I can promise y’all this post is going to be part rant, part analysis, part grieving process, all realness, and a lot of emotional work.
Today after a lot of sad reflection I’ve started to wonder what the absolute heck is happening to the body positivity movement.
Or maybe I’m just now realizing that it has never truly, wholeheartedly meant to include specific bodies over a certain size all along.
Once I have examined all the privilege I have being in a body with a voice in eating disorder recovery, body pos, and fat acceptance all at once, I realize it’s probably the latter.
I’ve started to realize that body positivity as it stands, really hasn’t told us anything new for a long time. I say this because it’s rooted and it survives and thrives in a big hearty pot of western (white) feminism. It’s worth acknowledging that as a white cis person, there are more than a few ways I benefit from this. But as a fat person, I don’t, and neither does anyone bigger or more brown or differently abled than I am.
Being body positive and fat positive aren’t the same thing.
…In much of the same way that saying you’re not a racist and rejecting white supremacy aren’t the same thing. Just like tolerance and acceptance aren’t the same thing (though in a lot of settings they are problematically and incorrectly conflated). Taking one of these actions does not automatically signify doing the other.
Loving your body and giving people space to love their bodies too does not altogether erase attitudes and inherent policies that are fatphobic. It does not erase or remove thin privilege or the fact that people do indeed benefit from being smaller on an economic, social, and systemic basis.
And if you’re a body positive influencer who is in an “acceptably fat” body, standing next to a fat person for a picture and hoping that your privilege and success will somehow rub off on them and make them be seen isn’t fat positive.
Thinness is a western ideal.
So it makes almost perfect sense that even in “body positivity”, that thin, cis white bodies are at the top of the pyramid.
And maybe they don’t mean to be, but it’s hard to unlearn old habits. Western attitudes colonized, stole and claimed the rest of the world as we know it, and I think that despite the best efforts of western ideals to shift and to (even if only cosmetically) pass themselves off as inclusive, western ideals are failing to hear and respond to the demands for accountability from all the other cultures that differ from us.
Thinness is one of the west’s old habits that continues to die hard.
In some eastern and many African cultures, the larger a body you were in, the more status you received. In western cultures, the converse of the above statement is true. You are assigned more personal value, more social currency, for the less space you take up in the world. Thin is not merely a vain statement of fashion, but a distinction of class, moral character and righteousness. And to pretend that this has not carried itself into body positivity is, for lack of a better word, dense.
Thin members of the body positive community need to start doing better than taking pictures next to or with other fat women and hoping that somehow their thinternet success will rub off on us fat girls and make us worthy of being heard, too. If you want to actually share our space, move away from your privilege, hand over the mic to people with further marginalization than you, and let them speak.
This sort of non-specific callout post includes me, for race/class/ability/gender performance reasons.
I have learned and grown the most from the women of color who claim their bodies as their own and reject notions of body colonization. I have done so, often from the internet sidelines. I don’t deserve awards or accolades for not demanding emotional labor from people who don’t need to give it to me. But I think something can be learned from the very act of not making demands of people who are already deep in the struggle for representation, power, and a slice of this self-love that seemingly does in fact have a size limit.
First and foremost, I listen.
I tell people about the wonderful work being done by people like Sonya Renee Taylor and Dianne Bondy (@diannebondyyoga) and Jessamyn Stanley (@mynameisjessamyn) and Rachel McKibbens (@vulturekiss) and J. Aprileo (@comfyfattravels) and Jes Baker (@themilitantbaker) and Ericka Hart (@ihartericka) and Your Fat Queer Friend (@yrfatfriend and Jude (@merqueenjude) and actresses Joy Nash and Jen Ponton and more and more and more.
I am so grateful to them for my own voice and for love of my body and for taking my body out of a harmful context and putting it back into a context that recognizes its place in a world where there is so much struggle for people who are like me and in some cases even more struggle for people who don’t.
Freedom from restriction is still the dominating recovery narrative.
Though there are a full spectrum of eating disorders that we know about, somehow a lot of the bodies represented in the ED community and those who stake a claim in the body positive movement are ones who have struggled primarily with restriction.
While I am not aiming to detract from these particular stories, I think that again, thin privilege is at play here. Binge eating disorder wasn’t, after all, seen as even being a real eating disorder until only five years ago, despite being the most common one that Americans are faced with symptomatically. There is a lot that comes with unpacking the particulars of this. Let me try:
We as a society value being thin, but only thin enough to keep oneself alive. And for every body, this looks different. Let’s not forget that fat bodies can too be acting out restrictive behavior, despite preconceived notions about how their body became a fat one in the first place.
