By JAMILA RIZVI
Eighty per cent of us are unhappy with the way we look.
Sixty per cent think negatively about our appearance at least once a day.
And a whopping 90 percent say that the way we feel about our body has stopped us from doing something in the past 12 months; whether that be going to the beach, having sex or getting our picture taken.
These are the results of Mamamia’s first annual Body Image Survey and while they are extremely concerning, they are not altogether unexpected.
As women, we are bombarded with digitally altered images of airbrushed perfection every day. We see them in catalogues, in magazines, on billboards, on the television and on the internet. Almost every picture of a woman’s body that we see has been nipped, tucked, smoothed, cropped and stretched beyond recognition.
The result? We think we’re somehow supposed to live up to these impossibly thin, impossibly pretty images.
But you know what the operative word is here? Impossible.Because the reality is that none of us will ever reach the crazy societal bar that has been set. The only way you can look like that is with the aid of a computer. Just ask Jessica Gomes and Jennifer Hawkins, who’ve both been on the receiving end of some pretty hard core body shaming from the media this past week.
At Mamamia we don’t put up with it. We’ve always drawn attention to the fact that women are being sold a shit deal. A fake ‘reality’. A lie. And we have always called for there to be more diversity and realism about the way women’s faces and bodies are portrayed.
We call out Photoshop fails when we see them, we refuse to engage in the seemingly endless ‘post baby body’ commentary, we expose marketing that makes women feel rubbish about themselves in order to sell a product and we never airbrush or digitally enhance photos on this website that we have created ourselves.
But it’s not enough. It is nowhere near enough.
Because this new data shows that too many of our beloved readers still feel pretty shitty about themselves.
And we’re going to do something about it: We’re going to start publishing the alternative.