Unfortunately, body shaming goes on daily in today’s culture. It can be targeted to heavy people, thin ones, old ones, young ones, big-breasted, small-breasted, and so forth. Body shaming truly hurts when women do it to other women, especially when the victim is a teenager.
Such an experience recently unfolded inside in a Dillard’s Towne East Mall Wichita, Kansas store dressing room. The event has since exploded across the internet going viral, as the young teen Lexi Harris and her mom decided to publicly tell their story. Since that time, more than 50,000 people have shared this story to take a stance against the bullying and body-shaming of young women.
Like any other teen girl excited about an upcoming formal dance, 13-year-old Lexi went shopping with her mother, Megan Naramore Harris to find the perfect dress. They were at Dillard’s sorting through many featured gowns, when Lexi’s mom came across a lovely red dress. She asked he daughter to try it on, and Lexi did, but thought the gorgeous gown made her look too mature for her age. Still, she didn’t mind her mom snapping a photo of her in the red dress.
After that moment, the story gets ugly. According to Lexi’s mom, a Dillard saleswoman working the floor approached them and gave her unsolicited opinion, allegedly saying that the teen would need to wear SPANX if she were going to choose that dress.
Lexi’s mom was mortified and quickly asked her daughter to go and change out of the dress. She then scolded the saleswoman, and both mom and daughter left the store.
Lexi’s mom wrote an open letter about the body shaming incident and posted it to her Facebook page, wanting to share the experience with others.
“Dear sales lady at Dillard’s Towne East Mall, This is my teenage daughter who wanted to try on dresses for an upcoming formal. I found this dress and asked her to try it on. She told me this was not her style, but tried it on for me.
“I told her how grown up it made her look and she smiled, and told me this made her look too old but still, she let me take a picture. Right after that, you entered and told my daughter she needed to wear Spanx if she wanted to wear this dress. I told my daughter to go change. I told you that she was just fine without Spanx. You continued to argue with me. We left soon after. I wish I had told you how many girls suffer from poor self-image and telling them they need something to make them perfect can be very damaging. Girls of all ages, shapes and sizes are perfect because that is how God made them.
“If they feel good in a dress, that is all that should matter. My daughter is tall, she swims, runs, dances and does yoga. She’s fit. She’s beautiful. She did not need you telling her that she is not perfect. I hope this is shared and gets back to you so that you should not say something like that to a girl ever again. You never know what negative or positive thoughts they are thinking about themselves.
Sincerely, Mother of a beautiful girl”
To learn more about this story, watch the video below from KAKE.com: