On the subject of body shaming...

When it comes to body shaming, it’s fair to say that people don’t treat skinny shaming the same way as the treat fat shaming. It’s wrong to call someone fat – presumably because we only see fat as a word with a million negative connotations, despite the fact that it’s not an inherently negative word – but it’s seen as complimentary to tell someone they’re soooo skinny. Ages ago, when I first started blogging, I wrote a post about the Dove ‘real women’ advertising campaign. The women in the photo were of various skin colours, they were different heights and had a nice mix of hair colours. Of course, they were all real women, but there was not one skinny girl in that advert. So are skinny girls not real? Sorry to burst the media bubble, but they are. Some girls are naturally skinny, and some are battling with eating disorders, and that doesn’t make them any less real than a girl with curves. Representation matters and just like it’s wrong to only show skinny bodies in adverts, it’s wrong to ignore them altogether because you think it fits some sort of body-positive agenda.

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I tweeted something along these lines a while back – defending girls and boys who are victims of skinny shaming – and I was instantly shot back with “fat girls shouldn’t talk about skinny shaming” which in all honesty made me laugh for a good few hours. I’m certainly not a skinny girl myself, but at the time I was a size 10 and far from being fat either. That aside, I was literally calling people out for body shaming others: I was defending people who are on the skinny end of the scale, only for one of them to have a go at me for doing so because I’m not skinny myself. It beggars belief, at the risk of sounding about 80.

If you’re against one form of body shaming, you should be against all forms of body shaming. If you wouldn’t like somebody to say it to or about you, don’t say it to or about somebody else. As a bigger person, you have every right to defend others from skinny shaming. As a smaller person, you have every right to defend others from fat shaming. It works both ways; it’s a two way street, one on which we should all be comfortable with the size we are.

"Body Shaming"

This is something I've wanted to get off my chest for ages and now seems as good a time as any. It's becoming more and more common in the media to promote 'curvy' as beautiful, instead of the skinny girls we are used to seeing on the catwalk. It's all well and good to promote a healthy lifestyle and to tell girls and women to be happy with their body even if they're not a size 6 like those we see in magazines - however it has to be done right.

It seems to have got to a stage where curvy or "normal" (what is normal, anyway???) is being portrayed as better than being skinny, and that's wrong. The media is now making girls who are naturally skinny feel victimised in the way that girls who are on the curvier side once felt. It's like a see-saw, and a balance hasn't been reached. What the media ought to be promoting is that it is perfectly okay and wonderful to be whatever size you want to be, as long as you are happy and genuinely healthy.

Take for example, these two campaigns: one by Victoria's Secret, and one by Dove.

The VS campaign shoes seven skinny girls, while the Dove campaign shows a number of curvy girls in a range of colours and sizes - however, none of the girls in the Dove campaign are skinny. And whether the girls in the VS campaign are naturally skinny, photoshopped or whatever - that doesn't escape the fact that the Dove campaign is sending the message that skinny isn't "real beauty". And in my opinion, that's unfair to the girls with fast metabolisms who are skinny but still healthy; they can't help being the size they are, just as curvier girls can't always help being curvy. Similarly, though, campaigns like the VS one which have been around for donkeys years, do make bigger girls feel insecure.

While I may not have written this in the most articulate way, I hope my message is making sense: companies need to portray beauty from all angles, not just one. What started as an innocent way to make curvy girls (like myself) feel better, has turned into something which completely victimises skinnier girls. The media is, as always, unfair.