KEY POINTS:
You know," I said, pulling my nose away from a picture of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his gorgeous new wife, Carla Bruni, gazing at each other with barely restrained Euro-lust, "I look a lot like her."
"Mm-hmm," my partner mumbled into his newspaper.
I might as well have announced nuclear winter was upon us. "I bet this week some people at the grocery store might ask me what he's like in bed - by mistake," I tried.
Nothing. Not even a decent snort like I got a couple of years ago when I told him that my mother said I was better-looking than Penelope Cruz. What can I say? I have a visually optimistic family.
My mate has been down this road before. After the holidays when I've had a slight tan, I tell him I look a lot like Halle Berry in a bikini. At least that one gets a laugh.
I'm from the delusion-is-good-for-the-soul school of beauty. I just pretend it's all there and hope that the rest of the world takes it up, like Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.
Otherwise, what's the alternative? Imagine the mass revulsion if someone lined up giant full-length mirrors on the beach that showed how we really look when we emerge from the water. Suddenly we'd realise we're a dead ringer for our cross-dressing Great-Uncle/Aunt Frances.
Even the best of us would run for a large pellet gun.
Admit it: for 98 per cent of us, our bodies don't measure up - certainly not to Angelina Jolie's or Daniel Carter's but especially to our own distorted idea of how it should be.
It's like a vast, culturally manufactured disease, leeching into the developed world. I'll bet that even our grandparents' generation didn't have this kind of negative self-criticism that most of us assume is normal today.
In one United States survey, 81 per cent of 10-year-old girls had already dieted at least once, according to the Social Issues Research Centre. Okay, you reason, maybe US children are heavier. But then how do you explain that 25 per cent of 7-year-olds in Sweden have dieted. In Japan, 41 per cent of elementary schoolgirls thought they were too fat.
A Harvard study showed that by age 13, 50 per cent of girls are unhappy with their appearance. By the age of 17 the numbers rise; 8 out of 10 will be unhappy with what they see in the mirror.
Psychology Today reports that 56 per cent of women and 43 per cent of men surveyed were dissatisfied with their overall appearance. How did we, as a society, so completely lose our physical self-respect?
Fair enough, we were all tortured adolescents once. But consider, at what time in your life did you look in the mirror and give yourself a healthy dose of acceptance without endless editorialising?
I'd wager that the next time you get out of the shower, you won't be able to take 60 seconds to stand in front of a mirror and look at your body - without criticism. Try it for one measly minute. Men may hold out for 15 seconds, but I don't think most women would make it past five, tops, without screaming for a towel and a mental airbrush.
Let's face it: who is advocating that we owe ourselves simple acceptance of who we are? Your mother maybe, if you're lucky. We don't appreciate this good machine because no one is teaching us to. Nobody is teaching us that there is beauty in stretch marks from having the strength to carry a child.
Nobody is pronouncing that lines in our brow might signal years of empathy towards other people. Because there is just no money in it - and that stinks.
What we are taught from a very early age is that we can be "fixed". Get bigger breasts or pecs. Get smaller waistlines or pores. The health, fashion and beauty industries' job is to stick voodoo pins into our self-image because that gives them a renewable market.
Like every parent, I don't want my children to grow up to be obese, anorexic or self-absorbed by how they look. But I have to ask myself, what am I doing to teach them how to appreciate what they look like in every stage of life if I don't model it myself and disparage the negative "fix it" onslaught?
So the way I see it, I won't hate you if you mistake me for Carla Bruni in the grocery store. She may have snagged the French President, but I have it on good authority that I'm just as beautiful in my own way as Penelope Cruz. Just ask my Mum - that wise, wise woman.
www.traceybarnett.co.nz
