Boys and Being Self-Conscious as Depicted in a YouTube Comment

I read this comment on YouTube today by a guy who was obviously very self-conscious about himself. He asked something like "I'm overweight, but I've been told that I have a nice face and I'm funny and stuff, but girls don't like me because of my weight. How do I get girls to like me otherwise? How do I lose weight? blah blah something else I can't remember" (I can't actually find the comment, even though I could have sworn I commented back to him, and I even tried to find the comment by going through videos I watched today, so this is not exact wording. I had to paraphrase. However, the actual comment was pretty sweet. )

This comment struck me as odd for 3 reasons:

1. This guy was actually being sincere and self-conscious (at least I think so)
2. Body shaming is a thing among both genders
3. The comment back to him

So most of the time, we think of being self-conscious is a womanly trait. We think of women looking at their bodies and being hyper-aware of every dimple and every freckle anywhere on their bodies. We are told during school "girls are very self-conscious, especially during puberty," which, I mean, is mostly true. But we are practically berated to believe that women are the only ones who are self-conscious about their bodies. However, guys feel self-conscious about all the things we feel self-conscious about as well, but they are told to swallow it up because it's not the manly thing to do to feel feelings about your body. I mean, man you're practically a woman if you look in the mirror and feel bad about your stomach or your thighs. Man up, be a man about the situation and stop looking at your body. Man. However, I think that mentality is kind of ridiculous. It's manly not to think about feelings, so in the rare case that they do, he's sensitive to us womanfolk, and that self-consciousness makes us feel tingly inside like he's just shared some deep secret. But if he's too self-conscious, he's unattractive because he's considered a pussy by today's standards, and who wants to date a self-conscious pussy? So when a guy reaches out on a social media site actually being sincere about his feelings of being self-conscious, it's surprising because we're not used to it. We're only used to teenage girls whining about how ugly they are because it's what they're taught to do, and men are taught to bottle it up.
Then there was the body shaming part of it. It isn't just women being the victims of body shaming, men can be subject to it too. Body shaming, for those of you who don't know, is the putting down of one particular body type. For a long time, bigger, curvier women were the victims of this. In the media, stick figure thin was considered the height of beauty for a long time, and if you had curves, you were considered fat. Now it seems the pendulum has swung, and now women that are stick thin are getting flack for being so skinny, it's ugly.We most often see body shaming in women's world. However, it can happen to men as well. Women judge men. They have to be 6'2. They have to have nice abs. They have to have a good butt. We see men in magazines, and we want to get a piece of that. We shame other men in the process of that. We don't want bigger men, or men with beards, or men with long hair, we want what we see in magazines (with the exceptions of course. I'm not here to cause conflict, just stating what I see). Men are body shamed as equally as women, and it wasn't until I saw this comment that I actually understood that men feel as though they can't get a mate unless their like the models in the magazines as well.
And then there was one comment left by a woman, I'm guessing, It was something about eating clean and exercising and losing weight, then women will want you, something. I find eating clean and exercising a good method to lose weight, but the sole purpose of losing weight shouldn't be to find a mate. It should be for you to feel good about yourself (call me cheesy, but whatever). I thought to myself, that if this were a girl writing this comment there would be people on their keyboards saying that she didn't need to lose weight for any man to come into her life. So that's what I did (or at least I thought I did, it seems my comment has gotten lost in cyberspace). I commented something like "personality is key, and I know people who like bigger guys blah blah blah." I mean, we have to support the guys like people support the girls, right?!
So this comment actually got to me, and I don't really know why. I just wrote an entire blogpost about how on this one comment from this one guy I don't even know. Is this what writers do? Wow, great conclusion.

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