists’ had posted criticism of her under multiple names, which is an accusation completely without foundation.* I don’t know everyone but I know that there were at least three FA bloggers posting on her site, at least two other concerned people who support FA that I personally am aware of, and also several other regular Mamamia commenters who accepted that what I and some others were saying was reasonable criticism. To blithely make statements erasing all of those people as if they never existed is, frankly, offensive. To delete the comments of posters who tried defending themselves against accusations of dishonesty is not a positive way to contribute to peace-making. Ms Freedman is fond of saying “peace out”, but in this case she’s not been fond of compromises, humility or in a few instances even a fair go, and that makes the peace process a little difficult.

Here is the bare face of it: I’m a fat woman, with a loud voice. I used that voice (independently, there was no carefully mobilised attack force here!) to express my concern about whether the commentary on the blog of a body image advocate was appropriate. I didn’t expect that I would necessarily be handed the floor. But I also didn’t expect to be personally attacked and to have my integrity called into question. I am a person with a mental illness, and although that illness doesn’t prevent me from being reasonable and articulate (I hope!) it does make me feel anxious and vulnerable. Especially when people call me crazy like it’s a joke. Especially when I am silenced for speaking my truth.

My truth is that I am a fat woman who has to walk out of my front door tomorrow into a world where, if the comments on some of Mamamia’s posts are to go by, I will be deemed selfish and lazy and hideous. My truth is that I was once a girl who was teased about her weight, and I have a daughter who will face a world full of body prejudice soon enough. My truth is that when I think about all the young fat girls who feel that they are disgusting and unlovable, I feel overwhelming sadness. My truth is that I know that what those girls need to hear from someone they look up to — someone who advises the government on how best to protect their self esteem — is that they matter and they are not disgusting and they have been heard. And my truth is that I don’t think, after all that has happened, that Mia Freedman is listening.

If that truly changes, I’ll peace out.

• I think it’s really important to note that no one is asking for Mia Freedman to be ‘sacked’, as was suggested on the Today Tonight piece. This isn’t, once more with feeling, about attacking someone’s character or livelihood. There is a good clarification of that here.

Scales of injustice

Now that I donate blood regularly, I am weighed a few times a year. This is the most frequently I have stood on scales in recent memory. It’s been interesting, to me, to note in numbers how my weight has altered (mostly increased) during this period of post-partum body adjustments, depression, medication and other health events. The number on the scale doesn’t mean very much: it is a number. It would seem very high to some, but then, I know that my dense body is heavy even when not particularly fat. So I don’t fret. But I can’t share that number with you here, as much as I would like to have that kind of fearless candour. It is still too early in my fat acceptance journey, perhaps. Or maybe it’s because I know what numbers mean to other people.

I know what numbers can do.

Like many people, high school Physical Education classes were not funtimes for me. I was labelled as unfit and unco-ordinated very early on in my school career and thereafter it didn’t seem to matter what I did. If I tried hard to improve my fitness, I was laughed at (mostly by other students: one notable time, by a teacher.) If I dawdled and wheezed, I simply confirmed the stereotype. If I listened too hard, I heard the slurs whispered behind my back as teams were picked or we lined up at the swimming pool, bodies exposed to scrutiny. Sometimes the hostility was overt.

A few times, we were weighed in class and those weights were listed publicly. I remember the trembling shame, and the flooding relief to not be heaviest. I remember the knowledge that I would never be popular until I was thin. But my body doesn’t do thin. It didn’t do acceptable in those formative years any more than it does now.

Kate Moss was it-girl of the moment (how little things change!) and my body, my unwaif-like body, was never going to make it onto the ‘hot’ list. And because I am obstinate and strong, I decided to just bide my time until I could choose to be around less-judgemental peers. But that wasn’t an option for everyone – fad diets were a weekly event for some of the students at my boarding school and I sporadically joined in. I remember telling a friend, mid-diet, that she was perfect how she was, and being laughed at. I was a fat girl, a lost cause, what would I know?

I feel like I need to say here that I wasn’t that fat. I wore straight sizes. I was active. I may have been in the D grade team, but I played sport. But it was apparent to me that in the eyes of my adolescent peers, and also my family, my body was outsized, unattractive and out of control.

