Why Body Positivity Isn’t Enough

by Arielle Juliette. Approx. 6 minute read.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about body positivity, and the pros and cons of the movement. Feeling positively about our bodies, believing they are deserving of care and kindness and celebration, that we deserve to take up space and be seen is a radical act in a society where only a small range of bodies are represented in media and upheld as “good”. It takes a lot of courage to internalize that message, and it usually takes a LOT of unlearning.

For many of us, getting to this point can relieve a lot of shame, pain, and feelings of unworthiness, and free us to live the best lives we can right now, not when we look like what society says we need to look like to be happy. And it makes sense how so many of us got here- just Google “happy person” and you’ll see what I mean. Nearly every single image is of a thin, conventionally attractive person and THAT is what we are told happiness looks like. We’re sold this myth that this type of body is a prerequisite in nearly every advertisement we’re subjected to, every TV show, every movie, etc.

Before we continue, I want to define some terms so we’re all on the same page. Fatphobia- also known as anti-fatness, weight stigma, weight bias, and weight-based discrimination- can be defined as such:

“At its most basic level, it’s consistent, systemic oppression against larger-bodied people, which makes it difficult or impossible to find clothes and spaces that fit, healthcare that’s effective and non-discriminatory, equal access to employment, and other basic human rights that we all deserve.

As Janet Tomiyama, one of the leading weight-stigma researchers, put it in 2014, weight stigma is “the social devaluation and denigration of people perceived to carry excess weight, which leads to prejudice, negative stereotyping, and discrimination toward those people” (Tomiyama 2014; CW for weight-stigmatizing language).

Researcher Rebecca Pearl further defines weight stigma as “a broad range of experiences from minor, everyday instances of differential treatment, or ‘microaggressions’ (e.g., being treated with less respect than others in subtle ways), to being treated unjustly in specific contexts (e.g., being denied employment)” (Pearl 2018; CW for weight-stigmatizing language).

In other words, weight stigma can be incredibly subtle or huge and overt.” -Christy Harrison, RD, “What Is Weight Stigma?”

People who don’t experience anti-fatness are those who have thin privilege. As Aubrey Gordon, AKA YrFatFriend puts it,

“Thin privilege is complicated bc diet culture demands that none of us feel thin enough. Thinness is positioned as a perfect ideal, something that’s perpetually out of reach, even for straight size people. Very few of us identify with thinness.

But whether you “feel thin” or not, if you can get on an airplane without worrying about losing your seat, you’ve got thin privilege. If doctors take your symptoms seriously and investigate them, rather than brushing you off, telling you to come back when you’ve lost a hundred pounds (or more), you’ve got thin privilege. If you can walk into nearly any store in a mall and buy clothing in your size, you’ve got thin privilege. And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

It might not feel like a prize, because really, it’s not. It’s the baseline that everyone should have. But a lot of us just don’t.” -YrFatFriend

A good way to understand thin privilege and understand the scale of body oppression is Virgie Tovar’s description of intrapersonal fatphobia, interpersonal fatphobia, and institutionalized fatphobia.

“It's important to recognize that fatphobia – like other forms of bigotry — does, in fact, affect every person. We are all harmed by systems of inequality and hierarchy ideologies. Fatphobia creates a reality in which you are either experiencing the social stigma of being fat or you are living in perpetual fear of becoming someone who experiences the social stigma of being fat while also still gaining a sense of safety that you aren’t yet that person. It's a total lose-lose situation, girl.

It is also important to recognize that people are affected differently depending on their body size, shape, color, ability, and gender.

In order to understand the effects of fatphobia in a nuanced, three-dimensional way, it is helpful to look at fatphobia as occurring on three distinct levels:

The first level is intrapersonal.

The intrapersonal level is about how fatphobia affects how someone sees themselves. Many people are hit very hard on this level. The pain of intrapersonal fatphobia is very real. Our culture teaches us to feel like we are never good enough, and that we can use weight control as a mechanism to accept blame for anything that might be going wrong – whether it’s our fault or not. Women in particular are taught to blame ourselves for whatever might be going wrong in our lives (even though we know sexism creates a lot of those problems!). I find that the intrapersonal level is where people share most common ground. Oftentimes, regardless of body size or shape, people are getting hit really hard on the intrapersonal level.

