You’ve probably heard of the concept of body positivity. It’s kind of hard to escape in our current social media landscape. You’ve seen the hashtags, the candid post with minimalist lighting where the poster encourages us to embrace our every flaw, just as they have embraced their own. Body positivity means as the name implies: loving every inch, curve and blemish about your body.
The concept came largely out of the fat acceptance movement of the mid-2010s, and even though it has been adopted and co-opted by many other groups and for many other purposes (and we’ll get to that), the core idea is creating space for people who have been largely left out of narrow definitions of beauty. In the body positivity movement, there is space for big bodies, disabled bodies, dark-skinned bodies, trans bodies…by definition, none of this is a bad thing. It’s all about positivity, spreading love, proclaiming to the world, “I love my body, despite everything that you told me was wrong with it!”.
Or, that’s what it’s supposed to be about. But let’s go back to that candid post with the minimalist lighting, the one at the top of the #bodyposi hashtag, what did that body look like? Was the poster thin and speaking to us from a nicely decorated home with nice lighting, hunched over just enough to create the illusions of rolls in her belly? Did the poster truly represent the kind of body that has largely been marginalized in our beauty-obsessed, perfection-driven culture? Or does she instead symbolize the way even well-meaning movements are commodified and appropriated by those who have largely benefitted from the standards set by that very culture?
Especially when body positivity BECAME mainstream, mainly through its popularity as a topic of discussion on social media. As any activist will tell you, once a movement goes up, it’s only a matter of time before it’s original intentions are watered down to make it more palatable and digestible for the general public. This has its advantages, obviously. We’ve seen more diverse bodies being lifted up as beautiful on our runways, on our television screens, and on the covers of magazines, and many women have started embracing the parts of themselves that they once may have viewed as ugly.
That being said, there’s no escaping the way a formerly radical movement has been commodified by brands. When we see these diverse bodies on the runway or in magazines, we can celebrate how far we’ve come while also keeping in mind that those bodies are still being used to sell us something, whether it’s clothes or makeup or an unattainable lifestyle. Furthermore, we can acknowledge how our standards of beauty have been expanded, while also being real about the ways in which it hasn’t. Like, we’re seeing more plus-sized bodies being considered beautiful, but how many of those plus-sized bodies fit a certain mould: smaller at the waist, with a more traditionally “sexy” body proportion, rather than a body that has more rolls, or less of an ass.
Body positivity also hinges on the idea that you have to see your body in a light that not everybody is able to or even wants to see their bodies in. The slogans always read “all bodies are beautiful”, and that’s fine and good, but not everyone is going to believe that about themselves, and it can cause a lot of self-loathing if someone is not able to meet that standard, even if only for themselves. Instead of focusing on beauty, which is a concept that is tied to fickle and ever-changing and often damaging standards that some people are just never really going to reach, maybe we can move towards a more “body neutral” view.
Body neutrality doesn’t require that you see yourself as worthy of being because it is beautiful, but rather that you can have a complex relationship with your body, and still be worthy of love and care just because everybody is worthy of love and care. Body neutrality is less “my body is beautiful” and more “my body keeps me alive, and helps me move around and that’s pretty cool”. It’s a more attainable and sustainable model of living with a body. Body positivity is like a constant upward climb towards the peak of self-love mountain. You may not ever reach the top, and the journey can be damaging in more ways than one. Body neutrality is like deciding to take up yoga. You can take breaks, you can go as fast or as slow as you want, you can ditch the practice altogether for the day and crawl into bed, and try again another day. It requires patience and practice.
Your relationship with your body is allowed to be complex. You can have bad days. Some days you won’t love your body and think it’s perfect and gorgeous, and that’s OK. Your body doesn’t have to be any of those things. It can just be a body.
