Body Positivity or Body Neutrality?
TW: Mention of EDs
The body-positive movement causes raging debates in Facebook comment sections and sends middle-aged white ladies into a total meltdown. The notion that people might feel confident and happy at any size triggers a deep rage in people who live and die to support diet culture.
There has been a transition from including a ‘curvy’ woman who is probably a size 12 (and a Glassons size 16) on the front cover of magazines to including bodies of all sizes, not just ones that still manage to fall into conventional beauty standards. There’s debate on whether acknowledging that all bodies are beautiful encourages an unhealthy lifestyle - as if billboards covered in models with completely unattainable bodies don't.
Being body positive is not exclusive to those who are plus size, it’s also about challenging the representation that is often centred around small, Eurocentric, and able-bodied people. The body positive movement has made leaps and bounds, especially in the fashion industry. In 2017, Vogue was essentially bragging about their inclusion and wokeness by including Ashley Graham - a plus-size model - on their American Vogue cover. Granted, they included her sandwiched between other Victoria’s Secret supermodels like Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid. Regardless, big brands have forced progress in their representation and caused controversy by encouraging people to love their bodies.
The term ‘body positive’ encourages people to love their bodies at any size or shape. In 2015, a new term was popularised by author Annie Poirier - ‘body neutrality’. Body neutrality focuses less on physical appearance, and instead on respecting your body as it is, even if you have the desire to change it. Annie Poirier, an eating disorder specialist, defined body neutrality as “prioritising the body’s function and what it can do rather than its appearance”.
Not focussing on appearance and instead working to make your body feel good has been praised by a lot of people for taking the focus off of weight and instead listening to your body and respecting it to give it what it needs. Body neutrality is growing, and appears to be a less divisive movement. The body positive movement has an important role to play in addressing the harmful stereotypes that plus-sized people are faced with, dismantling the idea that being thin = being healthy. However, some people don’t want to be seen as body positive icons simply for just existing in larger bodies.
Drew Afualo is known for tearing men to shreds in her TikTok duets and recently tweeted about her dislike for the body positivity movement, saying, “I have never said I was body positive. I don’t believe in body positivity, that movement was co-opted by YT feminism & excludes BIPOC/Trans/Disabled women/femme presenting people. I believe in body neutrality.”
A lot of commenters on Drew’s tweet mentioned that during eating disorder recovery, viewing their bodies neutrally rather than trying to love their body helped them get healthy again.
Sam* is in recovery from an eating disorder that saw her hospitalised multiple times. Being able to view her body in a middle-of-the-road way, where she wasn’t telling herself it was bad, while also not outwardly loving it, meant that she was able to get healthy again by acknowledging that she didn’t feel entirely comfortable with how she looked but understood that her appearance didn’t need to be the driving force for how she treated herself.
“When I stopped expecting to love my body completely, it got a lot easier to treat it well. Respecting it for keeping me alive and allowing me to do the things I love, meant I focused less on what I thought I should look like, and instead on how I felt,” Sam said.
It is true that a lot of the people who use body positivity as a part of their influencer presence still fall inside conventional beauty standards and are unlikely to have faced fatphobia because of this. Identifying people that still have conventionally attractive bodies as ‘plus size’ creates more harm than good by telling people that if they exist in a larger body, then they are only attractive if they are larger in a socially acceptable way.
Identifying with either body positivity or body neutrality is always going to be up to the person. The idea of body neutrality is to remove the need to determine someone’s worth and value based purely on what they look like. Body neutrality is not apathy, but instead the hope that we can start to accept our bodies as they are, without worrying about if we are attractive to others or not.
The body positivity movement feels like a good start to people accepting themselves and being able to see themselves represented in the same way thin people have constantly seen themselves represented. Normalising bodies looking different is a valuable step in helping dismantle the patriarchal system that tells us we should aim to look a certain way. Body neutrality goes a step further by saying it really shouldn’t matter.
*Name change