Recently, I saw a Tiktok response video to a man who tried to tell a woman that she was just using body positivity to be fat and to be lazy. This man claimed that when he was young, women didn’t try to “repulse” men by being lazy or fat (for lack of a better term). For background context, this man was probably late 50s to early 60s, and he looked like he weighed more than the girl he was commenting on. I remember thinking “what an asshole” and reflecting back on it, I can see where there’s a miscommunication between his generation and ours. Within Gen Z, there was something that made us all think “who cares?” and we stopped caring about our appearance. Menand wrote “The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant” (Menand 12). I can only imagine that a baby boomer or a millennial described Gen Z this way. Maybe in a way we are “lazy” or “arrogant” but I think rather, we stopped caring how people may see us. We grew up in the aftermath of 9/11 and the aftermath of Columbine school shooting. We learned about 9/11 each year in school and I think we stopped perceiving the world as this amazing place, where we can flourish and we can grow into who we want to be. Our normal is school shootings, racial injustice, gender inequality, etc. We no longer care what others think about us because we understand there are scarier things in the world than if someone doesn’t like the way we dress or the way we present ourselves.