An example of intrapersonal fatphobia is when someone cannot focus on a meaningful moment in their lives (like sex or a wedding or an important birthday) because their fatphobic thoughts are so loud that all they can think of is how this moment would be better if they were more weight compliant.

The next level is interpersonal.

The interpersonal level is about how other individuals treat and see you. This is where experiences can begin to diverge between fat people and thin people. Maybe a thin person has a lot of really intense negative thoughts about themselves (internalized fatphobia), but other people do not see their body as unusual, particularly threatening, or worthy of commentary. Further, people might not treat them as a less viable romantic partner or job prospect. Often, if you are fat, you have experienced personal rejection because of body size. Fat people have also learned to expect that other people are going to comment on our bodies — or we have at least experienced it enough that even if it doesn't happen that frequently, we are often dealing with the stress of expecting it to happen all the time (this is called hypervigilance).

An example of interpersonal fatphobia is when someone makes a negative comment about your body size or how you're eating.

The final level is institutional.

The institutional level of fatphobia has to do with access to meaningful participation in society, which includes things like whether or not you feel a sense of belonging when you’re out in the world, access to quality medical care, and your ability to see yourself in the culture at large (through things like movies, literature, etc.). It also means access to things like loving relationships and a general sense that the culture is invested in your participation and existence.

I can’t speak for all fat people (or all women of color), but I know that I personally don’t feel like my culture (San Francisco, particularly) is invested in my participation or my existence. In fact, when I leave my house, I feel like there is this invisible metaphorical cursor looming over my head that seeks to click and drag me into the trash bin on America’s desktop.

An example of institutional fatphobia is when a fat person goes to the doctor seeking treatment for depression and leaves with a prescription to lose weight rather than a prescription for anti-depressants.

Each of these levels is not a stand-alone entity. There are ways that each informs the other, and there are some parts of each that overlap with the others. For instance, access to meaningful loving relationships is both an interpersonal and an institutional level thing. The people who make up a relationship and the decisions about specific individual relationships exist in the domain of the interpersonal. Whereas the systems and cultural beliefs that go into constructing someone as worthy or interesting or smart (or unworthy, uninteresting, or less intelligent) make up the institutional piece.”

To circle back to body positivity, the movement- when not being coopted by corporations who are heavily invested in making you believe your body is a problem to be fixed in a plethora of ways- can do a good job of addressing intrapersonal fatphobia, the feelings that damn near all of us experience. And I do believe that’s worthwhile, because those thoughts can be all-consuming and keep us from our power and our voice. It can also help, to a degree, to bolster us against interpersonal fatphobia to give us resilience to brush off the rude opinions of others who don’t actually stand in our way.

However, telling people who experience institutionalized fatphobia to love their bodies is a tall order when society is set up to push those with the largest bodies to the margins. Even those who do have thin privilege have to fight an uphill battle to maintain positive feelings about their bodies, when the culture we swim in tells us we need to change in so many different ways at different stages of life. Until we are ALL free from the body hierarchy, none of us can really be free at all. And those with the least privilege, those in the largest bodies, are those who need the most focus. All bodies deserve respect, love, access to high quality medical care, equal employment opportunities, and the option of participating in society. This is rising tide that will lift all of us up!

As this quotation from “Self-Love Without Social Change Ain’t It” states,

“Self-love is not sustainable without social change. It cannot exist without challenging the dominant society to uproot its beliefs about certain bodies and help create a society where fat people can thrive.

It’s essential to treat fatphobia as a social justice issue. Treating self-love as the solution to navigating the impact of social, political, and economic fatphobia is not helpful.”

If you’re looking to dive deeper into the world of body liberation, I list a ton of great people and pages to follow, books to read, and podcasts to listen to at the end of this article from our blog. There’s lots of ways to get involved, which I plan to write about in next month’s blog! Will you join me on a journey to take action to create a just world for all bodies?

-Arielle Juliette

If you have any questions about this article, or a question/topic for the next blog post you'd like to see covered, please don't hesitate to write me and let me know!