So, pretty much everyone has heard the new song by Meghan Trainor called All About That Bass. When I first started listening to it, I was thinking ‘well this isn’t too bad, quite catchy’, until it got to into the chorus and some of the lyrics provoked anger within me. If you see me in person, I am fairly skinny but that is because I do sports, exercise and try to keep in shape, and I also high a fast metabolism. But what right does Meghan Trainor have to refer to the majority of thin people as ‘skinny bitches’? Basically, if it was the other way round and someone thin called a person seen as ‘overweight’ a derogatory term such as ‘bitches’, there would be a lot of arguments and the ‘equal rights’ card would be pulled out.
In my opinion, weight doesn’t matter. Some people like to keep in shape, some people don’t feel the need to exercise, but I speak for most people when I say that we would prefer to feel comfortable with ourselves rather than having our weight discriminated against. So what if someone is bit bigger than you? So what if that girl can fit into a size 6 and you can’t? The battle to be a ‘perfect’ body type and weight is created immensely by the media and the magazines that portray women to be skinny. I saw a magazine recently that had the headline ‘5 ways to lose your chub’, and the photo of the women was of an average size. So I do understand why girls feel as though they need to be skinnier because these images of ‘attractive’ and ‘perfect figured’ women are shown everywhere, and then some people feel as though that’s what they need to look like to be attractive or such.
Back to my original point though; is it acceptable for a women in the music industry to sing about ‘every inch of you is perfect’ and then completely go against what she said degrading skinnier people for being a different shape. I don’t really think that is right. The song itself is producing more unnecessary conflict between different weights.
The stigma is that society is pressurising us to be a certain weight and body type. There are so many different influences in our lives that can be the reason we are who we are, and what weight we are. In women, some hit puberty different to others; some may have a bigger change than others such as the width of the hips will become larger and others don’t. Another influence is the upbringing, mainly the parents. For example, some parents may be very strict when it comes to the weight of their children, and if they feel as though their child is becoming the stereotypical ‘overweight’ then they may but the child on a diet or attempt to force them into a healthier lifestyle. Whereas some parents may feel as though it is up to the child, or teenager, whether or not they want to participate in exercise and become a different body type. There is also scientific influences such as the metabolism rate, and adiposity rebound (the period of increasing body mass index throughout childhood). Everyone is different in this way, some people may have a larger increase of body fat when they are a child and this may be an indicator for predicting ‘obesity.’ I put obesity in inverted commas because I don’t believe that there should be a standardised word (that may be seen as derogatory) towards people that are not the stereotypical weight. Whatever the influence is, what people don’t seem to understand is that the weight of another person does not make any difference to their own life. Everyone wants an equal world, but with people that judge someone because of their weight, whether it be thin or not, how is that world ever going to be possible?
