How sad: the clever girls who just want to look like Posh
AS TEENAGERS in the late Seventies, my friends and I never discussed how much anyone weighed. None of us knew anyone who was on a diet, either. That’s not to say we didn’t care about how we looked.
The truly daring dyed their hair, put on a black bin-liner and went punk; the less courageous opted for a cheesecloth hippy look, or wore their fathers’ checked shirts with bootlace ties as they head-banged to Status Quo. And there were a few squares who couldn’t have cared less what they wore.
What we all had in common was a very clear idea that what you looked like was absolutely secondary to your character and personality and what you wanted to achieve.
How dispiriting, then, to read the results of a new survey of 500 11 to 17-year- old adolescent girls, which has revealed that more than half of them are unhappy with their looks.
More depressing was that two-thirds of them — including those who were achieving highly at school — said they weren’t confident of having a successful career.
For several years now, girls have been outperforming boys academically, gaining better grades not just at school but at university, too.
What a triumph of feminism, you might think. How fabulous that, half a century on from the campaigning of their pioneering grandmothers and mothers, young women today should have come so far.
Except that, as the survey shows us, they haven’t. Because what most young women in Britain aspire to today is not to be the best — but to look the best.
From the social heights of Samantha Cameron and the Duchess of Cambridge through to Geri Halliwell and Anna Friel, the message is clear: a successful woman has to be glamorous, glossy-haired and catwalk-model thin. Victoria Beckham has taken it a step further, turning her skeletal frame into a cartoon impossibility with a tiny waist and surgically-enhanced bust.
For most of us it’s an unobtainable and totally unrealistic look. (Try watching the Seventies Top Of The Pops repeats on BBC4 and you’ll notice that none of the lithe female dancers or pop stars even had a bust, let alone hair that shone like a mirror.) Nevertheless, it’s the look that almost every famous woman at the top of her field strives to emulate, as she devotes hours of her precious time — and considerable amounts of money — to transforming her face and her body shape.
Where are today’s equivalents of Joan Armatrading, Aretha Franklin or Annie Lennox, whose looks were nothing compared to their voice? Gone are the days when sheer talent was enough to win you followers and acclaim. What today’s singers sell, from Rihanna to Katy Perry to Madonna, is sex.
With the exception of Susan Boyle and Adele — currently losing weight and reported to be on a strict diet — it’s almost impossible to name a female celebrity who isn’t notably thin or who hasn’t had cosmetic surgery — or, increasingly, both. Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston pursue their workouts with the fervour of athletes; the athletes themselves, meanwhile, are trying to look more like celebrities.
Olympic contenders — from heptathlete Jessica Ennis to cyclist Victoria Pendleton to synchronised swimmer Jenna Randall — have all been photographed recently looking like movie stars.
How different from the Seventies heyday of Mary Peters and Tessa Sanderson. Back then, we admired them for their sporting prowess and frankly couldn’t have cared less how they looked.
The same was true of tennis stars. Virginia Wade and Martina Navratilova were superb players. I never considered for a moment what they looked like, but simply wanted to play tennis as well as they did.
WE URGENTLY need to start talking not about how attractive women are, but how accomplished or how interesting they are, and what they are actually achieving. At the moment, the only high-profile woman I can think of who’s providing that inspiration is Michelle Obama.
She recently invited to the White House 12 girls from the inner-london comprehensive she visited on her first UK trip in 2009. They came back utterly inspired. As one girl said afterwards: ‘I can still hear her saying to us, “You have to push yourself hard, because if it feels easy you’re not trying hard enough.”’
Twenty years ago, we thought it was laughable that in crazy California, women went to aerobics classes and devoted themselves to weird diets. Who’s laughing now?
Certainly not our desperate young girls. Despite their strings of A* grades, they’re convinced that their lives are over before they’ve even begun — simply because they don’t look like Victoria Beckham. It doesn’t get much more crazy than that.