Facing up to an age-old reality

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A purportedly untouched photo of Sarah Murdoch on the cover of the Australian Women's Weekly has created a media furore across the ditch.

The model and millionaire wife of Lachlan Murdoch asked that the photo not be airbrushed - a process commonplace in women's magazine to remove imperfections.

The computer distortions inherent in magazine shoots was exposed most recently when a model in a Ralph Lauren photograph was manipulated to the point of freak show proportions.

It's easy for Ms Murdoch to eschew modern technology. She's gorgeous, and even if she disdains surgical methods for looking younger, she has the disposable income to spend on the best creams and cutting-edge facials.

I'm on the cover of Next magazine this month and I've been airbrushed to buggery. I had the same photographer who took Helen Clark's election campaign images and transformed her from snaggle-toothed blue stocking into a ravishing hottie. Say no more.

I did include a photo of myself on a boat in Turkey, with no makeup and with my hair doing it's frizzy pubic mound thing so readers could compare and contrast. But really, despite Sarah Murdoch's calls for women to embrace the beauty of ageing, she's on a different planet.

She was born lovely, is currently lovely and will forever have great bones and symmetrical features. Those of us who are all too depressingly normal will take whatever help we're offered if we're going to be beaming out from newsstands.

I can remember seeing a poor woman on the front page of a provincial newspaper, bemoaning the fact that nine of her 14 pussies were being removed from her state house.

She was standing there, frizzy hair split and dull, her baggy eyes sliding into her saggy jowls that subsided on to her enormous breasts that collapsed on to her tremendous thighs, and I had a moment of realisation. I was only about six months' pay cheques away from that.

Looking good means regular trips to the hairdresser, the beauticians and the dentist. It requires a good diet and regular exercise. It requires somebody to love you and care about you and not every woman has that.

If the magazine truly wants to promote realistic women, put a careworn 48-year-old mother of six on the cover whose bras are older than her teenage son.

* www.kerrewoodham.com

- HERALD ON SUNDAY