We live in a world concerned with images. And in this day and age, with social media at the forefront of advertising campaigns, it’s even easier for people to push images onto you- images telling you what you should look like, what you should eat, and how your life should look. They’re not always this glaring, either, and usually rely on aesthetic or emotion relayed through the picture to get you to think what they want you to- usually in order to sell a product or maintain a certain socially-accepted standard- making the images much easier to ingrain in one’s mind. According to the Reflections on Body Image report published by the National Children’s Bureau in 2012, sixty percent of adults are ashamed of the way they look, with seventy percent of women and forty percent of men admitting they’ve felt pressure from television or magazines to look a certain way. Almost even more startling are their statistics on children: one in four seven-year-old girls have tried losing weight at least once, and between a third and a half of girls fear becoming “fat” and develop eating disorders. With these ideas so pervasive in society, how are we to feel happy about our bodies?
What Would Melissa McCarthy do? In addition to managing an impressive film career, McCarthy also produces, writes, and designs the clothing for her own clothing line, Seven7. Perhaps as a reason behind why she wanted to create the line, she once said that she felt plus size clothing lacked style, something that anybody of any size can have. One might even consider this a form fat-shaming, or a microaggression of sorts, that plus-size clothing is so limited to clothes that are only just functionable, and not fashionable. McCarthy acknowledges the angle that most people take to explain their stigmatization of bigger bodies, which is that it is “unhealthy” and nobody should be applauded for being body-positive when they’re “unhealthy”- and then she promptly throws that angle out the window. You see, it is possible to be healthy and still be big, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Size does not make anyone any less of a person. And though it’s hard to unlearn these things images have taught us so well, and to ignore these images when they continually bombard us, McCarthy offers up some advice that gives the power back to you, and gives you the choice whether to listen to an image or not: “Even when someone gets to looking like she should be proud of herself, instead she’s like, ‘I could be another three pounds less; I could be a little taller and have bigger lips.’ Where does it end? You just have to say, ‘It’s pretty damn good. I am right here at the moment and I’m OK with it. I’ve got other things to think about.’”
