In Japan, there’s a teaching that people have three faces: the first, you show to the world. The second, you show to your close friends and family. And the third, you never show anyone. The last is supposed to be the truest reflection of who one is.
When body positive model Iskra Lawrence stripped down to her underwear on a New York Subway, she was attempting to expose the third face, the one that says, “this is me, I am not ashamed.”
Without a question, the task couldn’t have been easy. Yet, the curvy model had an important reason for doing what she did. The video below, which is part of the High Quality Human Beings and Me You Don’t See #UNMUTED campaign, explains that Iskra sought to empower others by becoming as vulnerable and honest as possible about how she’s felt about her body in the past.
Like most people, Lawrence has felt uncomfortable about her shape, largely due to the fact that society promotes difficult-to-attain standards of beauty. She told the commuters:
“I want to make myself vulnerable today so you can see truly the journey I’ve come on with my own body and how I feel about myself today.”
“I grew up hating what I saw in the mirror because society told me I was not good enough. I thought there was something wrong because I didn’t have a thigh gap. That is the media. That is society making a small standard of beauty when we are so much more than that,” she says in the black and white video.
This isn’t the first time the model and blogger has spoken out about unconditional self-love. She often tackles the topic on her blog. On the subway, she made the same plea for others to mute the internal negativity and talk to themselves respectfully in an effort to fight limited beauty standards.
“This body is not just something to be objectified, to be grabbed, to be looked at,” she says. “This is my vessel. This is my home.”
Though the form of activism took place a while ago, it’s still making rounds on the internet. Watch the moving video below:
What are your thoughts? Please comment below and share this news!
This article (This Woman Stripped On The Subway. The Reason? To Proclaim An Important Message ) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com
