Thin shaming hurts too…
“You don’t eat anything, do you?”
“Your legs look like toothpicks.”
“Look at those bones. God, eat a burger or something.”
-above are some of the few statements that every thin person in the world has heard at least a hundred times because apparently, thin shaming is completely fine as opposed to fat-shaming. But before we proceed; let us first understand what exactly body shaming is.
As per the Cambridge Dictionary, body shaming is “to criticize someone based on the shape, size, or appearance of their body.”
In a world where Victoria’s Secret models are the inspiration of most of the young girls and Calvin Klein can’t help but feature male models with at least 4-pack abs, people have come down to believe that being thin is in vogue and that every person, especially women have to be a size zero in order to be termed as ‘beautiful’.
As a result of such narrow mind-sets, women who were overweight started starving themselves; sometimes even to death. Eventually, when the ill-effects of starvation and such ‘beauty standards’ were realized by people across the world, they came up with ‘new standards’ which included criticizing the bodies of naturally thin women. Weirdly enough, this gradually became a part of pseudo-feminism with women 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.
However, if you ask any naturally thin person, they’d all come to a consensus when it’s said that thin shaming hurts as much as fat-shaming does.
Just like people who are overweight, thin women and men are also called out stupid names- toothpick, skeleton, bony, are 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’. When women are 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?
The society needs to be reminded that in the process of making a certain body type feel better and uplifted, they are hurting the sentiments of people with other body types. Perhaps it needs to understand that some people 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 physical and psychological health of those affected when they try to lose or gain weight to fit in.
Women and even men were not sent to Earth to fit into the disgusting standards set up by society. A person of every size and shape is beautiful; because beautiful is a mental state, not a waist size.
