When Gemma Collins entered the jungle in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! she knew she would receive online abuse, and boy, was she right. The abuse she received for her weight was explosive, ranging from fat shaming tweets to photo memes on Facebook. It was easy to laugh at these comments; easy to look at her body and compare it to Kiera Knightley’s and accuse her of being fat and lazy. But when you stop and imagine how crushing it must be to have thousands of people mocking you for your appearance, the whole situation suddenly becomes very serious.
What does fat shaming say about society’s perceptions on body weight? It shows that we still live in a society where skinny is the dream, where a woman cannot be beautiful and valued unless she fits into a small dress and waves her long glossy hair in the soft blowing breeze. This flawed perception of body beauty is exemplified by the fact that the number of primary school girls being diagnosed with anorexia has increased over the years. Young girls who have not even gone through puberty are looking in the mirror and feeling the pressure to diet and obtain this impossible idea of perfection.
People are overweight for many different reasons. More often than not, there is an emotional element behind it. To most people, comforting eating is the occasional thing when we are feeling low. But sometimes this can get out of control and become an eating disorder – that’s right, there is an eating disorder that leads to obesity called compulsive overeating. I am not suggesting that Gemma Collins suffers from this, but fat shaming will not help somebody suffering from this improve their health. Bullying is not the correct way to encourage somebody to lose weight.
The main problem that is highlighted from Gemma Collin’s fat shaming is the intolerance to anything that the media and fashion industry has not declared beautiful. It suggests an element of consumerist and psychological control: if all of the celebrities are skinny, and all of the models in the magazines are skinny, then we too must be skinny in order to be beautiful. Instead of enjoying life and learning to love ourselves, we spend our money on diet books and gym memberships, desperately trying to prove to society that we are worth accepting. Eating healthily and exercising is very important, but when concern for how we appear to the rest of the world begins to consume someone, then it becomes a very negative thing.
Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, and being a size 6 does not make you any more beautiful than a size 10, or a size 16. Instead of insulting Gemma Collins on her weight, we should commend her for being brave enough to enter the jungle. When she said she wanted a treat in the next 48 hours, society reacted. But if a thin woman had said this, it would have been accepted.
Why do we feel we have the right to bully someone because of their weight?