I am tired of hearing that body positivity promotes unhealthy bodies and lifestyles
Body positivity by Pexels
Body Positivity by Pexels
What is body positivity, and what does it want to reach?
With the term "body positivity," we define a movement that fights for accepting and respecting bodies that do not conform to beauty standards. Many times, we wrongly assume that body positivity only deals with bodies that are deemed to be fat, but it goes much beyond that: it also wants to represent non-able bodies and overall all those bodies that, in different ways, do not match contemporary beauty standards.
As an intersectional feminist, I consider body positivity one of my perspective's core values. However, it is pretty evident that we're far from achieving that goal in media representation. One of the most notorious phenomena in opposition to body positivity is feeling legitimised to insult overweight people - also called fat shaming. Researching the topic, more celebrities than I would have imagined have been accused of fat-phobia, from Khloe Kardashian claiming that people are "fat" because they don't work hard enough for their image, to Blake Lively accused of publicly fat-shaming the reporter Kjersti Flaa. And the list would go on and on.
Although most of them end up apologising, it is not really possible to cancel the harm that specific claims inflict on people with non-conforming bodies, and these declarations only fueled the hate machine of fatphobia. It becomes clear that people feel legitimised to express this hatred towards non-conforming bodies and that body positivity is still very much needed.
Does body positivity "romanticise obesity"?
The common counterargument is that "body positivity promotes obesity". Plus-size models and entertainers are constantly bullied and shamed online when their only crime is accepting their own bodies and inviting other people to do the same. The pictures of the plus size model Ashley Graham were retwitted with comments such as "The fat positivity movement is getting out of hand." Needless to say, the model was just happily existing in these pictures.
How come these people have no problems with the romanticisation of smoking, especially in certain cultures (as a southern European, I definitely was influenced by that a lot)? Or they do not mind jamming dance songs that talk about doing drugs (#BratSummer). Many things are romanticised without necessarily being "healthy". An example could be seen in how, in the late 1990s, the term "heroin chic" was used to define very skinny models: a term that does not convey much interest in personal health. I do not want to fall into the fallacy of body shaming people because they are skinny: the body shape of other people is not something I either want to comment on or judge. There is clearly a double standard, however, noticeable by how "fat bodies" have been emarginated from the fashion scene since relatively recently.
For years, many young girls tortured themselves by undergoing extreme diets, depriving themselves of the joy of enjoying food and wearing uncomfortable shapewear, hoping to reach these strict beauty standards.
People do not care about "health issues"; they just hate non-conforming bodies.
The truth is that people feel uncomfortable when dealing with non-conforming bodies. It is something that I lived in my personal experience: my weight, due to mental health issues, fluctuated a lot, having moments in which I could be considered overweight. The respect people paid me changed significantly, probably because they were less attracted to me.
This ancestral resentment could be due to different types of influences coming from all sorts of media – for people who, like me, grew up in the early 2000s, it was difficult to see characters in movies, TV shows, videogames or music videos who deviated from the stereotypical idea of "beautiful" (among these parameters being skinny, able-bodied, cisgender). We were socialised to despise what did not fit in.
This is the reason why we live in a profoundly ableist society; this is why transgender people are only somewhat closer to being "accepted" by the heteronormative society (yikes) when they "pass". Not even to mention how many traits considered beautiful are rooted in colonial ideas of attractiveness (such as straight hair, small nose, and blue/green eyes).
Pretty privilege is deeply routed in racist, homophobic and ableist beliefs that, as a society, we are still far from having unpacked. As Nietzche's famous quote goes: "If you kill a cockroach, you are a hero; if you kill a butterfly, you are bad. Morality has aesthetic standards". In our perception, we feel legitimised to hate people vocal in challenging the banal dichotomy "conventionally pretty= good". This tendency is defined in psychology as the Halo effect.
We don't give a shit about the health status of people that we've been thought to find unattractive or even monstrous. It takes a long time to deconstruct values instilled in us, which might mean facing our biases and problematic assumptions. Although, as a society, in the last couple of decades, there have been massive positive changes, it is still uncomfortable and difficult for us to question and challenge a problematic concept of "beauty".
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