Body positivity: a reality check
So, my merciless doctor informed me this week, I put on 19 kilograms in 2020. Since then, when I’ve told anyone my mum’s age, they look at me so pitifully you’d think I’d just announced I’d woken up and found all my organs harvested and sold. Whereas, when I’ve told my 20-something friends, they carefully, conspicuously celebrate it.
The last one actually high-fived me in front of everyone. I wanted to smack her hand away and run screaming into the bathroom to throw up every cheese roll I’ve ever eaten.
Now before you blink, snort, and shout, ‘‘but I thought all you young things were body positivity gurus, running through sunflower fields laughing at how happy every inch of your fleshy pockets make you!’’ Well . . . no.
See, despite field-running appearances, most of us have had guilty, silent doubts about the movement for a long time. And I’ve just realised how fully it’s failed.
It hasn’t failed in a marketing sense. Wokecapitalist savvy brands have dropped their old, emaciated models for more normal-looking bodies to sell us undies, frozen peas and tampons. And yes, it’s nice to see someone like me eating yoghurt while roller-skating, or whatever else young women supposedly do on their periods. But it’s still just a marketing shift. (And the impact is diluted by the fact that for every woke brand, there’s an influencer selling you laxative tea.)
However, in terms of a revolution on our own self-acceptance, I have to admit the movement’s a bust. We’re now happy for other women to be fat. We’re happy to reclaim the word fat. And we’re happy to abstractly celebrate the word fat. We’re just not happy to be fat ourselves.
So if you’re like me, you end up in surreal scenarios where everyone’s congratulating you for your weight gain, while you sit there silently screaming in self-disgust but unable to admit that for fear of letting the running-through-thesunflower-fields side down.
Does that mean that behind all the supercilious yoga selfies, we’re actually just stinking Spandexclad hypocrites? Well, no. The movement has changed our public appreciation for other women’s bodies. My friends are being genuine when they say I look great despite the weight – in the 90s they’d just have told me to live off Diet Coke for a month. So that’s a small win.
It’s just that there remains a huge difference between what’s OK for others and what’s OK for ourselves – and all our infernal, eternal, internal hang-ups and high standards. See when it comes to how we see ourselves, we still have the inherently human ambition to be the best possible version of ourselves. And the definition of your ‘‘best self’’ is completely unchanged. It’s still as skinny as it was for our mums. (Although now we have to have a backside too.)
The silent, subliminal societal message that skinny, classically hot people win the most in life remains completely unchallenged. And with it the aspirational value of skinny.
Now there must be (please God) compelling arguments that skinny really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But body positivity resolutely fails to make them. It just settles for making us kinder towards others, before telling us to go home and sweat and starve ourselves skinnier.
And this week, the full, exhausting, failure of it all hit me. All those #selflove days, selfimprovement podcasts and motivational mindsets . . . and it turns out I still loathe my body just as much as my mum’s generation did. The only difference is they were allowed the one, tiny catharsis of admitting that out loud.