Everyone is entitled to an opinion and I endorse that with all my heart. But I also believe that if that opinion is aimed at an individual, you should zip your mouth for a minute to think. Especially so, if it is about how that individual looks.
Body image has always been something I have struggled with. My colour, my hair, my figure, and my feet — everything about my body has been scrutinised and found wanting. As a teenager, I have always wanted to fit into the beauty standards set in society, Tall, shapely, long-haired, fair skinned — it doesn’t end, and every criteria that ‘they’ had, I didn’t fit in. And people didn’t ever shy away from telling me that I didn’t fit, and giving me free tips on how I could try to.
But who decides these ‘criteria’?
An ideal body as popularised by mainstream media across the world is not even the same over time. Every decade sees new trends and perceptions change from region to region. In some countries, being petite and lean is what counts, while in others curvy is beautiful. What has stayed pretty much standard for women in many regions is what people call an ‘hourglass’ shape. However, women in popular media, with this so-called ideal shape, represent just over 5 per cent of all women in a country like the United States. This would mean that everyone else, or rather everyone, is just trying to fit into that mould or is being told that she is ugly because she can’t.
When do these issues start?
Eighty-one per cent of 10-year-old girls today worry if they’re fat or are afraid of being fat, according to a recent survey by TeenSafe (a service that helps parents monitor children’s usage of tech). As for boys, it’s the opposite — 25 per cent of young boys worry that they are underweight and not muscular enough.
This was proven to me first-hand when talking to a 10-year-old from church. She was participating in a dance competition and I got excited as I had been a regular performer in school. She looked up at me with a strange look and said, “But how did you? You are fat and I don’t want to be fat.”
At that moment, I wished “fat” wouldn’t be the obscene word that it had become. Far beyond the point where this could affect me personally, all I could think of was that at an age when she shouldn’t care about how anyone looks, least of all herself, she has an opinion about what “fat” people can or cannot do.
The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) analysed five popular social media platforms for mental health impact, both positive and negative, with a survey of 1,479 young users ages 14 to 24. Instagram was found to be the worst app for mental health and confidence of young people with its worst metric being body image. Scrolling through countless images of ‘perfect’ bodies, regardless of obvious filters and Photoshop changes, does affect the mind of gullible youngsters.
Facelifts, nose jobs, lip-fillers, diet pills, breast or bottom-enhancing surgeries — these are just a few of the invasive changes that young girls are looking at on a daily basis. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders and lack of social confidence are some of the most common effects of all this. However, there are some positive messengers out there. Ashley Graham, Lena Dunham and Melissa McCarthy are just a few influential celebrities, on the app and on other media platforms, who focus on positive body image and breaking the zero or single-digit size fixation.
After all of this, I do have a call for action, for parents and older siblings: Show the young ones that it is okay to be human, to be fat or thin, to be short or tall, to be fair or dark, and to be completely unique. Make sure to know the kind of social media channels they follow and who influence their day-to-day fashion and body choices. It is also important to ensure that your children or younger siblings understand that saying something, anything, about how someone looks should never be taken lightly — that you never know what someone is going through.
Is that enough? I think so. I am sure the 10-year-old who so eloquently shut my jam down heard her mum or someone else she knows say how being plump or larger meant no dancing, no beauty, no scope for an active life. I only hope she can one day grow out of it.
As for me, a successful 25-year-old in my own right, I can now shut down anyone who would dare treat me as anything less than the perfectly imperfect human that I am. I am beautiful, and so are you.
