"Body positivity"

[quickkimchi]

Is anyone else very sceptical about 'body positivity'? As far as I can see the reason many women hate their bodies is because we're abused and controlled for being female, and then blamed for the abuse.

Not controvertial that you'd want to make peace with your feelings about your body btw, I understand why women are eager to put down that burden. But in the face of oppression, 'positivity' seems irrelevant and shifts responsibility back to women.

I also resent the way it centres women's value in beauty and sexuality. There seem to be a lot of parallels with sex positivity. Hardly revolutionary.

Dave don't apologise for being cringy, we all have our own journey and sometimes cliches apply.
I'm absolutely not interested in vilifying individual women who want to engage in a thoughtful life, deal with their trauma and feel freer as a result. I do feel there is a sinister undercurrent esp in SM, where so many people are eager to jump through hoops to show their worthiness. There is the side where people support each other to heal, then there's the rest of it, all the manipulative doling out of tasks to prove you're in the club. As pp said upthread this anxious display wastes a lot of energy.

The term body positivity is asinine because if there is a problem with self esteem/acceptance the root of it lies in the psyche. Focusing on your outward appearance will not address the cause. Wether spending time effort and energy slapping on make up, sexy lingerie or whatever the shape you happen to have will only paper over the cracks.

You might say it’s fucking easy for me to say that being a man, and actually I think you would be right to do so. Notwithstanding a few outliers there isn’t quite the same connection between a man’s sense of self and his appearance.

So why the disparity? I theorise that it starts pretty early in that if I compare and contrast the messages I was exposed to growing up one of the crucial messages was self actualisation. What a lot of women were exposed to wasn’t a message of be yourself, and rather little girls and women are told what to be seemingly from all directions. There is very little space devoted to really exploring who you are and more so how you perform any given “role”.

I know the term “boys will be boys” comes up a lot especially in relation to men crossing boundaries, but it also has some relevance here in that boys are allowed to break the rules and to fail in a way girls simply aren’t.

"I also resent the way it centres women's value in beauty and sexuality. There seem to be a lot of parallels with sex positivity. Hardly revolutionary."

It very much is - it is basically "everything is fantastic", everything being a choice you make (to sell your body, to perform fetishes, to pretend anal is great and you are a prude if you speak ill of it or whatever else) and in this case it is your body.

We should not bully people for their bodies. But we shouldn't encourage them either, and some bodies, anorexic as much as obese, are simply bad and we should not normalize them and encourage them and pretend there is nothing wrong with them.

Absolutely MrGH.

My 'journey' was also linked to children, breastfeeding and mild disability. I worked out physical strength is far more important than anything else.

I do strongly believe that if breastfeeding was more visible in society and a part of SRE in terms of human reproduction, the current worsening of the war on breasts (that now they must be removed and this is body positivity too, as anything goes) wouldn't be what it is.

Tanerélle Stephens made a great point about this recently by not wearing any form of breast lifting attire to an award ceremony.

Longer boobs allow more sleep with a baby. Sleep is all I currently care about!

I'd really recommend watching the whole 2 episodes of 'Who are you calling fat?' which is referred to above - there is a 'body positivity coach' on there who makes a living out of telling people who are fatter than she is that they are beautiful and worthy as they are, and that health is a social construct
There's a load of weird buzz words that cluster together on instagram - body positivity, intuitive eating, Health at every size (#haes) - it seems to just encourage larger people to stay large despite any potential risks to their health. They all seem to be younger people trying to put their heads in the sand regarding what their excessive fat will do to their health when they are older. One of the women who are also fat positive in that programme is a prostitute for men who are into fat women - if that's not clear about the real winners of 'body positivity' I don't know what is - it is for the satisfaction of men above the health of women.
Previous posters are right, we should be celebrating what our bodies can do and not what they look like. I've been a lot more active in the last few years, and whilst I am a bit more aesthetically shapely, my favourite outcomes are: I can run upstairs without getting out of breath, I can balance on one leg, I can sit cross-legged and I can still carry my 11 year old 💪🏻- I can literally do more with my body. Now that's body positivity, not plastering on makeup and posing naked for the male gaze.

FWIW body positivity doesn't "encourage" different body types, what it does is say that people still deserve respect, access to clothes etc no matter how fat/thin they are.

