CHARLIE DAWN-SADLER, 23

For Women, unconditionally, During lockdown, like thousands of us around the country, I found myself a new hobby. A lifelong lover of literature, I decided to share my thoughts, recommendations and book reviews in video format to YouTube. Tis niche little corner of the site is afectionately referred to as ‘BookTube’, a great space for people to excitedly share their bookish opinions with other bibliophiles. Afer editing and double checking, processing and loading, I was eager to see the kind of reaction I would get. Tree minutes later, I found out. A comment, woohoo! What does it say? What did they think? In large capital letters, the comment reads: “LOSE WEIGHT FATTY!!” Now, at 23 years old and with a lifetime of fat-shaming under my belt, I chuckled and gufawed at the surprise of it. Afer texting my friends and hilariously sharing it to my Instagram story, it got me thinking: what efect would this have had on me fve years ago? Would I have burst into laughter or tears? For some, a comment like that could send them plummeting into the depths of self-conscious loathing. Comments like these are demeaning, cruel and intentionally harmful; they are all these things and more, but one thought twisted through my mind again and again: why? I wondered less about why the anonymous commenter would say that to me (people have their own bizarre

excuses for doing all sorts of things, and you can’t apply reason to unreasonable people) but more about why those specifc words could be used to hurt my feelings. Why have words like fat, pig, cow, fatty, big, chubby, hefa and all the other schoolyard taunts we’ve heard before caused such riots in our minds? Because we have learned that Fat is less than, Fat is ugly, and there is no room for beauty in Fat. For one moment I want you to imagine that this is true, that Fat really does equal unattractive, undesirable, unwanted. For a second moment I want you to think about this: are attractive, desirable and wanted the best things you could be? For a third moment I want you to answer: who says attractiveness, desirability and wanting are a must, a necessity, a requirement of being a woman? Is Fat ugly? Is Fat beautiful? Or are neither of those things conditional to the other? We can, and do, sustain ourselves on much more than just beauty. So, if there is no obligation to be beautiful, be whatever makes your skin glow from the inside out. Once you take away their power to dictate what you should and must be, you gain the power to unapologetically be yourself. If being a woman has no superfcial beauty conditions attached, then their name calling, their taunts, are nothing more than words falling on deaf ears, echoing back to themselves.

Yours sincerely, Charlie-Dawn Sadler