Aesthetic violence

Put forth by Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (1991), this is a type of systemic violence that particularly affects women, who are under more social pressure to be young, beautiful and slim, which pushes them to make their bodies fit the normative model and into the clothes that go along with it. This form of violence begins as early as childhood in many schools (as bullying) and is expressed in forms of micro-violence that are difficult to manage because they belong to the order of intimacy and are expressed in such normalized ways that they are often neither noticed nor questioned. According to UNESCO data, physical appearance is one of the top reasons for bullying among peers, and workplace discrimination also occurs on the basis of size (sizeism). There is a current trend towards reclaiming the existence and beauty of non-normative bodies (body positivism) and the reappropriation of the right to one’s own body.