The best beauty rule

I don’t care about your body. I really don’t.

What I have an issue with is your own obsession with it.

I’ve seen many photos go viral lately that are “body-empowering.”

They depict women, usually normal or plus-sized, standing proudly in their underwear, smiling.

They come from blogs, news websites and Lady Gaga’s recently notorious “Body Revolution” website on which she encourages people to post pictures of themselves half naked so they can feel “empowered” by the community.

You know what real empowerment is? It’s confidence in yourself, regardless of what the media says, without having to turn to any community and beg acceptance and approval.

On sites like Tumblr, girls often post pictures of themselves in their underwear or nude captioned by something along the lines of, “this is my body, and I love it the way it is!”

These photos are in the same genre of girls who tweet or Instagram photos of themselves proclaiming “barefaced” or “no makeup.”

Good for you. I don’t care.

And I don’t understand why you want other people to care so much.

You see, by posting these photos with these sorts of captions and actively campaigning for your body, you’re undermining yourself.

If anyone wants the media to realize that size 12-14 is the new normal, and sizes bigger than 6 can be just as attractive as their svelte counterparts, we need to have some confidence in ourselves.

And that’s me assuming you posting nearly nudes is for that cause and not just for a little ego boost.

If you really loved your body, you wouldn’t need this kind of approval.

Frankly, the practice of blogging your body is almost a little skewed toward girls without typical model bodies.

If any girl with a more typically sexualized body type posts photos in her underwear, it’s called “slutty” or “desperate,” not “empowering.”

Is this because people assume girls with these bodies don’t merit community encouragement, as they get it already from the mainstream media?

It’s a tricky double standard.

I’m all for a new wave of healthy men and women to take the media spotlight and change current beauty standards.

I would love to see normal, plus-size and skinny girls grace the pages of magazines, and I think that goal is becoming increasingly realistic.

The only way a healthy body image will become widely accepted is if people everywhere stop making such a big deal about how “abnormal” it is to see one.

Make healthy women of all sizes the new norm by being proud of your body without advertising how crazy that concept is.

Stop apologizing for it, stop asking for approval and, for the love of God, stop clogging up sites like Tumblr, Instagram, and even the Huffington Post with your grainy cell phone pictures of it.

You shouldn’t have to ask permission from an audience to be happy with the way you look.

If you really want to empower yourself, then have some confidence in your ability to be content with yourself.

It’s a much less volatile relationship to maintain.

­— kelfritz@indiana.edu