Love Yourself
Submitted by jcht2010 on
Jessica Coleman
Staff Writer
Society is funny. One day, your shape, size, or build is “in,” and the next, it’s the butt of jokes. The memes and status updates scroll across our news feeds and jump off of the pages of magazine articles.
For a time, “fat shaming” was the issue. It wasn’t ok to be big, or even normal sized. A woman was to be as skinny as she could starve herself into being, or she was to be made as insecure as humanely possible. Today, it’s “real women have curves. Only dogs want bones!”
I’m here to say that neither of those are ok. Why do we as a society feel the need to put down other people to make ourselves feel good? Why do we need to make someone else feel “less than,” so that we can feel ok?
I am a 100 pound woman who stands almost 5’5”. I’m built about like a spaghetti noodle, and I am fine with that.
However, I don’t appreciate my husband being called a dog just for loving me. I don’t appreciate being told I’m not a “real woman” because I lack an hourglass figure. I know my friends with larger frames are tired of looking at models with angular features and long, thin legs, and seeing nothing else on the pages of magazines. They’d love to see a woman that resembles them modelling clothes, so maybe they’ll know what they’d actually look like in them.
For men, it is the tall, dark and handsome trope telling them they need to be of a certain muscular build and grow to over six feet tall, with a tan.
My husband Brian is not a tall man (although I’d definitely call him dark and handsome- Love you, babe!). Does that make him less of a man? Absolutely not. He’s a wonderful man with a big heart, a wicked sense of humor, and an amazing tolerance for my ridiculous middle of the night questions (such as “is the thumb a finger?”).
Why can’t we just decide that our bodies are our bodies, and do not define us as a person? Why do we feel the need to opine on someone’s health because of their weight or body type? We don’t have to tell someone else they aren’t good enough in order to feel good about ourselves.
I read an unattributed quote that said “Confidence isn’t walking into a room and feeling superior to everyone else. It’s walking into a room and not needing to compare yourself to anyone else at all.”
I agree. Love yourself, big, small, or in between.
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