There are things to criticise about it, definitely, but the common accusation that it "glorifies obesity" is wrong. I've never ever seen any activists saying others should gain weight, but there is this strange idea that fat women having a public profile and daring to say they are happy with themselves and not on a diet is seen as encouraging others to pile on weight.

I don't really have anything intelligent to say but have really enjoyed reading this.

I think I would say that both body positivity and body neutrality don't sound like a bad idea as a concept but the fact that it's really about an aesthetic is the issue when you dig deeper. This is juxtaposed by women, in particular, not being "allowed" to celebrate some of the ordinary, extraordinary things their bodies can do. Breastfeeding, giving birth, carrying toddlers and babies, reading, lacework, embroidery. In fact (coincidentally ) it seems like the only bodily achievements, outside of appearance, that can be openly celebrated are in stereotypically male fields - running, weightlifting, orgasming.

There are exceptions to this, like singing and dancing, but unfortunately (see Susan Boyle) these have been commercialised to the point they're about appearances, too.

I do strongly believe that if breastfeeding was more visible in society and a part of SRE in terms of human reproduction, the current worsening of the war on breasts (that now they must be removed and this is body positivity too, as anything goes) wouldn't be what it is.

Breasts are an excellent example of society obsessing over what bodies look like rather than what they do.

Breasts are amazing. They provide infants with all their nutritional needs. They adjust the specifics of the milk to match ages and stages, even when feeding two infants of different ages, they adjust for thirst and hunger, for the time of day. They do this whether they are large or small. They are incredible.

That is what we should be hearing about breasts, not yours are too big, too small, too saggy, don't fit with this year's fashions.

Another area where we could do with concentrating on what our amazing bodies are capable of is diet. The human digestive system is a marvel. We can thrive on a wide variety of foods which has allowed us to expand our range across all continents bar Antarctica, living in rainforests, deserts, savannahs, high plateaus, even the edge of ice sheets.

Compare the range of humans to the other great apes. The contrast is startling. Yet many people have incredibly difficult relationships with food. Worrying constantly about eating the 'right' thing. Entire industries are built around insecurity around diet. No one ever says relax, your body is amazing, your diet is good enough.

I went into this a little on the Yoga thred a few weeks ago. As a teenager I was totally depressed about my body and not living up to the standards that men (then and in that country) liked. I wanted to be white and blonde and slim, which was what all the men ran after in a country where the people were 95% black and brown. Yes, I wanted desperately to be white, so as to get a good man. Instead I got fat and and had an eating disorder (basically stuffing my face) and so got fatter and (in my view, and theirs) even more unattractive. And all I wanted was to be loved.

I discovered that men don't care if you are fattish, if they want to screw you and screw you over. And if you were in love (I mostly was: it was love I yearned for, not sex) with them that could be devastating. Basically thinking that if a man desired me he loved me, which we all know is the game many of them play, because they see our weakness, that longing for love, and take what they can get. It's the big deception that many of us fell for and still fall for.

As I said in that thread, discoving yoga changed all that; I got slim in a few months but more important was a change in attitude, in that I no longer identified with my body, in thinking, because my body is fat and ugly (in my view) that's what I am, and so I can never be loved (by men).
It was no longer "this (body) is me!" but "this (body) is my home, I live in it". I became more objective towards it, and so I could deal with it by eating healthy foods, exercise (yoga) etc. And so it took care of itself, and my weight sorted itself out.

I don't think that constantly telling obese people, oh, but you're beautiful, just as you are!!!! is helpful. They KNOW it's not true. They still hate their bodies, even when they repeat it day and night and try to pretend they "love themselves" just as they are. It's not love at all imo.

For me it was an inner growth, in which I could kind of dissassociate with the body and at the same time look after it and keep it healthy, while seeking something in myself, in my mind, that WAS and IS healthy and beautiful. Cultivating an attitude of knowing and disovering who I really was: someone, a person, who inhabited this body and who could feel good within it, no matter what it looked like and no matter if men were attracted to it or not.

I've kept up that attitude all through the decades, which is why I found it much easier to accept the body's ageing.

I see older women complainaing and worrying all the time about no longer being "sexy" and how to keep themselves "sexy" well into their 70's and 80's. I think there's a basic problem with the word "sexy". It has become a synonym for beautiful, whereas it basically means being sexually attractive. I don't think that is helpful for our self esteem when we are ageing.

