Love.Shape.Sex.Perfection.Shame.

So when did we become so obsessed by every inch of our bodies, with removing the curves of life-giving hips, the rotundity of motherhood, the sensuality of soft skin? When did it become normal not to have that little bulge of Raphaelite angels and to razor away the thighs that gripped Rodin’s kisser in the throes of love?

Our bodies have become something that we manufacture. They no longer play a role in creating but have instead become objects of creation. Creation under strict censure.

Susie Orbach, author of the revolutionary Fat is a Feminist Issue, a bestseller 30 years ago and famed for its shockingly honest and hard-hitting content, has recently published a new book, Bodies. In it she highlights how this modern obsession has escalated beyond the boundaries that she hoped weren’t possible. In FIFI (Orbach’s pet name for her first book),she explained her belief that dieting only leads to compulsive eating; putting on weight is a rebellion, resisting society’s insistence on how to look; that we eat to soothe inner pain or trauma. All this may seem unsurprisingly obvious when you have been brought up on a cocktail of television programmes, self-help books and magazine articles exploring disordered eating habits. You only need to flick through this week’s television guide to find a plethora of examples, Gok Wan’s ‘Too Fat. Too Young’, Myleene Klass’ ’10 Years Younger’, that explore the reasons behind our obsessive relationship with food.

Right now, flicking through magazines filled with skeletal images, the perfect hangers for designer clothes, it evokes in us, not horror, but big waves of envy. Increasingly we no longer recoil in disgust and sorrow but instead desire those jutting collar bones and protruding knee caps. A part of many women will see the translucent skin shifting over a sparse ribcage as a celeb rolls out of their limo or a model struts down the runway, and want to emulate this famished victim of the fashion industry.

But disordered eating isn’t something that affects only disordered people from disturbed backgrounds. Officially it now haunts the lives of every 1 in 20 women, but realistically the figure is significantly higher. Obsession with thinness, the perusal of the ‘slim aesthetic—with pecs for men and ample breasts for women,’ and the complex distortion of our natural appetites has become the norm. Anyone not fraught by concern for their shape has become the exception. Girls as young as five harbour disgust and shame for their bodies, and the deep desire to change it is implanted by the media’s constant attention to shape and to the criticism or appraisal of celebrities. Disturbingly, in 2006, according to the Liberal Democrats, the NHS treated 58 children under the age of 10 for eating disorders. Websites such as ‘Miss Bimbo’ have emerged where it is possible to create a virtual doll, for whom six year olds buy breast implants and new noses.

Orbach, a practising psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, identifies the growth of a ‘progressively unstable body, a body, which to an alarming degree, is becoming a site of serious suffering and disorder.’ We have become plagued by a desire to reshape and restructure, fashioning our bodies through increasingly accessible plastic surgery, liposuction, gastric bypasses...the list is endless. There is a relentless pressure to conform, to look ‘beautiful’—and in the eyes of who? We are striving, exhaustingly towards honing our bodies so that they become ‘acceptable’, slimline, toned, manicured, to emulate the images that we are bombarded with daily and that can only be created by a computer. The perfection to which we aspire is a myth. It doesn’t exist except when made up of tiny dots morphed and replaced and coloured by technicians sitting at their computer screens.

Of course, there are other complex reasons for the growth in eating disorders and the media or fashion industry are not solely to blame. This dissatisfaction with our bodies is ‘shaped and misshaped by our earliest encounters with parents and carers’, our anxieties about our bodies are transferred generation by generation, each passing on a ‘panoply of injunctions about how the body should appear and be attended to.’ Furthermore, the symbolic connotations attached to fatness and thinness are growing and changing. Our body size has become a new form of classification. If the class system has been deemed dead and unsatisfactory, a new one has emerged in its place. Lithe, taught bodies or those rippling with muscular tension now signify wealth, education and a country manor in the Cotswolds, whereas twenty years ago they may have meant coming from an under-nourished family on a council estate. The voluptuous plumpness of the upper classes of the eighteenth century, or even icons such as Sophia Loren, have been transformed into goji-spirulina-eaters who attend morning pilates followed by a 3 hour session with the personal trainer.

Is there any hope of our age being released from the grip of this fearful obsession, the necessity to conform to a homogenised form? Where will it end? A few months ago came cries that a revolution was on its way. Kate Spicer in the Sunday Times questioned whether we could ‘be laying size zero to rest?’ and highlighted the introduction of a new ‘curvy, sexy future’ in figures such a Daisy Lowe and Dita von Teese. This seems somewhat optimistic, but you never know.

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