Transcriber: Polly Lok Reviewer: Chryssa Rapessi
Fat.
Too skinny.
You look like a man.
Eat a sandwich.
Thick thighs.
Flabby.
The Great Fatsby.
Ugly.
Obese.
You look pregnant.
Eat a burger.
You look anorexic.
Wait, Excuse me.
Why do I talk like this?
I expressed the horrible words I heard from the mouth of the body shamers.
When I was in grade six,
I encountered body shaming for the first time.
One day I sat together with my girlfriends,
and we were talking about things.
And then one of them started to talk about how she was not satisfied with her weight,
and she thought she was too fat, and everyone started to agree with her.
Everyone started to talk about how they were not satisfied with their bodies.
As a friend, I tried to cheer them up.
“None of you guys are fat” I said, “We are perfect just the way we are.”
“No, we are not.
We are all too fat, except for those two who sit over there,
go and lose some weight.”
I was shocked by this, my brain went completely dark.
Wait, what are you talking about and why? I have no idea what to respond.
I never thought I was fat before,
but I think there's only one way to prove that.
So I went home and I used a scale.
After I step on the scale, the numbers appeared.
However, the numbers were not desirable.
I closed my eyes and reopened them again, but that didn’t work.
Numbers were shocking.
So opened and closed my eyes, and opened them again.
But that’s still didn’t work, the numbers were still there.
But this draws more thought to me.
I never thought I was fat, but now the numbers don't lie, do they?
And I started to question myself.
I’m fat, but what am I gonna do?
And the thing I wondered the most is if this was my friend,
why would she do that to me?
Oh, then I realized some people would take their own insecurities
and target other people so that themselves, they can feel better.
Body Shamer endured body shaming somehow during their life,
and they are being afraid of being abandoned by their social group.
So they started to bully other people to make themselves feel better.
And they all wanted to be a normal figure, just like everyone else in a group.
Wait, so normal, what is normal or abnormal
and what is the average body standard of the world this day
and who creates the standard that we all follow now?
I would say the influence of people on social media and advertisements.
Different celebrities publish their products on different social media,
whether it's Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
And also the advertisements are also everywhere.
Magazines, newspaper, even billboards next to the road.
And models that are being used in the advertisements are thin models.
The ones appear perfectly, body slender, body frames
they also subconsciously persuade us that that is how we should be.
And then the models they use, as we can see,
are not just random people from the streets.
They’re either hyper-beautiful or hyper-unusual compared to the rest of us.
But now we can see people all want to be hyper-different from each other.
But there's no way we should do that,
because uniqueness is what makes the world diverse,
and only through difference we make a beautiful world.
But now how can we face body shaming?
What are any things that we can do to reject
the negative things people say to us?
Well, I didn’t have any ideas in the beginning.
Then I found a Chinese app.
This one, I found a Chinese app there
where people will publish their experiences and their stories,
and others will come in to help.
So I researched online body shaming
and I found many experiences that were written by others.
Some of them were written by the victims
and some of them were written by the family members and friends of the victims.
And I have to say all of them are encourageable, especially the comments.
So I started to share my feelings online, too.
And you know what?
People started to speak positively and encouraged me as well.
So it makes me feel much better to know that I am not alone.
And they are strangers will help me to pick it up.
And now I wanted to challenge you all to have the courage to say
what you have encountered from those mean things,
not just say that body shaming is wrong,
but also you don’t remain impacted by those horrible words others said to you
just because they are not confident of themselves.
Everyone in the world is unique.
We don’t have to change ourselves into someone else to make ourselves better.
Thank you.
(Applause)