“I wish I could go back to tell my 13-year-old self, ‘You don’t have to push yourself for validation, you don’t have to apologise constantly for everyone’,” says Aakanksha Luthra, a 28-year-old Instagram blogger from Udaipur. It was only when a former boss pointed out to her that she was always apologetic, mostly for other people’s lapses, did she sit down to think about how fat-shaming had affected her.
The same story
Most overweight women identify with Luthra’s experience. Vishakha Bhaskar, 23, from Delhi, was used to having her self-esteem take a beating each time someone called her “fat”, “moti”, “bhains”, “elephant”, until one day a classmate told her, “You’re too pretty for a body like that.” It was then that she felt the need to write about it, choosing Instagram as a platform that she felt had the largest reach.
Neha Parulkar, 25, Mumbai, says that it’s not just strangers who are unkind; school teachers and relatives were too, comparing her to cousins who weren’t overweight, or saying no one would marry her. She too found a voice on Instagram. “When people reject you because of your body, it’ affects your self-confidence. One fine day, I said, ‘Enough is enough; please let me breathe’.”
Speaking up
Parulkar started talking about her struggles and the compromises people her size often had to make, via Instagram. “I started grooming myself, socialising more, and became my own role model,” she says. She also started telling people who were rude and cruel that their words hurt and that they had no right to comment on her physical appearance.
Today, Luthra has a following of 22.9k and has the words ‘body positive’ in her bio. Bhaskar tells people to “Fearlessly love yourself”, while Parulkar, who has walked the ramp at the Lakme Fashion Week thrice, calls herself a “body positivity influencer”. Ishleen Sethi, 23, from Delhi, another Instagram blogger, is at 40.2k followers. All found expression in fashion: it built their confidence. As they began mopping up followers, brands took an interest, offering them product-placement monetary opportunities. A number of these are clothes for plus-size women, but there are also several that are shape-neutral.
Body shaming is not restricted to women who aren’t the ‘perfect’ size though. “I get PMs from school kids who are skinny, who are at the receiving end of hate comments,” says Sethi. When she started her blog four years ago, she says she got many messages in poor taste. “Today, that has changed,” she feels, in part because of the growing movement of self-love, and to a great extent because her own confidence levels have risen. She also speaks of it as a community on Instagram, with more and more girls realising that they didn’t need to hide just because they were not at their ideal body weight.
Springboard for kindness
Unlike Twitter, seen as a news-and-views social media platform, or Facebook, a family-and-friends connector, Instagram looks at itself as a blogging site that promotes kindness, both in its products and services. “We have an understanding that there isn’t such a thing as a standard image of beauty, and our community is saying to the world: ‘This is my story; I dealt with it this way’. Perhaps, others will take inspiration and find support. The aim is to break stigmas and create awareness, whether it is about bullying or being comfortable sharing a picture of unwaxed legs,” says Tara Bedi, Policy Programmes and Community Partnerships, Instagram, India. The #KindComments hashtag that originated at a trans-community event, saw an outpouring of stories, with events world over springing up spontaneously to spread the message.
It is possible to filter out words you don’t want to see under Comments. There’s an Automatic Filter that hides comments that may be offensive, along with a Manual Filer that enables you to put in keywords (such as fat) that you may not want to see. In the Story Settings, you can hide your profile from individual handles, prevent the Allow Sharing feature that lets others share photos and videos from your story as messages, block users, prevent others from resharing, and use a few other tools.
The other side
The body acceptance movement has two sides, says Kolkata-based psychologist, Mansi Poddar, herself an obese young adult, who changed that by 25. “The bright side is that people feel confident; they go out and interact with the world. Self-hate will not fuel self-love and until we accept ourselves, we can’t change ourselves,” she says. Which takes us to the dark side of it: the fact that it may prevent change, and promote an unhealthy lifestyle. “There has to be some focus on having parameters within what is considered a healthy range,” she says.
She talks of reverse body shaming, where people, on a mission to ‘accept’ themselves, may put down those who choose healthy eating and exercise, becoming pro-obesity without understanding the health consequences. “It’s simply the other end of the spectrum: you’re focussing on shape,” she says. She hopes that the focus shifts from shape to self-esteem. “That should not be based on the way you look, but on your inner self and how you think of yourself.” As Sethi puts it, “It’s not about promoting a plus-size; it’s about shedding insecurities.”
