LET’S TALK ABOUT BODY SHAMERS!

MAMA SNOWBEAR - 23 Jan 18

I was body shamed a little while ago, whilst I went to get my routine hair cut, only this time it happened to be in a new hair salon. Alternatively, perhaps you could of called it fat shamed, or both. I wanted to write about it because it shocked me, stunned me, upset me, and because the way I make sense of things I don’t understand is often to write about them or talk them out with someone I trust.

I’ve read a lot about body shaming of women. I know it happens. I know it shouldn’t but I know we are heading away from progress in that area and it fundamentally needs to be addressed, not only in daily life but in show business, advertising and local high street shops which often do not stock clothes above the size 16 ratio, shame on you.

Just this morning I read a feature about the top 14, Photoshop fails, where magazines or advertisers had attempted (and failed) to make women look different. Usually by making them thinner or younger looking and by removing natural folds of the bodies skin. I saw an article recently Stacey Solomon shared and it amazed me how these advertising company’s get away with flaunting “fake perfection”. Therefore, I know it happens and Stacey Solomon’s instagram shares of her figure backed that theory up to, the comparisons between the real and the modified where unreal. In addition, my own body-esteem goes, I’m no supermodel but I did use to model when I became a teenager so perhaps my figure changing after motherhood affects me more but still.

My body is an average 5’6 figure it looks like the body of a 29-year-old woman who likes to eat chocolate and Nando’s sometimes guilt free and does light exercise. I don’t kid myself that it is any different and I work on it daily especially after having 2 children. However, the shaming experience in the salon really hit home.
I felt frustrated with myself for allowing it to even happen. The lady in question asked me “how far along” I was, and I genuinely did not have a come back with what to say to her, so I found myself making excuses for her wild assumption of my mum tum and told her i’d recently had a child, just to save embarrassment.

Even though evidently the child I spoke of happened to actually be 4 years old now. I was dumbfounded and it’s not exactly the first time that this kind of thing had happened to me. I blame the dress I wore that day but still what a cheeky bitch, who does that. How does that even happen? , How is it that something horrible can happen to you and then we still somehow manage to find a way to be pissed off at ourselves?.

I won’t go into the minutiae of the event but, in a nutshell, It seemed to happen pretty quickly and as soon as she realised I wasn’t pregnant she vanished to attend to a client leaving my hairdresser feeling awful for me , yet I was the one assuring them it was ok and not to worry.

For a moment, I wondered if it had been about me. It’s easy to feel paranoia when you see another women visually eyeing your physic waving at you asking when are you due. So, I almost thought that perhaps it wasn’t at me. Then I realised it was. There was nobody else around. The shouting came right at me and I rather froze in a way. Although I carried on chatting and having my hair blow dried, it stunned me. A moment earlier, I had been feeling good.
It was a gorgeous sunny morning. I was looking forward to seeing the children. It was a nice end to a tiring week and I felt good. Then Mother Universe dropped by to remind me, that things are not always so simple and that life can be a right old bitch sometimes.

I put the incident out of my mind for the rest of the day, telling myself that she was just a t.w.a.t. Who had nothing more interesting to do with her morning than assume I was a fat women she didn’t know. I didn’t even know what she really looked like or whether she was alone in her thinking.
I didn’t look in her direction after the comment was made. The rational and reasonable part of me understood this was a silly incident by an unpleasant woman, who clearly just walks around picking out people’s flaws, she obviously had her own issues. But slowly my mind started to digest what had happened and all of the doubts and low self-esteem started to creep up and by the end of the day I had decided I was going on a diet, starting now and the dress I wore made the dust bin that evening.

There are moments in life where it would be handy to step outside of yourself and give your other self a good shake. This was one of those. I needed the shake. From the other me and I needed a little bit of girl power back up. But deeper than this is a real issue with the way women are viewed, for it to be considered okay by some people, even if it is a minority of people, to openly pass a judgement about a woman’s body.
I know this isn’t even about my weight. My weight, my body, they’re my business nobody else’s, I really do not care if you like it or not. If there is a diet to be started, it is because I want to do it for me, not because some low-life in a hair salon felt nothing more in her this morning than an ugly thought.

I’m not sure why I decided to write this and I imagine I might read it again and feel shameful for experiencing this and shameful for admitting it had somewhat affected me. It would have been very easy not to tell a soul and keep it hidden in the box named my self-esteem. However that would be doing an injustice to women and girls who experience things like this every day. There is no shame in bodies.

There is no shame in large or small and there is no shame in being a size 16 either, why we have to now call it “plus size” is somewhat demoralising for some and there is absolutely no shame in women and girls. The only shame here was the woman in the salon making comments that should not have been made, cheeky bugger.

MAMA SNOWBEAR

Mother of 2,Artist ,creator,blogger and illustrator who enjoys lots of tea and the occasional glass of malbec :)

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