From what food we eat to who we date, we are told to be self-restrained in all areas of our lives.

Don’t eat the cake, you’ll get fat.
Don’t date the girl, you’ll go to hell.

Women are shamed into shrinking themselves, going to excessive lengths to reduce every aspect of their body, their personality, their life. This is because, as a society, we are taught that it’s somehow ‘wrong’ to take up space.

Consider giants, for example. Representing the human body, but magnified, a giant is essentially evil cosplaying human. Their portrayal in folklore highlights how people are taught to fear themselves — or, more specifically, their size.

How to make a giant: Take the human body and enlarge it to the point of being monstrous, and voila, you have created the next villain.

Ever wondered why the beauty industry and the market for diet products is so large? It’s precisely because of the fear that is instilled in us all regarding our size.

By creating problem areas for us to feel insecure about, they can sell us the proposed cure…

If we’re not too much, we’re not enough. Why can’t we ever just be ‘right?’

Women who flaunt their sexuality are ‘sluts’, ‘whores’, and ‘slags’. Women who don’t are ‘prudish’ and ‘frigid’.

If you’re a virgin, ‘what are you waiting for?’ If you’re not, ‘why didn’t you save yourself?’

It’s an extremely immoral marketing strategy, albeit an, unfortunately, all too successful one…

Alas, a lie of happiness packaged up in pretty packaging is still a lie.

As people are shamed for not having the ‘right’ body type, so too are people shamed for not dating the ‘right’ gender. 

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind.

The quote above is used, not because homosexuality is an ‘abomination’ to the natural order, as the bible would have us believe, but because it violates the neat categorisation of men from women, something which homophobes just can’t fathom.

Being so backwards-thinking in their ways, homophobes can’t fathom the dynamics of same-sex relationships.

Who is the man, and who is the woman? Where does that differentiation come in? How can a same-sex couple have children?

A lesson in biology might help if their confusion was genuine, but the reality is that they aren’t confused; they’re just angry. They’re angry that people would dare to go against the norms of society in such an overt way. And maybe they’re jealous, too. They would never admit it, of course, it might shrink that colossal ego of theirs, but maybe, just maybe, they’re jealous that a relationship can actually be founded on love, real love (who would’ve thought it!), not just a need to procreate.

The fact is that whether it be homophobia, fatphobia, transphobia, or xenophobia, all forms of oppression have five unassuming letters in common… p-h-o-b-i-a.

Phobia (noun): An extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.

What are the bigots scared of?

In a system that places money and capitalism on a pedestal above all else, a happy society is a dangerous one, for a happy person doesn’t feel the need to spend money to feel better. This is why all the things we do in life that bring us happiness are, in some way or another, deemed to be ‘wrong.’

But… It doesn’t have to be this way. When the oppressor retains their power by exuding as much hate as possible, we can all work together to erode tyranny by the power which they cannot know — the power of love.

Eating what you want to eat because you love food, not eating what you think you should eat because some shitty commercial you saw on TV last night told you chocolate makes you fat.

Loving who you want to love because you have found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, not loving who you think you should love because you can still remember your mum telling you, when you were ten, that her ‘only wish for you in life is to meet a nice man like your dad who will look after you.’

Spending your days doing work that you want to do, not doing work that you think you should do because a career advisor told you in high school that ‘creative careers don’t pay.’

Stripping back the layers to realise that you don’t need to keep buying into someone else’s narrow-minded vision of a ‘perfect’ world, because, as some of us have learned the hard way, perfection doesn’t exist.

You, however, do, and this is your life, so do with it as you please.