The Parseltongue of Body Shaming

 A wedding or a birthday party is not only a celebration of the people concerned but also a platform to share the warmth of human bond. It is certainly a joyous occasion. But a recent family event I attended left me with a dollop of sourness tingling through my spine. 

I am not unused to have the spot light on me all for wrong reasons while in public. As a child I have been targeted by both my friends and family for my not so conventional looks. My curly bobbed hair was a problem for many, while my slim figure, brand-named 'size zero' in the past decades caused problems for others. For a few both of these aspects created issues. It does not affect me much anymore; yet, I have been musing on addressing this behavior we exhibit as a society and my recent brush with a thorny tongue have prompted this post.

If on this recent occasion I have been targeted for my slender stature, the same person about fifteen years ago on my son's baptism ceremony had lashed her tongue out at my chubby post pregnancy disposition. I had never asked her opinion on my looks on either occasion. However, her views that I have become hideously fat earlier and gruesomely thin now and moreover, she didn't like the way I looked on both occasions was puked out on me voluntarily. 

As had been rehearsed almost all my life, I had given out a warm and hearty smile on both the occasions. Though it is never a happy roller coaster ride when people shame us for our looks and body features seldom do we express our discomfort or show the bruises. It could be either because we don't want to attract any more attention upon us than that we already have or because we know that the indicators' abusive manners are indeed intended to be hurtful and hence there is absolutely no need to further announce their success in the act. It is certain to even a blind person that such bullies are never under the false belief that their verbal diarrhoea were supposed to make us euphoric. 

What seemed even more disturbing to me was that those who are with us when such inflictions occur, even when they are our immediate family, tend to remain acquiescent as if there is nothing atrocious about it. Most often they too smile in agreement to what has been spitted out. If I remember correctly I have been subjected to such experiences right from my childhood and would often  come home with tearful eyes, hurt, especially because my parents remained deaf to those verbal venoms spatted out on me only to be counselled on being 'hypersensitive.'  

What I am talking about is a classic" body shaming" and it is ubiquitous.  For those  who might be unfamiliar with the term can read it up on internet. As Wikipedia comprehensively describes it , body shaming, "is the action or inaction of subjecting someone to humiliation and criticism for their bodily features. The scope of body shaming is wide, and includes,... fat-shaming, shaming for thinness, height-shaming, shaming of hairiness (or lack thereof), of hair-color, body-shape, one's muscularity or lack of it, shaming of penis size or breast size, shaming of looks (facial features), and in its broadest sense may even include shaming of tattoos and piercings or diseases that leave a physical mark such as psoriasis."

Body shaming is not a recent phenomena though we have been brave in the recent times to openly discuss the issue. From the intimate circle of friends and the warm security of family to the famous works of literature we can find imprints of body shaming. Most of the children's books and movies, especially Disney, portray obese characters as unattractive, evil, cruel and unfriendly and more than half of the portrayals involved consumption of food. I am sure we all remember Uncle Vernon and Dudley from Harry Potter.

But opposed to the common belief that body shaming is something that overweight people are subjected to there's an increasing trend in criticizing those who look 'too skinny.'

Some forms of body shaming have ancient origins in popular superstition. In Malayali culture men of short stature and those with hunch back are considered as people who cannot be trusted.  One is reminded of Zacchaeus, the chief tax-collector at Jericho in the Bible at this point.

Why do people continue to engage in the act of body shaming? It is most often due to their own insecurities about their looks and feels it comforting to talk badly about another person's looks. We are in fact brought up to think it is okay to joke about the way another person looks. Many of our friends, family members and even some medical professionals have our best intentions at heart and points out perceived areas for improvements in another person, unaware that they have crossed a line and the person on the receiving end does not like it. That being said I feel that body shaming is basically our inability to accept differences. The inability of the human brain to accommodate deviations. The present times of inclusivity makes this an issue of grave concern.

Bullying of an overweight woman depicted in a 1942 advertisement for a dietary supplement.

If one is to go by the world of advertisements, the westerners are hung up on bullying overweight women while our society does the same with the skinny ones. 

"മെലിഞ്ഞുണങ്ങിയ ശരീരം"

          

Though parents might instruct their children to give deaf ears to such remarks, they themselves are not immune to the same. Unable to handle the criticisms pointed against our children we prompt them to conform. We take them to doctors asking for the magic potion that can make our child plump or petite. We hunt pharmacies and super markets for the powders  and lehyams to do the trick. We seal the matter as classified and have secrete meetings to chart out strategies. Often the matter becomes a hot dinner table discussion making the child embarrassed or even sorry for letting down the parents.  Instead of teaching our children to embrace themselves for what they are we create a paranoia crushing their sense of self. 

Not only do the parents but many times children of the targeted ones are also affected. Well in to middle ages I might have developed a thicker skin and may not want my parents to swoop in to rescue me.  But my perceptive daughter have been distressed witnessing the frequent shaming that her mother has to handle.

 Research shows that 94% of teen girls and 64% of teen boys have been body shamed. It can have a variety of effects in a person according to their own social and perspective life,  endangering their self esteem to a great extend. It lies as a preliminary cause of various mental health issues which in the past history have led to high suicide rates of about 1.3% of all the deaths occurring throughout the world.

Isn't it time we shed our complacency cloak and react to such spiteful tongues spraying their sputum on us and our children?