Lately I’ve noticed a stream of articles about body positivity and body love, all by very skinny girls. While I do understand that skinny people have body issues too, it is entirely different for people who are not skinny. It’s easy to promote body positivity when your body type is still largely celebrated as the ideal type in marketing and media.
Body positivity comes on two different levels: individually, and communally. If you have the right mindset, it is not particularly difficult to say that everyone should love their bodies. But loving your own body is an entirely different task.
Personally, I don’t find it difficult to accept and appreciate other body types, because I try to find beauty in everyone. Body hair, acne, scars, stretch marks, and other physical features are more difficult for many to accept because it is engrained in our society to want to get rid of anything deemed “imperfect” on ourselves. Body positivity goes beyond just weight.
It’s also difficult to push past barriers and misconceptions about people who don’t fit traditional beauty standards (which is just about everyone, by the way). We naturally judge the people around us, and while part of it is an evolutionary trait to determine if a person is a friend or enemy, part of it comes from human culture. Human culture drives us to be judgmental in ways that go beyond friend or foe. Judgements go down to emotional and mental levels, but rarely physical harm.
What I’m saying is that it’s tough for me to be treated as a symbol of body positivity. I’m told that if I’m wearing something cute or take a full-body selfie that I am somehow emulating the values in body positivity. But, I’m just existing. I’m just existing as an overweight person, I’m not actively trying to be body positive. That’s because body positivity implies that there is body negativity to begin with.
By treating me as a symbol, you're just pushing body negativity. This is because you’re implying that for me to love myself and my body is something unusual, and unexpected, because with my body type it’s “normal” that I would have low self-esteem. I’m not saying I don’t, because I have my trying times and I don’t always feel great about myself. Very few people do (and they’re called narcissists).
Fat people are not here for you to project your values of body positivity onto. If you truly want to live the values, then you don’t need to make comments like “you’re being very body positive today”. If you’re giving an overweight person a compliment, just give them one like you would any other person. Incorporating their weight or another feature of their body into it almost makes it not a compliment, in my opinion, because then you’re just highlighting something that likely wasn’t even on their mind.
Even though it seems like it’s popular to be curvy or “thick” right now, it’s still such a major part of our society to make skinny (and white) the most popular thing to be. It’s still popular to be thin and tall and to have flawless skin. Even though we know most of those body standards are unattainable, it’s still so common in society, with dieting fads and jeans that promote “tummy control”. We treat bigger bodies as if they should be smaller, whether its their actual body or just the clothing they wear. We want to cover up bigger bodies, and it really isn’t anything other than bias. We’re so used to seeing skinny (Eurocentric) bodies celebrated that we don’t often want to celebrate any other types.
The experience for thin people and overweight people is very different. Now, I’m coming from the perspective of a woman, but there are definitely unattainable standards for men as well. Everybody has likely heard negative comments about their bodies on either sides of the spectrum. “You should eat a burger”, “maybe you should try going to the gym”, “you know, stripes don’t look good on bigger women”, or other variations of these are common. Just a few months ago I went into Eddie Bauer, and a women working there kept adjusting a (horrible) skirt I was wearing and said I needed to “hide my problem areas”. Next door over in Maurice’s, that didn’t happen. My body wasn’t the problem, the clothing was.
Another thing I’ve dealt with is the stereotypes associated with being overweight. It’s assumed that if you’re overweight, you don’t exercise, and you don’t eat healthy food. Sorry, but those are ridiculous assumptions. I taking boxing classes twice a week and go to the gym four times a week outside of that. I don’t always eat healthy food, (it’s college) but I work with what I can get. Yet, I’m still overweight. I’ve come to accept that I’m not exercising or eating a certain way to lose weight, specifically. I want to feel awake and I want to feel strong. If I make it all about weight loss I’m just focusing on how I can achieve beauty standards set up in our society.
Making it about actual health and strength makes it so that I can try to find beauty in myself. Does it work? Not often, to be quite honest. I’m still bogged down by the idea that if I lost 20 pounds I would be so much more attractive. And you know what? I’m sure I would. But, that’s a continuous goal. Trying to lose weight as quickly as possible is what they want us to do. They want us to shrink, and want big bodies to disappear, or transform into skinny bodies as quickly as possible to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
I do want to lose weight, but it isn’t my end goal, and when I do it, I’ll be doing it for me, and not because I feel pressured to do so. Next time you talk about body positivity, be sure you’re keeping in mind societal pressures, and the internal beliefs we often aren’t aware we hold about people. Loving others is easy, but I believe the hardest thing to do is to love yourself. It’s easy for us to pick out the good in others that are close to us, and easy to tell them to love themselves since we care for them so much. But on the personal level, it’s not easy, and no matter how many times someone tells you “just love yourself!” it doesn’t quite stick.
