Perfection is what has always been expected of girls and women.
The world may have changed and modernised, but certain crushing expectations still remain.
Girls and women are still expected to be slim, pretty and quiet.
We must be perfect mothers, just the right amount of intelligent and content with our place in the world.
We are allowed to have emotions, but only at certain times, like the birth of a child, and only in certain ways.
Words like hysterical, shrill, crazy, overly-emotional, bossy and ball-buster are almost exclusively reserved for use against women – a subtle way to take down a woman who dared break the mould society has deemed she must fill.
It has become even worse with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Now you can curate your life so it looks from the outside exactly as it should.
We only post the pictures where the filter and the setting make us look amazing, happy and carefree.
We only show the baby laughing and being cute.
This might only happen once a day, but once the photographic evidence is online, from the outside we look like the perfect mother of the perfect child.
And even though this perfection does not exist, it’s still not really ok to not be perfect.
This is the beauty of Pixar’s Oscar-nominated film 'Inside Out' - it shows an ordinary girl struggling and unhappy and definitely not perfect.
It shows her desperately trying to adapt to a new life situation and failing.
We are so rarely told it is ok to fail and as such many people, particularly women, are hugely afraid of making mistakes.
Many women suffer from imposter syndrome, always convinced they will be 'found out' as incompetent, an imposter.
In a special featurette attached to the 'Inside Out' DVD women from the production team spoke about how their lives and their reactions to the movie.
What they had to say was enlightening and heartbreaking all at the same time.
One woman said she had to “learn it was ok to fail” and that “it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake as long as you learn from it and move on”.
Another spoke about how the overwhelming theme of the movie was “it’s ok to be sad”.
It broke my heart that we have to deliberately set about making a movie to let not only boys and girls but men and women know they have these fundamental rights – to fail, to make mistakes, to be sad.
When we fail, when we are sad, we learn more about ourselves.
It helps us to process our thoughts and feelings, understand what we are capable of and learn how to feel better again.
We learn to embrace all that we are, not just the bits we would like to show the world.
Young girls need to hear more often that they don't need to feel happy or grateful all the time.
They need to know that they don't need a relationship to rescue them and make them whole.
Because even though failing or feeling angry or sad is not a great way to feel, it makes the happy times so much better.
It is what you feel and understand and do that makes you who you are, not your partner or your beauty or your social status.
It sounds bizarre when you say it, but it is very rare for anyone, let alone girls, to be told it is ok to be less than perfect.
We will never be the perfect Disney princess, but we can be something much better.
We can be who we really are – emotions, mistakes, warts and all – no prince required.
