Because women are judged on their appearance more than men, and standards of female beauty are considerably higher and more inflexible. Women are continually bombarded with images of the 'ideal' face and figure - what Naomi Woolf calls 'The Official Body'. Constant exposure to idealised images of female beauty on TV, magazines and billboards makes exceptional good looks seem normal and anything short of perfection seem abnormal and ugly. It has been estimated that young women now see more images of outstandingly beautiful women in one day than our mothers saw throughout their entire adolescence. In 1917, the physically perfect woman was about 5ft 4in tall and weighed nearly 10 stone.
Human infants begin to recognise themselves in mirrors at about two years old.
Female humans begin to dislike what they see only a few years later. The latest surveys show very young girls are going on diets because they think they are fat and unattractive. Even normal-weight and underweight girls want to lose weight. For girls, however, puberty only makes things worse. The normal physical changes - increase in weight and body fat, particularly on the hips and thighs, take them further from the cultural ideal of unnatural slimness.