We Got Called Out For Body Shaming

WJ Cope9 years ago

Batten down the hatches; we’re taking heavy fire. Respected national college publication HerCampus has launched a rebuttal to our very own The Therapist’s column about why girls should stop wearing high-waisted bikinis. The woman who wrote the reaction piece to that column had me pleasantly surprised, as it was mostly coherent and well-written.

Much like another publication that loves to critique us, HerCampus articles range from broken, incoherent word-dumps to quite solid writing. So I’ll give credit where credit is due. Now let’s break down some of the points that our friend at HerCampus makes.

From HerCampus:

The main points in the article that “proved” why women should stop wearing high-waisted bikinis and “get back to being cheeky” were as follows:

“They look like something our moms would wear.”

OK, and my mom is an awesome, independent woman who doesn’t give a sh*t what you think so what’s your point here? Are we seriously going to sit here and go through a woman’s wardrobe and tell her that she can’t wear something because she’s “too young” to be wearing such a thing?

Now wait just a minute. We love moms here at TFM. And no, we are not going to sit here and go through a woman’s wardrobe. I don’t have all fucking day.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from this paragraph, “Most college girls aren’t willing to give up their margaritas and late night pizza long enough to allow these Pull-Ups disguised as bikinis to look good.” Well, at least he knows us “college girls” love our margs because this article had me in desperate need of one (or twelve).

A humblebrag about how much she drinks? She should be working for us.

How will women ever feel comfortable in their skin if articles like this continue to be published? It should be every girl’s ultimate goal to wear whatever outfit she wants based on her beauty standards. If you’re a guy, I challenge you to think of a time you’ve ever body-shamed a woman in your life for something she chose to wear. Now, imagine a boy doing this to your 13-year-old or even 21-year-old daughter. Or even your sister. Is this how you would want somebody to treat her, leaving her to believe that she should abide by the “if you got it, flaunt it” rule?

Woah, now. As much as I understand that articles like this don’t exist in a vacuum, I have a hard time believing that any real harm has been done here. Our website was founded nearly 70 years ago as a place of one part satire and three parts dick jokes. Ideally, nobody that can’t understand the underlying satire will read the piece anyway. If they do, however, then we certainly hope they won’t see any of our content about trying to bring back bullying, killing bees, porn workouts, and burning your house down. That would be pretty damaging as well.

Total Frat Move, fighting the patriarchy since 2010..

[via HerCampus]

Image via Instagram/@TaylorSwift