Body positivity does not challenge the importance placed on appearance as a signifier of a person’s value. Whilst inclusivity is important, we should try to move beyond defining people by their appearance.
The argument
The complaint here is about where the body positivity movement locates the problem. It does not question why people have come to have unhappy relationships with their bodies, and instead places the burden of loving bodies on the individual — which leaves the cause untouched while making each person responsible for their response to it. The movement's emphasis on loving oneself makes the issue one of internal struggle. Framed that way, insecurity becomes a private failure of attitude, and the remedy becomes private too: work on how you feel about your body. But that framing overlooks the importance of historical social and cultural trends that seek to control and define the way we — and women in particular — look. Those norms are not generated inside the individual and cannot be dismantled there. The movement's main strategy runs into the same limit. Visibility in the media is not enough on its own to help everyone embrace their body: widening the range of bodies shown does not disturb the underlying assumption that how a body looks is what should be evaluated. It changes which bodies are approved of, rather than the practice of approving or disapproving of bodies at all. For that reason the argument treats the movement's gains as surface-level. Without challenging the wider cultural norms that judge people on appearance alone, the underlying reasons why people are unhappy with their physical appearance will persist, and the insecurity will reappear in whatever terms the prevailing standard sets next. What is needed instead, on this argument, is to move on from appearances as a major source of self-worth or dissatisfaction, and to find value in other aspects of a person's identity — a change the body positivity movement, on its own terms, was never structured to bring about.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The body positivity movement is part of a wider cultural backlash against objectification. It is an important first step in this wider transformation of society - it has done a great deal for challenging harmful norms and empowering marginalised groups. There is of course more work to be done, but this does not take anything away from the movement thus far.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise is largely shared by the movement's defenders, so it does not separate the positions — the disagreement is over whether the movement addresses those norms, not over whether they exist. [Rejecting P2] The characterisation understates the movement's origins: the fat-acceptance activism it grew out of targeted medical, employment and airline discrimination directly, which is structural rather than individual, and the commercialised self-love framing is a later development that critics inside the movement also reject. [Rejecting P3] "Root causes persist" is a standard no social movement meets within a few decades, and applied evenly it would count every campaign short of complete cultural transformation as having accomplished nothing — which is the counter's point about first steps.