the outline of my body, can make me feel as if I’m guilty of a moral transgression. This bizarre notion – that physical appearance and moral worth are directly linked – is so deeply sunk into my brain that I feel it to be true on an emotional level. I feel it so powerfully that it easily overwhelms the part of me that reasons that it’s nonsense. But it’s a cultural invention. It was made up by humans. As classical scholar Dr Michael Squire of King’s College, London told me, ‘The Ancient Greeks had this idea that being physically beautiful was the same
