What is low self-esteem and why do we have it?

GG and I went and saw Dawn French the other night, if you don’t know who she, she is an English comedienne and I just love her (star of TV show Vicar of Dibley), she is also someone who doesn’t have low self-esteem. She was talking about the highlights and big moments in her life and one of the ones that really pissed me off, on her behalf, was all the newspaper headlines commenting about her weight. How she was a ‘deadly’ weight, how big she was and all the rest, and then she mentioned that she needed to have a hysterectomy and the doctor said if she lost a bit of weight he could do keyhole surgery (recovery 6 weeks) , if she didn’t want to lose weight it would be the ‘big’ surgery (recovery 6 months) she decided to lose the weight and so she did, and then the newspapers started up again with all the ‘how she lost weight’ and ‘comments about how she must be dying because she lost weight etc. She couldn’t win regardless of what she did or didn’t do.

As I get older I get more and more pissed off about this kind of thing. You very rarely see anything said about how a man looks, whether or not he has put weight on, what he wears every single moment of every day, yet not only are women constantly being judged by how they look, we are encouraged to comment on how they look, how many magazines / Facebook pages ask you ‘who do you think wore it better?’ or ‘who do you think had the best dress at the Emmy’s?’. It shouldn’t fucking matter what they are wearing, why aren’t we asked to comment on ‘who do you think performed the best?’ You don’t see then discussing the suits that the men wear.

Men don’t get it, because they aren’t bombarded as woman are, yes, I’m a feminist however, my view of this is that we should all be treated equally, I don’t believe in trying to tear men down, that isn’t what it’s about, but seriously, how many anti-wrinkle face creams do you see aimed at men? None. Because apparently, it’s OK for men to age and get wrinkles but it’s not OK for women. We now have anti-wrinkle cream that apparently stops the wrinkles before there are wrinkles (WTF?).

Please remember that what those in marketing do is make women feel like they are constantly not good enough, because you see, if we’re feeling like shit and ugly and fat we will buy their fantastic creams, lotions, potions and weight loss shit so that we will feel better about ourselves – however we don’t feel better about ourselves because that isn’t their intention, they want to sell more products so that they make more money so they will continue to constantly make us feel like we’re not good enough and around we go in a circle. Their goal is for women to have low self-esteem because that means they make money.

Your low self-esteem won’t be boosted by running other women down, you feel so much better when you make someone else feel good, so please, be kind to one another, offer compliments, don’t get caught up in the running down of women, we need to boost each other up all the time to counteract the media and marketing. Can you image how many businesses in the beauty industry would go bust if all the women of the world woke up and said, ‘you know what, I’m happy with myself, I’m beautiful as I am, I don’t need that crap anymore?’ How awesome would that be if women did that?

Keep an eye on this space because I’m in the process of doing a one day seminar / workshop on this very thing, because I want ALL of you to feel that your beautiful, to focus on the good bits of you and to acknowledge just how bloody awesome you are.