Body positivity has been commercialised and sanitised and is less inclusive as a result

The argument

The growth of the body positivity movement has partly undermined it. As it gained publicity and became commercialised, its message was diluted and its radical element ignored. The dilution followed from what made the movement popular: a message reaches a mass audience most easily in the version that asks least of it, so the parts that made demands were the parts most readily dropped on the way. As a result, body positivity today focuses on cisgender white women of a particular shape — a narrowing that leaves the movement addressing the bodies closest to the conventional ideal it set out to challenge. When brands entered the body positivity picture, the problem got worse. When social movements get co-opted by profit-driven businesses, the original intentions get warped and re-packaged into something acceptable and uncontroversial, and which does not challenge the status quo. A company adopting the language has a reason to keep it undemanding, since a campaign that unsettled its customers would not serve the purpose it was bought for. The movement's vocabulary survives while the claim it was built to make does not. This has led to the absence of bodies of a particular size, colour, sexual orientation and gender identity from mainstream body positivity campaigns. The exclusions are not incidental, on this argument; they are what a movement optimised for marketability produces, since the bodies furthest from the norm are the ones a brand is least willing to put forward. Men are also often left out of the body positivity movement despite also facing pressures to have a particular physique and suffering from shaming and mental health issues — it is important that 'imperfect' male bodies are celebrated. A movement that has come to exclude on the very grounds it named has not accomplished what it set out to.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The body positivity movement continues and still has much to achieve. Large scale social change is never a smooth process, but the general direction of travel in this case is positive. That there is still work to be done does not mean the body positivity movement has failed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Commercialisation and dilution are plausibly described but not evidenced — no campaign, brand or measure is cited — and the premise treats the movement's most visible commercial expression as though it were the movement. Fat-acceptance organising, disability activism and the writing the movement grew out of continue alongside the advertising. [Rejecting P2] The exclusions named are a serious criticism, and they establish that the movement has fallen short of its aims rather than that it has achieved nothing, which is what the position claims. The counter-argument draws exactly this distinction and the argument does not answer it — co-option is itself usually evidence that a movement has shifted the mainstream enough to be worth co-opting. The conclusion also changes ground, from "less inclusive than it should be" to "has not achieved what it set out to".