Why I always wear high heels when I visit my mother

A hint, not too much, of cleavage, under a v-neck top which slims the hips. A belt, or a cross-over top, all designed to emphasize the smallness of my waist. High heels, to improve the width to hight ratio, and tone the legs and butt. Strictly smooth lines over the hips and butt, its all about the silhouette. Clear but not overdone make-up. Hair styled. Long earrings to emphasize the statuesque qualities of my neck.

I've turned my sex on baby. I haven't turned it on for my husband, or to aid some sort of career goal, or even just to get some damn service in a jewelery store. I've turned it on for my Mum. Because if I wear enough flattering (read: slimming) clothing, and dazzle her with enough male-gaze pleasing sex appeal, she forgets for a while that she lies awake at night worrying that I'm fat, or not slim, or whatever she thinks. If I turn it on enough we can have a proper conversation, about something other than the calorie content of what she assumes I had for breakfast, or about how to fit the exercise she assumes I'm not doing into my schedule.

It didn't work this time unfortunately, she saw through my efforts. Should have worn higher heels.

The scene: dinner at my folks' place, after dinner Dad brought out some cheese, a risky thing to do he knew, later "I shouldn't have brought out the cheese" he lamented. As the cheese is slowly devoured by the four of us, unbeknown to the men, Mum and I play a perverse game of voyeurism with each other. I let her take a piece first, then I take a piece; I would never appear too eager, it gives her too much angst. I only eat the cheese at her pace, one for her, one for me. She watches the size of the piece I take, modest of course. Despite my careful efforts she eventually decides that I've had too much. "No more cheese" she declares, as she pulls the board away from me and towards herself. "I've only had as much as you, you know" I reply. Her face is a little shocked at this, usually I don't bite back. She has an almost embarrassed look, who knows what it means, the more cynical part thinks it means "yeah well I can afford to have more cheese than you".

I finally crack. The wine had more than a little to do with this. Mr T wasn't shocked, not one bit, after years of threatening to tell her off himself, I think he was actually glad.

"Why?" I demand, nasty, not how I would have preferred to have this conversation. "I'm sick of my body and everything I put in it being under constant surveillance!" Shit I've jumped in too quick, its a more nuanced argument that she probably won't understand at this juncture. I'm right, she goes on the defensive "Oh darling you've had too much to drink" as she rolls her eyes at my melodrama. "Well then so have you, I've been drinking you drink for drink as well!". Ha that got her, and she knows it too.

"Well weight watches says a match-box size piece of cheese" ... "Do you think I need to go to weight watches?" ... "I didn't say that" ... "Yeah but you think it, we all know you do, and I'm sick of you being obsessed with the size of my butt!".

Really eloquent. Not.

She cracks it, gets up and leaves the room. I cry, get up to leave, try to drag Mr T with me as he and Dad try to sit me back down.

Dad questions me, if I think she's wrong, why do I care what she thinks? Because she's my Mum of course, and I'm sick of the constant comments. I don't know what he's getting at with this line of questioning, whether he thinks she's right and is trying to prove to me that I do too, or whether he thinks I should just ignore her obsessions.

She comes back. Her emotions have cut through her defensiveness, she feels bad. I'm still too angry to care that she feels bad. I push it, years of saying it in my head all come forth like a torrent. Maybe just because you're obsessed by the size of your own arse you shouldn't expect me to be too! Did you think all your comments about big titty wop wops weren't going to impact your big breasted 16-year old daughter?! You always assume the worst of me! Can't you see the good job, or the academic success, or the happy relationship, or the good friends, or the positive attitude to life - no all you see is the size of my butt!!!

Now she's crying. "I'm your mother, I'm allowed to say those things, I didn't think they impacted you! I don't think you're fat, I think you have a great figure, your body has hardly changed in 8 years!"

Rubbish. Utterly incomprehensible, contradictory rubbish, which we all know is a lie, her opinions on the acceptability of my body are well known, she is as transparent as a window. Even Dad nods in agreement. I point all of this out to her.

She cries. I cry. Dad and Mr T point out that she loves me very much. Which I know she does. We have a hug. Mr T and I leave.

She calls the next day but I'm too...emotional...to talk to her. I don't want to talk about it. Mr T spends the next two days nagging me to call her, he doesn't want this to fester and damage our otherwise great relationship.

I don't want to call her, because I don't know that I can explain it to her. I know if she says I'm too fat then that should be the most terrible thing on the planet. But even if she does say that, my problem is that I just don't care that much. I'm on a path of body love that values how my body feels for me, not how it vainly looks to anyone else. Maybe the fact that I like eating good, healthy food and I enjoy the energizing effects of running and swimming, have fooled her into misinterpreting my behaviour as someone who wants to be skinny, not someone who just likes feeling good on the inside. Maybe I should talk more about just how low in calories my lunch is, or just how many kms I swam or ran this morning, maybe that would make her feel better, I don't know. But I find that kind of conversation so intensely boring, and it sounds like bragging, so I'm just not interested.

