Is the Body Positivity Movement truly positive?
Thanks to the Body Positivity Movement, the concept of beauty no longer needs to conform to media’s photo-shopped standards. Jamie Leigh Curtis famously posed au natural and explained what a difference hair, makeup, and lighting can make- not to mention plastic surgery.
So when a movement came along and said, “Hey wait a minute! There are a lot of beautiful people in this world that don’t necessarily conform to the size 2–4 standards,” people rejoiced.
With the help of social media people, rather than ad agencies, now have the ability to shape public perceptions and that has resulted in many important movements, not the least of which is body positivity.
Thanks to these powerful and sexy, full figured pioneers many major brands have taken notice and are starting to incorporate more realistic sizes into their ad campaigns. This is good for business and it’s also good for society, a win-win scenario.
But things are not always as they seem. A recent case in point within the movement was ‘Thicc Strip’, a body positivity strip show whose mission states, ‘Our aim is to give marginalized people the space and platform they deserve. To those who are frequently told “NO” based on weight, age, gender sexuality and skin color, we are here to say YES. We want you, we love you, and we embrace you.’
Sounds so, well… positive, but according to Aria, one of the participants who performed at the inaugural event held on Dec 14th, 2018, it wasn’t exactly an empowering cake walk, she said, “It was not easy, AT ALL. The whole entire experience was completely different than I expected, it was a lot of fighting for my own personal boundaries, my own personal thoughts- my comfort-ability that I thought I already had. Like I really honestly thought I was more comfortable in my own skin than I actually truly was when it came down to it.”
“There were a lot of things that I fought, like through-out the whole entire process. I said if this was going to be like a strip club I absolutely do not want pictures or videos taken by the patrons, only by professionals- that got fought. I said I didn’t want to use my real name- that got fought. Every single time that I asked a question, instead of saying “I don’t have the answer to that,” it was- I was coming at them.”
Situations like this reveal the darker side of labeling things positive and then assuming that it is so. Objectively, we can all agree that body positivity is a good thing for society but if it is being done in a manner that is exploitative rather than being positive, it is opportunistic and idealistic at best.
Another darker side of the movement is that some brands, while attempting to appear inclusive in ad campaigns, often don’t even carry plus size clothes.
John Labiento, an educator, pug enthusiast and proud volunteer at PugNationLA.org said, “I would like to see dudes of my size not having to go to a particular store, because stores don’t really carry your size, there’s really only one or two stores you can actually shop at and then your wardrobe just starts to look like everybody else crossing the street on their lunch hour.”
So the body positivity movement, while heading in the right direction, still has a ways to go to address the needs of the real people, which it claims to serve.
