“When we hate one type of body, we start to hate them all. We compare and critique, hating our failures and then hating others who appear to be more successful. Then we start to hate those who are failing more than us so that we don’t feel so bad about those guys that we hate because they’re succeeding! Hate. Hate. Hate. It’s a lot of hate, and it’s vicious.” – Jes Baker
Jes Baker, blogger and body acceptance advocate, has proven that she is not afraid to speak her mind when it comes to body image, hate and shaming. She not only is organizing an event called The Body Love Conference that is meant to inspire women to love the bodies they are in NOW (you can read that report here) but now she has spearheaded a photo campaign online that has gone viral. And it’s all about fighting back against body shaming.
The photo series called “Bodies Aren’t Ugly. Bullying is.” came to life after Jess was conducting a simple online search one day on Google and noticed that when she typed in the search term “fat people,” autocomplete terms such as, “fat people are gross”, “fat people don’t deserve love” and “fat people deserve to be bullied” popped up. Instead of getting angry, she decided to do something about it. And this photo campaign was born.
“As long as we continue to demonize and degrade one body type, we will never reach true body acceptance as a society. And until we reach true body acceptance as a society, we will continue to see low self-esteem, depression, eating disorders, sabotaged relationships, employment inequality, sky high suicide rates, and all sorts of other social infirmities. No more please. No more.” ~ Jes Baker
Jes shared her photo project on her blog’s Facebook page and asked readers to send in their own photos and join the campaign. To date, she has received over 500 submissions.
Kudos to Jes for this amazing campaign that is bringing people together to stand up against body shaming. This photo series is compelling and powerful. If it can inspire just one person to change their way of thinking when it comes to body image, that itself can cause a revolution.
To check out the “Bodies Aren’t Ugly. Bullying Is.” photo campaign on Facebook, click here.
To read more about the photo campaign on Jes’ blog, click here.
To learn more about The Body Love Conference, happening in April 2014, click here.
What do you think of Jes Baker and this photo campaign? Will you be joining the campaign and submitting your own photo? Please leave us a comment below and let us know.