I'm smart but unattractive. I wasn't even attractive when I was young. My 19-year-old daughter and 20-year-old son are GORGEOUS (don't ask me how) and of very average intelligence. There is no doubt in my mind they will be happier than I have been, and more successful in their work and love lives.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, but the fact is, looks count for more than brains in our extremely superficial society. And no, they don't last forever, but you can parlay your attractiveness into careers and marriages for which the ugly need not apply.

There is no doubt in my mind that good-looking people of average (or even below average) intelligence have more opportunities than ugly people, no matter how smart.

I was recently at the fashionable store, H&M, which just opened in my area. I was accompanied by two young girls (a friend's daughters) who were 11 and 13. The thirteen year old is just hitting puberty, she is very thin still and hipless, but has tiny breasts (AA probably). She was trying on bikinis on summer clearance, and "modeling" for us in the dressing area 3-way mirror.

She looked cute of course -- who wouldn't look cute at her age? -- but what was interesting was the reaction of other, adult women (all normal size and reasonably attractive but over 35). They were raving as if she was a supermodel! "Oh honey, you are SO GORGEOUS! What a PERFECT BODY you have! I'd give ANYTHING to look like that!" Naturally, the girl was delighted and flattered.

But as an older adult, I was kinda squicked. Why should normal, healthy, not fat adult women idealize a thirteen year old with AA breasts? How the hell did that get to be our cultural ideal?

Of course the answer is the fashion industry, and especially advertising and the fashion magazines. They have put on a pedestal, for many decades now (I came of age in the Twiggy era) the body of a pubescent teenage girl -- hipless, skinny, tiny breasts, flawless child's skin and hair, etc. It is an ideal that about 00.00001 percent of all ADULT women can ever hope to achieve!

Holding ourselves up to this ideal -- to con ourselves into thinking we can maintain a child's body and complexion into our 30s and 40s -- is delusional, cruel and frightening. It is also impossible. There is great beauty in a growing, pubescent girl...but there is also great beauty in a healthy adult woman, in a middle-aged body that has "been around the block", in a body that has grown a child and given birth, and in the wise face of an old woman who has lived life to the fullest.

By obsessing about ONLY the very youngest and most fleeting of all physical appearances, we are doing great damage to womanhood in general. I don't know who is worse off -- the older women whose innate beauty is "dissed", who are made to feel ugly and inadequate....or the young girls who are fawned on and made much of -- but only for a few years. Who have to fear every month and each birthday because they will suck her beauty away instead of adding to it.

We are doing both young and older women a huge disservice in this way. Life is a long process, to be enjoyed and treasured as it comes along. No stage of life is "superior" to another. Holding ourselves to impossible standards is a recipe for lifelong misery.

BTW: this also contributes to the discussion in another Broadsheet piece about the financing of plastic surgery -- why the hell do you think women are willing to indebt themselves for surgical operations? To achieve an unachievable ideal, to become the artifical picture in the magazine or on TV.

And in the meantime her accounting position gets shipped to India, then what? Now she has 150K in college loans to pay off in a shit economy, when she could have made enough at 15 to pay for all her college expenses.

Again--who exactly are YOU to tell other people how to live?

Oh yeah, & becuz I don't agree with YOU, the great libbie, I must be uneducated.

Typical libbie logic.

Since "Women's" Gymnastics in the Olympics has been dominated by 12-to-14-year-olds for the past several decades, I don't see what the fuss is about. If the IOC says these kewpies are women, why should the fashion industry quibble?

International competition (at least the Olympics) has banned gymnasts younger than 16 for at least a decade. More recently, the International Skating Union also banished those younger than 16 from international (senior level) competition. Why did they do this? Exactly the same reasons... because children were being exploited (and actually injured). Remember China's Mighty Mao who was a contender for the world title at 13, injured badly the next year in a training accident and never seen again?

You're at least a decade off Irving.

Here are two photos of Clair Quirk:

http://blogs.news.com.au/images/uploads/claire.jpg

Quirk is on the right in this one, the older model who replaced her is on the left.

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb241/fashionising/quirk.jpg

As a mother of a tween girl, it is completely impossible for me to look at these photos and say "no, she is not being inappropriately sexualized." She is. Whomever is using these images is exploiting this girl's beauty, making her a symbol for what she is not yet: a woman--and a very stylized, sexualized, woman at that. The pictures tell the story like words never will.

However, look at THIS picture of the girl whose mother made the remark on beauty being ageless:

http://www.news.com.au/common/imagedata/0,,5571488,00.jpg

Big difference, huh?

Beautiful, yes. Age appropriate, yes. Sexualized? HELL NO.

It is a far cry from demanding burkas to asking that young girls not be tarted up into teenage lolitas. Girls should get to be girls before they are made--like velvet rabbits--into women by people who want to use their beauty and youth to sell clothing.

Good for Melbourne! Shame on Clair Quirk's mother. What in the WORLD is this woman thinking?!