#35 Do Our Beauty Standards Keep Women Looking Like Girls?

This week’s episode was sparked by an article from Jamella Jamil with the provocative title “Ah shit, we let paedophiles decide our beauty standards.” I don’t often build a whole podcast episode around an article, but this one made me stop and think - particularly after last week’s episode on power, hierarchy and abuse.In this episode, I explore the question: Do our beauty standards keep women looking like girls?I reflect on the way adult female bodies have increasingly been shaped by expectations of hairlessness, smoothness and agelessness, and how girls and women internalise these cultural messages about what is acceptable and desirable. I also share some of my own experiences growing up in the heroine chic era, and how the transition from a girl-shaped body into a woman-shaped body felt unexpectedly threatening.From a psychological perspective, I explore how cultural standards become internalised, how girls learn to regulate their bodies long before they understand why, and why the transition into womanhood can feel psychologically loaded rather than celebratory.This is a reflective episode about culture, power and internalisation - and about what happens when adulthood in the female body starts to feel like something to resist rather than inhabit.