Making light of a heavy topic

Girls need to stop shaming those who don’t fit into the ideal mold of perfection.

Making light of a heavy topic

The issue of body image, especially in association with teenage girls, has become one of putting down others because they don’t physically fit into a certain mold.

Why is it becoming so common for teenage girls to shame others and themselves in regards to body image?

Nobody benefits when comments are made about someone’s weight, size, height or appearance.

However, the root of these remarks is the “ideal woman” people notice at a young age.

For over a century, the media, in addition with other factors like beauty pageants, has focused public attention on unattainable, sometimes even unhealthy, portrayals of women.

This is not a one-sided issue. Our society has almost reversed its ideals with recent songs like Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” and Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda.” These songs convey the idea that to be a woman, you must be curvy, contributing to the new norm: skinny-shaming, which is the degrading of thinner women.

With a society that has become so heavily centered on personal appearances, it is necessary to step back from the media for a moment and realize what is really at hand here.

As young women in an ever-changing society, we are the voice of the body image movement. And as tough as it is, we need to be realistic. We need to realize that your physicality will, unfortunately, skew peoples’ opinions of you.

 

And although it is necessary to see the importance in the way you present yourself physically, we need to help each other to love our appearances and to be in our own skin, whether big or small or short or tall and everywhere in between.

 

Tell your peers not to judge each other based on their appearance. Tell your peers it’s not acceptable to carelessly toss around terms like “anorexic” and “bulimic,” because there are people around you struggling with those conditions. Tell your peers it’s not okay to make rude remarks about another person’s weight. Tell your peers it’s not their place to make judgments about someone else’s eating habits.

 

However, it is even more important that you teach yourself that your looks do not define you. Don’t listen to the snide remarks and rude comments people say about you or your body.
Never stop reminding yourself the importance of feeling beautiful, inside and out. You are one of a kind.