WITH International Women’s Day coming up on March 8, The Guardian put a question to its readers. What is the biggest issue facing women where you live? One story this week encapsulates my contender perfectly: body shaming.

Edwina Currie, the former Tory junior health minister, called a size 14 woman obese. On the surface, it almost sounds flippant. It’s just a petty fat jibe from a washed-up politician. It’s hardly newsworthy.

But every public comment that shames women’s bodies ratifies a culture where aesthetics are more important than who we are. We live in a world of playground taunts. Every new body-shaming comment floats down like a Tetris block, fortifying a landscape where we see each other through value judgments. Fat is a word we’ve become anaesthetised to. We have to reconnect with its meaning, and dissect the disparity between what it means and how we use it, to understand its payload.

Is a size 14-wearing woman obese? No. I’ll spare you the dictionary definition, as despite the loose and lazy use of the word, most of us have a good grip on what it means. You only have to take a closer look at the context here to understand its usage. This is an uncomfortable social snapshot we all need to examine.

This isn’t health advice, it’s a power play. Currie’s remarks didn’t come from a place of love, or concern, it was used as a pejorative. Here, a living, breathing woman became a label. To a cell. A fellow woman used an instant value judgment to elevate herself. It’s a tired trick – one we’ve done without thinking for so long. It’s time we started calling it out, in others and in ourselves.

Fat has become a synonym for a thousand things. When we’re feeling bad about ourselves, we feel fat. When we’ve eaten too much, we feel fat. When we’re fed up and tired, or bloated, or premenstrual we feel fat. When we want to insult someone with laser precision and instant results, we use the word fat to do it.

Just look at the way we tiptoe round it. Women are conditioned to react to it, to reassure one another when it’s uttered, because it’s a dirty word. We covet thin bodies and laud them without question. Other body types are curvy, voluptuous, plus-sized, fuller-figured, Rubenesque – they’re anything but fat. Because fat is shameful.

Currie is not alone. She’s yet another voice joining that clamour that tells women how to look and why. It’s not a new issue, but once more the internet has catalysed the shamers. Online anonymity offers Dutch courage and little recourse for unpopular opinions.

In the last year there have been hundreds of examples. Canadian vlogger Nicole Arbour’s rancid soliloquy Dear Fat People used other people’s misery as currency for followers. A Facebook page, Project Harpoon, sprang up to share "improved" (read: heavily edited) photos of women, enforcing body ideals on strangers without their permission.

In the real world, a middle-aged man has been doling out Overweight Haters cards to women on the London Underground, calling them selfish, greedy and ugly. All this points to a body hate culture that’s getting worse.

Of course men suffer too, but the pincer grasp of womanhood and value judgments is stifling. We’re caught between magazine facsimiles of womanhood and a growing backlash against anything that deviates from this. Currie’s remarks are a stark reminder that we’re expected to coast through life with other people’s perceptions in mind.

Thanks to Photoshop, porn and mainstream media, our bodies are constantly modified, commodified and sold back to us. But they are selling us snake oil. They’re selling us an impossible ideal. Only five per cent of women naturally have the coveted western shape. That makes for a lot who don’t make the cut. That’s almost all women who can’t conform to what we tout as normal. We’re setting ourselves up to lose.

Body shaming imprisons people. It narrows what we, society, deems as acceptable, which gives labels more venom. When that label becomes front and centre, it stops people from living their fullest lives. We limit ourselves, at the same time as society limits us. Imagine what could happen if we were free from this constant scrutiny? When I hear remarks like Currie’s, I bristle. I know no-one’s worth is skin deep, but it harms all the same. It hurts because we’re all conditioned to these bodily heuristics.

We look at someone we’ve never met, and we cobble together an analogue that allows us to infer who they are. This person exercises, and is good. This person is lazy and unhealthy, so is bad. We can never gain any real insight from such binary judgments.

I also bristled when I heard Currie’s remarks because I know all too well who else is listening. When we exist in a world where we normalise appearance anxiety, everyone hears the insults. We hear that fat is bad, and thin is good, and wherever we are on that spectrum, we benchmark ourselves. I can’t claim to speak for everyone, but I’ve felt the pressure of that measuring up most of my adult life.

Every day I have to polish my mirror. My nine-year-old is naturally waif-like, and already knows this is social currency. Her peers tell her this. They already talk about dieting. She has an explicit, yet unarticulated understanding that her natural, pre-adolescent body shape will be extolled.

She knows it will be used to place her on the socio-cultural hierarchy. I worry for her. Despite her brilliance, she’s subject to that same fragility we all are. The unrealistic standards. The intolerance for diversity. The barbs that cut through self-esteem like a hot knife through butter. I worry that as she grows up in a world where she’s more exposed to these limiting ideas, that I’ll exhaust my capacity for damage control.

Even though I know it’s what's inside that counts, this is yet another reminder that what’s outside is seen and judged first. And what people see is often all they need to form an opinion, and one they’ll use against you when they can.

No-one sees hands that can hold, mend, cook and make music. No-one sees a brain that’s learned to process language and to walk. No-one sees a body that’s fought every germ that’s ever penetrated it and lived.

I hope that on International Women’s Day we can remember that our bodies achieve unbelievable things every second. I hope we remember that our bodies are only a fraction of who we are. If we can do that, we can be kinder to ourselves and to others.