As we watch our televisions, look over our Facebook, and skim through the newest edition of a magazine in the grocery line, we are blinded with ads and stories that show a very powerful statement about body image.
This epidemic does not just target plus-size women, but it is an obstacle that all shapes and sizes face in today’s society.
We shame large women, we shame thin women, and we watch as fitness guru’s promote a barrage of different diets and workouts. All of this to advocate for what they think a body should look like.
We don’t realize that even the fitness guru’s are facing body image issues everyday. What is the perfect body? Who determines what is beautiful and what is the correct size?
In the following video, JCPenney took the time to really talk about this issue and used extraordinarily resolute women to voice it. Though the video talks about “fat women,” this message can be useful for all women.
Any woman who has ever put a piece of clothing back on the rack because they feared the public would demean them for their size should take the message in this video to heart.
Start loving yourself for who you really are and stop allowing the media to dictate how you see yourself.
Through generations the “perfect body” has changed in the media’s eyes. We have seen wafer thin as beautiful, athletic as beautiful, curvy as beautiful, and the cycle goes round and round.
Ultimately the issue is not so much as what society tells us is beautiful, but how the media, and celebrities, allow women to forget what is personally beautiful to them.
This world is made of every persuasion of human being that can possibly be created; we are all different but we also face the same life altering issues. Body image contention delves deeper than just shaming ourselves because we don’t fit into what society portrays as the right size.
This is a problem with the lack of cultivation in the area of self-worth that women receive from birth.
We are taught to cover up the imperfections, work not to please ourselves but to please the general masses, and to forget that the person we are is not our skin or our body fat percentage, it is who we are on the inside.
There has been a long standing stigma of who can wear certain types of clothing and what is “appropriate” for certain body types. The issue shouldn’t be what you are allowed to wear but what you feel comfortable in.
Women should not hide who they are, nor should they fear bullying by the people around them because they aren’t the size they are told they should be.
On the more dangerous side of body image issues comes the devastating 10 million women who suffer from eating disorders in this country. Anorexia, a disease at least four-percent of women suffer from, is considered to have the highest fatality rate of all mental illnesses.
Over a half-a-million of those suffering from eating disorders are teenagers. We are affecting women before they have even had the chance to grow a tenacious ideal of who they really are.
