I Wasn’t Ever Told I Was Beautiful

A three-year-old in a fairy skirt, gumboots, dragon tail and Bob the Builder helmet thinks she’s beautiful.

This episode is about what happens before the world talks her out of it.

Content Note
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

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Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com.au...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Before we get into the episode proper, a few updates from Sealand. First of all, this podcast has now been listened to in 22 countries and around 70 towns or cities. I'm gonna put the exact towns and countries up on my Instagram stories over the next couple of days because I find that data fascinating. If you're not into that stuff, obviously skip it, go make a cup of tea, live your life. But I am it brings me so much joy that this podcast has been listened to in 22 countries. When I started this, sitting in my little corner of regional South Australia, talking into a weird fluffy microphone attached to my phone, which I'm still doing. Chatting about feminism, panic attacks, periods, women in sport, inequality, use of the word cunt, and whatever else was rattling around in my brain and body that week. I did not imagine people all over the world would let end up listening to it. 22 countries in less than three months for a little independent bootstrap podcast, and by bootstrap I mean absolutely no marketing budget, makes me very, very happy and very, very grateful. As far as I can tell, we've hit every continent except Antarctica. And honestly, if there is a feminist penguin out there with Wi-Fi, please identify yourself immediately. I've got an episode for you. Now, the way podcast data works is I can't actually see individual listeners because privacy people. I use Buzz Sprout to publish the episodes, and what I get back, the data I get back from Buzz Sprout includes location data. So country, a nearest town or city to where the person is, kind of sorta. So for instance, when I listen to an episode in Victor Harbour, Buzz Sprout um notes that as I'm listening in Adelaide, which is about 80k's away. A couple of locations on my list absolutely stand out to me. Um, and one of them is, and I'm gonna pronounce this wrong, Kilu, oh god, Kilu, Kiru in the province Gunma. I'm totally butchering this. It's in Japan. I'll put it in the show notes so you can see it. But to the person, to and I think it's one person um listening. Because if that's you, if that's your city or town in Japan, please pop into my Instagram and one, leave me a DM with exactly how I should pronounce the name of your town, and two, let me know if there's anything at all I can talk about on this podcast. Because you, my friend, have listened to 13 downloads, 13 of the 15, that whether you like it or not, makes you a super fan. Um, and I am just so grateful that you're here. It delights me more than you'll probably ever know. Hopefully, you're not hate listening, and hopefully you're getting something out of it. If there's a topic that you want me to explore, please let me know. I can talk about women in Japan, um, female beauty standards in Japan, Japanese women in sport, anything at all. It doesn't have to be Japanese related, but I would love to research and put out a podcast for you. Honestly, the world was our oaster. Or sushi. I'm probably culturally misappropriating now too, so that's awesome. I just wanted to thank you for letting me into your world. The other location that really caught my eye is Saltash in Cornwall in the United Kingdom, which I had to look up. Being of Irish descent, Cornwall has always had a little place in my heart. There have now been six listens in Saltash. So if that's you, my friend, big shout out and thank you. And to anyone listening who would want me to talk about a particular theme or topic, please get in touch. Um I'm really open to new episodes and new themes. One of the unexpected joys of doing this podcast has been realizing that these conversations travel. Women's experiences travel, thoughts travel, stories travel. So if you're listening somewhere unusual to me or far away or tiny or cold or hot, coastal, chaotic, peaceful, wherever you are, please say hello sometime. I answer all my DMs because quite frankly, I'm not that big or fancy yet. So slide into my DMs, they're always open. Send me a message on Spotify or send me an email, I'll always answer you. I'm now planning episodes between now and the end of the year. So this is a message to anyone listening. If there's a theme or a topic you'd like me to explore on the pod, let me know. I'm planning a couple of different series. My interviewing is really starting to ramp up. Broadly, this is a feminist podcast that also talks about mental health, anxiety, depression, CPTSD, women in midlife, and the strange little systems we all live inside. Because honestly, I'm just showing everything I have at this podcast and seeing what sticks to the wall. One of the episodes I went for recently was recording an episode with my