BODY-SHAMING
Making critical and humiliating comments about a person's body weight or appearance.
People are victims of Body shaming during every minute of their lives though media, stereotypes advertisements, diet products, pharmaceutical products ads and fashion.
Nowadays any sign of body imperfection, particularly being overweight, will bring on the wrath of society.
If the weight average does not correspond to the exact calculation of nowadays body specs, people are consumed by guilt and directly projected into a dreadful nightmare of calories count.
Have we ever thought if this century norms fit the beauty ones?
Every person perceives beauty differently. Body shaming perpetuates the idea that people are judged mainly for their physical features.
PRESSURE
Through media
Magazines constantly offer tips about how to lose weight “in days,” appear slimmer “instantly,” and hide our “imperfections” raising the guilt to a higher scale.
Through Fashion Top Models
Catwalks and fashion icons are strictly chosen upon drastic criteria creating a wrong image about normal and natural beauty and a difficult image to keep up with. Moreover, most of fashion designers create their collection to fit thin people.
Retouching applications
Social media, Photoshop and CGI can perform tricks that would transform anyone. They are constantly updating applications that produce special thinning effect which correct any imperfection and beautify an image which doesn’t match with reality mirror.
Slimming products
Pharmacy shelves are crowded with pharmaceutical products that push people to use drugs in order to be thin and fit in the society. Productions of medical and paramedical lines have been booming since society started to intensify its critical behavior towards imperfection. “The human body is the best work of art.”
“The human body is the best work of art.” Jess C. Scott
SIDE EFFECTS OF BODY-SHAMING
While magazines glamorized the “perfect cliché body” look, women’s health suffered.
Eating disorder
It was estimated that more than half of women, teens and adults, suffered eating disorders particularly bulimia.
Many studies show that weight discrimination (like fat shaming) causes stress and leads overweight people to eat more calories.
Self rejection
Digital photography and social media provoke a self image refusal especially after looking at a better version of reality through retouched pictures.
People cannot recognize themselves anymore, thus they have trouble combining between their true image and the filtered one; they end up by body shaming their own selves.
Their self-esteem is significantly reduced and people become at higher risk of depression and other mental disorders.
FACTS
A new study has found that 94% of teenage girls in America have been shamed because of the way their body looks.
The Yahoo health survey collected data from a representative sample of 2,000 people in America between the ages of 13 and 64, finding that 70% of male respondents are either body positive or neutral, but that the opposite is true for women: 66% of female respondents are body negative or ambivalent (have a love hate relationship with their bodies).
Weight is not the only cause of body shaming. Height, skin color, sexual orientation, gender, different abilities, and specific physical attributes can also be sources of shame in an ignorant society.
Beauty norms change from a culture to another and evolve over time. Only people who have difficulty accepting themselves find difficulties accepting others.
In the end, inner peace and self esteem constitute a virtual wall that puts a shield between a person and the rest of the world.
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