If I had to choose the most upsetting statistic I’ve ever come across, this one would come close to the top of the list: research shows that 80 per cent of 10-year-old American girls have dieted to lose weight.
Perhaps more than at any other time in history, women’s bodies are burdened to breaking point with the weight of societal shame, pressure, judgement and exploitation. Girls are pushed to share Photoshopped photographs on social media, where images of celebrity ribcages, thigh gaps and cleavage abound. Young men are socialized to demand nude photographs to prove their ‘lad’ credentials, resulting in enormous pressure on girls to provide them, followed swiftly by censure and judgement, whether they comply (slut) or not (prude). Airbrushed adverts and magazine articles force endless unrealistic images of emaciated models upon us, without acknowledgement of the vast majority of women whose bodies don’t look like those in the media spotlight. Those with bodies whose size, shape or skin colour aren’t deemed ‘beautiful’ are variously shamed and mocked, or patronizingly praised as inspirational tokens, as if their mere existence is a form of bravery.
A billion-dollar industry works to undermine women’s body confidence in order to sell them everything from spiralizers to cellulite zappers for invented problems they never knew they had. Vulvas and vaginas remain stigmatized, and the discussion of female sexual pleasure, and of conditions like endometriosis, period pain and thrush, is contained to hushed, shameful tones, while the international porn industry profits endlessly from the exposure and exploitation of those very same body parts.
Online porn teaches female viewers that their pubic hair is strange and unnatural and their ordinary labia ugly or lopsided, to the extent that leading gynaecologists have warned that enquiries about plastic surgery from girls as young as nine are fast increasing. In 2015–16, more than 200 girls under eighteen had labiaplasty on the NHS. It is the world’s fastest-growing cosmetic procedure, with 45 per cent more operations carried out in 2016 than the preceding year. Pregnancy renders women’s bodies automatic public property as they are subjected to a thousand high-pressure instructions about how to be pregnant, to birth, to breastfeed a baby, but simultaneously shamed for doing it the ‘wrong’ way or failing to instantly shed their ‘baby weight’. Trans women face enormous pressure to conform to the bodily demands and curiosity of others, who see only genitalia and not humanity.
My friend and hero Emer O’Toole was invited on to a major breakfast television programme to ‘debate’ the fact that she’d chosen not to shave her armpits for a year, as if her personal bodily choices were a matter for public record and challenge. Which, of course, is exactly how women’s bodies continue to be viewed – just ask our sisters who continue to battle for abortion rights after an Irish minor was placed in a psychiatric clinic against her will for requesting a termination and a Northern Irish woman who was forced to carry her baby for another fifteen weeks of pregnancy and go through a delivery despite having discovered at her twenty-week scan that the pregnancy was not viable.
From the ongoing scourge of female genital mutilation to the shaming of women with different body sizes and shapes, the hyper-sexualization of black women’s bodies and the commodification of disembodied breasts and stomachs by advertising moguls, women’s bodies remain tightly policed, debated and embattled. We are still dreaming of a world in which our bodies are our own business and nobody else’s.