My Body, Not an Apology.
Size zero, tall, dark, handsome, bikini body, chotu, motu and what not. Who among us hasn’t heard them or even used them on an everyday basis? Starting from our family members calling us chotu or motu to friends in school who gave us those dreadful nicknames that never stopped!
The shaming never stops. At first, none of it seems serious and you tell yourself, it’s just a bit of good fun, everything done in jest, that’s all. However, nobody, not even you, realizes that these small chips in the wall called taunts at your body type will soon manifest into a huge hole in your self-confidence.
This prejudice, this stereotype, isn’t just home taught; that is if you would want to start pointing fingers. It starts from what we notice, what we observe, and most importantly, what we visually consume. Movies, TV shows, performance industries. Everything that is said to be fit for visual consumption comes with the same biases, the same prejudices. Almost all actors and actresses, all the models of the fashion industry perpetuate the same stigma that has been revolving around us for decades. Fat is bad, thin is good. Fat is obese, fat is unhealthy. Thin is good, thin is healthy, thin is perfect. You would think being on the other end of this disastrously proportioned swing would help. But no. Even being too thin is shamed in society, called unattractive.
Media, models, celebrities, reality TV, everything is oriented around creating an image of perfection in ourselves that seems and is impossible to attain. The societal norms of needing to have a perfect body lead so many of us to suffer from the dysmorphia of not being able to achieve it. And if the battering of our self-esteem and self-confidence weren’t enough, we have our households, we have our society, we have biased media to thank, for aggravating it.
Being too fat, being too thin, not being conventionally attractive, seems to leave us at the mercy of the demeaning, humiliating eyes of others. You, me, we are put down constantly.
And while I go off on a tangent of how being on the higher end of the scale pushes us towards the gallows of social ridicule, I would like to reiterate just this. It’s not just about being fat. Body shaming isn’t about someone being or calling someone fat.
A short boy simply existing, playing sports that advertise themselves to be for the taller masses, a fat girl dancing, the unreal standard of the magnitude of weight being equal to balance and grace, they all perpetuate the same discrimination that comes from just being photographed as something, not aesthetically conventional. A receding hairline, facial hair on a gender expected to be unrealistically hairless, I could go on and on about the biases associated with the body.
Are any of these things controllable? No! Or maybe I am wrong there. Some of these are controllable. But do they need to be?? Do you need to lose weight to fit yourself into a box that isn’t even for you in the first place? No!! Are any of these things wrong? No! And you know the most important thing? Are any of these anybody’s business other than yours? No!
None of this is funny, nor does it do any good. Passing a comment and walking away might seem a small thing in one’s life, an instance one would forget come tomorrow. But doesn’t that make one stop and wonder: how did they take it?
A comment once passed is but a comment in the air, simply a crack on the surface. To everyone else, it’s superficial.
It is not for you.
You stand in front of the mirror, holding yourself back, not doing things you like because maybe you wouldn’t look good doing them, maybe you never did. You try and you fail to change, taking your failure to be your fault. You say to yourself, “You’re not worth it, you’re not capable, you should just give up.”
It starts as just a crack on the surface yes. But it’s barely in a blink of an eye that the shame turns into a fissure. The destruction on the outside exponentiates from the inside, turning the ‘taunts’ and the ‘light-hearted leg-pulling’ into self-doubt, anxiety, a crippling sense of self-esteem, an absence of self-confidence, and a modicum of eating disorders.
A fat girl can wear a crop top. A short boy can play basketball. A boy with no facial hair is still a boy. A ‘sickly’ skinny girl or a ‘morbidly’ fat boy can dance, run, swim, act, model, and be better than anybody else in ways that you can’t even imagine. A thin, lean boy deserves love and appreciation as much as a boy with 6 pack abs does, similarly, a fat girl deserves these things as much as a girl with a bikini body does.
Nobody is anybody to decide what a person should wear, do, eat or look like. Nobody knows what you deal with, and in conjunction, nobody has the right to say anything to you. If you are happy with your body, everybody needs to leave it alone, leave it at that.
Putting down someone just for your amusement doesn’t make you a friend, as much as it doesn’t make you a decent human being. The girl they call fat might be capable of achieving so many things but the fact that everyone called her fat and made her think that she was not good enough, makes her hold back and puts her in dark places nobody would be able to crawl out of.
Not everyone is strong to fight this.
And more importantly, your body shape is nothing to fight against.
You are worthy of love, care and attention, regardless of the world. That being said, nobody will give it to you until you stand up for yourself and make it clear that you are okay and happy with what you have and what you don’t. Once you are content and satisfied, nobody can affect you or hurt you. They could only envy you, and envy you? They will. The world will accept you with open arms once you accept and embrace yourself fully and even if they don’t, it is okay because you were not born to impress people.
The only things that should matter to you are your physical and mental health and your happiness. The rest is not important enough to waste even a second on!
~Submitted and written for Aurora TLS by Tanya Sehgal
