The body confident

I am sitting on the side of a pool in France, watching my children play in the water and wondering how long and how often I have been merely an observer of a life rather than one who participates.

I love watching my beautiful daughter stride around the pool with her long,long legs and hate it when she says she won't wear her tankini because it shows her belly. I hate looking at Max's wobbly belly and knowing that is my fault for not making him have a more active lifestyle.

I'm watching French, Dutch and German mothers in the pool with their offspring and am hearing them repeat, almost word for word the same things I say to my children.  "Ca ce n'est pas gentil" "Bien, jolie!" "schnell !" Then there are the mostly British mothers, like me, sitting on the sidelines, rolling our 3/4 trousers up past pasty knees, slipping our cardigans onto the floor for a moment.

But all these women in the pool look fabulous. Better than me, I think. Or maybe not. Do they look so good because they take part and do the exercise and don't waste time caring what anyone else thinks about -and now I look closer, I can see them- the stretch marks and broken veins and tan lines, and not wearing underwired bikinis or even shaving every bit of body hair.

If I hadn't been so self conscious about what I now realise was my flat stomach and toned thighs, perhaps I wouldn't have become the two stone over-weight blob fish I am now. And if I don't strip off and get in that pool I won't get any browner or lose any of that belly that has resumed the approximate size and quality it had immediately after my fourth pregnancy.

Maybe next year, knowing I have to get undressed, I will behave better throughout the year. Otherwise I'll be waiting until I'm 65, the see when most women feel body confident.  Of course by that time,my daughter will believe that sitting on the sidelines is an option. I need to take responsibility.

Oh. "Is this OK?" the French woman asks me, moving the chairs. Despite the fact I am pretty fluent in French and German everyone speaks tome in English. Is it the fat?  Is it the pink hair? No, just the fact that I am watching from the edge while everyone else takes part. There is definitely a metaphor here....

XS ive

There is a new perfume advert on tv.  I don't know why. It isn't Christmas. Perhaps it's for those people who go on holiday and think they need to spend all their money on over priced aftershave on the way home.

I think this may be the most ridiculously sexist advert for fragrance I have ever seen.  Until the next one obviously.  The fragrance is Pure XS by Paco Rabanne, which as far as I can remember, actually smells quite nice, but I won't be buying it for my husband any time soon.

You can watch it here, should you wish to.

Ok. So this is partly an indication of my age, but the boy in the advert looks very young to me.  He is far too clean shaven, far too hairless, I really am not a fan of this massive over grooming trend at the moment, I like my men to be a bit hairy, but perhaps I should be encouraging the equality of difficulty.

Anyway, this pretty little boy is going to have a bath in a very nice bathroom, or is it a library? There are books all round the walls and it turns out that some naughty little minxes have just placed a bath in the middle of a posh room with a two way mirror to spy on any passing boy who fancies having a bath.

The oversexed young vixens are getting very overheated, hiding in the book cases and in the cupboards as they spy on the boy who starts to get undressed. They are terribly excited by his smooth, smooth tanned and perfectly sculpted chest, in fact he is pretty excited by it himself and keeps touching it as he poses in the two way mirror - unknowingly watched by a dozen or so attractive women, who have literally nothing better to do than wait in the cupboard for unsuspecting boys to come along and have baths.

He seems to forget that he wants a bath, or rather, starts to think like the teenager he actually is, and realises that it is much quicker to just spray a load of scent over the smell rather than really have a wash.  So after stroking a couple of brass taps, which spurt water in a way which suggests that the girls might need to employ a passing plumber to come and fix the waterworks at some point, he unfastens his trousers and gives a cheeky squirt.  At which point, all the girls faint or fall over in rapturous ecstasy.

All this time the Habanera from Bizet's Carmen is playing in the background.  I am no expert in opera, but everything I remember about Carmen suggests to me a strong female role model - teasing and manipulating a male audience at this point - "If I love you, then beware!"  Perhaps I am missing the point. Should I be celebrating the objectification and voyeuristic treatment of the male body?  I don't think so.  He seems a little too aware of his audience and he is not being observed by one woman but several. When he removes his trousers he seems to be controlling a whole brood of women with whatever is under there.

I may once again be showing my age, but I seem to be seeing many more genitals on tv at the moment - it may be my choice of Amazon over Netflix, but I haven't yet seen a show that has justified any use of genitals, I just can't quite see the point.  I have never yet seen a group of young women lose control of their dignity over the sight of any man's penis. And that includes the women at work the other week googling a particular Love Island contestant (?), competitor (?) and discussing his size, girth or length I don't remember. They passed round a phone screen, zoomed in on the poor man's organ, reducing him to a single attribute and passed interested comments, but no one fainted, or declared it a beauty.

What is this advertisement trying to say? And who is going to buy the fragrance or the image on the basis of this?  A young woman, who wants her man to appeal to a large group of other women?  A young over-groomed man who buys his own eau de toilette?  And what is the image being sold? That men are sex objects too? That the best we can hope for is that pretty young men's bodies are exploited as much as young women's bodies and that is the kind of equality we have achieved in advertising?

The ASA is planning to "crack down" on sexist advertising and adverts that perpetuate sexist stereotypes.  I am not sure that this is what they had in mind, but I don't intend to give a company that suggests women need to fall at the feet of a man who unzips his fly any of my spare euros this summer.