October 14th was Love Your Body day.
This summer I wore a bikini top. I was inspired by another fat woman who also wore one. I did it for a lot of reasons. Mostly to prove I wasn’t ashamed of my body. I didn’t wear it to be an object or to be sexualized. I often wonder where the line is between not being ashamed of your body and being sexualized.
I recently saw Darryl Roberts' third America the Beautiful movie, this one subtitled The Sexualization of Our Youth. In the movie Darryl explores many issues mostly turning people (mostly women) into sex objects. He covers different issues that might be to blame, child beauty pageants, advertisements, teen sex on television, porn, but the big issue really is women believe they have no self-worth unless they believe they can obtain what they see in a magazine. Being an object makes you a thing not a person.
Too many women (and we are now seeing it more and more in men) hate their bodies. They see them as too fat, too old, too flawed. They look at magazines, movies and ads that say they are gross. They are told they would only be better if they used this make up, this diet product, or these clothes. And then when they buy these products and they don’t make them look like a model, their self-esteem plummets and eating disorders skyrocket. A recent study has shown that eating disorders can start as early as elementary school.
To conduct their studies, Prof. Meilleur and colleagues studied the psychological, sociodemographic and physiological characteristics of 215 children between the ages of 8 and 12 with eating problems…
…The team found that 95% of the children had restrictive eating behaviors, 69.4% were afraid of putting on weight and 46.6% described themselves as "fat."
This is more than just trying to look nice, keeping yourself groomed, tossing on a bikini top because you think you look good in it. This is about trying to obtain something a marketer decided is sexy and pretty. Beauty isn’t what you see in on the fashion pages, beauty comes from within.
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