Either way, there's nothing wrong with your body

The Guardian rounds up a list of the body parts you didn't know you had.

A thigh gap does not mean that your body is underweight. Everyone is built differently, and some people naturally have one. If we're going to declare war, can we declare war on superficiality and objectification, and not on specific characteristics? Let's acknowledge that the thigh gap obsession is Not a Good Thing without stigmatizing the gap itself or blowing it out of proportion. That last article gets it right:

No, it is not a widespread trend and, no, not every single female between the ages of 14 and 29 is obsessed with ensuring that their thighs don't touch any more than every single female thinks it is totally normal to wear 5in Louboutin heels every day (or ever). What it is, though, is an example of yet another form of body hatred that has been successfully marketed to vulnerable girls and women... 

and

But to suggest that there is a dichotomy between having body neuroses and being intellectually stimulated isn't fair and misunderstands the problem here... When I was a teenager in the 90s, I happily read Charlotte Brontë and Chaim Potok novels, but simultaneously became so obsessed with having a flat stomach when I was 14 that I pretty much stopped eating for a decade. Turns out that intellectual pursuits are no guarantee of good mental health. To reduce body obsession to empty-headed narcissism feels like yet another way to criticise women and girls.

 and

...I remember reading an article in US Vogue several years ago by a British writer in her late 30s about her devastation that she no longer had a gap between her thighs after having had two children. Incidentally, this writer studied at Oxford: clearly, as has been repeatedly proved throughout British history, that is no guarantee of intelligence or even common sense, but it does reinforce the point that intellectual stimulation is not a guaranteed medicine against body obsession.

To bring it home:

No one can stop women and girls hating their bodies, no matter how many novels they read. But what we – the adults who don't obsess over thigh flesh – can do is to keep reinforcing the message to young people that to be strong and healthy is a good thing and to be frail and sickly is dangerous, and that anyone who feels differently is not to be hated but to be pitied. And, most of all, we need to live by our words and set the example accordingly. Because, ultimately, a life spent measuring your thighs is a life wasted.