Pressure on girls for perfect body 'worse than ever', says Orbach

Susie Orbach has been involved with a year-long campaign to remove cosmetic surgery apps targeting primary school-aged girls. [File, AFP]

Girls and young women are under more pressure than ever to achieve the perfect body in an oppressive social media-driven world that could never have been imagined by 1970s feminists, says psychoanalyst and bestselling author Susie Orbach.

Forty years after the publication of her seminal book "Fat is a Feminist Issue", the British writer -- who was once Princess Diana's therapist -- said women were commodifying their bodies as they tried to conform to false images peddled by online beauty influencers.