“You don’t eat anything, do you?”
“Your legs look like toothpicks.”
“Look at those bones. God, eat a burger or something.”
– just some of the few statements that every thin woman has heard at least a hundred times because apparently, thin shaming is completely fine as opposed to fat shaming. Before I proceed; let us first understand what exactly body shaming is.
“Body shaming is defined as inappropriate negative statements and attitudes toward another person’s weight or size.” (Source: www.bodyshaming.org)
In a world where Victoria’s Secret models are the inspiration of 80% of young girls and girls with lean bodies are able to score better jobs when it comes to modelling and acting, people have come down to believe that being thin is in vogue and that every woman has to be a size zero in order to be termed as ‘beautiful’.
As a result of such narrow mindsets, women who didn’t conform to the “Being thin is in” trend, started starving themselves to death. Later, when they realized the ill-effects of starvation and such ‘beauty standards’ on their health, they came up with ‘new standards’ which involved criticizing the bodies of thinner women. This gradually became a part of the “pseudo- feminist” movement with people coming up with slogans like “Real men like curves, only dogs go for bones” and “Real women have curves”.
The result? It became okay to frown upon one body image in order to make the other one feel better.
Being a naturally thin person, I can assure you one thing; thin shaming hurts as much as fat shaming does.
Just like women who are overweight, thin women are also called out stupid names – skinny, toothpick, skeleton, bony, to name a few. They are stared at too; when they walk down the street no matter what clothes they wear. They have to think twice too, before buying a piece of clothing in order to avoid being addressed as ‘a hanger’. On being called a ‘skinny b***h’, they became a victim of verbal abuse too. Why it is then that fat shaming is considered hurtful and thin shaming is considered absolutely fine by the society?
I, in no way, support fat shaming (if that appears to be the case). I, however do feel that with people trying to bring up the issue of fat shaming, the society has forgotten that they are hurting the sentiments of people with other body types. Perhaps it needs to understand that some women are naturally thin, they do not starve themselves to look the way they do, they do not have any eating disorders and their weight has nothing to do with some disease. Telling someone that they need a good meal is just as rude as telling someone that they can afford to lose a few pounds.
Body shaming, of any kind, whether thin or fat, is hurtful. It has adverse effects on the health as well as the psychological conditions of the victims when they try to lose or gain weight to fit in. Women were not sent to Earth to fit into the disgusting standards set up by the society. A woman of every size and shape is beautiful; because beautiful is a mind state, not a waist size.