And far more of us will eventually die from lack of exertion rather than from overdoing it.The trick, I suppose, is, on the one hand, not to wait until you see the blue flashing light of the ambulance before buying a pair of trainers and, on the other, not to believe all the guff about no gain without pain There is a key difference between pain and mere effort. It’s a pity that so many people end up learning that the hard way.p.vallely independent.co.uk. Two separate stories, seemingly unconnected but actually entwined, emerged this weekend, each in its own way questioning the idea that Muslim women who wear hejab or the burqa are serene and content with the way they look, untouched by the punishing pressures of media-generated beauty myths which have left most of the rest of us unable to live in peace with our faces and bodies. Professor Mann wanted to find out whether attitudes to beauty and body shape differed significantly and to test whether media images were causing higher levels of eating disorders and anorexia in western countries.The results were startling. Women in Iran were just as obsessed with their weight as those in the West and were as likely to suffer from eating disorders.

What’s more, they felt they needed to lose twice as much weight, on average, as their Western counterparts.Story No 2: News is emerging, so my human rights friends in Pakistan tell me, of how the Taliban tortured women in prisons for disobedience to their menfolk, for alleged immodesty or adultery, for being suspected of political activities and for being interested in make-up and ornaments. In the women’s prison in Kabul, they have found lipsticks, bangles, perfume, even stockings, all evidence, apparently, of the depravity which the regime wanted to stamp out. So behind that moving shroud (And please don’t tell me women must want the burqa because they have not all thrown it off to dance semi naked in the streets. They can’t give up something that they have lived under for so many years without fear and they don’t trust the men from the Northern Alliance not to violate them.) these women still felt the need to adorn themselves, even when they knew that it might lead them into a torture chamber. In two cases, my informants tell me, their husbands reported them to the Taliban because they hated the women making themselves look beautiful, even though they were seen only by other women, mostly in the family.There has been much argument this week over whether Cherie Blair was right to say that the burqa worn by the women of Afghanistan symbolises utter degradation and oppression. Perhaps it is to be expected that those for and against this position have argued loudly and with immovable conviction Uproar on both sides. Feminists and liberals wholly applauded her statements while devotees of the hejab hated her presumptuousness and felt she had no business attacking religious and cultural practices which she knew nothing about.

Did she not understand that covered women had greater freedoms and equality than Western women?In her book, A Glimpse Through Purdah (1999), researcher Sitara Khan, who works in Yorkshire, found these views were widespread among the Muslims she interviewed. One reader’s letter to a newspaper captured what I have heard many times over: “I wear the burqa, and would want my daughters to because this frees us from the horrible looks and wants of men outside the family and also makes us happy to be what we are I don’t need to diet, or to colour my lips My husband likes me how I am and always will. Non Muslim women [have] nervous breakdowns because they must be young forever and look like film stars.”As ever, the truth is more messy and complex and I hope the stories I alluded to will lead us to reconsider the bland and brash statements we have all been making on the lives and desires of women in veils. I am convinced that Western ideas of beauty have been stamped across the world and that it is hard not to be influenced by them. I cannot look in the mirror without feeling a failure because the whole world is thinner, younger and indescribably lovelier.Bollywood actresses were once plump and pretty and of all ages. Now they all look like Cindy Crawford and seem always to wear green contacts to hide their dark eyes The same is true in Africa and elsewhere.

Maybe the Iranian women are simply reflecting this other pernicious kind of globalisation.But it could be that these anxieties are worse for Iranian and other veiled women because they are so desperate to get some kind of control over their lives, some kind of autonomy, in an existence which offers so little personal freedom and choice. I wonder if being forced to wear the veil (as happened to educated women in Iran during the revolution, when they were imprisoned and beaten if they refused to cover themselves) made them start to focus inwards. Denied the right to be attractive in public places, perhaps they become obsessed with attractiveness in private places, inside their cloaks. Professor Mann found that Iranian women in Tehran craved empty stomachs and hard exercise regimes.Remember, too, that these societies, which allow men so many more rights, may be making women fearful that they will be easily discarded.