In a world that considers all women physically flawed, we need less angst and more anger

To call it "the politics of appearance" suggests a seriousness that this kind of talk really does not deserve. These debates damagingly redirect attention from the issues that really shape a woman's life to nonsensical discussions about the shape of a woman.

Last week the so-called "thigh-gap prejudice" experienced by the model Robyn Lawley was discussed at length on NBC Today and various other platforms. At the same time, the scandalous news that three times more young women are employed in low-paid, low-skilled jobs than 20 years ago was hugely under-reported. That's how the system operates. Better to nurture debilitating individual angst rather than encourage collective action and anger to flower.

It's relatively easy to persuade many young women to focus inward on themselves, to make them accomplices in their own objectification. This is because it's deemed that to be female is to be physically flawed. Perfection can never be attained, but the pursuit of it can keep a woman permanently captive to her own disgust, unable and unwilling to fight for what really matters. While men have other ways of displaying their worth (power, cash, cars, a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona), historically, for women, it's the physical form that counts.

"Men act, women appear", the critic John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing. Women connive in keeping themselves as a sight, policing each other with the razor weapon of judgment, aided and abetted by a marketplace that makes huge profit out of insecurity.

Five hundred years ago painters portrayed women as supine, naked and plump, a prize for male patrons who were spectators of female passivity. Now, women in their millions have a huge appetite for taking pictures of parts of themselves, snapshots of bodies wasting away. It's the ultimate in the surreal when a gap, nothingness, between the limbs is viewed as success. It takes an optimist to believe that one day, understanding how this corrosive process works, the manipulation, the neutering of active politics beyond the very personal that can and does trigger radical change, may give muscle to the female gaze.

When it does, only then, will women see with clarity beyond their own reflection in the mirror. And what a different world will be observed.