Societal Stigma

BeingFran: Body Positivity and What’s Wrong!

I get it.

The society has some form of standards and morals that one ought to observe.

Not to say i’m hard-headed, but i don’t quite conform to these rules. At least, not all of them.

I see societal values and standards as a collection of its peoples’ personal belief on what is acceptable and what is not.

According to society, well, not until recently, being plus size was viewed as a case of laziness among many other things. Gaining the slightest weight was condemned.

Phrases like “bikini body” and “drop two sizes” were/are used on the covers of the magazines and tones of YouTube videos until the Body Positive Movement came into the scene and pretty much everywhere you looked women started changing their fitness goals from “get flatter abs” to “get stronger and feel great.”

Body Positivity isn’t bad at all.

It is like a breath of fresh air to anyone caught up in the vicious cycle of “try, fail, try harder, fail harder”. The body-acceptance movement can sometimes feel like hitting a pause button on the spiral of self-loathing and failure .

There is a lot of public lip service on how “brave,” and “strong” a woman is for accepting her body’s natural state and not apologizing for it.

“Go girl, nobody should put you down for how you look!” 

“It’s not how you look, it’s how you feel”. 

With any woman who rocks her body—flaws and all—one might easily start to think that striving to change any of those “imperfections” is some kind of sin.

When Ashley Graham graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, everybody was in awe of her! The Plus size community felt very well represented by a plus size model on the cover of a mainstream magazine!!

But now she’s being shamed for “appearing to look thinner” in some of her recent Instagram photos.

Certainly, the media puts a lot of pressure on women to be thin and stay thin. But does this mean that we should start pressuring women to stay “larger”? Definitely not!

Here’s what i think:

“Each person is entitled to do whatever she likes with her own damn body. And there is zero reason for anyone to judge another person’s body—or her motivation for training it.”

To say that Graham “betrayed” the plus size community or let us down by starting to weigh something other than what “the society” would like her to weigh is not body positive; it’s saying that she has a responsibility to make sure that her body stays looking how you want it to look for your own needs — and suggesting that you have any degree of ownership over someone else’s body, that you somehow have some kind of stock in how it gets to look, is about as blatantly body-negative and anti-feminist as it gets.

Ashley Graham responded:

“People come on my page and body shame me because I’m too big, because I’m too small, because I’m not good enough for their standards . . . But at the end of the day I’m good enough for me,”

In summary, there is no moral high ground when it comes to training your body. There’s only the question, “what’s best right now?” If that’s working toward a fitness goal, great. If that’s just tuning into your body and never looking in the mirror, fabulous. No matter where you are in your journey or what your goals are, I encourage you to come from a place of positive, self-compassionate intentions.

Do this over the long term and you’ll find that you both feel better and look better.

And that way, the Body Positivity Movement will be right again.

XOXO

– Fran –

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