Body positivity has only marginally expanded the range of which bodies are celebrated

The argument

The body positivity movement may have given excluded bodies greater visibility, but it has not produced a shift in general attitudes towards size. Visibility and acceptance are different achievements, and on this account only the first has been secured. People generally still see being thin as ideal — Adele was recently praised for her weight loss, and the praise itself carried the implication that her previous size had been a problem. What has changed is which non-thin bodies are permitted, not whether the ranking exists at all. Rather than living up to the body positivity movement, mainstream culture now celebrates 'acceptably fat' and 'curvy' figures that have small waists and wide hips — a shape that is no easier to achieve than thinness and, for most people, no more attainable. At the same time, plastic surgery has been normalised and a new ideal body shape has emerged in the image of Kim Kardashian, which means the standard has not been relaxed so much as relocated, and in some respects made more expensive to meet. The limits of the change are clearest in what remains invisible. The new body ideal might embrace curvy bodies with a roll or two, but scars, acne and body hair are still excluded from mainstream visibility — and those are features almost everybody has, which makes their absence a better test of the movement's reach than the range of sizes on display. Rather than achieving inclusion and celebration for all bodies, only curves in the right places are embraced. The body positivity movement has fallen short of its aim to celebrate all bodies, having widened the category of acceptable appearance without abolishing it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The body positivity movement has made great progress and continues to do so. Cultural change is always a gradual process and will take time, but this does not mean the movement has been a failure.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise sets its test at general attitudes and then measures it with a handful of media moments. Praise for one performer's weight loss is a data point about celebrity coverage rather than about population attitudes, and the movement's stated aim was never to abolish a beauty preference — it was to widen who is visible and to change how people treat their own bodies, which the premise concedes in its opening clause. [Rejecting P2] The observation is accurate, and what it describes is co-option — which is what happens to movements that gain enough traction to be worth co-opting. Commercial appropriation of a demand is evidence that the demand reached the mainstream, not that it failed. The same period also saw changes the premise omits: plus-size ranges across mass retail, restrictions on retouching in advertising in several countries, and standard-setting on model health. [Rejecting P3] The standard applied is one no social movement meets. Judging by whether all bodies are now celebrated makes failure certain in advance, and the question asked is whether the movement accomplished anything rather than everything. Cultural change of this kind is cumulative, and a partial shift at this distance is what progress looks like rather than evidence of its absence.