Why are you hitting yourself?

A couple o' months ago, I wrote a piece about unrealistic beauty ideals and what they do to women's self-esteem, called Hands Up If You Feel Ugly. I did it because the current prevailing definition of sexy is too thin, too young, too inoffensive, and quite frankly, too super-bloody-lame.

There's a uniformity to the look. It's unattainably thin, but it's also - somehow, inexplicably - got knockers. It's got clear, glowing skin, and a perfect, cute little button nose! And most "how do they do that?!", it's got no scars, no floppy bits of skin, and no bruises. It's like the most popular girl from your secondary school all over again. She's better looking and has a better life than you, and she's taunting you everywhere you look, and selling everything from chocolate to cars.

There's only a certain amount we can do if we want to be free of these images. You can stop buying magazines, and if you really wanted, you could stop watching telly. But for God's sake, what sort of a society would we be living in if we were only allowed to enjoy entertainment if we were willing to pay the price of feeling dreadful about ourselves?! Come on, people. Wouldn't it be better if the general rule were to populate the worlds of advertising and television with people who looked like real human beings? Real human beings are great. They come in all shapes and sizes. Lots of them are sexy and beautiful in unexpected ways, they have personality and vigour, and they don't look like they just stepped out of some bizarre heavily airbrushed nether-world.

Unattainable beauty ideals have shocking knock-on effects for your average woman in the street. Looking at them every day - which you could only not do if you wore a blindfold everywhere you went - makes us feel fat and ugly by comparison. We come to hate our own bodies, and we don't feel sexy. That, friends, puts us off getting naked in front of our husbands and lovers. Who in their right mind wants to live in a world like that? DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING!

In an interesting twist upon Big Corporations Doing Evil Things That Are No Good, [past examples include killing third world babies with formula milk, and shooting anyone who joins a trade union], Dove have set up the Susie Orbach-instigated campaign for real beauty. Part of this campaign involves using a wider range of body types and beauty ideals in their advertising, and education work in schools to improve body image in little girls. There's a short film on their website about how girls and women develop skewed ideas about beauty on their website here.

In other good news, the Liberal Democrats called last year for a ban on heavily airbrushed images, arguing that they are bad for women's mental health, and that they put pressure upon women to live up to unrealistic beauty ideals. [The libs would also make it easier for small venues to get a license for live music, and abolish Council Tax, so vote for them. DO IT!].

Wouldn't it be great to see loads of sexy girls and boys of all shapes and sizes in the public eye? For every Eva Longoria Parker, a Nigella Lawson; let's have more pictures of big girls eating cake, and more images of older women looking pleased with themselves. Let's have everybody feeling good about themselves, and a chocolate fountain on every corner. Let's make sexy older, let's make it more interesting, and best of all, let's make it bigger.

Hands up if you feel ugly

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that most of us feel ugly at least at some point in our lives. (I'll go further still, and say that if you've never felt ugly, there's probably something the matter with you). And although I've no stats or evidence to back me up, I think it's more common in women than in men.

We're constantly surrounded by images of women - in advertising, on TV, in magazines, on billboards, on packaging. Any images of realistic looking women - and by "realistic", I don't mean women who are size 12, who have quirky faces or haircuts, or any other slight deviation from the narrow and homogenised beauty ideals we're constantly surrounded by - when I say "realistic women", I mean women who look tired, women whose clothes look like they need a wash, women walking around carrying 73 different bags containing everything they need for the day ahead - are vastly outweighed by these unobtainably beautiful images of women which can only be rendered possible with hours of lighting and photography, and a lot of judicious photoshopping after the fact.

Beauty I have no problem with. We all like to look at something beautiful, after all: that's why National Parks and America's Next Top Model are so popular. But the images of beautiful women with which we're surrounded are so completely ridiculously attainable, there's no way that even the foxiest of average woman isn't going to feel inadequate by comparison every now and again. Who has time to spend six hours in make up every morning? (before a full day at work, right? When do I have to get up? Four hours before I go to bed?) Who's got a special 'photoshop filter' through which everybody will look at them? (Look! No skin blemishes or marks! And look at my unnaturally thin thighs!)

There's no way we can live up to these ideals. We haven't got the genes, for one thing, for another, we haven't got the time, and for another, we haven't got the technology. But that's just the way advertisers like it: our insecurities make us buy more. Like it or not, that's the premise upon which so much advertising works, and women are especially susceptible because of being primarily judged on their looks. (Gee, thanks, partriarchy. When's the next stop?)

Wouldn't it be far better for everybody's mental health if advertising images used only images of normal women? Here, I've got to make a slight detour to give Dove a nod for using real women - with visible rolls of fat - in their advertising campaigns. Imagine it: you'd look at a poster of somebody who looked like your foxy 50-year old neighbour, modelling lipstick, and you'd congratulate her for looking so sexy at 50, you'd congratulate the company for using a real person, and you wouldn't feel ugly by comparison every time you looked at the image. Hell, you might even buy the cosmetics they were advertising.

In a world where it was the norm for women to feel good about themselves most of the time, as the rule rather than the exception, everything would run so much more smoothly. No more spending ages despairing over our own reflections in the mirror every time we think about leaving the house. No more desperately seeking reassurance about our image from our partners (come on, guys, this is a winner. Imagine never being asked "Do I look OK in this?" ever again!) No more obsessing over how ugly / old / sunken our faces are becoming. The casualties would be the photoshoppers, the advertisers, the beauty fascists, and who's going to mourn them??

Who's with me?!