People being ridiculed for their body flaws is something that happens both offline and online. Online is worse due to the fact that it can be viral and reach way more people than in real life. I’m sure you have seen incidences of this uncouth behaviour on the social media landscape and it has led to some of this people deactivating their accounts and worse, seeking psychiatric help.
Social networks have measures in place to combat cyber-bullying of this nature and they let people flag the post/person or report the person and adding tools like block/mute to block the offenders. However, they are some who have decided to embrace their flaws and are using social media to embrace them and this Tumblr account Flawnt It is an example of such.
The Tumblr blog seems to have been opened rather recently. The first post was published last month on the 19th and the creator of Flawnt It revealed herself as Taruri Gatere. The format is simple: A person’s story of their struggles with body image is published complete with pictures in the blog. She says in the post that she wanted to create a space in the world where “it was okay for me to be me.” “I was tired of constantly measuring myself against the worldly standards of beauty and working so hard to fit them,” she says in the post.
She went ahead to say that on this blog, they will post a different story of people who want to share their story. “We will be posting stories of other amazing “Flawnters” who are in various stages of their journeys of self-love and acceptance, all with different flaws,” the post indicates. Obviously, there will be trolls who may want to trash the project and Taruri requests to keep comments on the blog respectful and any disrespect will not be tolerated.
Apart from the creator’s inaugural post on October 19th there has been three other posts where the last story was published and they were all published on Monday. The last post was published last week Monday so today they will publish another, if they are still following the momentum. Check out the Tumblr blog at flawntitlove.tumblr.com.