«WOMEN IN REVOLT» FOR THE 21st CENTURY

“It’s all about insecurity,” reckons the PR guru Max Clifford. “You get a pretty girl, and the women will say, ‘Look at the size of her bum.’ It’s getting worse, because it’s increasingly difficult to be a woman these days — there are so many more opportunities for self-improvement, and the more pressure women feel, the nastier it gets.”The media has to take some of the blame, with gossip magazines encouraging us to focus on women’s looks, bodies and clothes, rather than on the attributes we should be celebrating, such as kindness and wit. “Feminism provided the culture to admire women for their qualities, not their visual appearance,” says the psychologist Jacqui Marson. “Now the whole celebrity-magazine culture has given us permission to direct our gaze at women’s minute physical flaws and choices, and to pick them apart. There has been a big shift, and the feeling of sisterhood we used to have doesn’t exist any more.”

Times
Oct 5 2008