Clodagh Finn: Tell the body-shamers where to go and enjoy your outdoor summer

Two in three young women in Ireland have such a negative body image that they avoid a school event or, in some cases, even the doctor, because they don’t like how they look.

Oh no, here it comes; peak body-shaming season. The annual exhortation to get into shape for summer has already begun.

Add a bit of early June sun to the ongoing obsession with losing the so-called Covid stone and it looks as if we’re heading into the eye of a perfect body-image storm.

If only we could ride it out with a beach hat and a banner that says: “Breaking news: All you need to achieve a summer-ready body is a little bit of sun.”

We got the sun last weekend. Its warm kiss brought us out in crowds so numerous that there were renewed concerns about public health guidelines. I wonder, though, if anyone has taken the time to consider the effect of the Covid stone: not of gaining it, but the ongoing entreaties to lose it?

Yes, obesity is a serious health issue and it plays an adverse role in Covid-19, but body dissatisfaction has also been working away, quietly and corrosively, behind closed doors over the last 15 months.

For some, that amounts to daily self-loathing; looking in the mirror and willing soft, southward-moving flesh to stand to attention. 

That inner critic can inflict untold damage, drip-dripping bile that is poisonous enough to prompt a range of actions, from buying pointless stuff to trying any number of pointless diets.

For others, the effects are even more severe, developing into an eating disorder. In both cases, the pandemic has made things worse. The HSE has reported a 66% increase in referrals for eating disorders since March 2020, yet there is no attendant increase in services.

Last month, a mother of a 13-year-old girl with anorexia was so desperate about the lack of treatment places for eating disorders that she felt compelled to speak out publicly. Her child had been in a general hospital for more than two months because there was no specialist care available.

“Do I have to lose her for them to realise?” she asked.

The anguish in that statement fills me with absolute fury because, yet again, it has come to this. Yet another Irish woman has been forced to bare her deepest, most personal pain to secure a service. 

There was a Government response to her plight and a call for an urgent HSE review, but this issue has been spiralling into crisis for decades. 

Where is the health policy, the strategy, the plan to ease the burden before it gets to this point?

And make no mistake about it, this is set to get worse. According to a new survey, a heartbreaking 87% of Irish girls between the ages of 10 and 17 say they do not have good body esteem. That was one of the highest figures recorded globally by personal care brand Dove in a study published in April.

Two in three young women in Ireland have such a negative body image that they avoid a school event or, in some cases, even the doctor, because they don’t like how they look.

The last thing they or, indeed, anyone needs right now is a public dressing-down for added inches. It’s not the time to think of transformation, but rather celebration. Your amazing body (and its lockdown layer) got you through, let’s hope, the worst part of a global pandemic. We should really think about rolling out a nationwide campaign — ‘Hips, Hips, Hurray’, perhaps — to remind us that body acceptance rather than body shaming is a much better look for summer 2021.

For all the strides of the last number of decades, it is absolutely devastating to think that young women — and men too — are still embracing the destructive belief that makes them think their appearance is a reflection of their success, or failure, as a person.

At least the people at Dove are doing something to promote body positivity. Its Self-Esteem Project, which aims to reach a third of all 11 to 14-year-olds in Ireland by the end of 2021, is laudable.

But why have we left it to a brand, which ultimately wants to sell more product, to do something the Government should be doing?

At least the Dove campaign is a blessed relief compared to some of those older, deeply cynical ads that kept body satisfaction continually at arm’s length. The one that still goads me is the odious jingle that accompanied Kellogg’s 1984 campaign for Special K. It went: “If you can pinch more than an inch, you may need to watch your weight.”

Remember that? The ad recommended replacing two meals a day with a bowl of Special K for two weeks to lose 2kg. You’ll still find a version of it on YouTube telling you that the resultant weight loss will make you feel "special".

I have long since stopped pinching anything, although the jingle has worked its way deep into the psyche of those of us of a certain age. I am reminded of it again now because the Covid stone is just another expression of the "pinch more than an inch" body dissatisfaction that has the potential to wreak such havoc.

We should be reminding ourselves how wonderful it is to be alive, sagging bits or no sagging bits, instead of tormenting ourselves for eating sourdough bread to take the edge off the long months of winter

However, as long as there is money to be made out of it, there will be inches to pinch and flesh to punish.

I had hoped, naively, that the next generation would learn from our mistakes and read the books we read to save them from the voice that tells them they are not thin/fit/toned enough.

Yet, more than 40 years after writing Fat is a Feminist Issue, author Susie Orbach said she never dreamed — or feared — that it would still be in print today.

Four decades on, she is describing the same “bad body feeling” that is still constantly stoked by images and blandishments “to do, be, brand, mark ourselves in ways that reward not the human body as a place we dwell in but as an object to enhance the profits of the beauty, fashion, diet, cosmetic surgery, food and exercise industries, no matter one’s age”.

It might be true to say that ‘thin’ has given way to ‘strong, fit, and healthy’ and that now men are also in the beauty industry’s crosshairs, but the pressures are the same. Worse, in some ways. I can’t imagine how I might have coped with a photo-editing app that chiselled away at my too-chubby cheeks or gave me whiter teeth. Not well, is the short answer. 

Cue intense personal insecurity and body dysmorphia.

The pedlars of body hatred are many and powerful, so turning a deaf ear to the ‘lose the Covid stone’ pronouncements is just one very small step — but what a glorious one and what a way for anyone who wants to tell the body-shamers where to go and get on with this outdoor summer.