mum. I was a bit nervous about it. We sat on my bed after the dishes were done. We both got sore backs when we were recording it. We laughed a lot, we giggled, and we did it in one take because I still don't know how to edit my own work. If a podcast needs editing, I outsourced that. Blessed be the editors. I've had such lovely feedback about the episode with mum. People have been asking for her to come back onto the pod, which is very sweet and also slightly annoying. I'm sure we'll have her back on at some stage. I'm passing on all the lovely feedback to her. She mostly just laughs and says horse because her generation's never really been one for marinating in praise or giving it to other people. Coming up soon, I've got an interview with a sexual health expert, and honestly, I thought I knew a bit about sexual health. Turns out I did not. There was so much practical information in that conversation. When you get tested, how often, what testing actually involves, what treatment can look like, and all of those things we probably should have been taught, but weren't. So I'm really keen for that episode to come out. And this is going to be the last announcement before I get into this episode. I'm beginning to organise some live events and talks, which sounds very fancy, but it looks more like me talking in a library about first periods and that kind of thing. Once they're all um settled and confirmed, I will absolutely let you know where they're happening. And I'm also quite nervous and terrified and a little bit pleased with myself that I've been asked to speak at those events. Anyway, now all of that's out the way, on with the show. Today's episode is about beauty, appearance, and what happens when human beings are taught to see themselves primarily as visual projects. When the language we use about people is primarily visual. I genuinely can't remember when my parents ever telling me that I was pretty or beautiful. Occasionally I was told I looked nice. More often it was, oh, your hair looks nice, which is completely fair because I do have quite nice hair. I'm almost always having a good hair day. I was thinking recently about how often appearance is the language we use to greet each other. You look amazing. Your skin looks incredible. I love your outfit. You've lost weight. That colour really suits you. You're looking snatched. Look at I do it too, not all of those. I don't think I've ever said, oh my god, you're looking snatched. But most of the others at some time. I don't say them all anymore. I certainly don't comment on people's weight, but I definitely do some of those things. I watch a lot of reality TV, really trashy reality TV that I absolutely love, particularly the Real Housewives franchise. And one thing these women do constantly, without fault, without veil, is greet each other through appearance. Oh my god, your dress. Is that Gucci? Your hair, you look so cute. That glam is incredible. Look, and it's affectionate, it's social, it's bonding, it's a shared language. But it made me wonder, how do we greet each other if we're not talking about how we look? How do we say hello to each other? How do we give each other a compliment? How do we communicate warmth, admiration, approval, attention if we take appearance out of the sentence? Look, and I I don't mean that cynically. I just think appearance has become one of the primary ways we communicate approval, admiration, warmth, and attention. Particularly for women and increasingly men. But like I wonder why that is. Somewhere along the way, we simply stopped having an appearance. We stopped simply being who we are, aesthetically, if you want to say that, although I loathe that word. And we started managing it, monitoring it, negotiating it, striving for it, performing it. And I'm not I'm not immune to this. I'm I'm not immune to saying hello to someone by commenting on how they look. I would wager that most people, particularly women, move through the world carrying a low-level disappointment about how we look. Not always catastrophic despair, although I think we've probably all had many, many moments. When we're going out to a party, you thought you know you were wearing, you thought you were gonna look cute, put the outfit on, yikes, it does not look cute. And suddenly there are clothes all over the bed, you've half an hour left to do your hair and makeup, and you realize you need about six hours for a completely different makeover. When you look in the mirror, are you happy with what's reflected back or are you unhappy? And I'm not just talking about on special occasions. If you look in the mirror right now, are you happy or are you unhappy? Or do you feel neutral? A lot of women, me included, we have a constant background hum of maybe I'd be better if I looked different. Maybe life would be easier if I was prettier, I was thinner, my hair was shinier, my clothes were nicer, if my tummy was smaller, if my boobs were perkier, my skin was better, if I didn't have that underarm bit that appears to have its own emotional life. