Body shaming, one of the nastiest things about this generation. Body shaming is the practice of making critical, potentially humiliating comments about a person’s body size or weight.

The technology that has evolved in this decade, is astonishing and has improved the world we live in today, but it has also caused many more problems. Adults, teens and young children are constantly looking at computer screens, phone screens or an ipad for fast information but are we don’t always use these electronics for the things they were originally made for. Cyberbullying has made a huge increase since the early 2000s and mainly because it has become easier to confess feelings via social media.

For some reason, this generation seems to have lost their sense of compassion and sensitivity to one another. Along with this loss of feelings, people tend to feel the need to compete with each other for everything. Whether it is at work, school, extra curricular activities or any other area in life, everything is a competition and some people will stop at nothing to be at the top and with that comes many negative things. It seems as if nobody is happy for anyone anymore. We tend to strive to be better than everyone and tear people down in order to achieve that. This is where body shaming comes in.

Often times while I am scrolling through social media, I see some posts that bother me, but some bother me more than others. One specific tweet stood out to me. The first picture attached to the tweet was a picture of a man dancing, the tweet read “Spotted this specimen trying to dance the other week. He stopped when he saw us laughing.” The second picture was a picture of the man, clearly defeated by the laughter, with his head down and a look of pure sadness. Not only did people respond against the woman who tweeted it, but a tweet was sent out in search of the man. A group of body-positive women tracked down Sean O’Brien and threw him a dance party. O’Brien even got his own hashtag, #dancingman. Through this tweet that was supposed to be malicious and mean, came out with so much positivity and that’s something we don’t really see while scrolling through social media.

As awesome as it was to hear about Sean O’Brien and his fight back against these body ‘shamers’, not all of the stories end that positively. In a society driven by looks, men and women around the world are constantly being judged for the way they physically appear. It is not about the number that is seen on the scale, but the way you feel about yourself. Nobody should be able to make you feel lesser of yourself because they struggle with issues themselves. Instead of focusing on the outside, we need to start taking a look on the inside and judging people for who they really are versus the way they appear to us.