One Woman's Brilliant Words About Her Body Will Make You Rethink Your Thoughts On Body Image

With the words of her poem, one woman is looking to change the way we all talk about our bodies.

Samantha Peterson's story is all too familiar: one day, she was walking down the street and some man started catcalling to her, describing her body in terms she wouldn't use herself.

Peterson presents a rebuttal to his point of view, cheekily titled "Dead Men Can't Catcall," in the 2014 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, where she seeks to put an end to "fat shaming" and the metaphorical way larger women talk about their bodies.

Society is so uncomfortable with those who don't fit the traditional skinny mold, Peterson says, that we often come up with different ways of talking about "fat" people, to somehow make their forms seem more attractive.

I know bodies like mine can only be talked about in metaphor. My stomach could be the curve of a sand dune, my calves a flexing ocean. You could hook up with a mountain of a body, you could describe it later as legs you climbed all the way up. But a fat body — a dirty sidewalk — is too big to be worthy of the human form. So when I talk about myself I describe a landscape, a skyline, a galaxy of a woman.

Watch the video to see Peterson perform in all her wisdom.

H/T: Huffington Post