Hilary Fannin: Boys will be awfully well-groomed boys

I was writing last week about negative body image, specifically among adolescent and prepubescent girls, and how the Girl Guides have devised a new badge called Free Being Me for their woggle-toggled members to attain.

The badge encourages Girl Guides to resist participating in negative body talk and to build awareness of beauty industry practices – such as airbrushing – that create unrealistic images of female beauty. We’ve all been subjected to photographs of women with ludicrously – nay, insanely – pert backsides and alabaster thighs longer and more heartbreaking than Hillary Clinton’s to-do list. Presumably, most of us respond by cantering to the cookie jar or the gin bottle, muttering “Oh shag it, Sandra”. (Or is that just me?)

Unfortunately, other more vulnerable observers of images of models who’ve had their ilium, ischium and pubis photoshopped to within an inch of their lives head straight to the bog, where they spend a decade or so chucking up their breakfast.

It’s not just young girls who are slaves to images of unattainable perfection, however. As a mother of adolescent boys, I have first-hand experience of watching that generation navigate a marketplace that peddles cool in the form of €100 trainers and logo-heavy hoodies that retail for about the cost of a weekly food shop.

Meet the Psycho

I found myself in a dead-trendy barbershop off a narrow cobbled lane recently, idly perusing a menu of haircuts, one of which was called “the Psycho”.

Biding my time underneath illustrations of various classes of hair tonic, displayed on artily designed walls (one featuring a woman astride a bottle of shampoo, head thrown back in bristling ecstasy), I counted the grooming products – the gels, the powders, the sprays, the de-luxe pomades, the moulding pastes and holding pastes – which were all mere enhancements to the fades and shaves.

The precision and professionalism smouldering away under the laidback aura of the establishment made memories of pudding-bowl haircuts from one’s briskly indifferent mother, while you were picking your blunted tresses out of your tripe and mash, seem Neanderthal.

There’s a part of me that quite admires this youthful obsession with looking “fresh”, with taking care of appearances. There’s a confidence, an alertness, a briskly articulated sense of self, that I don’t remember from the nicotine-stained blokes I hung around with during my own adolescence, some time last century, when, in my neighbourhood anyway, the epitome of cool was a pair of backless clogs and a couple of loving chew marks on the sleeves of your moulting Afghan sweater.

Grooming is cyclical, I suppose, but this business of self-image feels more potent now; it feels like wildfire, given the petrol douse of social media.

Turn down the hip-hop

Later, post-barbershop, I spoke to a sales assistant in one of those big international fashion stores where the stock changes faster than the weather and where you’re terribly tempted to show your age by asking them to dim the lights and turn down the hip-hop.

“Boys,” she said sympathetically, as I slumped over a sale rail outside the dressing rooms. “I feel sorry for them. They’ve image pushed at them morning, noon and night. They can never keep up.”

In the face of children desperate for the latest piece of footwear that some puffed-up footballer likes to wear while he’s having his nipples tattooed and his knee-caps studded with diamonds, parents peddle platitudes. What else can we do?

“Shoes are shoes, you’ll grow out of them. Why not eat up your greens and develop a nice keen interest in beekeeping/horticulture/medieval saints?”

But our children haven’t licked this obsession with image off the ground. Even negative attention to the beauty industry is attention. I count myself among the serious offenders.

Tut-tutting at skeletal models stomping around the catwalk, looking provocatively miserable in expensive knickers, we then happily turn our politically correct attentions to the movement towards "real beauty". I quite like those group shots of healthy, happy-looking "real" women, in glowingly white underwear, group-hugging each other's barely visible curves, but even they can still make one feel downright inadequate. Apparently, to be cast as a "real woman" for the campaign, you mustn't be too curvy or athletic, but you do have to be under 45 and in possession of flawless skin and magnificent hair.

Forget about being paid to advertise sting-free deodorant, sweetheart: if I had those attributes I’d happily hang around O’Connell Street in my undies.

Just for the heck of it.