I don't think that constantly telling obese people, oh, but you're beautiful, just as you are!!!! is helpful.

The point here, I think, is that 'beautiful' is utterly irrelevant.

It's not the be all and end all to be beautiful or not. It's important to live healthily, look after our bodies, appreciate them, take care of them as best we can.

Judging the body (and by extension ourself) as desirable or not is a problem - but the solution isn't (imho) to decide that yes, my body is desirable/acceptable and I will prove it by standing in the street in my pants and allow strangers to judge me. The solution is to say - fuck desirable, am I healthy? Comfortable? Do I enjoy living in my body, or could I do more exercise/less exercise/rest more/eat differently.

I'm not judging those women, btw, I hope they got something from the exercise. But I think it's a bit of an odd way to go about self-acceptance and wonder if the programme makers pushed them into it in the name of TV.

I've had a disordered relationship with food since I was a teenager - laxatives, bulimia, weight loss pills etc. I'm in my 40s now and have mainly learned to manage these issues with watching what I eat with a focus on health rather than weight, and with exercise. I have occasional slip ups where I binge and purge, always triggered by stress rather than putting on weight (never actually been overweight). Food is treated as a comfort rather than something to nourish the body, and this coupled with a media trying to sell women products based on the latest trend in physical perfection, as well as judgemental comments by others is a lethal combination for triggering disordered eating. I see body positivity tackles the latter issue, making it socially unacceptable to criticize fat bodies, but not the others. Instead of tackling emotional eating it celebrates it. The influencer I mentioned upthread who is also recovered from an eating disorder has lots of photos of her eating high fat and sugar foods for example. I understand this is to give the finger to those who will rudely comment on what a woman is eating, which I support, but it's not tackling the underlying emotional distress which leads to disordered eating. It's surely no coincidence this influencer is also a trans rights activist, going with the idea that self-acceptance means rejecting scientific measures of health and wellbeing and opting for the consumption of products (whether it be food, plus size clothing or cosmetic procedures and harmful medication) as a path to happiness. Similarly, instead of turning away from a hypersexualised media and showing representations of women being active rather than passive objects, body positivity plays exactly the same game, but tries to widen the 'representation' of those being objectified. Lots of little girls dream of being models and it seems like this brand of body positivity is all about appealing to that little girl fantasy of 'hey, I can be a model too!', still buying into the dream but changing its parameters rather than having any analysis of the ways in which that dream isn't good for women or finding a different value system. This is why it's popular, it plays to emotions not critical thinking. BTW I'm sure the influencer I mentioned is a lovely person with good intentions, just very young and trying to deal with her eating disorder in a positive way, but her activism is literally a bunch of feel-good quotes with zero depth. It's clear she still suffers from depression and struggles to value herself beyond how she looks.

... plus I have to say that beyond how my body looks, I have so much more energy, strength and better mental health when eating healthily and exercising. I know we're all different but the difference to my wellbeing is massive, I know that if I was overweight I would feel weaker, out of breath going up stairs, tired and more consistently in a low mood than when I'm taking care of myself. I'm prone to depression so am probably sensitive to the effects of increased endorphins from exercise etc, but find it really difficult to believe that fat activists have bodies that would react in such a different way to mine.

What would we do if we knew no one was watching us?

"Similarly, instead of turning away from a hypersexualised media and showing representations of women being active rather than passive objects, body positivity plays exactly the same game, but tries to widen the 'representation' of those being objectified."

This is sort of what I'm getting at, though really it's the 'showing representations of women' that is persistently used against us, no matter how much we think we're changing the narrative to suit our own 'positive' ends. We can't just move the lens; scrutiny and surveilence are the problem. 'Celebration' of physical attributes is part of the problem. The concept of fitness, body types, 'healthy eating' etc are all used to control us.

By all means enjoy your own breastfeeding experiences but once it's on the table for public 'celebration' I think it sticks to the same unhelpful narrative as the rest of it. Sexually objectifying breasts is just the other side of the same coin. It also allows focus on our reproductive value, which is often turned against us.

Part of what I find infuriating is the subtext that, like children who need a medal for participating, we need constant assessment to reset our natural default position. If left to our own devices we might hate ourselves too much, love ourselves too much or, idk, maybe just be ordinary people.