Body Shaming: Analysis and Understanding Its Myth
摘要
The recent case of comments made by a political party member of India on the famous cricket player Rohit Sharma who is also the captain of Indian cricket team. As per her comment, “Rohit Sharma isn’t fit to be a player, and he is overweight.” This isn’t just one comment on someone’s body structure. There are thousands of tweets, comments on social media by users on social media who take fun in commenting on someone’s body. Body shaming is an act of conscious or unconsciousness which leads to making fun of someone’s body structure. There was a time when obese students were made fun of in their schools and were given some nick-names. What could be fun for someone, can be humiliation for the person who is at the receiving end. Sometimes women love to flaunt their beauty and in the process they use latest and updated beauty products to maintain their beauty standards. As time passed, the concept of beauty has changed over generations. What used to be considered as healthy, is now being considered as obese and mocked of being overweight. Similarly perception matters with age. Teenagers agree to the concept of Zero figure” while older people would not prefer it. It is a very common sight in social media handle where users troll other netizens on the basis of their facial look, physical structure and appearance because they do not agree to the viewpoints/ comments/ posts of the victims. For judging themselves through these in-fashion beauty standards, individuals post their activities on different social media accounts such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to gauge their place on the rubric of in-fashion beauty standards. Positive and encouraging responses squash them into cheerful and confident moods. While negative and discouraging remarks/responses subject them to inferiority complexes, depression, low self-esteem, pessimism, etc. So it attests to the fact that the nature of these beauty standards is virtual rather than physical and genuine, which fails the test of the actual human world. Therefore this paper is an attempt to understand the concept of Body shaming in detail and make an analysis of its occurrences in social media through various instances. This is a theory based research and therefore conclusion is based on the results that were obtained from the study.