Why do we care that our bum always looks bigger than it is? - Women's Agenda

Why do we care that our bum always looks bigger than it is?

Three year seven girls, at Perisher to compete in the interschool ski competition, stood behind me in the line for coffee. They were wearing body-hugging all-in-one ski suits with the school logo emblazoned across the back.

At the precise point that I was thinking how wonderful it would be to look like that in that style of clothing, one of them caught sight of their reflection in a mirror and exclaimed, “look how big my bum looks in this!”. It caused her friend to quickly check herself out too. The friend appeared horrified: “look how big my legs look!”. The third friend started turning wildly in front of the mirror.

Before me were three wonderfully athletic young women. All had slightly different body shapes and reflected the obvious training they would have had to do to be in the school ski racing team. To put it bluntly even Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have been able to find an ounce of body fat between them.

I wanted to turn around and tell them they had nothing to worry about but I resisted because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference. They don’t care what I think. Teenagers don’t care how adults view them unless that adult is Miranda Kerr or sings in One Direction. The one thing I learned as editor of Dolly magazine 20 years ago is that the people who can make a difference to their body confidence are other teenagers: boys and girls that they care about.

The girls in the line were from a private girls school, so no doubt the most important people to be boosting their body confidence would be other girls in their circle of friends. The formative teenage years are when we develop views about our self-worth. In most cases it’s too early for them to have achieved anything significant in their lives so it’s easy to see why their appearance has heightened importance.

My 15-year-old son explained that girls think they are bigger than they are when they look in the mirror and boys think they look “more ripped” (apparently the holy grail for young men).

So the same warped visual seems to apply across the genders with teenagers. They see a bigger version of themselves when they look in the mirror. The difference is that too many girls see this size enhancement as a negative while most boys see it as a positive. Why?

Clearly this crazed body dysmorphia stays with us for life. I have never been a dieter for weight-loss purposes (but I have tried the two-week sugar-free diet for health reasons), I am not particularly insecure about my appearance and I dress for myself but I have been known to ask, “does my bum look big in this?”. My husband refuses to feed my irrational moments and will walk out of the room, leaving me with my mirrors and crazy thoughts.

We recently ran a meme on the Women’s Agenda Facebook page that read: behind every successful woman is a ‘best friend’ giving her crazy ideas. It spread like wildfire and reached almost 10 times the people that other memes have reached. It clearly struck a nerve. If the crazy idea given to a best friend as a teenager was that her bum doesn’t look big in anything we may save ourselves from a lifetime of unnecessary angst.

Do mirrors still give you crazy thoughts, or is it just occasionally me?

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