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Should, should, should. And if you look into where this feeling of discontent has come from, as I, your friendly podcast host Karen, speaking in the third person, if you look into this, this level of aesthetic pressure has not always existed in this form. I'm gonna say this another way. We have not always been as obsessed about how we look as we do now. Beauty's always existed, beautiful people have always existed, attractive people have always existed. There are myths about Helen of Troy being the most beautiful woman in the world, Cleopatra, Neferati, Nefertiti, Neferati. Someone will correct me. All of those women. Beauty is not new, but the scale is new. How many people we judge are new, the saturation is new, the constant comparison is new. I want us to think about Marjorie Kemp. Marjorie lived in England in the late 1300s and early 1400s. She was married to a man called John Kemp, and they had a lot of children. Think old Mother Hubbard who lived in a shoe. They didn't live in a shoe. They lived in a world where most people were not surrounded by mass-produced images of idealized bodies and faces everywhere. She was not a farmer's wife exactly, but she was a medieval married woman living in a world unimaginably smaller than ours in terms of visual comparison. Or imagine an ordinary woman in 15th century England, milking cows, hauling water, baking bread, wiping children's faces with the hem of her apron, probably smelling faintly of smoke, wool, and livestock. She was not opening Instagram before breakfast, seeing models, actresses, influences, people with fillers, veneers, professional lighting, ring lights, stylist, face tune, or 20-year-olds trying to reverse age before they're even developing their first wrinkle. Her comparison group was probably her village, her sister, the baker's daughter, someone she saw at church who had particularly good cheekbones. And that matters more than we realise. Because the human brain involved for local comparison, not global aesthetic saturation. Let me say that again. The human brain evolved for local comparison, not global aesthetic saturation. And this is where the technology matters. Before printing became widespread in Europe, books and images were far harder to reproduce and circulate. Gutenberg's printing press arrives in Europe in the mid-1400s. Then over centuries you get printed books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, then photographs, film, television, the internet, and finally social media. Social media is a tidal wave. We are not pushing back to sea It's a huge shift. A medieval woman might have seen paintings in church, maybe a few illuminated images if she was unusually close to books or wealth, but she was not being visually bombarded from the moment she woke up until the moment she went to sleep. Most people, if they thought about it at all, probably thought, oh, I'm average looking, and that's okay. Now, more and more and more people seem to think I'm not ready, I'm not beautiful, no matter how hard I try. And those are very different emotional experiences, and they take up very different space in the brain. Now obviously. Our women friends from the 1400s had other things going on. The days were full of work, children, cooking, cleaning, farming, pregnancy, pregnancy, pregnancy, pregnancy, church, survival, the plague. We have had our own form of the plague, but you know, all of that kind of stuff. I'm not romanticising medieval life. Please do not send messages to say actually, Catherine. Women died in childbirth. I get all of that. But what I'm saying is that human beings now spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how attractive they are. That obsession did not arrive out of nowhere. It is not fuelled by nothing. If it this is not a big bang of beauty, and I'm talking about the event that started the universe, not the television show. For most of human history, marriage was often most likely to be economic, practical, strategic, not love-based. It was about land, it was about family alliances, it was about survival, it was about legacy. But as Western culture shifted towards romantic marriage, beauty became more socially powerful. I'm gonna say that again because I really love it. As Western culture shifted towards romantic marriage and away from arranged marriage, beauty became more socially powerful. Not invented, intensified. Look, I want to say here that I'm speaking as a white middle class woman who grew up in a Western culture and studied European history. I don't have a deep knowledge of how beauty functions in every culture, and I'd absolutely love to hear from you if your if beauty functions differently in your culture. But in the Western tradition I inherited and I live in, you can see beauty and desire being negotiated through literature. Shakespeare. Shakespeare has a lot to we can blame Shakespeare for a lot when it comes to beauty. He writes, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Which is essentially a very poetic version of saying, You had it glow up. Also, I know that I