Why are so many people ashamed of their appearance?

Children don’t care about how they look. Three-year-olds run around naked without a care in the world. But older children, teenagers and adults all care about their appearance. Self-consciousness is a learned behaviour. So what purpose does it serve?

Who is it that benefits from girls and boys (to a lesser extent) worrying about their figures? People who want to sell you their products.

If you want someone to buy your product, it needs to fix a problem they have. If they don’t have the problem your product solves, you need to make them think they have that problem. Hence the vast majority of advertising towards women (and now increasingly men) is designed to make them feel unattractive, and to drill home the idea that a very specific product will make them sexy and therefore happy.

But there’s more to it than that. People, especially women and girls, have had their appearances policed for ages. They’ve had their bodies, which must be the most natural thing they own, considered a cause of immoral behaviour. Which means that their bodies are supposedly something to be ashamed of. What else could someone mean when they urge you to “cover up”?

Here’s an attempt at a justification. “If people weren’t self-conscious, they’d be immodest”. That’s a euphemism for: “if women weren’t self-conscious, they’d go around flaunting their bodies all the time. If women walked around naked, they’d be sexually assaulted. So it’s for their own safety, really.”

In other words, it only takes a naked female body to turn any man into a rapist. If this were true, nudist beaches would have far more sexual assaults than clothed beaches. The continued existence of nudist beaches seems to indicate this is not the case (although a five-minute Google search didn’t reveal any solid statistics).

So what happens in mainstream culture where nudity is both a taboo and an obsession? It makes low-cut tops and short skirts controversial because they remind us that women have bodies under their clothes.

Why should that be so terrifying? Because our culture equates a naked female body with sex. And although sex is something we spend so much time thinking about, desire is still something we don’t really understand.

That might not have been such a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that desire is by far the most mind-shatteringly powerful drive we have. Whenever an attractive person enters our field of attention, all of our neurons immediately drop whatever they’re doing and stare. This effect operates far below the level of our conscious minds - when we’re attracted to someone we can’t usually say exactly why, and we certainly can’t turn the feeling off.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that we’re so afraid of desire, given how incredibly powerful and uncontrollable it seems to be. Historically, we’ve dealt with the issue by pretending it doesn’t exist - women are told to keep their bodies covered not to keep them out of sight but out of mind.

This obviously hasn’t worked. And it seems to have destroyed female self-esteem in the process. Even today, in modern, progressive societies, we can see the effects of our failure to deal with the issue of desire.

Consider the infamous Wrecking Ball video.

The video can be interpreted as Miley Cyrus using her naked body as a weapon, revealing it as something powerful and out of control. A hyper-sexualised camera cuts between close-ups of her crying face and wide-angle shots of her nude body writhing on a wrecking ball that represents the human capacity to destroy and disrupt the world.

What the hell does this mean?

The video might have been received the views it has not just because it includes soft-core pornography but also because it features an actress that once symbolised innocence. Which, in a very twisted way, makes the thought of her naked body twice as exciting.

So for many straight male viewers, Wrecking Ball is a sex fantasy involving the formerly sweet, pretty, unattainable Hannah Montana, pre-packaged and available instantly on YouTube.

For Miley Cyrus herself, it might be a reaction against the ferocious All-Seeing Eye of the paparazzi that’s continuously pointed at her. I imagine she’s forced to spend far more time than your average woman worrying about her body-fat and how much of her cleavage is showing.

It’s entirely possible that for Miley Cyrus, Wrecking Ball is meant to be a giant “fuck you” to the omnipresent male gaze that follows her every move: “If you’re obsessed with how I look in a bikini then wait till you guys get a load of this.”

What if it’s not some fictional ex she’s crying about in the video. What if she’s crying tears of frustration at what her life and career have become?

Of course, for her record company, Wrecking Ball is a guaranteed source of controversy, attention and therefore income. I’m sure they couldn’t wait to have it released.

One thing is for sure: Wrecking Ball is a symptom of a disease. That a video containing a naked, tearful, angry woman tops online charts shows that we have a problem.

This problem is hardly new. Freud explored it more than a hundred years ago, but today Freud is often dismissed as a pervert obsessed with phallic symbols and his mother. Maybe these dismissals further his points instead of invalidating them.

How can we overcome our fear of sexual desire, if this is the underlying problem? By understanding what it’s made of. We can only do that by hearing both male and female perspectives on it.

As a man, I find it hard to imagine a female perspective of the world until I hear about it in the words of an actual woman. But aside of women we actually know, there simply aren’t enough female voices for us to hear. There are more male authors, scriptwriters, directors, artists and politicians, saying more things, louder, than their female counterparts.

So the next time you see a female person or character portrayed in a way that makes her perspective seem unknowable, see it as a problem that you need to fix, personally. If she’s real, ask her what she’s thinking. If she’s not, create your own work of art that explores what her perspective might be. If you are that woman, let people into your head. I know all of these things are far easier said than done, but this is a conversation we all need to have.

If we do this we might one day have a balanced view of our desires, which might even lead to understanding and control. And maybe, then we might not be so afraid and ashamed of our bodies that we have to care so much about how we look.