ColumnWhat’s the best way to fight back against body-shaming bullies? Put your ass into it!

The fastest way to make a girl feel bad is to make fun of her body.

Forty-seven percent of girls in 5th-12th grade say they want to lose weight because of magazine pictures, according to The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Related Disorders.

You can veto women’s magazines from your home, but short of forcing your daughter to live under a rock, it’s impossible to keep girls from absorbing societal messages about what they are “supposed to look like.” And, with added pressure from classmates, it’s easy to understand why so many people (20 million women and 10 million men) have eating disorders.

Carleigh O’Connell, an awesome 14-year-old from New Jersey, found that some of her classmates spray-painted a rock with: “Carleigh’s ass.”

The message Carleigh was supposed to receive, internalize and—possibly—struggle with for decades to come is that her butt is too big. Instead, she posed with the graffiti wearing a bikini, showing off her tush and smiling.

Then, she posted the photo of herself on Instagram and asked her mom to put it on Facebook. Her mom posted it with this note (you can read her whole post here): “My daughter heard that her “rear end” “figure” “body shape” ….you can see the description for yourself in the photo ….was made fun of on a big rock at the beach. Well….it was true. She found it and knew it was hers since her name has a very distinct spelling. Many kids at school told her about it. We talked about it. And while she was upset, she told me she was going to make something good out of it.”

Cheers to Carleigh and her mom for taking control of the situation and turning it into something positive. With mean girls firmly entrenched in most schools, #thinspiration everywhere and oh-so coveted thigh gaps being photoshopped in so often that it’s easy to forget that not everyone has one, it’s hard out there for a girl.

Carleigh’s reaction and willingness to share her photo shows that one person can shift the conversation.

“I wanted to show whoever decided to write that that I was stronger than that,” she told TODAY.com. “It didn’t impact me at all. I didn’t put my head down, I didn’t cry about it. I didn’t give the kids the power they wanted.”

“It felt very empowering,” she added.

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Image: Daryl Lynn O’Connell on Facebook

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Confession: When I learned about the thigh gap trend, I looked in the mirror to see if I have one. I don’t, and guess what? The world didn’t come to an end!

The “thigh gap” is the new cleavage (which I don’t have either!). In case you haven’t heard, a thigh gap is the space between the tops of your legs when you stand with your feet together. This feature has become a disturbing form of ‘thinspiration’ among young women, with entire Tumblr blogs, Pinterest boards, Twitter accounts, and hashtags dedicated to the subject. There’s even a tutorial on how to get a thigh gap (FYI the first sentence of step one is “Understand that a thigh gap is not physically possible for most people.”)

When it comes to body image trends in general, I’ve been completely out of the loop for the past few years – on purpose. I spent almost my entire 20s trying to build and maintain the “ultimate” lifestyle that’s “supposed” to make a woman happy: the career, the home, the clothes, the shoes, the makeup, the tech, the socializing, the relationship. On the outside, my life looked like a Marc Jacobs ad. But I was exhausted trying to keep up, and behind all the glitz I wasn’t a woman anymore – I was a shell.

Sure I could blame the photoshopped celebs and models in fashion mags, and every thigh gap blog out there for how I feel about myself, but the only one truly to blame for my formerly-skewed body image is me. How you feel about your body is 100 percent in your control. A fashion ad is just that – we’re the ones imposing the subliminal messages of perfection onto ourselves.

What helped me break free was when I started thinking about the women I admire and the reasons I admire them. Surprisingly, my admiration had nothing to do with their looks or thigh gap at all, instead it was what they’ve achieved – they’re so successful in their areas of expertise they surpass the concept of physical beauty. In fact, their eccentricities are their signature – and the “weirder” they are, the more I admire them!

Even if you were to achieve the perfect thigh gap (I can’t believe I just said that), there’s going to be a new body image obsession right around the corner – you have to decide where to draw the line. Model Robyn Lawley put it best:

We have the power to change perceptions about body image—and we have the power to stop harmful trends like the “thigh gap.”

How do you feel about the thigh gap trend?

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

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