laugh at my own jokes about it. And then later on you get novels like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. In Jane Eyre, beauty and plainness, aka ugliness, are constantly being negotiated. Jane says, Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? That line matters because she is saying, just because I am not beautiful, just because I am not wealthy, just because I am not socially powerful, do you think I don't have a soul? Do you think I don't have a heart? Women became aesthetic proposition, not just people. One difference is Jane Eyre was not seeing tens of thousands of faces a day like we are now. Back in Jane Eyre's day, or the Bronte sisters' day, capitalism arrived carrying a mirror and a marketing department. I should say after the Bruntees. After the Bruntees, capitalism was getting a foothold during the Bruntees, but it's really been sort of 19th, 20th, and 21st century where capitalism has just sped up. Beauty has become very commercialised. Let's think Hollywood, Netflix, advertising, fashionizing, television, social media, and dear dear Mark Zuckerberg. Appearance wasn't just social anymore. It became economic infrastructure. Marketing works. Marketing works by identifying a problem, amplifying it, and then selling you the relief. And this works very neatly with the human brain. Our brains are wired to notice threats, deficits, gaps, and problems. Psychologists call this negativity bias. Historically, if there was a saber-toothed tiger outside the cave, that mattered more in that moment to whether your skin was glowing or not. So bear with me. Tiger with me. Survival comes first. The brain is wired for survival first. In 2026, in Australia, unfortunately, not many of us need to concern ourselves with immediate day-to-day survival in that same way. Yes, in Australia we have snakes, redbacks, rodiles and sharks and drop bears. But honestly, come to Australia, it's beautiful. You're very un you'd be very unlucky for any of our critters to kill you. In Australia in 2026, we have doors on our houses. We have supermarkets, we have plumbing, we have welfare, we we have jobs, we have funds coming in, we have plumbing. Most of us are not being stalked by carnivorous beasts outside our cave entrance. Most of it oh my gosh, now I've lost my sorry, and I'm I can only do one take. Just give me one sec. I'm nearly there. I just um accidentally put my finger on the screen and ended up somewhere else. Okay, this is all great. Okay, very good. In in Australia, in 2026, we have got doors on our homes. Most of us are not being stalked by carnivorous beasties on the way to the letterbox. But our brain doesn't know that. Our brain continues to solve problems. When we solve a problem, we feel relief. Relief can feel rewarding, and marketing exploits that loop relentlessly. Once real survival problems are reduced, real meaning lack of food, lack of shelter, carnivorous species after you. Once real survival problems are reduced, invented problems will do nicely. Thank you very much. Because if you convince someone their body is a problem, you've created a renewable resource for your business. And just pause with me here for a second. Have you ever thought your body was a problem? No, really. Have you ever thought it was a problem? At any stage in your life, have you thought what you looked like was not good enough or problematic? Where did that thought come from? It did not arrive out of thin air. Look, I'm not saying marketing is the only force responsible. Families do it, doctors do it, schools do it, friends do it, religion does it, fashion does it, film does it, strangers do it, algorithms do it. But marketing is a big part of how we come to assess our feelings about our body and our looks. Because a person who believes their body is unfinished or imperfect or not good enough is a very reliable customer. And that is why the anti-aging industry is an enormous. Because in reality, every day we age, every minute, every moment. Gravity is not going away anytime. Sorry, I just stood up and that's got an echo. Gravity is not going away anytime soon. We're gonna go away before gravity does. So if you can convince people that aging is a problem, you don't have to create a new market. The market renews itself every morning when someone looks in the mirror and thinks, Christ, that's a shit show. One of the uncomfortable things women are beginning to reckon with is this. And men, all humans, who exactly designed the beauty standards we inherited? Because beauty standards don't emerge from naturefully formed, they just don't. Human beings create them, industries reinforce them, powerful people benefit financially from them. And as someone who has put on weight, this is me, and lost weight over time, I can tell you this. I am treated differently when I'm perceived to be thinner than when I'm fatter. This is not in my imagination. This is a recognized social pattern. And something even more disturbing is that the stories that have emerged from the Epstein files have forced a lot of people, including me, into a