The body positive movement often encourages women to accept and love the curves and roundness of their bodies. It praises this body shape as beautiful and womanly. Just as important to remember, however, is that women of all body shapes and sizes can feel insecure in their appearance and can feel unhealthy pressure to conform — whether the standard they feel they must follow is one of thinness or one of curviness. Yes, curvy bodies are beautiful, womanly and desirable. However, the implication that the thin, curveless female is not a real woman is incredibly damaging as well.
Last week in this column we discussed the ways women are expected to put more effort into their appearance than men are. In direct response to this centuries-old phenomenon, a “body positive” movement has emerged in recent years. This movement emphasizes that women can and should accept their bodies as they are, without feeling pressured to change the way they look. The media’s portrayal of the stick-thin woman without an ounce of cellulose is unrealistic, this movement emphasizes, and is unattainable. Instead, this movement focuses on the bodies of real women whose thighs touch when they stand with their feet together and boobs do need that extra bit of support.
One particular example of the body positive movement in action is Dove commercials, an instance of advertisements fighting harmful norms instead of perpetuating them. In these commercials promoting a positive body image for young girls, the girls are pre-adolescent, curve-less and thin. Women in the advertisements that target post-adolescent women, generally ages twenty to thirty, however, have large bosoms, round thighs and curved stomachs. The overall message conveys to women that they should be thin when they are young. The instant they hit puberty, however, they should be fertile-looking women with lovely curves all over. The problem is, just as most of our bodies do not look like Keira Knightley, most of us don’t develop in that manner either. Women grow and develop at different rates and in many shapes.
Most important is the fact that women of all shapes and sizes can have body image problems. The body positive movement generally depicts a type-casted rounded body, but not a thin or obese body. This can cause a fixation of girls on certain aspects of their body, just like seeing those thin models in magazines does. If large breasts, thick thighs and a rounded rear is the desirable body for a woman to love, what happens to the round all over or stick straight women?
The problem that the body positive movement needs to address isn’t the particular content of our narrow beauty standards (thinness versus curves), but the fact that our standards are so narrow in the first place. Most critically, feminism emphasizes that women should feel no pressure to conform to these standards at all. We cannot just turn this societal pressure to a slightly different, slightly curvier goal: we have to do away with it altogether.
The movement seems to focus on some middle ground full of womanly curves and portrays this to be the natural woman’s body: everything else is unattainable, fake, and not womanly. However, women come in all sizes, and no shape of their body, whether curvey or pudgy or rail-thin, makes them no less of a woman. The body positive movement should show images of women of all shapes and sizes and instead say “Love your curves, you lumps, your bumps — or your lack thereof.”
— Kathleen Connely is a senior in philosophy. Lisa Dicker is a junior in political science. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
