Has the body positivity movement accomplished anything?

Body positivity combats the rise of artificial image-editing from the rise of social media

Question: Has the body positivity movement accomplished anything?
Position1 of 3›: Yes, the body positivity movement has had positive impact in the world
Argument‹3 of 3: Body positivity combats the rise of artificial image-editing from the rise of social media

As the general public becomes more accepting of varied body types, people no longer feel the need to edit images they post of themselves on social media, leading to a rise in personal authenticity.

The argument

This argument describes a self-reinforcing cycle and presents the body positivity movement as the thing that interrupts it. The cycle begins with pressure. As people are pressured to conform to standards of what the ideal body is, they adjust not their bodies but the images of themselves that they post on social media. That adjustment snowballs the existing problem, because the edited image is presented as an ordinary photograph and so convinces viewers that it is actually authentic. Each viewer therefore measures themselves against a standard that no one actually meets, and the standard rises rather than holding steady. The next stage follows from the first. Soon we see a deluge of photos online that have been previously edited so as to convince viewers that they are not, and others feel mounting pressure to conform to the body type those photos depict — pressure they relieve in the same way, by editing their own images. As these behaviors continue, social media, advertisements, and magazine images become entirely constructed of edited images, until we, as a society, forget what it means to have an authentic and unedited body. The reference point for an ordinary body is lost, which is what makes the pressure inescapable: there is nothing left to compare the edited standard against. What the body positivity movement supplies is that missing reference point. By circulating unedited bodies and naming the editing as editing, it restores the comparison the cycle had erased, and it addresses the mechanism rather than only the feelings the mechanism produces. Because it interrupts a cycle that would otherwise leave no visible example of an ordinary body, this argument holds that the body positivity movement has had a positive impact in the world.

Premises

[P1]Pressure to meet ideal-body standards leads people to edit their social-media images and pass them off as authentic, snowballing until feeds, ads and magazines are filled with edited pictures and society forgets what an unedited body looks like. [P2] The body positivity movement pushes back against this deluge of artificial imagery by promoting authentic, unedited bodies. [C] Because it counters the rise of image-editing driven by social media, the body positivity movement has had a positive impact.

Counter-arguments

First, studies show that social media image-editing is as common as it has always been, if not increasing with the rise of social media usage. Additionally, body positivity has only shifted the "ideal body type," where people now edit their images to appear artificially "thick." Impossible beauty standards prevail despite the efforts of the movement.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise describes a mechanism by which edited images propagate, which is a claim about social media rather than about the movement — the body positivity movement appears nowhere in the reasoning offered, so nothing here connects the problem to the thing said to address it. [Rejecting P2] Even granting the second premise, promoting unedited bodies is an aim rather than an accomplishment, and the position asks what the movement achieved: no measure of editing prevalence, advertising practice or self-reported body image is offered before and after, which is what an argument about impact requires.