horrible kind of aha moment. So when we think about how did we get to a point where we have an obsession with youth, of tiny bodies, hairlessness, the feticization of looking younger and younger and younger. I want to be really careful here. I am not saying every preference is sinister, but what I am saying is beauty standards are not neutral. They are shaped by culture, by power, by money, and by industries. And yep, often by men with way too much influence over what women are told they should look like. Most people don't consciously choose what they find aspirational. Culture delivers it repetitively until it feels obvious. Like it's always been there. And beauty culture now disguises itself as well as culture, which makes it even harder to spot and harder to resist logically. Because now you're not just trying to be attractive, you're trying to be healthy, disciplined, optimized, high-functioning, your best self. Living your best life at 60 apparently means you want to look 40. And if someone says you don't look a day over 40, we're meant to take that as a compliment rather than a tiny little cultural hostage note. Something very strange happens when you spend your life surrounded by images that do not resemble most actual human bodies. You don't think the images are wrong, you think you are. And what I mean by that is this 60 to 70% of adults are overweight or obese. Yet when you watch the television tonight or scroll through scroll through your social media feed, I want you to count the bodies. The live the white ones. This is not a true crime podcast, not yet. When you're watching TV tonight, ask yourself, do 60 to 70% of these bodies I'm seeing reflect that reality? Are the newsreaders are 60% 70% of the newsreaders overweight or obese? The romantic leads. The people selling skincare, clothing, holidays, perfume, professional credibility, happiness, fucking ice bars, protein powder. When you spend your life surrounded by images that do not resemble most actual human bodies, you don't think the images are wrong. You think you're wrong. The way you look is wrong. Oh, and by the way, I am not going to debate the idea that fat automatically equals unhealthy, because that is not this that this is not that episode. That episode's coming. This is not the episode where I talk about BMI as a medical indicator that was basically founded on a Belgian twink and then somehow became everybody's moral spreadsheet. What I will say is this. Even if fatness did automatically equal ill health, which it does not, if it did, saying that to fat people does not magically make them thin. It makes them feel worse. And people who feel worse are often easier to sell things to. I'm gonna say that again. People who feel bad about themselves are often easier to sell things to because they want a fix. Your brain is a pattern recognition machine. If you repeatedly see bodies unlike yours presented as desirable, successful, lovable, luxurious, worthy of attention. While bodies like yours are absent or corrected or mocked, pathologized, or treated as before and after photos, your brain draws conclusions. Not consciously, not logically, just quietly. And eventually people stop simply disliking how they look and they begin to distrust how they look. Their body becomes a project, not a home. And I want to pause here and say this non-representation is not only about that people, it's also about people of colour, people with disabilities, older people, poor people, people whose bodies do not fit the narrow template of white, able-bodied, upper middle class, average to below average weight, respectively. Although I don't know what's respectable about that. The representation we have of bodies in the media, in all facets of the media, printed, screen, film, social media, it is an unseriousness of representation. Is it getting better? I mean yes. Is there a long way to go? Oh shit yeah. Has a Zimpic led a rethinning of what we see on television and social media? I th I think yes. And then I think about little kids. Particularly little girls. Imagine a three-year-old walking down the street in some completely deranged outfit. Fairy skirt, gum boots, dragon tail, Bob the Builder helmet, singing a made-up song about how beautiful she is. No mirror, no audience, no apology, just joy. But that joy does not get socialized out of her gently. It gets crushed. Not by one evil person, not by one comment, but by the thousands and thousands and thousands of signals about what kinds of bodies deserve admiration, visibility, desire, and attention. I suppose I'm trying to slowly and imperfectly extricate myself from that loop, but I find it really difficult. I find it really difficult to not get sucked into the trap that says I'm not beautiful, I'm not thin enough, I'm not disciplined enough, I'm not finished yet. But maybe the problem was never human appearance. Maybe the problem was building an economy that depends on people feeling wrong in order for that economy to function. I'm Catherine Redden, and this is the C word. I'll see you next week with a brand new episode.