I read a piece in the Observer about young women's latest obsession: having a gap between their thighs. Surely this must be the harbinger of the apocalypse.
Rita, by email
Come come, Rita. To intimate the apocalypse you're going to have to do better than citing an obsession with one's legs. As all Bill Murray fans know, the only true harbingers of an apocalypse are "human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria!" So until you show me any feline and canine cohabitation, I'm going to maintain you're still OK to make holiday bookings for next year without any risk of losing your deposit due to brimstone flooding.
However, as my colleague Rosie Swash detailed in her article, the thigh gap obsession is not good. In fact, this column is officially dubbing it A Bad Thing. To type "thigh gap" into Instagram is to gaze down a dark hole of scary sadness. The sense of horror Edvard Munch captured in The Scream is the terror he felt upon seeing Instagram names such thigh_gap_please and Twitter accounts such as @CarasThighGap. No, it is not a widespread trend and, no, not every single female between the ages of 14 and 29 is obsessed with ensuring that their thighs don't touch any more than every single female thinks it is totally normal to wear 5in Louboutin heels every day (or ever). What it is, though, is an example of yet another form of body hatred that has been successfully marketed to vulnerable girls and women, and anyone who says that these trends are propelled by articles (such as – wahey! – this one) about said trends has clearly not spent much time talking with teenage girls recently or looking at their social media.
Just when you think there hasn't been an inch of the female body that has failed to be deemed in some way wanting, along comes another body obsession, whether it's the Daily Mail wailing about women's cankles or Instagram accounts obsessing over Alexa Chung's thigh gap. From one perspective, one could see this as proof of the inexhaustible ingenuity of the human species. From another, one might want to crawl under a rock.
Two popular misconceptions, though, should be cleared up from the start. This column has always given a big thumbs-up to Madame Caryn Franklin, but her contention in Swash's piece that young women aspiring to unachievable physical ideals is a new development won't quite do. "I had spent my teen years listening to Germaine Greer and Susie Orbach talking about female intellect," she says, and cheers all round. But to suggest that there is a dichotomy between having body neuroses and being intellectually stimulated isn't fair and misunderstands the problem here. When I was a teenager in the 90s, I happily read Charlotte Brontë and Chaim Potok novels, but simultaneously became so obsessed with having a flat stomach when I was 14 that I pretty much stopped eating for a decade. Turns out that intellectual pursuits are no guarantee of good mental health. To reduce body obsession to empty-headed narcissism feels like yet another way to criticise women and girls. Moreover, to claim that it's only in the past few years that women have been encouraged to suppress signs of sexual maturity in favour of looking like little girls is very selective imagining.
Nor, incidentally, is thigh-gap obsession new, it's just that it has only recently transferred over from the myopic enclave of the fashion world. I remember reading an article in US Vogue several years ago by a British writer in her late 30s about her devastation that she no longer had a gap between her thighs after having had two children. Incidentally, this writer studied at Oxford: clearly, as has been repeatedly proved throughout British history, that is no guarantee of intelligence or even common sense, but it does reinforce the point that intellectual stimulation is not a guaranteed medicine against body obsession.
Yet if the tendency to obsess over one's body doesn't change, certainly the extent of the obsession is getting more extreme. My sad little fascination with having a flat stomach looks downright wholesome next to Instagrammed photos of thigh gaps. So what next? A fetishisation of visible collar bones is already here, with various beauty products on the market designed to enhance women's collar bones, for that de rigueur "starving child in Ethiopia" look. Perhaps thinning hair due to malnutrition? Internal organ shut down? If I don't see someone down at the Dalston Superstore hooked up to an IV feeding tube by next fashion week, someone's not trying hard enough.
The question of what to do about it is, I'm afraid, disappointingly prosaic. No one can stop women and girls hating their bodies, no matter how many novels they read. But what we – the adults who don't obsess over thigh flesh – can do is to keep reinforcing the message to young people that to be strong and healthy is a good thing and to be frail and sickly is dangerous, and that anyone who feels differently is not to be hated but to be pitied. And, most of all, we need to live by our words and set the example accordingly. Because, ultimately, a life spent measuring your thighs is a life wasted.
• Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com
