Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Can we stem the rising tide of body anxiety?

Monday 11 June 2012 10:26 BST
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On Saturday afternoon at London's South Bank, the sun showed up and even more startlingly, so did over a thousand stark naked cyclists of all ages, all sizes and colours. They rode unselfconsciously, letting strangers behold their bums, boobs, knobs and muffs. A good number showed off with piercings and paint, flowers and vajazzle, bells and feathers. The bikers were protesting against aggressive drivers, a worthy message shoved aside by erotic excitement and the infinitely various human forms one never sees in public. Without knowing it, the nude swarm cocked a snook at diktats about the body beautiful.

Then, like the sun, they were gone and billboards retook the space with their army of "perfect", thin, long- haired, wide-eyed, airbrushed women and George Clooney clones, as in the glossy magazines, glam television shows, commercially oriented internet sites and newspapers. The images infect our eyes, pollute our hearts and disease our minds, but the industries responsible go on without having to account for any of the damage. The worst gambling bankers, quacks, food and drink purveyors, cigarette manufacturers even, are more answerable than the brokers who actively encourage self-loathing and profiteer by promising false cures. Researchers are finding that females of all ages have a distorted and negative view of their faces and bodies.

This week Tamara Rojo, the exquisite Spanish ballet dancer and newly appointed artistic director of English National Ballet, spoke out against anorexia among ballet dancers. Another laudable iconoclast is the editor of Vogue, Alexandra Shulman. She is launching the Health Initiative to get her peers to consider how selling unattainable physical aspirations creates unhappiness and almost certainly increased levels of anorexia, bulimia and self harm. There may be deeper underlying reasons, but the merchandisers of popular culture trigger and feed the illnesses. The depiction and place of females in all societies has been determined by power and politics. According to the American professor of psychiatry, Joel Yager: "Every society has a way of torturing its women, whether by binding their feet or sticking them into whalebone corsets. What contemporary American culture has come up with is designer jeans."

The psychotherapist Susie Orbach has long fought the toxic cultural forces that make women hate their looks. I have never known her to be as apprehensive as she is today: "How did we get here? " she asks. The guilty will not hear the question. With so much cash and kudos why would they?

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