A supposed ‘expert’ on body and self esteem issues has proposed a plan to get girls feeling better about themselves. Aric Sigman, author of The Body Wars: why body dissatisfaction is at epidemic proportions, wants older boys at schools to tell their younger female schoolmates that they’re pretty.
‘It would be helpful for them to explain that what they find attractive is not just physical qualities but also qualities like caring, the sound of a girl’s voice and her body language,’ he told a teachers’ conference, before adding. reports The Telegraph: ‘Boys don’t have in any way near as rigid a view on what an attractive figure should be and they value many other physical qualities, including eyes, hair, and body language.’
We do wonder why this man was permitted to talk absolute nonsense, because as far as our memory serves, male approval should in no ways be the key to female happiness. Sure, male bullying will make girls feel shit about themselves, and it should be stopped, but to anyone who’s been catcalled; being given unwarranted compliments on how great you look can be just as insulting as someone screeching out that they won’t shag you.
READ MORE: 18 Million Of Us Are So Worried About Our Bodies We Won't Go To The Gym
All-girls schools are just as full of neuroses as mixed schools, so there is some investigation needed there too, but really, to suggest that only boys can help a girl see her beauty, or that self esteem is built on male desire, is so basic it needs to be a One Direction song. In fact, it is a One Direction song! A generation of girls have already heard What Makes You Beautiful, so what’s next?
Well, Aric also said this pretty dodgy thing about social media encouraging girls to attain bodies that aren’t part of their local demographic: ‘This is a distortion of the natural evolutionary comparison of looking at people within your geography by introducing unrealistic points of comparison’
Does that mean he’s anti immigration? Or against foreign models getting work? Seems pretty dodgy to us.
And if you weren’t quite convinced of these off-key claims? He said that male figures like parents and teachers haven’t go ‘the sensitivity of the subject’.
Yep, really, some people are worse than him.
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Picture: Eugenia Loli
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.