Young women are still obsessed with thinness. But a new programme, aimed at schools, plans to change Irish teenage attitudes, writes Fionola Meredith

Forget gender equality: being skinny and dumb is the way to female happiness. If given the choice, the vast majority of women in a recent survey said they would prefer a slender figure than a rapier-sharp intellect. Women come out of this looking like vacuous bimbettes, willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of physical perfection. But a desperation to be thin can't really be the only thought in our fluffy little heads, can it? The fact that the research in question was carried out by tescodiets.com, the supermarket chain's online dietary service, has caused some critics to question the findings.

"Look at the source!" exclaims American feminist Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth - How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. "If you ask the questions another way, you get different results."

Wolf recently advised cosmetics company Dove on a survey of 1,600 American women of all ages and backgrounds. "At my insistence, they asked different questions, such as, 'do you think every woman knows she has something about herself that is beautiful?'," she says. "Eighty per cent of women said yes. 'Do you think it's possible for a woman to be beautiful throughout her entire lifetime?' Eighty per cent said yes. It just depends on how you ask the question."

Far from clinging miserably to unrealistic and damaging stereotypes, Wolf is convinced that many women's attitudes to beauty have undergone a marked, and measurable, sea change. Yet she admits that the problem hasn't gone away entirely. "There's a study about global attitudes to beauty where some 23 per cent of women are more trapped than ever: they just don't feel good unless they look like that ideal. On the other hand more women take it for granted there's something wrong with having to measure up to those images. Many women are thinking 'I reject living up to these ideals, I'm going to find a way to call myself beautiful, to define it for myself, to celebrate it in other women.' So it's definitely a time of extremes."

It's often observed that celebrity culture, with its images of seamlessly buffed and airbrushed young goddesses, has a pernicious effect on many women's self-image: simultaneously tantalising them and punishing them with an impossible standard of beauty. And experts say the new trend for 'shaming' female celebrities - such as American starlet Lindsay Lohan - with photographs exposing their extreme thinness reinforces an unhealthy preoccupation with body size.

According to Jennie O'Reilly, chief executive of Bodywhys, the Eating Disorders Association of Ireland, "whether the focus is on overweight or underweight celebrities, it's all about an incessant emphasis on the physical".

In March, Bodywhys is launching a new CD-Rom for schools, aimed at addressing the issue of eating disorders in young people. Part of the programme focuses on decoding idealised media images: visually demonstrating to youngsters how techniques such as airbrushing create the fake impression of perfection. "The majority of eating disorders start between the ages of 14 and 17 years," says O'Reilly. "It is vital that more targeted prevention work is done in Ireland and the most obvious place is in the school setting."

But how much impact do images of celebrities, whether enhanced through surgery or the airbrush, really have on their teenage fans? The group of 13- and 14-year-old girls taking part in the "Express Yourself" workshop at the Model School for Girls in Belfast certainly don't seem over-influenced by celebrity role models. They are participants in a scheme designed to encourage positive behaviour and emotional competence through the arts. Today they're making collages from pictures in women's magazines. The girls enjoy a sense of schadenfreude as they look at what they call "the embarrassing shots": images of celebrities with pimples or sweaty armpits. Examining a photograph of fashion designer Donatella Versace, Karen (13) says, "I wouldn't like to look like her - she looks plastic, not real."

While these young women appear refreshingly critical of these images, a recent survey of teenage girls revealed a worrying preoccupation with the desire to acquire the "perfect" celebrity body. Bliss magazine, aimed at girls aged 13 to 18, questioned 2,000 girls over 10 television regions (including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) about their body image. Only 8 per cent said they were happy with their body. Some 35 per cent described themselves as overweight and 7 per cent underweight - yet 66 per cent thought they needed to lose weight and 71 per cent claimed they would be "100 per cent happier if they could lose half a stone". And a quarter of respondents admitted they had already suffered from an eating disorder.

Is it possible to identify a direct causal relation between the impossibly honed bodies in celebrity magazines and the increased incidence of eating disorders in young people? A number of other biological, psychological and socio-cultural factors contribute to the influences. Writer and former anorexic Hadley Freeman questions the idea that eating disorders can be "caught" from the pages of fashion magazines. Writing in the Guardian, she points out that it is "the current culture of skinniness [ that] legitimises the anorexic's beliefs . . . why are women who weigh seven stone venerated as icons of beauty?"

O'Reilly agrees that glorifying skinniness contributes to a body-obsessed environment: "Eating disorders occur in societies that promote thinness as a means of achieving health, success and happiness."

Ailbhe Smyth, director of the Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre at University College Dublin, is concerned that young people are being encouraged to buy into an empty idea. "For girls in particular, there is the notion that what you need to strive for is an ephemeral kind of celebrity, where you're famous for doing nothing except being on television. And there are still many pressures in our culture that underplay the contribution women make to the world. The emphasis for girls is so hugely on appearance; one of the ways that comes across most strongly is in the judgments on girls who don't measure up. The message that's sent out is 'you'd better be anorexic': how crazy and mixed-up is that?"

Germaine Greer recently noted that "every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful." It seems that it's the centuries-old curse that no amount of gender parity can ever truly shake off.

www.bodywhys.ie helpline: 1890-200444