In 2004, Dove launched a worldwide Real Beauty campaign featuring an image of women posing in their underwear, honing different shapes and colours. The ad stained my memory – vividly I recall exiting a London tube station and spotting the poster. Today, there’s nothing titillating or gob-smacking about seeing plus-size women posing next to thin. Is the body positivity movement helping or hindering?
Appearance over wellbeing
Lisa Kaplin writing for Mind Body Green, discusses the issue with “highlighting appearance” over the benefits of health and fitness. Rather than empowering women to nurture their bodies and shift tension from looks to intelligence and skill, the body positivity movement fixates purely on physical. Corporations use to encourage customer insecurity by making people not feel good enough. Now, they’re saying – you should feel bad for not feeling good enough.
Confidence guilt replaces body goal dreams. In addition to still noticing flaws, we also have to feel guilty for noticing them in the first place. All around, women regardless of size, push self-love and supposed self-care motivation. Influencers who post 24/7 pics of their abs popping and then upload one selfie showing stomach rolls, signify advertisement tactics. From enticing you to adopt their healthy lifestyles to then ‘inspiring’ you to accept how you look.
It’s creating mixed-messages and avoiding the root cause of low self-esteem. Fast-food and sugary snacks dominate shopping spots and lunchtime meals – unless you’re willing to spend a fortune on salad; women debatably act as their own worst critics – many actively gossip about celebrity bodies. A piece on Vox notes how we’re not addressing the cause of women’s confidence problems. Despite being “socially constructed” and not inherent. Body positivity simply chunks a variety of females together who preach body happiness.
Aren’t we all insecure?
What about men and transgender and actual ‘fitness addicts’? I’ve met flawless models who openly complain about disliking their appearance. Everyone needs body positivity. While working out and eating well makes you feel better, it’s not an instant ticket to self-esteem. I’ve spent the past few years going up and down scales like a yo-yo. I’ve seen my abs defined and as these photos show, playing peek-a-boo. Taking care of myself has tremendously helped and moved me away from calorie counting hunger, but collectively, I’m not content.
Why do we promote obesity yet hide anorexia? Catwalk models flaunting ribs and bones instantly get shunned and shamed; plus-size model Tess Holliday made the cover of Cosmopolitan. In my time as a makeup artist, I realised females across the world face the same dilemma. They try to like their outer selves; their eyes use to light up at me – the makeup artist who can transform them. They failingly struggle, because the bombardment on beauty bears too much strain.
We do need more women of colour in the media and more sizes in fashion. But we also require education stronger than powerful quotes and women admitting their self-love struggles. Corporations won’t attempt to reach these deeper concerns, which is why their body positivity movement seems false. It’s merely a marketing scheme producing assurance doubt in women – an extra thing to stress over.
What the body positivity movement needs
The movement requires positivity around wellness in a non-obsessive way. Less bodies displayed and extra talk on how health helps mentality and energy. Imagine a day, where two women converse on diet without mentioning a rigid regime or mentioning weight-loss. It’s essential to present a mixture of people unique in their features. Stunning women with thin lips and big noses and thin brows. Such a collection, you’re unable to become obsessed on one portrayal – currently the Kardashian cinched waist, big hip ideal.
Body positivity should seek better awareness of handling jealousy and comparisons. So, women can post themselves freely however they prefer, not worrying whether they’ll be criticised. Since forming this piece, I’ve concluded I have to re-evaluate the advice I give. I’m also less inspired by the guidance I read.
How do you feel about the body positivity movement?
Thank you for writing this Laura! I really needed to read this in order to understand what i‘m Going through atm. I‘m trying so hard to finally reach my goal but I don’t even know why. It‘s really getting annoying to see fashion brands etc come up with their body positivity campaigns. It‘s not that I don’t like it, it‘s that they have to highlight it even though it‘s supposed to be a normal thing. I wish we could all accept that we are different. I enjoyed reading this!
Hope you are well Laura xx
Thank you Alex! Sometimes I think it’s much easier to set goals and put pressure on ourselves than it is to embrace how we look. We’re conditioned to constantly seek improvement.
I think the underlining message of body positivity is great, but I don’t believe campaigners do enough to address root causes of low self-esteem or insecurity. And it’s turning into a marketing ploy rather than a solution. xx
Beautiful and great post Laura !!
The positive body image movement is a dangerous fascination with women’s appearance and not women’s over all well-being.
Our joy, our strength and our personal happiness will not and should not be tied to our appearance. It must be tied to our comfort in our own skin, our health, our accomplishments and our relationships.
We have to drop the body love talk, the diet talk, the “cleanse” talk and even the “you are beautiful inside and out” talk.
Our self confidence can be our anchor — but only if it emerged from celebrating something about ourselves other than our bodies .
Thank you Jyolik! I think it’s important to celebrate our bodies and be proud of them. but they are only one element of us. And the body positive movement seems to forget that.
We do have so much about ourselves to celebrate and be proud of. I think what we’re missing is balance. The scale leans too much towards physical beauty based on society ideals.
Like you, I find this this body positive movement false. Not sure. Perhaps, after so many years of seeing anorexic models and actresses gracing magazine covers it is hard for me to accept this new approach.
So much has to be done to educate the public about self love. The advertising industry could use some traning itself. Don’t know if too much of this embracing all body shape and sizes is a good thing either. Promoting obesity can’t be a good thing. A delicate balance must be found. As with so many other problerms in life, education must be the way to eventually change things.
It does seem really false and I feel like brands only use the body positive movement to attract media attention or look diverse. If they really cared about showing a range of models, they would have done so earlier.
I feel the message today is eat whatever you want and live however you want and then be amazing by celebrating it. Which on the surface is great, but when obesity is rising and becoming a huge issue, it’s quite an unhealthy message. The fact is, there are unhealthy people in all different sizes and what we should be doing, is encouraging wellbeing and not making people feel bad for not loving themselves or putting all attention on how we look. We’re just obssessed with ‘beauty’ right now.
Thank you for taking the time to read. Always love knowing what you have to say 🙂
Your reply nailed it. Message should be about health not embracing shape or size.
Always a pleasure leaving my thoughts here.
Have a gorgeous day.
These pictures are gorge girl! I am all for the body positivity movement when it’s done right, but recently it has started to feel like just another marketing tactic with pretty Insta quotes generic posts as opposed to actually tackling the root causes xx
Thank you! It feels like some brands are trying too hard to look diverse all of a sudden, when they’ve spent years not caring. And with so many quotes and positive messages around, nothing really stands out anymore. Like you say, that don’t tackle the root causes. Thank you for commenting xx
Loved reading this! You look amazing in these photos. we need more blogs posted about being body positive x
Thank you Chloe! I think it’s a great issue or subject to blog about 🙂 x