How Women Perceive Themselves: A Man's Perspective

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about accepting my curves and how women need to stop giving themselves such a hard time over how they look. I thought it would be interesting to get a man's point of view on this too, especially as I had several replies about this post from men!

So it's my pleasure to introduce you to my first guest blogger - Andy from Parallel Parks.


A few words about Andy:
Andrew Knight is a 32-year old, North London-based market researcher, with a side-project to review and improve his thoughts via his blog, Parallel Parks.

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Gwyneth’s neck is like a swan’s and swans break arms. Angelina’s bee-stung lips look like there was more than one bee involved. Jennifer Lopez’s bum is too big and the shortening of her name to ‘J-Lo’ makes her sound like a legitimate rival to Cif in the domestic cream cleaner wars.

I feel bad about writing those things. I’m sure each of those women is wonderful, even J-Lo. My point is the opposite, that the Photoshopped images of celebrities and models say to women, ‘They are perfect. It’s your neck that’s too short, your lips that are too thin, and your bum that’s too flat. In a word, you are too normal. How dare you! Kindly purchase all of these products and break your mould. It won’t hurt a bit.’

This cultural rash flares up when men get involved, because men get the same ideas and ideals from the same places. Not all men objectify women, but it’s harder to dismiss the notion that boys objectify women, and that boys objectify girls. They do, and it takes a while – years sometimes – to break that spell.

Once boys have tripped into the hairier area of puberty, they are overwhelmed with desire for women; it’s hormones, people. Youth is impressionable and television, films, magazines, fashion and advertising inform youth to desire women who don’t exist. With pornography ever more prevalent and only a click away, this condition is worsening.

With those impossible dreams swirling round their heads, the boys venture out of their bedrooms to search for women approximate to those images. At first, they’re disappointed not to find them, but they continue to look, and shortly the looks become stares. They’re ashamed, but they can’t help themselves. Desire consumes and it needs to be fed constantly, so the boys become blinkered, directing all their energy towards the endless pursuit of the impossible.

Naturally this fruitless search becomes frustrating, which gets in the way of relationships forming—Nuts and FHM doesn’t teach them about actual interaction. Equally awful is that you see girls, under the spell of those same influences and influencers, trying to be what they perceive the boys to want them to be; often at the cost of their own natural development.

Images of the ‘perfect woman’ should be accompanied by a ‘don’t try this at home’ tag. Take the advice of Blue Peter, and you might, after 30 minutes, have a decent fairy-liquid bottle rocket as a reward for your hard labour. Trying to be something you’re not leaves you looking like an amateur escapologist refusing to admit you’ve made the chains too tight; you’re going to be stuck there struggling long after the crowds have moved on. You can’t get better at fitting into a body you don’t have; you can get better at feeling comfortable in the body you do have.

The beauty of it is that feeling more comfortable in your own body is the easiest, most cost-effective way of being beautiful. Okay, it’s not easy. It can be really difficult, but men have empathy for women’s situation. They too know what it feels like to worry about their apparent imperfections: too short, too tall, too wide, too weak; and let’s face it, Freud, it’s always been other men, not women, who suffer from penis envy.

So women should not have to fight this battle alone. Both sexes are being ruined by the pressure to achieve the unachievable and unless both sides work together to shatter the illusion, everyone suffers.

To hammer out a few clichés, looks do count, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you don’t have to be a committed rebel to find conformity tiresome. Within minutes, how drawn I am to someone is less linked to how closely she fits any ‘type’ I’d tricked myself into thinking I have, and more to how happy and confident she is in herself. If it doesn’t work out, both of us will walk away disappointed but hopefully not conflicted and consumed by self-loathing. I wrote earlier that desire consumes; well, happiness attracts, as simply and instinctively as returning a smile.