My stepmother wasn’t generally big on body shaming but she did worry about my weight. Inconsistency raised me: my parents encouraged me to restrict portions one day, indulge the next. They loved me with food because physical and verbal affection were generally out of their range. And they singled me out from my siblings by making me do extra exercise. A lowlight was when my stepmum publicly informed a few other mothers from my primary school that I had graduated up to adult sizing (something that frequently happens quite suddenly to girls about to hit puberty). They were audibly shocked, no doubt thinking, gosh, I’m glad that hasn’t happened to my daughter yet. It’s twenty years later but their judgement still smarts.

It wasn’t that I didn’t try to control my body. I documented my first serious attempt at a diet in a notebook. I drew up tables and stuck them on the fridge, indicating which days I would be allowed to have dessert. I was eight years old.

Eight is the same age of the daughter of one of the commenters on this post by Mia Freedman about weighing children, and about the age at which most girls are beginning to be aware of their weight.  In her post, Freedman asks: “We’re obviously keen not to give our kids any complexes about their weight but does that mean turning a blind eye to weight gain for fear we might say the wrong thing?” Apparently, Freedman accepts the premise that the growth of a child’s or adolescent’s body requires commentary, and that such commentary could actually control that growth.*

The problem with these types of arguments about weighing children to ‘fight childhood obesity’ is that they show little understanding of how diet–weight–health interact: that is, in a far more complex and non-linear way than is popularly believed. A number on a scale doesn’t shout to your body: hey, stop growing as you wish to grow (largely due to genetic factors) and fit neatly onto this chart, dammit! But it may say to the adults around a child: start putting undue scrutiny on this child’s appetite, start singling her/him out for ‘special’ exercise or food, start making her/him feel less than for not looking the right way.

What infuriates me most about the idea of frequently weighing children and adolescents – or publicly weighing them – to keep them ‘on track’, is that it singles out the fat kids, and the solid kids, and even the underweight kids. It perpetuates the disproven notion that weight and health are intrinsically linked. I’m all for improving the health of young people. I think reducing our reliance on processed foods and increasing people’s activity levels are admirable goals. But when you aim these goals almost solely at vulnerable people who are already singled out by their appearance and who are already at risk of low self esteem, you do them a huge disservice. And actually you do everyone a disservice. Because thin children need nourishing foods and plenty of fun exercise in the fresh air, too.

More than that, we all need to stop buying into the lie that a single aesthetic ideal is a virtue to strive for, or the answer to everything. It has taken many years to overcome the damage done in PE classes, but finally I don’t much care what the scales tell me. They can measure how much the fluids and tissues of my body weigh. They do not know if I am strong or healthy. They also do not know my worth.

Concerned parents, teachers, public health authorities and popular culture commentators with successful blogs take note: We must not make the mistake of letting some children think that they are worth less — worthless — because they weigh more. Numbers on a scale are not nuanced, they are not intelligent, they are not loving, they do not listen. They are no substitute for real information about health and wellbeing and they are not a parenting tool. Our children deserve so much more.

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* N.B. It is common sense that where sudden weight gain is large or coinciding with other symptoms (other than puberty) then that is a good reason for a health check with a good GP, and subsequent discussion. But for a typical increase in chubbiness? For heaven’s sake, children ought to be allowed to just be happy in their bodies. Bombardment with fat-shaming media is never far away so parents aren’t actually required to join in. Besides, shaming children into restricted eating and/or exercising will not make them lose weight – unless it pushes them to starve themselves. For more information on how children can regulate their own food intake and body size, Ellyn Satter is a good starting point.

An unkind cut

The Guardian newspaper ran an article in November about the alarming rise in labiaplasty.  I had read that anecdotally, requests for cosmetic surgery to correct ‘problems’ with one’s vulva have increased exponentially in tandem with the pornification of our culture – the British figures would appear to support that assertion.

A study published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology last week revealed that, over the last year, there has been an increase of almost 70% in the number of women having labiaplasty on the NHS. There were 1,118 in 2008, compared with 669 in 2007 and 404 in 2006.

There is no way to know how many girls and women had the procedure performed privately – but presumably the total figures are considerably higher. In Australia, the figures are also in the thousands. Thousands of women and girls who have subjected their most tender parts to slicing and trimming for mostly cosmetic reasons.

