It will not have escaped any of our readership’s attention that we live in a world highly concerned with physical appearances. For both men and women, socio-cultural pressures – the most nefarious crux of which is arguably the mass media – have set stratospheric standards with regard to the ‘ideal body shape’. In my particular experience as a woman, this ideal is painfully clear: thinner is better.

In the face of this, I have often found myself forced to incessantly reiterate within my own psyche that Marilyn Monroe wore a size 14, or that Barbie’s proportions would, if she were a real woman, physically reduce her to walking on all fours. I have, in fact, built for myself a barrage of such facts in a vague attempt to retain a semblance of peace with my body in a society that seems to strive for the very antithesis. Have I succeeded? In earnest, no. I still struggle with my physique and the desire to minimise it, to shrink it almost into oblivion.

I do not wish to sound too disparaging. I do not believe that this issue will define my future, especially now that I am at university, and the opportunity to pursue my passion is a reality, not a schoolgirl folly. Instead, I am choosing to ask questions, and seek answers. Why am I at all interested in the bodies of others, namely waif-like models with unusual genetic dispositions? What is it about my contours that proves so troubling?

Body dissatisfaction seems to me to stem from two assumptions: the first, that a body can be shaped at will, so that the only barrier between any mortal woman and perfection is effort, and secondly, that an imperfect body reflects an imperfect person.

On these two premises, it is facile to superimpose a highly unrealistic body ideal, and to lead women into the conflict with their own bodies that we know negative self-perception, and the eating disorders that emerge from it, to be. Tentatively, I would then suggest that a necessary aspect of resolving this problem is to attempt to stop reading character into the size of people’s bodies – whether they be those of others, or ourselves.

Indeed, we who find ourselves at university, especially at an institution like Cambridge, are fortunate enough to be enveloped in a milieu that not only enables, but actively encourages us to craft our characters in ways entirely external to our appearance. Here, we can be activists, artists or academics and be highly valued not only by others, but in our own estimation. Indeed, when we begin to externalise our image of ourselves from appraisals of our bodies, we begin to loosen the shackles of the pathology of self-hatred.

It is my hope that society, and we as individual microcosms within it, will learn to accept variations in body shape and weight as we do those of hair colour, eye colour and height, among others. Yet, in the meantime, I strive to remember that my body is merely a transport vehicle, and one that will invariably succumb to the decay of senility. It is in these times that I am especially reassured by my father’s once annoying words: “darling, it’s what’s on the inside that counts”