Body Positivity Will Not Save Us
A short essay on body image and the online relationship we have with it.
Let me paint you a scenario:
You’re sitting alone in your room after you’ve done your skincare routine. Looking in the mirror, you hold a moment of appreciation for yourself: you are beautiful and deserving of praise for said beauty. You then decide to take a selfie to commemorate this moment because why would you not want to recall the rare time you feel at home in yourself. But it doesn’t seem to be working. None of the angles fit your face, and your hair looks off, your face lopsided, your cheeks are too chubby and so on. That voice that appreciated your face is now replaced with one that begs the question of how you don’t fit whatever beauty standard you’ve been brought up in. That those men you follow online will secretly judge you and not find you attractive even if before this very moment you have never wanted them to. And this cycle continues to repeat itself day in and out, never giving you a moment of peace to simply just appreciate your existence.
When you peer into online spaces such as Instagram, you will be told that the way to deal with this is to celebrate yourself and stop worrying about your perceived flaws. That if you simply say #bodyposi the worries will fade, and suddenly you will be treated better in the world. But I think that it is a naive mindset to view bodies and our relationship to bodies, because in all honesty, being human is critical. Therefore, I like to believe that in between this lies a soft spot, wherein you accept that perhaps you will always feel both negatively and positively about your looks and that in itself is normal. It is human to simply be okay with your body’s existence and the fact you’re alive at this moment.
It’s what I view as body neutrality.
For a long time, I believed that Body Positivity as a movement was explicitly unique to the cultural timeframe we reside in. You know the online activism of Tumblr and Instagram where fancy infographics reign supreme and where, for genuine reasons or not, more and more people online are attempting to engage in some aspect of change in how they view body image.
But once I began researching this essay specifically, I very quickly discovered that the first wave of the Body Positivity movement stems as far back as the Victorian era. Still, for the sake of relevancy, we’ll begin with the NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance). Founded by Fat activist Steve Post in 1969, the NAAFA is a nonprofit organisation set out with the aims to “Work to eliminate discrimination based on body size and provide fat people with the tools for self-empowerment through advocacy, public education, and support.”
To summarise, their work centres around what many Fat Activists refer to as ‘Fat Liberation, a world wherein plus-sized people won’t be mistreated based on the way they look because of fatness. This is very different to what we now know body positivity to be, as rarely is there any mention of liberation, unfairness or even systematic mistreatment. For the most part, it is a movement of aesthetics.
At the age of 22, I don’t believe I hold the same views of myself I did at 16; I know my body will never be that way again and that perhaps what I saw then as my most grotesque self was instead deep-rooted insecurities reinforced through popular culture. Because it certainly didn’t help to watch films like White Chicks as a pre-teen and witness the changing room scene or to watch Mean Girls and have Cady tell the audience that the worst thing they could do to Regina was to make her gain weight. I don’t believe I have ever had a moment in my life where my body was my own, where I wasn’t made to feel ashamed and disgusted by the way I looked. This is somewhat ironic considering the latest wave of the body positivity movement began around my late teens. You would expect that it would’ve made me feel more comfortable. Still, in reality, growing around the online Body Positivity movement’s apex, I always felt somewhat outside of it, not because I didn’t relate. I did because I have always been plus-sized, but I could never figure out why this specific ideal didn’t make me feel more comfortable with myself. Suddenly I was being told that all of that self-hatred did not need to exist and that I had to accept myself. I had to feel that my body was perfect no matter what.
Not only that, but I felt like I was being pandered to and advertised to by fashion brands and influencers who wanted to make a name for themselves by creating spaces for fat people. Because honestly, when we break down body positivity and its impact on the mainstream wave of feminism, we can see that it is a capitalist tool more than anything else. This sounds somewhat ironic seeing as how in the 90s-00s the promotion of thinness which was often associated with the upper class of celebrity was used as a way to integrate a false consciousness into the working class (Masri, 2013) wherein being thin can be seen as being more put together and ‘elegant’. To have something so opposite also engages in these same marketing ploys is saddening. I am aware that it wasn’t created for that, but it would be absurd of us to ignore how quickly it has become a marketing ploy to force people to assume that they must at all times view their body in a positive light. To feel valid in their fat bodies, they must sexualise themselves and make their bodies or auras attractive to the male gaze.
As argued by Levy (2012), there truly is no part of the body that is safe from the gaze of advertisers [and men] who are looking to further existing insecurities as well as wholly create new ones. While it may not seem as if Body Positivity is causing new insecurities, we must unpack the stress that being positive 24/7 has on us. For myself, I struggle with several mental illnesses and so being positive for that often can never occur because it simply is not the way I will ever feel about myself. And the guilt for a long while ate away at me because I thought that I should be more positive, not knowing that I simply did not have to buy into this.
In a weird sense of irony, the body positivity trend has also come about around the same time as the uptick in skincare influencers. They base their entire existence on making teenagers feel bad for not having poreless skin or that if someone has wrinkles that it is the end of their life as they know it. And when we look at the trend of people on Twitter and Tiktok assuming that women in their early 30s must look like sawdust or simply ageing backwards, it all feeds into this narrative that our bodies are still harmful.
I don’t believe this is a new or groundbreaking essay I am penning because body neutrality has long been something promoted by online activists as a way to decenter not only consumerism within our relationships with ourselves but also the unreliability of our self-image due to social conditioning through popular culture. Still, it’s important I attempt to creative a conversation about it as someone who is directly impacted by this.
Further along in her essay, Levy states the following, and it has stuck with me for the past month; I hope it sticks with you:
In addition to economic struggles, a movement that will truly empower and liberate women should include fighting for better health and sex education that empowers young girls, and challenging the abusive advertising that attempts to ingrain a sense of intrinsic female/body shame. Just imagine for a second what it could be like to live in a world where no one is told they are “wrong” or “ugly” solely for the selfish desires of corporations to sell more products. Instead, society could be based on the power, beauty and importance of everyone.
If you want to see more takes about Body Neutrality from others take a look at the replies to this tweet.
