NAVEL GAZING

Thank goodness for stars like Kate Winslet, who recently refused to hide the rolls in her stomach during filming this fixation about tummy shape isn’t healthy

- Olivia Petter

I can still remember the shape of Mischa Barton's stomach. In the role of Marissa Cooper in The OC, the Noughties teen drama set in sunny, sandy California, the actor was often wearing a bikini. I watched that show obsessively when I was a teenager – and Barton’s body consumed me. I worked out that, in order to be beautiful, I needed my stomach to look exactly like hers: washboard-flat, and framed by two razor-sharp hipbones.

Hers was a stomach I’d seen elsewhere, too. Like on Paris Hilton. And Gwen Stefani. And the bodies of all the Victoria’s Secret models I was repeatedly told were definitive bastions of female beauty. Of course, in our apparent era of body positivity, it has since become “acceptable” to have a few curves on our figures. But this doesn’t really apply to the stomach, a part of us that society still insists must be completely smooth – have you seen those videos of celebrities getting lymphatic drainage massages on their bellies, too?

The belly is often the body part we fixate on more than almost anything else, yes in men (see: abs) but especially in women, and most of all at this time of year when many of us are gallivanting around in our swimwear. We judge midriffs on other people (soft versus hard) and we judge them on ourselves (flat versus rolls), often to a very nasty, self-flagellating degree.