EveryBODY is fine

Celebrating everyone, no matter their shape or size, is something society at large hasn’t quite figured out yet. So we are glad that the Student Recreational Sports Center is making an effort with their “Celebrate EveryBODY week.”

We just wish they would remove the word beautiful from the campaign’s tagline.

Encouraging high self-esteem, confidence and comfort when it comes to bodies is important, especially when mass media discourse makes it seem like anyone who does not look like Kim Kardashian or Ryan Gosling is not a real person with real thoughts and feelings.

People who are called “ugly” are told they are less important, less human, less valuable than people who are labeled as “beautiful.”

Everyone should feel valuable regardless of their cup size or hairline, but we should stop coaching them to derive this value from beauty.

Our beauty is mostly out of our control.

Society sends us signals, telling us which of our parts are acceptable and which are nauseating, usually making us feel weird and bad.

There are two ways to confront this problem: insisting everything is beautiful or insisting that beauty does not matter.

Not everyone can be beautiful, but not everyone can feel beautiful.

Despite what a college fitness center says, people know how they measure up to society’s standards.

Trying to make us believe that everyone is beautiful is like jamming our feet into shoes three sizes too small.

By touting beauty instead of quashing its importance, we are inadvertently allowing the roots of objectification to flourish.

For women especially, beauty is equated with value.

Women are sometimes thought of as decorative playthings.

The more beautiful they are, the more valuable — or screwable — they are.

Everybody is beautiful translates to everybody is doable.

Is this the message the SRSC wants to send? It blatantly ignores the fact that human bodies, especially women’s, exist for reasons outside sexual pleasure or aesthetic enjoyment.

Removing beauty’s importance altogether would have a more positive impact on IU students.

The SRSC campaign should be framed by the idea that everybody is normal. Everybody is fine.

Everybody has a body, and that is super cool because our bodies allow us to do, experience, connect.

In doing, experiencing and connecting we find our value, beyond the mirror.
 
We should encourage self-worth based on unique thoughts, feelings, skills and experiences, not how someone looks while having thoughts, feelings, skills and experiences.

The SRSC is not going to change societal conceptions of beauty through this one week of events, but perhaps it can help us as individuals realize that beauty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.