A woman found an opportunity to address society’s toxic beauty standards after her TikTok viewers tried to find rude “explanations” for why a plus-size woman is married to a muscular man.
Although body-shaming is always at its worst when it’s coming from the people who are supposed to be closest to us , that doesn’t mean we should underestimate the effects that it can have when it comes from strangers.
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Not only will such people think their larger peers are worthy of ridicule whenever they’re out doing just about anything , but the particularly nasty ones tend to imply that when their target finds love , their partner must be with them to fulfill some ulterior motive.
And both that vicious speculation and the apparent inability of these people to understand what attracted others to the person they’re mocking were clearly problems that one woman has had to deal with recently.
Yet while it may be tempting to give such commenters some vitriol in kind, she decided to discuss why she believes her relationship bothers them so much.
On June 19, a woman named Alicia McCarvell uploaded a brief video that showed her and her husband Scott standing in front of a mirror in their bedroom.
As we can see, the brief clip starts with them standing next to each other in towels before a jump cut shows them in their evening wear as they share an affectionate kiss.
In the follow-up video, McCarvell described this scene as being just like similar videos that so many other couples have uploaded to the platform.
However, there was a notable difference in how viewers initially reacted to her video compared to others.
Moreover, McCarvell stated that the only reason her video went viral at all is that, in her words, “By beauty standards, we don’t make sense.”
And she catalogued a series of comments that made it clear how intensely people felt that way, as they apparently found it necessary to invent explanations for why they’re in a relationship.
These ranged from theories that she looked different when they met to more colorful ones suggesting that she either must be rich or that he must be a fetishist, an escort, or someone who is secretly gay.
Sadly, it seemed that to them, any of these explanations were more believable than the idea that two people who look different simply fell in love.
In one case, a slimmer woman even DMed Scott and told him he should be with someone who looks like her.
But in McCarvell’s words, “Me telling myself for the majority of our relationship that I’m not worthy of his love because of my body is the exact same thing as this thin woman telling him that she is worthy of his because of her body.”
As she continued in what makes up the central thesis of her response, “We’ve both been made to believe that our value lies in our body.”
And it was that revelation that informed why she doesn’t get jealous when other women hit on Scott.
As she said, “When people slide into his DMs, they’re typically leading with their body first.”
And since she knows that he doesn’t prioritize conventional beauty standards, she also knows that’s not going to matter to him as much as her humor, her commitment, her love, her caring heart does.
In closing, McCarvell said she doesn’t blame her detractors for the way they’ve been taught, but does maintain that they have a responsibility to unlearn it.
h/t: TikTok | @aliciamccarvell
