There is one word that best describes the language of the body positive movement since the 2010s: thin. Like many of the social campaigns popular ten years ago, the movement originally began in the mid-20th century as a radical fat acceptance campaign, but in its modern iteration sold the comparatively simple message that women felt bad about how they looked because of how they were perceived by society – and that this shouldn’t be the case. To resolve this issue, this movement hung itself upon a series of messages which purported to champion all bodies and divert the male gaze, empowering women to see themselves, no matter how they looked, as attractive and “worthy”. “Do what makes you feel good”; “all bodies are beautiful”; “my size is not my worth”; “my health is not reflected in my weight”; “society can’t tell me what healthy looks like”. We were told these vague, platitudinal statements were subversive rallying cries, signals of a shifting culture that was beginning to accept new, gentler standards of beauty in the mainstream.
The accessibility of this language meant it could be understood and adopted by millions. It was fundamentally flexible and spread quickly in quotable slogans online. These messages appeared on brightly coloured tote bags in brush-lettered fonts, in lightweight Instagram infographics “teaching” us that stretch marks were okay and became the basis of ad campaigns which featured women of different sizes (almost always white, light-skinned and able-bodied women, who were most of the time also extremely beautiful). At the time, this movement did receive some feminist blowback for the shallowness of its messaging, particularly the brands which capitalised on its popularity to sell lotion and skincare. But while few argued that diet culture was being solved by these statements, many sincerely thought the popularity of these ideas was moving us rapidly in the right direction – that thanks to this movement people were having their minds changed and were more accepting of non-thin bodies.
In the last few years, though, the movement began to be seriously critiqued as we noticed that, despite its proclaimed success, body positivity hadn’t shifted culture radically – or really at all. Many noted how diffuse this language was, arguing that a better effort would be placed on promoting ideas like body neutrality or the devaluation of beauty (reducing the social cachet of thinness and beauty, and rendering them fortunate quirks like having the natural ability to sing or being good at a particular sport). Ultimately, the problem became clear that, by watering down complex concepts around our complex relationship to body image, it never seriously contended with any of them – while, at the same time, making it easy for anyone to utilise these bland messages to push their own aims.
Now, in 2024, we have reached the logical conclusion of this movement: a point where this blurry language can be used to promote the exact beauty standards it set out to disrupt. We’ve heard about the revival of “heroin chic” since 2022 and have had thinly veiled fearmongering around health issues as a vehicle to promote weight loss since the pandemic (be it gut health or high cortisol levels). But this year these factors coalesced and compounded to the point where the language and teachings of the body positive movement were fully adopted by the diet industry. We have seen a sharp shift where companies, influencers and random individuals are advocating women “practise self care”, “prioritise their health and mental wellbeing” and “redefine beauty” by making their bodies fit the narrow standard’s society has set for them.
You can see this in the endless number of ways we have now normalised speaking about women’s bodies. The boom in Ozempic among young women of a healthy weight is being framed as a feminist choice, promoted as an “empowering” way to escape narrow beauty standards (by finding an easier way to meet them). This year has been marked by a litany of social media trends obsessed with ageing and beauty, “celebrating” a middle-aged female celebrity’s plastic surgery and tweakments as well as their rapid weight loss, suggesting this fascination is actually the culture championing older women’s beauty (alongside the self-loathing Gen-Z TikTok trend of under-25s asking strangers to guess how old they are, bemoaning early signs of ageing). Even when trying to discuss serious issues like eating disorders and frighteningly low weights of certain celebrities, thousands of fans have invoked “body shaming” to prevent any type of productive discussion under the banner of body positivity’s core resolve: we should never talk about how another person looks.
All this together has made space for an insidious, inescapable argument making its way back into the mainstream, where many are now encouraging women to prioritise skinniness above all else, flipping body positivity language back on itself by using its self-care underpinnings to rebrand thinness as a health issue. “I get so much more joy from looking lean, feeling lean, waking up in the morning and loving what I see in the mirror,” one TikTok user said in a viral post of this ilk, which has been viewed more than 7 million times. “You have to prioritise yourself, how you look, how you feel, over food. I have one life in this body, so why would I not want to treat it the best I can and look the best I can?… Looks fade, but so does your health – so take care of you.”
What we’ve had confirmed isn’t just that the male gaze has remained effectively as dominant as ever, but that there is a core portion of the population who happily benefit from this hierarchy, who only bent to social pressure during the height of the body positivity movement to feign a desire to subvert it. And while patriarchy is to blame for the standards, men aren’t the only ones enforcing them. You only need to spend a few minutes in these spaces on Instagram and TikTok to discover it’s not just Andrew Tate-type figures pushing this message, but millions of normal women telling each other to do more to try to be traditionally beautiful – doing so by parroting the exact language that, ten years ago, they would have used to argue for the opposite.
This isn’t a view of the whole picture. There will be – as there always have been – a not insubstantial minority of women still pushing back against diet culture and arguing for a radical deconstruction of the beauty industry. There will be others pushing back in quieter ways by simply (and thoughtfully) disengaging with these standards. It’s also true that the women championing thinness as body positivity suffer from the same social pressures which make it difficult to untangle our lives from the desire to be skinny. But we cannot feign ignorance that we are helpless against the thinness obsession – or that the answer to these challenges is total capitulation to the system that oppresses us and spinning this, somehow, as empowerment.
2024 marked our official exit from the body positivity movement, an ultimately brief blip of a decade, with little suggestion that we’ll make a serious return. But there is hope in learning that this movement was never our salvation. In place of the saccharine, we deserve the resolute, the radical and the specific that can produce something lasting.
[See also: Self Esteem: “I’ve been maturing my disgust at societal norms”]
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