There are some women who suffer physical pain and discomfort because of the shape of their vulva (generally the length of their inner labia), and this can at times be quite severe. The fact that there are surgeons skilled in genital surgery is a boon to many of those women, and I certainly don’t begrudge them the chance to improve their quality of life.

But the reality is that the majority of labiaplasties are performed purely for cosmetic reasons. Yes, even our ‘private parts’ are meant to live up to the airbrushed standard.

And that ‘standard’ is indeed airbrushed. As Mia Freedman discussed in her recent blog post on this issue, even magazines targeting women routinely airbrush female genitals. And not just because they want to, either. Freedman explains

When I worked in magazines I got worked up for quite some time about the censorship requirements around vaginas. Unless anything has changed since then, the basic situation is that any magazine featuring a picture of a naked woman, had to digitally remove anything visible outside the ‘single slit’ of the vaginal lips. So any stray bits of labia or clitoris had to be airbrushed out. Because it was deemed OFFENSIVE …

The now defunct magazine Women’s Forum first brought the issue to my attention years ago and Cosmo then took up the cause with a campaign protesting it. What a shocker. And nothing changed.

To this day, any magazine showing any ‘genital detail’ must be sold in a sealed plastic bag. Like pornography. And I’m not talking about explicit legs akimbo shots, just shots of a normal girl standing up with her legs closed. She must look like Barbie or the airbrush will be deployed to make the censors happy and protect our sensitive eyes from OFFENSIVE VISIBLE LADY PARTS.

Many Australian women are unaware that these censorship guidelines even exist. I certainly was.

Like most straight women in our society, I’m not in the habit of looking at other vulvas. We don’t do much communal bathing in our country, so unless I do become a birth doula one day, chances are I won’t be getting acquainted with too many examples other than my own. And I’m not alone in that. So is it any wonder that girls and young women increasingly consider the bodies they see in pornography to be ‘normal’? Is it any wonder that their own genitals, if they differ markedly from that version of ‘normal’, seem somehow wrong? Compounding this phenomenon is the popularity of waxing – another legacy of pornification which means that genital variations are now more noticable than in more hirsute times.

There are a number of Australian cosmetic surgeons who advertise genital surgery services online. Their websites promised enhanced comfort and self esteem. Conversely, my googling didn’t lead me to any surgeons openly touting penis enlargement surgery – on the contrary, it is very easy to find sites decrying the practice as unnecessary, unreliable – and of course, reassuring men that a satisfying sex life is not dependent on their genitals living up to a porn-star standard. I’m not claiming that penis enlargement isn’t big business (pardon the pun) but the drastic option of surgery is something that is falling out of favour, right at a time when more and more cosmetic surgeons are acquainting their scalpels with women’s genitals.

Aside from the obvious pain and discomfort immediately resulting from surgery, women having labiaplasty do run the risk of future problems.

As with any surgery, labiaplasty is potentially risky. Dr Sarah Creighton [a consultant gyneacologist in London],says that there have been no studies into the after-effects or possible complications of labiaplasty, nor has there been any research into the impact on childbirth: she suggests that women who opt for this procedure might experience the same problems while giving birth as women who have undergone ritualistic female genital mutilations.

I can’t help but wonder how many women who opt for this procedure are fully aware of the implications for childbirth. Presumably, many of them are young and have not yet embarked on motherhood, or indeed decided whether or not they even wish to. In any case, the reality is that should they give birth in the future, a scarred labia will probably not stretch and open in the same way as undamaged tissue will. This is likely to impact on (or even destroy) their ability to birth without significant medical intervention. To me, that seems high price to pay – and a cost that I hope cosmetic surgeons are disclosing along with their $4000-$10 000 invoice.

Despite perhaps having some shared origins in the pathologising and commodification of female bodies, I don’t think we should conflate labiaplasty procedures with ritualistic female genital mutilations much further. These are obviously very different experiences and issues.

But what is very clear is that girls and women need us to teach them more about themselves. Generations on from women first being urged to examine themselves with a hand mirror, we’re still not getting it right. Body diversity extends beyond skin colour and weight, and body image concerns can be found below the belt.