There is a threshold of “too sick” for our social context just like there’s a threshold for “too fat”.
And those of us with binge eating disorder are often seen as just having no willpower, and are often congratulated for the very same behaviors that doctors and loved ones worry about when they are displayed in anorexia/ARFID patients. This stigmatizing and incorrect assumption is made clear by the fact that it wasn’t even listed in the DSM until 2013. This stigma and the idea that as a fat person, if I restrict and overexercise that I’m just being “conscious” is the exact reason why I was never deemed “worthy” of treatment, despite my absolutely disordered behavior.
In similar scenarios, doctors get to blame binge eaters (whom society also doubly denotes as being virtually all fat people) for an eating disorder for all of medical history until this century.
And because of medical perceptions and the misinterpretation of correlation and causality between weight and health, weight restoration for anorexia patients is often seen as a function of this lack of willpower in people with BED. The same behaviors that anorexia patients are asked to perform to “get well” are those that are vilified and discouraged among fat people and people with binge eating disorder (which, I will repeat, are not mutually exclusive). This in itself is a direct result of fatphobia, on both a social and medical scale.
This brings into play the idea that fat bodies can’t be participants in body positivity without being trolled by the health police.
The comments I have seen online about fat bodies, direct and indirect, expressing false “concern” for a person’s health, which when called out by the victim often reveals itself in its true form; nothing more than fat hate and deeply internalized weight stigma.
For people like me, weight loss or restriction is encouraged; and only bodies that are in danger of dying due to their smallness to begin with are allowed to show signs of weight gain and be applauded for it. Fat bodies are often locked out of body positivity in the name of health, which is why fat acceptance takes a radical extra step to ensure that fat bodies are actively being seen, tolerated, and accepted.
And even still, entertainment and mainstream media often make attempts that fall significantly short of humanizing fat bodies. Take this new show Insatiable for example–one that aims to address binge eating disorder and weight-based bullying by caricaturing it, only to actually play into and further normalize narratives rooted in fat hate.
I wrote a position statement on just the trailer alone, but I’ve heard enough about the first few episodes from a few blogs to know that it does far more harm than good. This show, as I’ve said before, does nothing but allow the dehumanization of fat people to sink further into the western psyche by neutralizing the oppression of larger bodies (not to mention not even having any actual large bodies on the set in the first place).
Before anyone asks, I won’t be giving the show “a chance” because I think it does a lot of damage to girls like me by making us re-live the trauma of growing up with the assumption that we were just fat, lazy, and, well, insatiable.
I’m all about growing through distress tolerance as a way of recovering, but I don’t need yet another media reminder that “just stop eating” is the recovery cure-all I’ve been waiting for for almost 13 years. If I wanted this kind of advice, I would still be interested in diet culture. Not to mention the classism, bad modeling of emotional regulation, and further stereotyping of addiction all in just the first episode. Big yikes.
And somehow none of it manages to create a fat girl who stays that way and claims victory because of, not in spite of, what size she is. There is no body acceptance narrative to even be found. And without the presence of body acceptance, you can forget fat positivity altogether too. Patty is only allowed to claim body positivity once she is thin. And even then, she has so much internalized fatphobia to work through that I’m just like girl, get a sponsor and some steps going to deal with all this fatphobic rage puuuuuuhlease.
Body positivity cannot exist without fat positivity.
I mean, so far, a lot of the time, it has existed without fat positivity across the board. But body positivity without fat positivity, fat acceptance, rejection of white supremacy, rejection of cissexism and heteronormativity and the intentional visibility of differently abled bodies is CRITICAL to creating a body positivity that is truly inclusive and intersectional. Body positivity doesn’t lock out anyone from the experience of personal, community body love through representation, peace, and when it calls for it, recovery.
So we need to do away with all the healthism, the pushing and shoving to get to the top of the pyramid, and dismantle the pyramid altogether.
We also need to agree to stop giving air time to shows, platforms, people, places and things that undercut people’s reality or their emotional health in pursuit of ratings or recognition. Evaluate the message, the message underneath the message, and lean into the impact that certain work has on you. Use that impact to hold creators and spaces and even law makers accountable for the ways that their actions may miss the mark on addressing and challenging weight stigma, or worse, ways that their work may contribute to it.
As a community we also need to note that none of this work exists without body diversity, and no voice deserves more air time than another. But without a doubt, there are certain voices that are getting most of the air time anyway.
Follow accounts, bodies and lives different from your own. Stand alongside people who have different experiences than you and ask them what they need. And when you ask, don’t just wait to respond–listen.
Ask. Listen. Act. Stand back.
Royally Incomplete 