Body shaming has been around for hundreds of years, but its grown leaps and bounds in this age of social media.
Body shaming can be both direct and indirect online. The most direct form of body shaming comes in the form of cyberbullying. A cyberbully can go on a person’s social media page and directly say something hurtful about someone’s body weight or leave a body-image-related meme on their victim’s page.
An indirect way a person can partake in body shaming is by liking a meme that fat or skinny shames someone, which in a way reinforces a cyberbully’s behavior.
Imagine if you’re bored at home playing on Facebook and you see that one of your best friends liked an image somebody posted. Out of curiosity, you roll your mouse over to see what the picture looked like and you see that it’s a meme that pokes fun at heavier set people.
How would this sit with you if that friend knows that weight is a sensitive issue to you? What about if you recently developed an eating disorder?
A major consequence that arises from body shaming is that it has the potential to lead to an eating disorder. Upon receiving this writing assignment, I took to a different social media platform, Instagram, to investigate. What I found was not only shocking, but it was heartbreaking.
I started my investigation exploring the hashtag #bodyshaming. Through one of the pics, I was lead into another hashtag, #ed, which is short for eating disorder.
When I clicked on that, Instagram popped up a content advisory notice for graphic content and it gave me three options - continue, cancel, or visit a link for information and support with eating disorders.
I was wondering how bad the content could be, so I hit show posts. I learned quickly why Instagram was warning me.
Right when the pictures popped up on the screen, I immediately saw images of anorexic bodies and quotes that reinforce EDs such as “to have your thighs not touch.”
I clicked on one of the very first pictures of a human, which came in the form of a very skinny pair of legs. From her selfie of malnourished legs, I saw hashtags that included: #selfharmmm, #suicide, and #pretty. Even worse about her photo was that I saw 13 likes from other users and one person commenting by begging to know “HOW.”
Weight is the most popular form of body discrimination. Most people feel that being overweight is the number one target of body shaming, but that’s not necessarily true.
Underweight people get it too. Thinner-bodied people often get discriminated with accusations about being sick, anorexic or drug abusers. They, too, have struggles, wishing to save money to get breasts so guys can notice them or squatting for hours in order trying to get booties. No matter gender or size, many people have a self-image struggle.