Body Shaming

Currently listening to: "Plush" by Stone Temple Pilots.

One of the most impressively irritating epidemics washing over every corner of the internet is the concept of body positivity. In short, body positivity is loving every part of who you are as illustrated by your various outward physical features. For example, if you're tall then you should embrace that you can reach things on the top shelf and ruin the concert going experience of everyone behind you (I know I do). The reason I find body positivity so irritating is because I can't believe how fucking necessary we find it to have to teach ourselves and others that your blood, skin, and bones can somehow be inadequate. Fuck all of that noise. The human experience is shrouded in this idea(l) that each person should aim for a very specific and very narrow range of what they should look like. Both men and women have incredibly strict standards which they feel obligated to fulfill. That's shitty. What is more important right now, though, is not the unwavering social standards we impose upon each other, but rather, the bullshit body shaming that is posed exactly along side of purported body positivity.

Body shaming is making specific individuals or groups of said individuals feel as though their bodies are inadequate for one reason or another. The most common example of this, and the one I will focus on for the sake of this blog post, is skinny shaming and fat shaming amongst women.

In the most recent decades, women defined as "voluptuous" or "curvy" are seen as nothing other that "fat" and "lazy." The media is the Body Gestapo and has been remarkably successful at assuring that women who don't get a paycheck from Ford or IMG models are broken or inadequate and their most important goal in life is not education, philanthropy, or self-discovery but making sure they can shimmy into that pair of size 0 jeans. In recent years, women began to fight back at this ludicrous self-image. The fight used to be a good fight, but then it slowly became the official Trampling of Confidence. Women who didn't personally identify as thin or statuesque began to berate those who did. No longer was anyone promoting that any body is a good body. Instead, the closer your physical self aligned to the media's expectation, the more likely you were to become a pariah of the cause. This switch of the pendulum's direction came with such pithy statements as "only dogs like bones," or   "real women have curves." The original blonde bombshell Marylin Monroe became the ironic poster child for the war. I say this is ironic because Monroe was actually a size 2 - 4 rather than the size 14 "internet experts" like to claim she was. She's also dead now. I find it equal parts impressive and depressing that a cause born from body shaming did nothing more than perpetuate the hate.

Here is what I have to say about all of this nonsense. Real women are whoever the fuck they want to be. So are real men. Everyone is fucking real. If you have a pulse, you are real. Bra-fucking-vo. It doesn't matter if you are a size 24 or a size 2. It is entirely irrelevant if you are 6 feet tall or 4. Your body is your body and it can do some seriously amazing things. It turns food in to poop. It can produce one of the two key components to creating a child. Your body is made up of star dust and is 4.5 billion years in the making. So eat that donut. Run that mile. Take the nap. Shave your head. Buy the short shorts. Curl up in the oversized sweater. Do whatever the fuck you want and tell everyone else to go blow themselves.