B
ack in about 1999, I
watched a programme
about women’s body
hair. The premise was
simple: take four women – two
with a typical Western
relationship with body hair
and two with extreme body
hair phobias – and ask them to
stop shaving, plucking, waxing
and bleaching for three weeks.
The four women fell apart,
just because they couldn’t
use a razor.This really got up my nose,
and not because the scent of
passionate, idealistic
feminism was still clinging to
me like stale patchouli after
years at an ardently liberal
undergraduate university. No,
I was annoyed because I am
irritated by most coverage of
women’s bodies in the mass
media. I’m at peak pop
culture despair right now
because we keep getting
bombarded with yet moreseasons of the size zero
debate, courtesy of Fashion
Weeks and similar events.
This is not a new debate, but
things have changed since I
glared at the telly in my
shared Glasgow flat in 1999.
Back then, people compared
themselves to individuals
seen on TV or in magazines.
Now, if we use social media,
we operate in a world in
which we’re overwhelmed by
the better versions ofourselves that we project into
the digital realm. In extreme
cases, people decorate their
bedrooms to look good on
Instagram, or get ‘selfie
su rger y ’.
For the women in the body
hair experiment, their biggest
concern was what their
partners would say. Now, the
worry is what random
strangers will think. The aim
in a hyper-visual culture is to
get as many likes as possible,Psychology
Our online image is now often more important
than what our partners think of us
7 TEXT: ALEKS KROTOSKI