On "Body Positivity," "Body Neutrality," "Body/Fat Acceptance," and the like.

I'm writing this as someone who came to the movement as a "genetically fat" woman in her late 20's with undiagnosed fibromyalgia, central sensitization syndrome, and joint hypermobility, just as the movement was starting in the wake of the 2000's super low rise trend.

I mention my disabilities because that was part of it, originally.

A little history: in the 80's, 90's and 2000's, the prevailing message towards women was that you need to strive for perfection. They'd call it "health," but if health had anything to do with it, people wouldn't have been shitting their brains out with Olestra, they'd be eating beans and rice like a sensible human being.

"Perfection" in the 2000's meant wearing your Seven For All Mankind low rise jeans in a size 00, and if you were using liposuction to get there, you didn't talk about it - the best plastic surgery in my area is still located in a luxury hotel, so you can "go on vacation" and no one needs to know you paid for your body. You were expected to maintain your perfect double-ought body with a 1,000 calorie diet and hour per day home exercise program. You were given no real instruction on how to maintain this other than magazine articles covering the latest fad diet or exercise equipment.

All of a sudden, all of the pro-eating disorder content on the early internet makes sense, huh? If you chose to live like this, it was the perfect recipe for literal insanity - your brain doesn't have enough calories to function. If you chose to reject this, you were ostracized in every way society could find to, from clothing selection, to blatant public bullying. It was not subtle.

This is what the original "Body Positivity" movement was created to address. It wasn't to "glorify fatness," which is how it was portrayed from the outside right from the start - of course, it was a threat to the status quo. It was to break away from this toxic idea of "health" that was keeping us as sick as possible, in body, mind, and spirit. As Naomi Wolf says in The Beauty Myth, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

The original idea was to love the body God and your ancestors gave you. You're bigger than a size 8 if you eat a normal, nutritious diet? You are worthy of love. You're the bony kind of skinny? You are worthy of love. Your body has disabilities that keep it from doing all the things fully abled bodies can do? You are worthy of love. Not to mention, your body is worthy of love, no matter what. Three babies and stress eating have you 70lbs heavier than you were on your wedding day? You are worthy of love. You are worthy of loving yourself, and accepting love from others. You are worthy of looking and feeling your best, no matter what kind of weight you're carrying around.

Now, loving yourself also means taking care of yourself, and taking steps to clean up your diet and get more exercise is an act of love. People declared Lizzo a "body positivity traitor" for losing weight, but what Lizzo did was true Body Positivity, in the original sense. She did it in the healthiest way, for herself. Body Positivity was never about generalized "fat acceptance." It was about accepting that your body does not dictate your happiness, no matter what phase of your life you are in or what your body looks like or can do. Your bony, skinny body is worthy of love, but if you choose to hit the gym and get yourself a peach of an ass, that body is worthy of love, too.

So, what happened?

If we have learned anything from both "body positivity" and also "toxic masculinity" as shorthand terms for complex philosophical concepts, one person should not be naming anything like this. Because the masses will take the pre-labeled concept, reject the concept, and build their own meaning around the shorthand term that was coined for the concept.

We also had a bit of a pendulum swing when it came to public bullying. Remember how I said that blatant public bullying of fat people was common? It was considered "good for their health" to publicly shame any fat person you saw daring to exist in public. In brutal ways. So, you have a good 30 year history of this building up in fat peoples' hearts and souls, and the fat people were expected to sit there and take it silently, because they were unhealthy and a drain on public resources, they had no ground to stand up to fight back on society's eyes. But, now we have "body positivity." And one of the earliest slogans adopted by the plus sized section of the movement was "Real Women Have Curves."

To say the women who had been playing The Game this whole time are now being told that the "perfect body" they had sacrificed EVERYTHING for was now not a "real woman's body" and instead they need to strive for... fat? They're still bitching in the comments about how "bullied" they were by this slogan. And again, it's very obvious why they felt this way. Revolution isn't pretty, folks. It takes addressing cultural trauma. Not fun. Necessary, but not fun.

