While I support everyone on their quest for self love and body acceptance, there’s a lotof room for improvement.
If you go into the body positive hashtag on any social media platform you’ll see thin, white, conventionally attractive people are getting the most attention. It’s pretty ironic that the faces of a movement based on accepting those who don’t meet society’s beauty standards are people who usually meet society’s beauty standards.
This is not to say that these people don’t have body image struggles or that they don’t deserve to love their bodies. Body positivity is for everyone, including thin and conventionally attractive people.
However the people who are hurt the most by body negativity and therefore need body positivity the most are resoundingly invisible. And these people often offer a more radical version of body positivity, which could help us all. Privileged people on body positive Instagrams have inspired a lot of people, and that’s great.
I don’t want them to stop. I’d just like to be seeing a greater variety of people highlighted along with them. Especially fat people who aren’t the conventional attractive shape. Let’s see more apple shapes! At the end of the day we need to bring it back to fat activism and get away from body positivity. I feel like body positivity is the equivalence of saying “all lives matter”
Using Thin Bodies to Represent Unconventional Beauty when thin women point out having cellulite, stomach roles, or any other “undesirable” thing it shouldn’t be seen as radical.
By portraying them as out of the ordinary and revolutionary, we’re actually contributing to the stigma against them.
People with conventionally attractive bodies, like Kim Kardashian and Beyoncé, are portrayed as curvy and larger than average. This perpetuates a terrible idea of what normal is. By using these bodies to represent people who are larger, we’re making average sized and thin people feel large and large people feel invisible.
Since fat people are the group that suffers the most from fat shaming, they should have the biggest role in the body positivity movement.
We need to be reminding everyone that fat is beautiful. Marginalized people are entitled to spaces where they can discuss that experience without catering to hurt feelings. This is especially true because mainstream body positivity was started by of fat feminists and then it was repackaged and sold to the masses.
The commodification of body acceptance, advertising profiting off of the insecurities that they sold us by now selling self-love as the antidote, is the main problem. But it’s especially problematic when advertisers water down fat acceptance to make it more tangible to mainstream audiences and then leave fat people out of its realm altogether, as Zaynab Shahar brilliantly breaks down in this thread.
Basically bring back the fat acceptance movement!!
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