Thesis on Body Shaming

Introduction

Body shaming has become one of the biggest problems facing both young men and women, mostly through internet victimization.  It has evolved as people negatively express different opinions, ideas, or critics regarding other people’s body shape, weight, and appearance affecting their behavior, appearance, and body mass index in their life history.

The paper focuses on how body shaming has negatively influenced individuals and the costs of changing their behavior, appearance, and body mass index over the years.

The Effects

Over the years, individuals have struggled to accept themselves due to critiques they experience in our daily world. Some have tried to adjust by changing their body shape and appearance. Clearly, if a person’s body shape is thin and little, they are presumed not to be lazy but scaled to be intelligent, wealthy, and successful in life. Many beliefs assume that most thin people are hardworking, and they avoid much food that results in weight problems. However, in some instances, other ways are considered to be unhealthy. For some, it has become a matter of cultural relativity trying to learn, follow, and emulate other people in society with or without reasons. It causes drastic changes in their patterns of behaviors, which to some extent, can subject them to adopt extreme diet restrictions that most likely affect their health status (Dzurec, Kennison, & Albataineh, 2014).

In contrast, most fat individuals become tormented by other peoples on their figures and shapes, which negatively affect them physically and mentally. As they become dissatisfied with their body structure, it affects their confidence and self-esteem. As of today, some still consider fat people to be lazy, unhealthy, and weak, while others presume them of taking a lot of unhealthy food and rarely doing less or no physical exercise. According to Sohn (2009), they are profoundly bullied and humiliated by their peers, causing irrelevant mindset about themselves. They become isolated and constantly avoided posing a negative picture of psychological and physical unacceptance.

Social media has greatly become an avenue of negative influence on youth, creating rising desires for them to change their appearances on comparisons with most celebrities. For instance, most of them compare and admire fitness in models and advertisers, which gives them a negative tip about their bodies. They translate these factors into harsh judgments, which mostly leads to unenthusiastic feelings and thoughts (Moran 2017).

The Costs

According to Gilbert (2014), body shaming is characterized by many forms of shameful feelings and emotions such as depression and anxiety, anger, sexual perceptions, laziness, carelessness, and mental illness. Alternatively, these feelings can cause individuals to change their behaviors and body shapes for reasons such as competition of attractiveness, social acceptance, for different abilities, and to be or feel secure. Humiliations have accompanied such characteristics to higher levels that call out for copying strategies that can end such feelings. Most of them involve difficult costs in the search for change, such as body modifications. Body modifications involve programs such as fitness programs made for weight loss and body maintenance, gymnasium activities, sporting activities, plastic surgery mostly by women while they change their shapes and the use of artifacts that can change the size, shape, and body look.

Conclusion

Body shaming continues to be a huge problem among many youths around the world that has steered them towards engaging in primitive actions. What other people say or express about other people’s body appearances has become a cause of influence that needs to be eliminated by teaching youths on matters of appreciating other people’s appearance. Some factors are inborn. Others are caused by medical conditions and the environmental factors around them; hence judging by seeing is not drawing from the fact.

Cited works

Azure, Laura Cox, Monica Kennison, and Raya Albataineh. “Unacknowledged threats proffered “in a manner of speaking”: Recognizing workplace bullying as shaming.” Journal of Nursing Scholarship 46.4 (2014): 281-291.

Gilbert, Paul. “Body shame: A biopsychosocial conceptualization and overview with treatment implications.” Body Shame. Routledge, 2014. 17-68.

Moran, Brian. “Self-Compassion, Body Image Dissatisfaction, and Negative Social Comparisons in Adolescents Utilizing Social Networking Sites.” (2017).

Sohn, Steve H. “Body image: Impacts of media channels on men’s and women’s social comparison process, and testing of involvement measurement.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 17.1 (2009): 19-35.