Plus-Size is Not a Size!

We live in a harsh world where it feels as though beauty has been put in a box, defined and every so often it has changed, but I cannot remember a time when beauty was ever about being ‘plus-sized’.

People have to realise that beauty is something everyone has to define for themselves; just like taste and style. I had a conversation with some curvy women and they expressed to me how they hated that term ‘plus-size’ and as I began to defend the term as a polite fashion terminology, I began to spiral off into my own thoughts. How exactly is this term considered polite? If they started referring to my size as minus size rather than petite; I think I would be highly offended. This is society at its finest – you have people believing something is normal until it affects someone.

What really bothers me about society is that we are all about classifications. “The chubby girl”, “the skinny girl, “the fat girl”… People feel the need to put you in categories or groups because it makes them uncomfortable to not be able to classify you. I have had many curvy friends and I have realised that no matter what your weight is, people are always going to have something to say.

At the end of the day, what really matters is how you, the individual, feel about it. What bothers me is the perception that your weight defines you, big or small. One of my friends was one of the most stylish people I knew, but because finding her size seemed impossible, she would always settle for whatever fit. I could not blame her. Have you been out shopping lately? The retail industry sets standards and those standards influence social views. Finding a store with plus-size mannequins in their window is unheard of, even for the stores that claim to cater to curvier women.

How is anyone supposed to feel good about shopping in a place where their image is a “problem”? I would like to see a store for curvy women embrace their customer base with crazy displays of spunky voluptuous women and signs that say “you can’t handle these curves” just the way store for less curvy women do. Unfortunately, I have yet to see that and yet we expect people to go into these stores and purchase clothing when everything about the store tells them they are the wrong size.

To top it off, television and media plays a huge role in this. You cannot watch any music video or television show that is not putting social pressure on its viewers. Every time you read a magazine, it is selling you ideas on how to look better and how to be thinner or how to be more stylish; which somehow always reverts back to being thinner again. We would all like to think that we enjoy things such as reading magazines, but who can really say that after reading a magazine there is not something they want to change about themselves?

On that note; I would like to leave you with a thought. It is funny how we can accept people’s heights as something they cannot change, but not do the same about weight. How different is being tall and short to being fat and skinny? It all just genetics, is it not? And if it is not, can we all just agree that people come in all shapes, colours and forms and therefore should not be labelled according to these forms and if they are to be labelled; can the labelled pick the label and not the latter?

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