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The horror, the horror. If you believe many of this year's movies, tabloids and blogs, one of the most terrifying sights is an adult female body that is (gasp) slightly imperfect. If you really want to scare the 15-year-olds to whom pop culture caters, forget chainsaws and torture devices - just zoom in on wrinkles, sags or cellulite.

In last August's hit comedy Superbad, a blind-drunk hottie in short-shorts dirty dances with one of the film's heroes, chubby Seth (Jonah Hill). He's delighted, until he realizes she's left a stain on his pant leg. "Period blood" he screams in disgust, while other partygoers reel. Okay, having that accident is unpleasant, but Seth is as repulsed as if the girl - hot no longer - had presented him with a severed head. Box office: more than $120-million.

In Knocked Up, which came out in June, hero Ben (Seth Rogen -- also chubby, which I point out because it's not an issue for the men) impregnates a babe (Katherine Heigl). But when she's delivering the baby, there's an extreme close-up of her distended vagina, with horror-movie sound effects. The friend who glimpsed it rocks back and forth on the waiting-room sofa, traumatized. "I shouldn't have gone in there, I shouldn't have gone in there," he chants. Box office: nearly $150-million.

In the remake of The Heartbreak Kid directed by the Farrelly brothers, which came out in October, Eddie (Ben Stiller) hastily marries the lovely Lila (Malin Ackerman), only to be repulsed by her sexual wantonness -- and the thatch of unkempt hair on her crotch. When she pulls off her jeans, the camera swoops in for yet another close-up as her flattened pubic hair springs back to menacing fullness. Stiller recoils as if from a werewolf. Box office: $37-million.

"I didn't see those movies, but I heard about those scenes," said Tracy Clark-Flory, who writes for Salon.com's Broadsheet, a blog that focuses on feminist issues. "They're the ones people walk away talking about."

"Women's bodies have always been fodder for jokes, but the envelope keeps getting pushed," said Jessica Valenti, whose book Full Frontal Feminism came out in March. "Young moviegoers expect more and more outrageous humour, so the movies get more risqué."

Offscreen, recent tabloids, TV shows and Internet sites raked Tyra Banks and Britney Spears over the coals for gaining weight. Endless unflattering photos of their non-washboard midriffs were displayed and discussed. The fact that Banks was at most a size 12, and that Spears has had two children, didn't matter: These women didn't maintain their veneer of perfection. They had failed.

A few weeks ago, the nitpickers hit a new low: They targeted Jennifer Love Hewitt, zeroing in on bumps on her bikini-clad bottom and blaring, "We know what you ate last summer."

Now, I try to have a sense of humour about this stuff. But Jennifer Love Hewitt is a freaking Polly Pocket, and obviously fit. Seeing her scorned - for I don't even know what, having hips? - I can't help but feel that the volume and ubiquity of this kind of criticism is tipping from humour into something uglier.

"Women's inferiority - in fact, their malevolence - is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they're sporting burkas," wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon on a website recently. "I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards... Women are weak, manipulative, somehow morally unfinished. The logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are expendable... There is a staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted."

The reasons are as old as time. Men are visual creatures who fear female power. Women are self-loathing. Each sex mistrusts the "otherness" of the other. Humans have a natural inclination to raise up heroes, then tear them down. Plastic surgery has created a super-race, and the Internet keeps their images in our face 24/7. The baby boomers who are running Hollywood are alarmed by their own aging. And on and on. I'm more interested in the results.

"I write about this stuff around the clock, switching between celebrity stories and the stories of women murdered by their family members in Iraq," Clark-Flory said. (And this week, tragically, in Mississauga.) "It's hard not to see a link. The imbalance exists in every culture. We're relatively lucky that this is how it shows up in ours. But that shouldn't diminish its seriousness. It's a valid concern that affects the lives of women in a real way."

Last February, the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls issued a report that examined "the omnipresence and damaging effects of sexualized images of girls and young women in American culture." In study after study, the report summarized, "findings have indicated that women more often than men are portrayed in a sexual manner (e.g., dressed in revealing clothing, with bodily postures or facial expressions that imply sexual readiness) and are objectified (e.g., used as a decorative object, or as body parts rather than a whole person). In addition, a narrow (and unrealistic) standard of physical beauty is heavily emphasized... Ample evidence indicates that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs."

Judy Norsigian, executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, a non-profit women's advocacy collective based in Boston, also sees an impact on women's health. "Humans have a natural desire to feel attractive," she said, "but our culture is pushing an extremely narrow norm of what constitutes beauty, and that results in critical risks: complications from elective surgery, from silicone ruptures to MRSA [the virulent methicillin-resistant staph infection that plagues hospitals]. Health risks from fad diets. New mothers being encouraged to lose their baby weight so soon that they can't produce breast milk. These dangers are downplayed left and right by the beauty industry. Their marketing misleads the public in massive ways."

Valenti, meanwhile, posits that a commercial and tabloid culture that encourages women to obsess about their so-called imperfections is a dangerous distraction from bigger issues, such as the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States. (In three popular films this year - Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno -- women who find themselves accidentally pregnant dismiss the option of abortion almost immediately. Characters in Knocked Up can't even utter the word. "It rhymes with smashmortion," one says.) Start looking, and everything seems relevant: VH1's show Little Beauties: The Ultimate Kiddie Queen Showdown featured four six-year-old pageant contestants - six-year-olds -- being kitted out with spray tans and fake teeth. A video starring Will Ferrell, running on FunnyOrDie.com, features a gang rape played for laughs. Several Delta Zeta sorority sisters at DePauw University in Indiana were kicked out for not being attractive enough. (DePauw dropped the sorority. The national chapter is now suing the university.) I know, I know, typical humourless feminist, seeing oppression everywhere. "That's the quickest way to shut someone down who is saying something valid, call them humourless," Valenti said. "But shaming someone, breaking down their spirit, is not funny. The thing is, I don't think the people making these movies or blogs even consider themselves sexist. It's such a part of our culture, we're so saturated, we don't even see it."

When Katherine Heigl recently called Knocked Up "a little bit sexist," blogs slammed her for being a hypocrite. Jennifer Love Hewitt felt compelled to post her dress size, 2, on her website. Then last week, former supermodel Janice Dickinson, defending Hewitt on The Today Show, inadvertently ended up embodying our cultural ambivalence.

"Jennifer Love Hewitt is a healthy, not emaciated, woman," Dickinson said. But she couldn't stop there. She had to add, "You want to see someone who's fat, I'm sorry, Tyra Banks is fat."

We're all pretty sorry, if you ask me.

fame gamejschneller@globeandmail.com