UK Edition
Britain's first female bishop on why she's leading the charge against negative body image
The Church of England’s first female diocesan bishop, the Right Reverend Rachel Treweek, is discussing her problem with Queen Elsa and Princess Anna, the female leads in the animated film Frozen.
“Everyone says the film is really great because the girls have courage, that they are not just typical women who don’t say anything. They are princesses, but they are brave and strong.”
Be that as it may, it rather misses a more startling point: that Disney has created souped-up versions of Barbie-on-ice.
“They still are beautiful,” she says. “They are slim, petite, thin-waisted, big-eyed princesses. They are not good role models, because it says if you are going to be successful like this, you still have to look a certain way.
“If you look at any book or fairytale, nearly always the ones who are successful are pretty, blonde, slim and blue-eyed. We start with those messages from a young age.”
Bishop Rachel, 53, is on a crusade. This week, she launches a social media campaign that hopes to redefine how young boys and girls view themselves and challenge negative body image, which she fears is creating a new generation with low self-esteem and leading to mental health problems.
The scheme comes with a social-media hashtag, #liedentity – a wordplay on the fake and unrealistic representations of young people’s bodies and lives that can be found online – and photos of schoolchildren with the part of their body that they don’t like airbrushed out. The aim is to start a better dialogue about self-worth and appearance.
Her move follows a Children’s Society report earlier this year that found a third of girls are unhappy with their appearance, attributed to the pressure to be perfect exerted by advertising and social media. This month, the Girlguiding Girls’ Attitude Survey found more than a third of girls aged seven to 10 believed they are rated more on looks than ability, and that in the last five years, body confidence levels of those aged seven to 21 has plummeted.
And all this after last week’s news that Cardwell & Simons, a photography firm that works in 700 schools across the UK, has introduced a photoshopping service to airbrush away pupils’ imperfections.
From now until Christmas, Bishop Rachel will visit secondary schools to hear for herself the impact that social media can wreak on young minds. Already she has been to some near Gloucester, as well as Eastwood Park women’s prison, where she was struck by their “poor self-worth” of inmates for “all sorts of reasons”, including their appearance.
For the Church, this is uncharted territory, and another strident move by the most senior Anglican clergywoman, as she marks a little over a year since becoming the Bishop of Gloucester – the first woman in history to take on such a role, and the first female bishop to sit in the House of Lords.
We meet in an office overlooking Gloucester Cathedral as the bells peal to conclude a graduation service, and the students – young women in sky-scraping heels – come flooding out.
“It really, really concerns me that young people’s perceived worth and value has got so caught up in visual appearance,” she says, shaking her head. “This is something that I haven’t yet seen the Church picking up on.”
She also has a personal reason for taking up the cause, as she remembers life as a 5ft 10in 14-year-old schoolgirl with “really bad acne” growing up in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire.
“I was very aware of not reaching a standard of prettiness. For school photos, I was always sent further and further back. At discos, I would look down on the boys I was dancing with. I had huge, size-8 feet – not particularly what a girl wants. Trying to find fashionable shoes for a 14-year-old with size-8 feet was a nightmare. Those kind of things made me feel really self-conscious.”
She struggled through, aided by the fact that her self-worth wasn’t caught up in her appearance – something she attributes to a strong Christian faith, a lack of social media in her formative years, and access to positive adult role models. She attended Brownies, church and dance groups, and describes her upbringing as “typically middle-class”.
The youngest of three children, her father worked in the City as a ship repair broker, while her mother stayed at home to raise the family. Bishop Rachel learnt linguistics at Reading University then began her career as a pediatric speech and language therapist in the NHS, a background that ensured she learnt the importance of children being able to communicate clearly with the world around them.
A calling from God ensured she retrained at an Anglican theological college in her early thirties, and she was ordained in 1994, serving in London’s Tufnell Park before settling in Bethnal Green. In 2006, she then married Rev Guy Treweek, then a priest-in-charge of two London parishes. He has since taken time out of his career to support her, and the couple has no children.
Bishop Treweek has had to remain adept at deflecting superficial criticism and raises one particularly barbed comment, written about her below a critical article about her appointment in July last year.
“This bloke had written: ‘Oh, she looks really ugly anyway.’ It was interesting because I didn’t think that would have been his comment when dismissing a male bishop. For girls, it is all about what you look like.”
Although she admits it can smart, a position of leadership doesn’t buy you the time or inclination to indulge vitriol. “You have to know you are going to have the hard stuff as well as the nice stuff.”
The campaign has already kindled moments of self-reflection. Part of the blame for a culture of young who are looks-obsessed must, she thinks, fall on adults and parents. From an early age, the default compliment a young girl hears is that she looks “beautiful” or “pretty”. It is these seemingly innocuous comments, she thinks, that are stoking the fire.
“I find my natural way of trying to building a relationship straight away is saying: ‘That’s a pretty dress.’ But what am I doing? I am immediately giving them a sense of this is what our relationship is built on.”
Recalibrating our value systems and sending out other messages is one solution. Another solution she advocates is parents having more “conversations” with children about their social media habits, rather than issuing heavy-handed blanket bans or restricting usage. “It is about being curious. When we are curious with people, people open up and talk.”
Here, she would like to be clear, she is not objecting to the pleasure and confidence that wearing make-up and spending time on your appearance can bring; it is when this borders on a reliance on the superficial for a sense of identity and happiness that problems and insecurities breed.
Dressed in a purple crushed velvet jacket, purple clerical smock, gently mauve lipstick, silver rings and black knee-high boots, Bishop Rachel is leading by example. Earlier this year, she made headlines for having her bishop’s jacket nipped in by a tailor so that it had a more feminine line.
“What we wear and what we look like can be an expression of who we are – and that is great – but it is not who we are.” To that end, she feels too much is made of the Prime Minister’s leopard print heels.
“Why is it that people can comment on Theresa May and what she wears? If David Cameron had worn some bright pink tie with blue spots, I suppose [the media] might have made a comment on it, but it seems to be about her identity.”
The conversation turns to the differing standards to which men and women are held. Of this, she has first-hand experience.
“There is a lot of pressure on women to be Superwoman and do things even better than men would. Certainly, I would say that I experienced that when I was first ordained as a woman in 1994, which was the first year that women could be priests. I remember myself and the women clergy feeling that we had to really, really do well. If a man who’d been a vicar for a long time had a bit of an off-day, it would be just that, he is having an off-day. If a woman did something not right, it would be, ‘Ah, that’s why we shouldn’t have women as priests.’
“I see that not just in the Church. I see it [everywhere]. Why is it that a woman with children has to be seen to be a fabulous mum and completely fabulous in the office? It is much harder for women to… underperform is the wrong word, but to be vulnerable and to be human.”
A year into her role in one of the world’s oldest boys clubs, does she still feel the need to live up to Superwoman standards? She thinks not. Being the first female diocesan bishop meant she had no role models and the “freedom” to “bring into this who I am”. It’s a gentle sidestep.
Right now, her message is clear. She would like to see people dancing to their own tune, the true route to happiness, and not take social media as gospel.
And Disney, Barbie and all the rest need to sort out their imaging departments?
“They do!” she laughs. “But, actually, I’d still love Barbie because I’d love her for who she was.”
For details of the #liedentity campaign, go to gloucester.anglican.org or follow @GlosDioc