Last week, an article entitled “Body positivity doesn’t mean praising obesity” ran in The Daily Gamecock. The essential point of that article was that, while body positivity is all well and good, we shouldn’t get too caught up in calling everyone beautiful and end up forgetting that obesity carries health risks. To quote the author of the piece: “Where do we draw the line between supporting people with natural curves and those who are simply overweight?”
While I don’t contest any of the facts in the article about statistical health risks or health care costs for people who are obese, I do think it somewhat misses the point of body positivity, and I think that point needs to be corrected.
First and most importantly, body positivity is not and should not be connected to health.
Or, I should say, perceived health. Obesity is easy to see when you look at someone, but health is not. Let’s take me as an example. I’m of a perfectly average weight. There’s no reason, under the standards set out in last week’s article, that you would look at me and conclude I didn’t deserve to be included in body positivity. But I don’t get that much exercise, and I eat a lot of crap. Objectively speaking, I’m not really that healthy. I’m just not overweight. If healthy lifestyle were really the standard by which we judge body positivity, I wouldn’t be included. Neither would most other college students. When we use obesity as a benchmark to judge health, we end up not really talking about health — we’re discussing looks, which seems like a counterintuitive way to gatekeep body positivity.
But more to the point, there’s another, less nitpicky reason why health and body positivity shouldn’t be linked: Some people are just not healthy, and they still deserve to feel good about themselves. Healthy, of course, is a moving target as far as definition goes. But if we’re just going with the idea of good physical condition and general wellbeing, people with cancer aren’t healthy. Neither are people with type 1 diabetes or, depending on how you define “good physical condition,” people with physical disabilities who have mobility issues. Just the thought of excluding sick and disabled people from body positivity based on health feels wrong, and it is, but that’s the road the "health as a benchmark" argument necessarily starts us down. Who is healthy? Where do we draw the line between people who deserve support and people who don’t?
The difference between obesity and cancer, of course, is that there’s a moral judgement attached to obesity. We don’t generally blame people for getting cancer — we do blame them for getting fat. And, to be fair, it’s not as if your body weight is totally out of your control, although medications, genetic predispositions and certain disorders can take some of that control away from you. But there are all kinds of other decisions we make about our bodies that predispose us to disease and high health costs — like smoking or going out in the sun too much, both of which can cause cancer — but don’t affect whether people include you in body positivity. When the only category of “unhealthy” that we’re excluding is “obese,” it’s hard to argue that the standard is really health and not looks.
Obviously, I’m not saying that we should applaud smoking or forgetting sunscreen or overeating as good decisions — I’m saying that they have nothing to do with body positivity. Of course we shouldn’t encourage people to make unhealthy decisions, but that has no implications for body positivity. The two concepts are totally separate.
Because body positivity, fortunately, isn’t about health. It’s not about beauty, either, although frequently it’s misrepresented as just the idea that “everyone is beautiful.”
Body positivity is, at its core, about worth. The idea behind it isn’t that everyone is beautiful, it’s that everyone has inherent worth, regardless of whether they have scars because they used to cut themselves or whether they’re bald from chemo, or whether they’re not considered beautiful by societal standards. And that worth entitles them to not to have to feel shame or disgust for the body that they’re in, no matter what that body looks like and what anyone else has to say about it.
Body positivity does not draw a line between people with natural curves and people who are simply overweight. It’s for everyone, or it’s not body positivity, it’s just a slightly lower beauty standard to hurdle.