While amidst one of my favorite hobbies of scouring the net for mindless distractions, I found a Victoria's Secret/Dove meme comparison saying "Healthy is the new sexy," implying that the larger women in the Dove ad are the more beautiful ones. None of the Dove women are fat, and none of the Vicky's women are too thin. They all look healthy to me. Here's the kicker, readers: The key words are to me. Let's stop pretending that sexy and beautiful are blanketed under one definition. Beauty and sexual appeal are totally relative, as you probably already know if you have disagreed with me by preferring Team Vicky's or Team Dove. And that would be perfectly fine, because I can't define what you deem beautiful.
We need not bash others to make ourselves beautiful. Why isn't this common knowledge? Larger, "real" women don't need to mock supermodels to better love themselves. Making snide comments or memes about skinny women is no different than bullying a woman into believing she's too fat to be attractive. I know we like to support the underdog, but the underdog becomes relative to who's being bullied. This is part of why I find the term "reverse bullying" redundant. Bullying is bullying. It's not reversed simply because one attacker/victim is more or less common than the next.
We've got to stop assuming that there is a single depiction of beauty that is universal. Everyone in this world has someone who believes they are beautiful. Some have more than others, but we all have at least one person who believes this about us. While you should rest easy knowing this, you should also stay humble to the fact that you will not be beautiful to everyone. Above all this, recognize that one of the most exhilarating realizations of your lifetime will be to recognize that your beauty, while relative to the beholder, is also not defined by them.
