Six Observations on the Body Positivity Movement by a Liberal Father with Daughters

I’ll admit I was slow to the take on this one. I really only started noticing this a year or two ago – this trend in social media and advertising to highlight “non-traditional beauty” and emphasize “body positivity.” But once I started noticing it, I noticed it everywhere, and the movement only seems to be gaining steam. Just today, I read an article entitled “24 Women Bare Their Scars To Reveal The Beauty In Imperfections,” which featured a cover photo of a young, remarkably fit woman pulling up a skimpy knit tank top, as though undressing, revealing two long scars on her abdomen. She was wearing snug-fitting jeans, which nonetheless seemed to be falling off her buttocks, and she looked, well, amazing, which of course was the whole point. 

Another one, also from today, with the headline “Senior Calendar Girls Are Both Bold and Beautiful,” featured a gallery of senior citizen women posing in various states of undress, their privates concealed by umbrellas, beach balls, flowers, and bath bubbles, among other things; their poses mimicking traditional “calendar girl” photos, some in overtly sexualized ways. It was a fun piece, and the grandmas looked as though they were having a blast.

Last week, it was “Incredibly Sexy Photos of Veterans Shatter All Kinds of Stereotypes,” featuring a small gallery of square-jawed and well-chiseled military vets, mostly nude, revealing prosthetic and missing limbs. Again, they looked truly impressive.

Others I’ve seen rolling across my feed recently have featured pregnant women, women who recently gave birth, so-called “plus size” models, women with mastectomies, women with alopecia (baldness), women over 50, and women with stretch marks, among others (mostly featuring women).

In addition to the rising number of blogs and articles on the subject (the Huffington Post has been particularly active in this arena as of late), there are now widespread advertising campaigns built around the notion of body positivity. Dove’s “Campaign For Real Beauty” and subsequent “Movement For Self-Esteem” have generated a good deal of attention and discussion around women’s body image issues. Special K’s more recent “Fight Fat Talk” campaign, like Dove’s, features women with more natural and attainable features, while also targeting body image negativity. Last year, “aeerie,” American Eagle’s sister store for lingerie, launched its “aerie Real” campaign, featuring models in photos that have not been retouched. It’s tagline reads, “the real you is sexy.”  Other companies have followed suit, with surely more to come.

Most of these articles and campaigns, I think, come from a good place and are at least attempting to address legitimate concerns. They obviously seek to challenge stereotypes, test assumptions, and broaden society’s collective notions of beauty, which have been sharply honed through the years by relentless media and advertising pressures. Likewise, they seek to help people (in most cases, women) feel better about themselves and their bodies.

The world certainly needs this to some extent. Understandably, legions of women—and an increasing number of men—have serious body perception issues. Problems stemming from these beliefs are myriad and complex, but include things like eating disorders, depression, suicide, sexual dysfunction, relationship issues, and substance abuse. These problems are serious and real, and anything that can be done to broaden societal notions of beauty, challenge stereotypes, and empower people to feel better about themselves, is a (mostly) good thing in my book.

And yet, when watching and reading these things, I can’t shake the feeling that many—perhaps even most—of these stories and campaigns are still missing pieces of the puzzle. So, without trying to disparage the movement, or throw out the baby with the bath, I’m offering up the following thoughts for consideration, based on some of what I have observed:

1.  Some Body-Positive Articles Miss the Point Entirely. Some of the “body positive” themed articles I’ve seen have failed miserably from the outset. A good example might be those articles featuring unusually attractive 50+ year-old women, offered up as “proof” that older women are indeed still “sexy.” These articles generally do nothing to challenge existing assumptions about beauty, and suggest nothing that might reasonably cause the average woman feel better about how she looks. Rather, they simply hone in on examples of exceptionally attractive over-50 women who seem to be defying the effects of aging—with skin that remains smooth and unwrinkled, and boobs and butts that have somehow eluded gravity’s pull. These features don’t say, look, aging is sexy, but rather, look, 50 can still be sexy, as long as it looks like 30. In terms of actually promoting healthier views on aging, beauty, or bodily acceptance, these stories falter from the get-go.

2.  Some Attempts at Body Positivity Inadvertently Create New Unattainable Standards and Archetypes. Don’t get me wrong. I like the concept of featuring amputees in an attempt to challenge stereotypes. But I question whether body image is really aided by showing handsome, ripped marines pumping iron with prosthetic limbs. Why? Because most disabled veterans don’t look like that and never will, through no fault of their own. However well-intended, I can’t shake the belief that this type of effort puts forth the same sort of unattainable ideal for many men with physical limitations as the impossibly-thin-yet-curvy Victoria’s Secret models do for most women. While it may be a subtle critique, the message of the article I saw struck me not so much as physical impairments are sexy, but rather you can still be sexy despite them, provided you’re otherwise handsome and buff. The same argument can be made in the case of the beautiful woman with scars on her stomach. Is the message conveyed that scars are indeed beautiful, or, rather, that beautiful women with scars can still be beautiful? Sometimes, it seems that in an attempt to expand notions of archetypal beauty, we run the risk of creating new archetypes, and new, equally difficult-to-achieve standards.

