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Clip description
Naked women jump into a swimming pool and play while one of the women in voice-over tells a story about a group of young ‘size 10’ women shivering miserably on a cold beach waiting for their boyfriends to finish surfing. She then goes on to say that not having physical strength makes you feel powerless. The song ‘Size 10’, written and sung by Robyn Archer, plays while women look into distorting mirrors, seeing themselves first as fat and then as skinny.
Curator’s notes
In Size 10 there are stories from the four women about how, when they were young, they were more concerned about how they looked and how their boyfriends viewed them. It was often the women’s movement that helped them see they were wasting their time worrying about the way they looked when they could have been working on their strength or improving their minds. Once they saw this for themselves, their transformation was irrevocable. One of the things that was often said in the 1970s was ‘once one jumps off the existential cliff, there is no way back’.
