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Don’t measure female success on appearance

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thinspoSamantha Brick set Twitter alight recently by claiming that fat equals failure, for women at least.

You may have carved out an amazing career, juggled it with family life and your sanity, but can you still fit into a size ten?

Controversial headline hunter and Daily Mail columnist Samantha Brick set Twitter alight with fury recently with the claim that fat equals failure, for women at least.

It could have been an interesting take on how society still measures a woman’s success based on the way she looks – Brick was a successful TV exec herself before going bankrupt in 2006 and surely has plenty of experience to draw on.

But oh no.

The 42 year-old claims to have been on a permanent diet for the last 30 years, and said: “Any self-respecting woman wants to be thin, and to be thin you need to spend your life on a diet.”

All I can say is that must be so boring.

“Chocolate, cakes, sweets and any other calorie-rich, fat-laden ‘foods’ are banned in my home.”

Yawn.

“For three decades, self-denial has been my best friend. And one of my biggest incentives is that I know men prefer slim women.”

What?! I’d bet that her obsession with food, or the lack of it, is driven by deeper issues than simply her desire to get a date.

What her article did do was shine a huge beacon of unflattering light on the demands that modern media, the Daily Mail certainly being no exception, place on women today.

I’m sure it also drove a lot of traffic to the paper’s website, where you might want to follow up with articles such as ‘Miley Cyrus showcases her long legs in tiny hotpants’, ‘Molly Ringwald shows off her legs at book reading in Los Angeles’ and my particular favourite, ‘Hotter after heartbreak! Recently divorced Danica McKellar shows off her sexy single figure.’

There’s nothing like a devastating break up to help you get into shape.

Anyhow, instead of discussing the pressures she encountered in the industry that she worked in, Brick goes on to boast about how she maintained her ‘svelte’ figure, advocating fad diets, skipping meals and existing on a meagre 1,000 calories a day.

Her ramblings sound akin to someone with an eating disorder; fainting from lack of food and enjoying the hunger pangs because they remind you you’re in control.

This woman has an unhealthy relationship with food, and for that matter with her husband, who has
apparently told her in no uncertain terms that if she gains weight, she’s out the door.

Luckily for me, there is no better weight-loss incentive than a Frenchman.

“Pascal would not tolerate a fat wife and has told me that if I put on weight, our marriage is over.

“What more motivation do I need?”

He sounds lovely.

I know I should be ignoring this kind of attention-seeking drivel, but in a society where young women and girls seek out ‘thinspiration’ online, it’s just downright irresponsible for a national newspaper to advocate a life of miserable self-denial in the name of beauty.

According to a government study, girls’ happiness lags behind boys’, purely because of the anxieties they have over body image.

The research suggested that one in three 11-15 year-old girls struggle with their appearance.

The internet has long provided a forum for girls and women to reaffirm their commitment to attaining that ultimate marker of success; skinny.

Since Kate Moss proclaimed that ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ the motto has become a mantra for pro-anorexia websites, and just as social media has exploded in recent years, so has its use by the pro-ana and ‘thinspiration’ community.

Instagram, Tumblr and Pintrest have put policies in place to curtail material that promotes eating disorders.

Twitter failed to take a similar stance, and there is now a petition calling on the site to ban thinspiration hashtags.

Material such as this, which promotes skinny as a lifestyle, fails to recognise the obsession as a very real mental illness, which makes trite commentary such as Brick’s all the more insidious.

By putting such a focus on women’s physical appearance as a marker of success, she is just accepting the notion that women and girls will only ever be valued for how they look.

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