Then, "body positivity" started focusing almost exclusively on fat bodies, which was the obvious place to start as demonstrated above, but it detracted from the message of "all bodies are worthy," and learned into the criticism of the movement being "fat positivity," which of course brought the inevitable chorus of "you're glorifying obesity!"

The upside? More clothing lines in lower middle class price ranges started offering "expanded sizes" of their usual Juniors, Women's, and Men's lines, usually up to 3X (a US 20-22 in Women's sizing, generally), while the established plus brands like Lane Bryant and Catherine's modernized their designs and expanded their sizes out to 5X or 6X. I went from wearing the absolute worst Christopher Banks thrift store finds as a fat girl fashion protest to being... actually fashionable. This was also about the time that Reddit's r/ABraThatFits started, and the women who had been cramming their H cups into DD's since puberty were finally wearing the right size bra, which was a game changer for a lot of women.

I even immortalized one of those godawful Christopher Banks sweaters in a professional headshot I actually used in the 2010's. I was that known for my fashion protest.

If you've never been in a fat body, or you're reading this as someone who came of age in the 2010's so this is just normal for you, you're probably real confused reading this. Clothes? Yeah, clothes. This was the first time fat bodies had been validated in any way by society. Before this, "plus sized fashion" consisted of paper-thin t-shirts of Tweety Bird and/or the Eiffel Tower, and leggings that we were constantly told were "not pants," but pants in plus sizes were not easy to find and often too expensive... it was purposefully dehumanizing. I understand many of these same brands are quietly removing these expanded sizes right now in the wake of Ozempic.

But the death knell was Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty." The ads were beautiful, and emotional, and oh so corporate. The minute it was taken from the hands of the people and turned into a sell-able commodity, it was done.

So, in 2020, "Body Neutrality" tried to fill the hole left behind in Body Positivity's wake. This is the concept that you don't feel any sort of way about your body. You don't love or hate anything about your body, you simply accept it as the vehicle of your mind and soul and a point of self-expression, a fallible physical organism that is going to change throughout your life, and therefore you accept your body unconditionally as it is in the current moment, whether you plan to make positive changes or have it on lock for the moment.

Not quite as dynamic as "you are worthy of love no matter where you are in your life or what you look like while you're there," but I know a lot of neurodivergent people who related a lot better to the neutrality concept. As someone who had both philosophies going into a spinal cord injury that made rapid and significant permanent changes to my body, where I had to grieve my old body and accept and incorporate the changes the SCI made, Body Positivity was a far more helpful philosophy for me as I was healing my body and spirit. But, again, both philosophies have merit, and can definitely be used interchangeably.

yr Auntie got into a self portraiture collective that utilized the philosophies of Body Neutrality in late 2020, which led to a brief career between spine surgeries as an alternative lingerie model. Photography: Megan Darocha for Mod Bettie, June 2023. HMU: myself. Fun fact: I won this photo shoot by winning the Grand Prize game of Drag Bingo. That's a night of bingo games called by a drag queen, and broken up with drag performances.

I'm seeing what I'm going to call the "Ozempic Freakout" happening online right now, under the dual tags of "Body Positivity" and "Fat Acceptance." And it seems to be a lot of morbidly obese people (one specified 100lbs overweight) digging their heels in about not changing their lifestyles and not losing weight, no matter the cultural trends.

First of all, "my body, my choice" covers this, too. If you don't want to lose weight, you don't have to defend yourself to me. The only person you have to defend yourself to is you, and if you truly believe you're living your best life right now, you do what's best for you, friend. And yes, you are worthy of love as you are right now.

That being said, if at any time you realize that you aren't living your best life, and that you'd be living a lot better if you got to the root cause of why you're carrying extra weight, and that causes you to lose that weight - you are not a "failure" at "fat acceptance." "Fat acceptance" is not a real thing. We're not falling in love with our fat here. We're falling in love with ourselves. And we are so much more than our body fat percentage. The goal of this is to have the healthiest body possible. Not the thinnest, not the fattest, the healthiest. If that looks like a higher body fat percentage for you, that's your body. If that means more muscle, that's your body. As long as you are caring for your body like the precious object deserving of love and care that it is, so it can take you through this life in the easiest way possible.

That is Body Positivity.