Body Shaming: What makes you ashamed of your body?

Even though the practice of body shaming is deeply rooted in the past, it is a term that emerged in public discourse only in the last few years, referring to all judgmental comments a person can receive on their appearance. This phenomenon concerns women and men alike, yet as it is primarily associated with the female body and its instrumentalization / objectifications, body shaming mostly victimizes femininities.

The beauty industry requires women or men, with “ideal” measurements, which are determined by magazine covers and social networks. Body shaming is defined as the sum of the spiteful comments that are expressed to insult and characterize a person’s looks – either their physical or acquired characteristics – when they are deviated from the non-realistic standards that dominate advertising and the media. Body shaming has deep cultural roots in society, media, our families, the way we grow up, even art and film, and of course in the patriarchal social perceptions and structures that still prevail and determine our ways of seeing.

This discussion has recently opened up in Greek society as well. The occasion might have been the fact that women have suffered from body shaming because of their weight, cellulite or stretch marks, or the fact that recognizable people might as well be the victimizers, because or their spiteful comments. In the meantime, women with unnaturally “ideal” body measurements dominate social networks, whether to enforce established standards of the beauty industry that glorifies the exceedingly skinny and athletic bodies, or to advise us to love our bodies as they are.

Amid the summer, during which several people feel reluctant to expose their bodies to the gaze of other people, we open this discussion, not only on the occasion of the beach, but mostly in order to talk about the ways in which we will manage to fit our bodies without guilt.