Everyone is constantly preaching body positive when people are watching, but for some reason, in the age of social media, when we don’t know someone, we have this horrifying ability to dehumanize them. We don’t view them as people with emotions, self-esteem issues, and feelings. They become our play things. We drop a nasty comment and forget about it, completely forgetting that our words aren’t received by some internet bot who won’t be affected — it’s a real person on the other end of your insult, who then carries that with them for the rest of their day, week, or life.
Fitness blogger Cassey Ho has over two million followers on YouTube, and unfortunately, the more people who “know” you, the fewer people care about your feelings. One day, she got sick of it. She was tired of people telling her to “take her career seriously and lose weight.” She was tired of strangers violently attacking her appearance, and mostly, she was tired of taking it to heart and pretending it didn’t bother her. So she posted a Photoshopped image of her “perfect body” to her Instagram page, urging people to watch her video detailing how she got that body. This is what they saw.
She followed it up with the following message on her Instagram page.