When my mum was a little girl living on a small sheep farm she suffered extensive burns to her upper body after pulling a large pot of boiling water down off the stove and onto herself as a toddler.

Her burns were so deep and widespread that the treatment and the many attempted skin grafts across her chest, shoulder and upper arms took a couple of years and she has been left with a lot of damage.

But Mum grew into a strong lady and I recall her simply not showing that she noticed when people’s gaze lingered on her extensive, shiny scarred areas, which spread across her breasts much like Turia Pitt’s burns mark her face, when we were at the beach as kids, or when she had a sun dress on, or any of the other times.

In fact, she is such a gutsy lady that when after saving up like mad she went on a trip to Antarctica and recognised the New York art-photographer Spencer Tunick among the passengers, she asked him if he was planning a shoot amid the stark terrain.

Yes, said Tunick, who is famous for shooting large groups of nude people to illustrate our shared humanity in locations around the world.

Was he looking for volunteers, asked Mum, to which he replied yes, but he wasn’t allowed to ask people directly because the people running the nature cruise thought that might unsettle the guests. Ha. My mum is not that easily unsettled, despite years of painful operations, despite being conscious of the scars highly visible in anything other than a button-up collar, she enjoys her body.

So at the age of about 60, mum nuded up among the ice and the jagged rocks. The photographer complimented her on how the wild landscape made a fitting backdrop for a body that had seen and displayed the ravages of its own experience.

The first I heard of it was when Tunick was featured in an SBS documentary and up popped the image of nude mum in all her glory; not that she was expecting that.

And look, she may have reconsidered her boldness for a second had the outpouring of gratitude and love for her gesture not been so strong and immediate in the little country town where she lives.

Women of different shapes and sizes and different sexualities approached her in the street to tell mum what she did had helped them to accept themselves and tangibly changed their idea of what “beautiful” is. They told her how brave she was, but the main thing they had to say was “thank you”.

Because they could see what I can see; that you have a choice in this life if you’re born a female in the west, with its huge emphasis on external appearances.

You can either listen to, look at and absorb all the tidal wave of negative bulls — t about what beauty and conformity and “good enough” means, or you can stand up to it as best you can and try to live your one life at peace with your body and your self.

My colleague Susie O’Brien wrote a piece today suggesting the women posing nude in various self-acceptance campaigns from Free the Nipple to sites such as Herself (the nude portrait site run by Australian actress Caitlin Stasey) are doing nothing to help real women feel better.

She has her arguments but I don’t see it that way. Because the truth is women are encouraged to hate their bodies, so they will buy the clothes, the makeup, the diets, the cosmetic procedures, the crappy magazines with “how I got my pre-baby body back” and “Half their size!” and “What body parts celebrities hate” spreads. The sense that looks matter above all else has gotten so intense we really do need to fight back.

Probably it affects boys too now, we’re that superficial in how we judge people. I keep an eye on my boys as well to see that they have healthy feelings about their bodies.

But from when girls are as little as my Mum was when she had her awful accident they receive the message that you must battle and struggle to make your body and your face beautiful enough to meet someone else’s standards — you’ll probably never it make it but still, buy this product and it may help.

The many passionate campaigns launched by activists to help women realise they are not just OK but super-fine how they are, to my mind, are extremely valuable. They are about everyday women like Mum (who wore the starchy white of a pharmacist for 40 years) reclaiming the right to feel good about themselves no matter what body they are in.

They’re about improving women’s quality of life by helping us to accept and maybe even like or love ourselves and have healthy self-esteem (and model it for our own kids).

One song I remember playing in our house when I was a kid was Jannis Ian’s ‘I Learned the Truth at Seventeen’ ... that love was meant for beauty queens, and high school girls with clear-skinned smiles.

I remember the words without needing to look them up. And I say all power to the “nude feminists” doing their body-loving thing, because I don’t want young girls, older girls, fat girls, wrinkly girls, women of every shade, shape and size, scarred girls, disabled girls — anyone — to buy into that crap.