3.  Some Attempts at Inclusivity Remain Oddly Exclusive. I’ve also noticed that many of the people featured in ads and photos attempting to promote body positivity, while purporting to be representative, aren’t actually. In the case of ads, this makes sense, since the models were obviously carefully chosen by marketing teams to portray a particular certain look or image. The result is that, while they may look more “normal” or “natural” than typical models, they still don’t necessarily represent the populations they claim to represent. Racial diversity, for example, while usually present in some form, is generally not representative of distributions in society. Larger-than-normal percentages of women depicted in these ads remain white. Their ages tend to remain under 40. Body weights and shapes still appear clustered within some presumably determined range. Have you ever noticed a Native American featured in one of these spots? A woman in a wheelchair? I haven’t either.

 4. The Focus Remains Solely on Physical Beauty. One of my biggest concerns is that these articles and ads tend to keep the focus exactly where it has always been – squarely fixed on physical beauty. Rarely do the stories or ads focus on anything else, such as intelligence or character or kindness or virtue. Rather, they seem to validate, however inadvertently, the very underlying message inherent at the root of the body image problem: that looks are indeed critically important. Put another way, the problem of body image, in large part, stems from society’s ceaseless, near-manic obsession with . . . body images. By constantly reminding people to look at and love their bodies, while tirelessly working to include more and more people into the standards of what society considers “beautiful,” the authors of these campaigns unintentionally reinforce the notion that physical beauty, in and of itself, remains a matter of tantamount importance.

5. Must We Love Our Bodies All The Time? Admittedly, this is a tricky one, but it seem fair to at least raise the question — i.e., is it necessarily healthy or even desirable for all people to love their bodies all of the time? While I agree that modern ideals of beauty are absurd, and recognize the dangers of negative self-perception, I wonder if sometimes the notions of “bodily love” can be carried too far. In the case of extreme obesity, for example, there are many good reasons to view the condition as a problem, rather than something to celebrate and embrace. This is not to say obese people should in any way feel shame or, under any circumstance, be shamed. It is to suggest, rather, that perhaps striving to attain a stronger, healthier body is not always an exercise in pure vanity or the product of self-loathing. Recognizing that our bodies could be healthier and wanting to change them can be an important step in actually implementing positive changes in our lives. Perhaps the more complete message might be love, honor, respect, and have compassion for yourself and the body that contains all that is you.

6.  The Real Message I Want For My Daughters. At this point, you might be wondering what my dog is in this fight, which would be a fair question. As an average-looking, reasonably fit, non-disabled white man, I don’t face the same body-image pressures, challenges, or issues that many people legitimately do. I know this, and am grateful for this fact. But as a feminist and father of two daughters, I can’t help but feel the weight and import of these issues.

My oldest daughter, who is now a pre-teen, is already beginning to grapple with these issues. She believes that certain clothes make her look “fat.” She hasn’t yet sprouted vertically, and wishes her waist was thinner and more elongated. While she is pretty and fit, she is also strong and compact, and, like most girls, will likely never have the long, thin proportions of today’s supermodels.

As her father, I’m grateful to see a movement in advertising away from the impossibly thin, Photoshopped, surgically-altered women who have dominated the scene for the past 30+ years. I don’t want her to measure herself against some impossible-to-attain standard of beauty, dreamed up by some advertising executive armed with the latest photo editing software. But the message I want her to receive goes far beyond just that.

For, in truth, I don’t want my daughter to measure herself against anyone’s standards of beauty, however they may have been expanded or defined. I don’t want her to believe that making her way into the physically “beautiful” or “sexy” club is a goal worthy of significant emotional investment. And if she happens to determine that being “beautiful” is indeed an important thing (which I realize will be difficult to avoid), I want her to know that true “beauty” delves far deeper than scars and skin and arms and legs and butts and boobs and birthmarks.

But mostly, I want her to know that she already is beautiful in every meaningfully conceivable way—not because some underwear ad includes a girl that looks like her, or because some article has a headline declaring people of her body type to be “sexy,” but because she is kind, caring, intelligent, sensitive, creative, talented, and funny, and because she’s interested in doing the right things and making the world a better place.

Which gets me to what I think this world really needs more of, which is not articles about physical beauty, but articles, stories, advertisements, focus, attention, and celebration of people—particularly women and girls—who embody these and other qualities, qualities of true character and virtue. And I’m 99% certain we could do this and still sell shampoo, underwear, and breakfast cereal ;).

Thanks for reading!

My best to all,

– T

Photo: Taken by myself last summer at Little Payette Lake, near McCall, Idaho.