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Elizabeth's avatar

But I think the fat positivity movement can also create a double burden. Instead of genuinely feeling good about themselves, women continue to want to look skinnier and then feel guilty for being unable to “love” their body the way they’re supposed to. It introduces a new way to feel bad about yourself, without getting rid of the original. Women still exercise and diet to lose weight, but aren’t allowed to be honest about the reason — instead they say they’re doing it to “feel good” or, the vaguest reason of all, “for myself.” These reasons might be true some of the time, but if exercise and diet had no effect on body shape whatsoever I think the gyms of the world would have far fewer women looking for “empowerment” and “self-improvement.” I feel very uncomfortable with encouraging women to speak this coded double-talk, to lie about their motives and their real inward thoughts. If anything, that seems a great way to encourage an eating disorder, and to teach them that they should hide their suffering behind a sunny veneer.

Maybe fat positivity is still nascent and it’s a “fake it until you make it” kind of situation. But I sometimes wonder if getting women to stop talking about their obsession with being thin (while they are still obsessed with being thin) is just a means of making others feel more comfortable with an uncomfortable topic, while still ensuring conformity. It’s like when women are asked to be “effortlessly” beautiful: we don’t want to hear about how the sausage is made, so on top of everything else, look happy while you do it.

What these conversations rarely cover is what I personally think is the solution. Blasting the message that “everyone is beautiful” still presumes the most harmful thing of all: that beauty is the most important thing. Beauty is so important, in fact, that we must twist and contort to make sure everyone fits. Because NOT being beautiful, NOT looking good, well that’s a fate so horrible it’s unimaginable.

The really radical message is not that fat is beautiful. It’s that beautiful just isn’t that important. Beauty should be like a wonderful singing voice: lovely if you’ve got it, but your world isn’t over if you’re born tone-deaf. There are other things to be. You can be talented, funny, intelligent, sporty; believe it or not, there’s an entire spectrum of human achievement completely unrelated to weight. And unlike “empowered” female scientists and superheroes on TV, those things don’t have to come ACCOMPANIED by beauty; beauty isn’t the prerequisite before you get to have other human attributes. This is more-or-less how men live, and I think it’s a way of being that is entirely achievable.

Celebrating fat beauty is just another way of saying beauty is still a requirement for female existence, but we’re going to let more women be people now. But what if we just didn’t give the word “beauty” that power? What if we just lived without that voice in our heads constantly assessing, positively or negatively, revising, trying to think what we “should” think, trying to see what we “should” see. What if it just didn’t matter? What if women could be something other than beautiful?

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Sara's avatar

As the mother of a Gen Z teen girl and 21 year old young man (both white), I suspect that their equivalent is also about skin care. The culture of Glossier and all of the other lite-makeup skin wellness products is strong. They all come delivered in minimalist packages, in white tubes or bottles with "clean" sans-serif designs, promoted through Instagram and Tik-tok (which are the Sassy and Seventeen for this demo). They are too old to hear me when I tell them that blemishes are not reflections of their character or worth. I wonder how this will play out when they are 40 or 50.

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