Tags
advocacy, beauty, body positive, bodydiversity, constructivism, effyourbeautystandards, femalebodyimage, mixedmethods, socialmedia
Transformative Design & Impact of study
There are women who have low self-esteem, anorexia, bulimia, and cause their own deaths as a result of social medias’ influence on the “ideal” female body image. Social media is something we use every day and becoming harder to avoid as everyone, including companies, are using it to stay connected with others. This kind of routine has made societies all over the world more attached to their phones, in order to check Facebook, Instagram, and twitter. With this is mind, it has become a superficial platform of selfies and random videos. For the women it can become a threat to their womanhood. They are insulted by groups of people and singled out for their individual physical appearances. This study will show the true impact that social media has on how women are subjected as objects and not human beings.
What is “Fat Shaming?”
According to Urban Dictionary, fat shaming is “a term made by obese people to avoid the responsibility to actually take proper care of their body and instead victimize themselves by pretending they’re discriminated against.” There could not be a more wrong definition for a word. Fat shaming is a term used to categorize the heinous acts behind those who bully or criticize any gender of people for being plus size, obese, or “fat.” These are acts of the community from virtual to in person.
#DearFatPeople
In September of 2015, a slender Caucasian woman named Nicole Arbour boldly, carelessly, and shamelessly posted a 6-minute video on YouTube, as well as, her personal Facebook page about her attitudes towards “fat” people, the new body positivity movement, and how she thinks fat shaming is not a thing. Ironically enough she spent the entirety of that 6-minute video doing nothing but fat shaming. She takes credit for speaking as the public and saying in her video caption, “What we’ve all wanted to say to FAT PEOPLE.” However, the comments she received on social media in reply to this controversial and hurtful video are against her argument and steer towards a more body neutral or body positivity side of the issue
What is “Thin” Shaming?
Well when you look it up on the internet, you get tons of hits for content based on research, opinions, social media, blog post, and otherwise. I found an interesting digital article on the Huffington Post website where a journalist from Ebony writes about the controversy of “Dear Fat People” and things that we should pay attention to as people in this society when it comes to body shaming overall. She even makes the note that we should not criticize anyone because even being skinny does not equal being healthy: “I have skinny friends that look healthy by appearances, but are not. You cannot tell if someone is healthy purely by the size of his or her body. I have skinny friends with diabetes, high blood pressure and who cannot walk a flight of stairs without falling out.”
Meghan Trainor: All about that Bass
While being a plus size woman who sings well and portrays a very girly image in the videos, Meghan Trainor sends the general message to young girls that they should be themselves and love who they are with the lyric, If you got beauty, beauty, just raise ’em up ‘Cause every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top. I would definitely say this is a wonderful message to vocalize in a song that hit the Billboard’s Hot 100 list for eight weeks. (check out the video here).
However, when Meghan Trainor continues the song with, I’m bringing booty back. Go ‘head and tell them skinny bitches that. No, I’m just playing… a new problem is created as the hashtag #tellthemskinnybitchesthat began to rise in usage causing unwarranted media attention.
What Meghan fails to realize in these lyrics, both at the time she released this song and after it is in the media, is that eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, “the body type portrayed in advertising as the ideal is possessed naturally by only 5% of American females.” Therefore, whether the woman is plus size or slim, 95% of woman are not even how they look due to Photoshop, airbrushing, and other editing alternatives. People have started using the hashtag #tellthemskinnybitchesthat and making t-shirts with the above lyrics, which was used 25,384 times on Instagram and almost twice as many on Twitter.
Recently, various health magazines and celebrity news sites have written articles about Meghan Trainor losing weight since her career jump started in 2014. Originally, Trainor weighed 175 lbs and was a size 12. According to healthyceleb and Inquisitr, in July 2015, Trainor weighed 149 lbs, which equals to a size 8. So much for being all about that bass.
What is “Body Shaming?”
Body shaming is a term used to describe shameful actions towards any body type. As a part of more neutral standpoints on the issue of “ideal” female body images there are more and more people discussing the differences between “fat” shaming and “thin” shaming by using the unbiased and all-inclusive term, “body shaming.” Body shaming affects everyone and can be tied to almost any aspect of our appearances — from weight to hair color to the size of your nose. If someone has reviewed your body for how it looks at any point in your life, then you are a victim of body shaming. This type of bullying is arguably harmful because it perpetuates the notion that somebody’s self-worth is subject to his or her appearance, a superficial implication that should not but does somehow exist. That is why the body positivity movement has come to the forefront so powerfully.
#effyourbeautystandards, 2012-15
Tess Holliday put together a self-acceptance social media campaign, using the hashtag #effyourbeautystandards, as a way to get back at those who bullied her struggle with childhood obesity, an effect of using food as a coping mechanism when her mother passed away. This campaign originally started and still runs proudly today on Instagram with 2,454 posts, 196k followers, and 7,498 following. The effyourbeautystandards has grown to Facebook and Tumblr.
*So based on this research design and the impact I would like this study to make on the issues of body diversity, body positivity, and body shaming HERE is my draft survey created using Google Form.