I have a short, oversimplified, little allegory that I’d like to share with you, pertaining to the necessity of feminism within our society today: Two children are playing, one of each sex; the boy has three toys and the girl has one. When the girl politely asks if she can have two more toys; the boy disputes, wondering why she should get more without him. It’s this little message, well, and a lot of other things that we shouldn’t really get into here, which perfectly phrase my devotion to feminism, the equality between races and genders, and my place in the LGBTQIA+ movement.
Why is this so important, you ask? Because over at Verbal Remedy (VR) they have hosted a month of articles aiming to combat body shaming and the media. Amidst these articles are those dealing with a variety of widely motioned, but very rarely dealt with (as a society that is), personal issues. These range from those surrounding body hair, gender association, body size, and typical portals of beauty and their effects of POC (Persons of Colour); all of whom, the authors, refuse to define themselves by their stereotypical representations.
Body image is something that many of us deal with. So, upon reading these articles, I was immediately aware of the brutally honest in these perspectives. Somehow they’ve managed to perfectly capture how the mainstream ideology of the ‘perfect body’ has been established through the lens of media sensationalism, which is celebrity culture, gender stereotypes, and how anything outside of this scope is demonized.
I realized, almost instantly, how essential VR is, especially with the rise of pocket entertainment featured on our phones. Literature, as it is today, is changing format, and although I doubt paperbacks with become obsolete, with eBook sales falling 2.4% in 2015, the rise of online media is rising rapidly. VR, and other personal blogs, such as Kat Blaque, fit into this market perfectly; giving an empowering devotion to the cause.
It’s disheartening for me, when I read a piece of literature, to find that tropes have been used to define characters, or for, yet again, shock value. Cut it out already. If more people read and understood such dedicated pieces as these, maybe our society wouldn’t be so monocular. Blogs, similar to VR has elegantly captured the perfect harmony of the human condition. It’s that simple, even if their personal battle are not.
VR provides us with real, intimate issues surrounding body images, and they allow us to associate with something better and more beneficial, not only to members of this community, but to the underprivileged, to POC, to each member of LGBTQIA+, and to everyone else that are marginalized because of these ideals. I mean, god knows, we have enough to deal with without that extra society pressure putting an excess drain on our mental and physiological health.