And having to explain all that to her, even if I could make her understand, I am afraid it will be taken as an implicit criticism of her - because she values being slim pretty much over everything else it seems. And I want to tell her just how goddamn sexist her opinions are, but I don't think we're on the same page enough for that to make sense to her.

Anyway I finally did call her. I apologised for having the conversation in the wrong way, and she apologised for being obsessive. We then talked a bit about her obsession, and she admitted that it really takes over her mind, like she sat next to a fat woman on the train the other day, and she couldn't stop thinking about it for ages. She said that when she would tell me to stop eating cheese, she was actually also saying it to herself. I said maybe she should cut herself some slack, she's on a constant calorie restriction diet and does like two classes at the gym everyday, perhaps she should just accept herself. I tried not to sound preachy.

It wasn't the right way to have this discussion with my Mum, yelling while we were both under the influence I mean. But I feel better for having had it anyway. There are things that I would have liked to have made a little clearer to her. Like that I don't actually even mind if she thinks I should lose weight, its more that she sees nothing else that really bothered me. And the fact that she sees it as such a central issue to a women's self worth that she couldn't come out and say something plainly, she had subject me to a constant drip of negative comments, almost like she was trying to subliminally make me hate myself slim.

But we resolved things well enough, and hopefully I'll get a break from it for a while (I'm not holding my breath that it'll be forever) and she can cut herself some slack, and give her mind a break from obsessing over fat people for a while.

Because feeling beautiful is central to women's self worth?

Jennifer Hawkins, former Miss Universe, appeared naked and unphotoshopped on the cover of Marie Claire. She had a crease on her waist *gasp* and apparently some cellulite. It was meant to raise awareness about eating disorders, and help your average woman feel better about herself. Anyway, not only did the feminist blogosphere go mad, but a large portion of the general public weighed in to the debate. In my opinion they rightly pointed out that the picture didn't really make much of a point because a) she's not an average woman, she's a supermodel, and b) she doesn't really look any different when she IS photoshopped, cos you know, she's a supermodel.

There has been a lot of talk about how they should have put on an un-photoshopped image of a woman who doesn't fit perfectly into the current cultural ideal of female beauty. Part of the problem is that we are exposed to so many images of one ideal, and so few positive images of anything else. A positive image of a fat chick for example, may have had a good impact on women seeing that even though they don't fit the ideal, they are still beautiful.

Marie Claire's actions, and the response, was largely predictable. It's been analysed until the cows come home. But as I've reflected, something else has stood out for me....

The whole argument seems to revolve around how a naked picture of Jennifer Hawkins does not make other women feel beautiful, in fact it makes them feel unattractive, which in turn makes the whole thing deplorable because it was supposed to be fighting eating disorders. A positive image of a 'real woman' ('real woman' - that's a whole other side to the debate) who doesn't perfectly fit the cultural ideal is advocated because this, it is presumed, will make women feel beautiful.

I'm going to assume it is believed that women will feel beautiful if they see a naked picture of an average woman because they will appreciate that the female body is quite beautiful even when it doesn't fit a cultural ideal, and that despite media saturation only genetic freaks fit the cultural ideal, so we should all stop worrying.

I think this is a fair enough statement. Working in a bikini shop and seeing women's bodies all day, I did in fact grow an appreciation for the beauty of the female body in all its diversity. But what irks me is that the implication coming across, including from those working to fight eating disorders, is that we must do everything we can to make women feel like they are physically beautiful. The goal is to redefine beauty so that more women fit it because 'feeling beautiful' is seen as centrally important to a woman's perception of self worth.

This is a fundamentally counterproductive approach to women's empowerment in general and eating disorders in particular. Sure, attempt to shift the goal posts so more women fit into the 'beautiful' category, there is merit in that particularly when ideals promote unhealthy behaviours. There is merit in expanding ideas about female beauty to appreciate women's bodies with their cesarean scars, womanly dimply thighs and flabby stomachs. But what would really benefit all women - conventionally beautiful, butt ugly and everything in between - would be to reduce the focus on women's bodies entirely.

Only when female physical attractiveness, however defined, is taken off its pedestal will we get somewhere with equality. And as men are drawn into this appearance obsession, we are not only risking equality of the sexes but a general healthy, mentally and physically, society. Seriously is it that difficult to imagine a society where being fat or ugly isn't the end of the fucking world? My sense of humour isn't to many people's tastes, but its not the end of the world, I just tend to consider the people who do appreciate it as connoisseurs of a fine brew.

"But being fat is unhealthy! And a drain on the health care system!" - it's true, it is. But so is cigarette smoking and sodium intake and not getting pap smears. But smokers, fish 'n' chips lovers, and women with creepy doctors do not center their entire self worth and behaviour around these issues.

I'm gonna put it out there - it's more acceptable for a man to fugly than a woman. Some women would say that's unfair and they resent being expected to hook up with ugly guys, and that's a fair point of personal taste. But drawing men into this insanity is not the answer, what a perverse equality that would be. A promotion of a wider variety of female beauty would be beneficial, but more importantly maybe we should all realise that being, or even feeling, like the opitomy of sexual attractiveness is not the be all and end all of existence.