Everything you need to know about Body Shaming

When I was little, my legs used to hang midway down the chair. I thought I would grow. I didn’t. Not a single day went by when I wasn’t realized by everyone that I was short. My first day at school brings back memories of how unacceptable it was to be short on a few feet. In my early teens, I realized that their opinion about me was never going to change. I was never going to grow a few inches tall. I would always be the short girl, no matter what. Some people feel that they are entitled to have an opinion about someone else’s body.

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 They feel the need to make sure that person knows how much weight they have put on over the summer or how many scars their pimples have left on their face.  There would always be a reason to make people hate their bodies. That, my friends, is called Body Shaming. 

You might feel that it isn’t that common or lethal, for that matter. It is just a word. Well, it is a word but not the one you’d think. According to the Cambridge dictionary, Body-Shaming means a criticism of someone based on the shape, size, or appearance of their body. Even the sound of this is unethical. How can you judge someone based on how they look? From where did the idea originate? Turns out, the idea had been sitting on mankind forever. Initially, it was inclined to women more than it was to men. 

Female bodies were supposed to have an ideal shape. Now, males run equally in the race of having perfect bodies. People of the 21^st century are more accepting of being different, but the wake of social media had made it easy to throw nasty opinions of someone else’s body without getting punched in the face for it. Studies showed that shaming someone constantly about their bodies have caused several serious mental problems in individual including anxiety, depression, anorexia, self-harm, and low self-esteem. 

Certain people have known to become suicidal after facing extreme bullying. They would become too scared to go out in public because they look a certain way. This affects the individual social and intellectual skills. Body shaming is a growing problem, but this doesn’t stop people from being kind to each other.

Call someone pretty, build their morale up, smile at someone once in a while. This is all it takes to stand up against the evil we have created ourselves. The results will manifest themselves in different ways.

People would have the courage to stand in front of a mirror and look themselves in the eye. Maybe an obese would go down to the gym to work up a few pounds. Someone somewhere would think twice before cutting the vein off. It never hurts anyone to be kind. Besides, bullying and obesity are not going to make him lose weight, motivating him will. The former would just make him lose his mind. Be kind, because that is all we can do.

A.Munir