ABOUT:
BODY DISSATISFACTION
Body shaming is an action or practice of expressing humiliation about another individual’s body, shape or size; a form of bullying that can result in severe emotional trauma, especially at a young age.
An image of a perfect body is built in our mind since childhood by our parents, siblings and friends. Even the cartoons which we watched had portrayed an overweight character as unintelligent and unhappy compared to underweight characters. The toys we played, for example Barbie dolls, are always slim and not fat. These things keeps on feeding in us the notion of perfection and an ideal body which we always desire to become.
Media is one of the major causes of body shaming. It has a negative influence on body image that serves manifestation of self-doubt among individuals. The youth who follows famous personalities through television, magazines and other social media platforms want to look like them. Various fashion magazines like Vogue, Femina, Elle etc. are filled with beauty advertisements, with underweight models and actresses seeding a desire of a perfect body amongst people. Also, the media is full of promoting unrealistic ideals about what men and women’s body type should look like in order to be considered attractive. For example, according to the media, men should be extremely lean and muscular and women should be extremely thin.
Unfortunately, due to basic biology these ideals are largely unattainable. So, people who buy into the mantra that thin/muscular = beauty are often left feeling sad, ashamed, and unhappy with their body.
“We are our own worst critic”
is often a phrase we use to describe when we as individuals are too hard on ourselves. It is a human tendency to always be better, faster, stronger and perfect in all means. This notion of becoming better and perfect results consequences like body shaming.
Our work speaks about a self-perception which women have about their bodies. It talks about the difference in opinions between oneself and the world. For instance, a woman who is fat for the world may not see herself to be fat; rather she is comfortable with her body. In the other hand, a woman who is slim for the world may see herself fat and insecure about her body. The shattered mirror reflects the image which world perceive of fat bodies that is, uneven, distorted and ugly. The vase is sculptured two ways which depicts both the body types showing that our body is one but we perceive it two ways and the fact that body shaming starts with oneself.