Body shaming is a serious issue that is happening everywhere, and it needs to stop.
Body shaming is the action or inaction of subjecting someone to humiliation by mocking or criticizing her or his shape, size or appearance. It has been happening for years with females and males but mostly females. This action can cause a person to feel self-conscious of her or his appearance and push that individual to change it to please others. A person’s mental and physical health can really be affected by being body shamed.
According to an article in the Daily Mail, singers Mel C and Victoria Beckham from British girl group Spice Girls developed an eating disorder along with depression after being body shamed by former manager Chic Murphy.
As a person starts to develop eating disorders, they start to feel guilt and shame for just eating. Bulimia is an emotional disorder involving distortion of body image and an obsessive desire to lose weight, in which bouts of extreme overeating are followed by depression and self-induced vomiting, purging, or fasting.
As stated in an article in People magazine, singer Demi Lovato grew up with a mother who suffered from bulimia and seeing her mom struggle with an eating disorder affected her relationship with her own body from an early age.
In Beyoncé’s song Pretty Hurt she says, “Pretty hurts, we shine the light on whatever's worst, perfection is a disease of a nation, pretty hurts pretty hurts. Pretty hurts, we shine the light on whatever’s worst you're tryna fix something, but you can't fix what you can't see it's the soul that needs a surgery.”
This song tells that not everyone is perfect and trying to be perfect can cause problems within a person. Instead of trying to fix something that doesn’t need to be fixed, teens should focus on bettering their mental state because of body shaming that can break them down so much that their souls need repairing.
To deal with this problem, we should start by asking what is going on at home that would cause someone the need to body shame someone else. We can’t do much to prevent it, but we can help build up that person’s confidence by saying the complete opposite and reminding her or him that all humans have flaws. Also, social media should have a better representation all people and not just the typical models.
