TO my horror, a fellow member of a local Facebook page recently shared a video I made in 2011 about Govanhill. I remembered it well. The editing process had been made tricky because I would not watch it back or listen to myself talking. I couldn’t bear to do it. Wouldn’t I be face-meltingly ugly, my voice sound preposterous and I be monstrously fat?

As I scrolled up the Facebook page, the video began to play automatically and oh God, there I was. A familiar feeling of dread prickled around my heart and into my throat. I forced myself to watch, seven years on.

And my takeaway? There was nothing wrong with me.

So why did I believe there was? Oh, a hundred little incidents all built up. The time aged five when paired up in a crocodile in kindergarten, the girl I was teamed with looked at me curiously and said: “Do you know you have a really flat face?”

In sixth year the boys rated the girls, hung the numbers in the common room and I was a four. These things. You absorb them.

For other women, it’s magazines and films and advertising.

So I watched Amy Schumer’s character in the new film I Feel Pretty with sympathy as she analyses all her constituent parts in the mirror and finds them wanting. The film has had a critical panning so it makes me feel almost sheepish to say I enjoyed it. Not least because in its wake, conversations have begun about beauty ideals.

In the film, beauty is equated with thinness. Despite body positivity activism, it is still the case that standard beauty ideals present fatness as bad – not for health reasons, which is a different argument – but for aesthetic reasons.

The actress Charlize Theron is currently staring in the movie Tully, for which she has been praised as “brave” for gaining 3st 7lb. Showbiz gossip site Access tweeted that reality star Kendall Jenner showed “bravery” in eating carbs – gasp – before the Met Gala.

Fat is still a subversive act. Schumer has flawless skin, hair like a Pantene advert and bombshell boobs. What she is, is heavier than your average film star. What she is, is fat, we are supposed to believe. Schumer has built a career on being a fat rebel without actually being fat at all. Her shtick is being like us, your average woman at home, and not like them, the skinny girls we see on screen.

There is an us and them divide. This is probably something we don’t like to admit and it’s why the language has changed: to make beauty a respectable pursuit.

The semantics of aesthetics has been altered to be less offensive: it’s not about thin, it’s about healthy; it’s not a facial, it’s wellness; it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.

In doing so we have turned the superficial pursuit of beauty into a moral imperative. The pressure’s on – you have an excuse not to be beautiful (you were born this way) but you have no excuse not to be good. Clean eating, clean beauty. All else is, by extension, dirty and wrong.

Whether the goal is to “thin” or to be “strong”, dissatisfaction with yourself is the default setting. Which is ridiculous.

I Feel Pretty offers self-esteem as the answer. The flaw there is that the onus is still on the individual to change without challenging the outside forces causing women to feel insecure in the first place.

Self-esteem, though, is a vital start. I wish it was our default setting. Renee realises she was fine all along, as did I, having wasted years agonising. Like the woman it portrays, I Feel Pretty might come with issues, but I can’t find it in me to sneer at a film trying to urge women to value themselves as they are.