UGLY. That’s an ugly word. Recently a friend of mine was called ugly and honestly, it just made me angry. The person doing the name calling didn’t know my friend, they didn’t look beyond her physical appearance and judged her. As the old saying goes, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and this couldn’t be truer because another friend found her beautiful. But that’s not the point. The point is what gives one person the right to judge an another based on their standards of beauty?
If we take a step further, we enter the zone of body-shaming. A person’s body is their own, what they choose to do with it should be their decision and while this may seem like a fundamental concept, somehow it remains alien to many. People are quick to comment on another’s body. Maybe they find someone too thin or someone too fat. They prescribe diets or say something like, “you need to lose x number of pounds” and through it all, never does it once strike them that they have no right to do so. Such comments loosely and casually thrown around have the power to lower a person’s confidence and can have lasting effects on a person’s psyche.
The sad fact is society has drilled the ideal standards of beauty in our heads and many are quick to judge based on them. Looks matter and not just on dating apps. It’s appalling how looks play a role in getting jobs and somehow most of the time it’s women who are held to these exalted standards. Shouldn’t experience and knowledge and something called education be the deciding factor?
And we may blame society as much as we want but society is made up of us, you and me. So we need to be the change we wish to see. We need to look beyond these layers of flesh and bone and see the person within. We need to look for and value a person’s qualities because at the end of the day what matters is a kind heart.
