Tag: body positivity

Who is body positivity for?

The body positivity movement has seen a lot of change over the years. The question remains as to who are its rightful stakeholders

On March 21, 2015, celebrity event planner turned author and influencer Rachel Hollis made waves in the mom-blogosphere when she posted a photo of herself on a Cancun beach sporting her post-pregnancy stomach. In the photo, Hollis smiles, leaning forward, as her stomach forms small wrinkles on her otherwise small frame. In her caption, she writes, “My belly button is saggy… (which is something I didn’t even know was possible before!!) and I wear a bikini. I wear a bikini because I’m proud of this body and every mark on it. […] Flaunt that body with pride!”

Four rows down on her profile, in March of 2015, Hollis posted a photo of a cake celebrating her accomplishment of competing in the Los Angeles Marathon, writing “Thank goodness calories don’t count on marathon day!!”

So, you should flaunt your post-pregnancy body because you deserve to, but calories from cake should be a concern? Something’s not adding up.

This is not an attempt to single out Rachel Hollis (though she has had her fair share of controversies in the past). Her co-opting of body positivity in the service of a less-than-ideal relationship with food is part of a much larger trend.

Recently, there has been some high-profile backlash against the body positivity movement, with celebrities such as Lizzo suggesting that it has lost its focus on liberation. As the singer explains in an impassioned TikTok video, “Now that body positivity has been co-opted by all bodies, and people are finally celebrating medium and small girls and people who occasionally get rolls, fat people are still getting the short end of this movement.”

Indeed, what we now call “body positivity” grew out of the Fat Liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. In those days, the aims of the movement were primarily to fight for the civil rights of fat individuals in healthcare and the workplace, as well as confronting the diet industry. This work continued through the decades and, as fat acceptance activist Stephanie Yeboah explained to Refinery29, in the late 2000s, the work moved online, as primarily fat, Black women shared their experiences with anti-fat bias and weight discrimination across social media groups and blogs. Around 2012, however, the movement exploded as people of all body types, including thinner creators, started claiming “body positivity.”

Now, on the one hand, this is a great thing. Arguably, any movement that helps normalize different body types and gets people talking candidly about their tumultuous relationships with their body image is a net positive for turning the tides of weight stigma.

As Dr. Sarah Nutter, Assistant Professor of counselling psychology and researcher of weight-related issues at the University of Victoria points out, weight stigma relies on what is called “healthy weight discourse.” This is the common conception that weight and health are inextricably linked, where a lower weight means a healthier body, and one can always achieve this through modifying their diet and/or lifestyle.

Dr. Nutter explained, “Inherent in ‘healthy weight discourse’ is this idea that weight is an individual and moral responsibility, and I think it’s that emotional aspect of morality that is really implicated in weight stigma and the way that people can respond to the body positivity movement.”

This notion is seen most strikingly in healthcare. Aubrey Gorden, a writer and podcaster who used to publish under the pseudonym “Your Fat Friend” until last year, discusses her experiences with medical weight stigma for Health Magazine. She explains that due to her size alone she does not receive the same quality of healthcare given to her skinnier friends. In the article, she describes the common occurrence of doctors not ordering necessary diagnostic tests, instead prescribing weight loss for any ailment under the sun (including, astonishingly, an ear infection).

Gorden writes, “I wondered how thin I would need to become in order to earn the kind of health care my thin friends got — a privilege that increasingly seemed reserved for those already perceived as healthy.”

Gorden believes, however, that despite good intentions, body positivity cannot solve this fundamental inequality deeply rooted in the healthcare system. She writes, “No matter how much we love our bodies, those of us living on the margins can’t love our way to good health.”

Though body positivity alone is never going to tear down the preconceptions keeping fat people ostracized, there is a real need for a movement that makes people in marginalized bodies (whether fat, queer, disabled, or otherwise) feel good about themselves in a world that wants them to be ashamed.

“To be able to curate a life […] that isn’t weight stigmatizing is really difficult,” explained Dr. Nutter. “For the health of everybody across the weight spectrum, getting rid of weight stigma is a really great idea.”

Zachary Fortier, a first year journalism and political science student, explained that while he finds a lot of issues with the current commodification of the body positive movement, there is still a necessity to promote fat acceptance.

“As a non-binary person assigned male at birth, my relationship with my body has been complicated,” explained Fortier. “Fatness and the celebration of bodies we’ve been told are ugly beyond repair is what fat acceptance is all about. Your body cannot be ‘beyond repair,’ what needs repairing is the jumble of harmful constructs that make up beauty.”

So, how can body positivity move to help uplift fat individuals, and not reproduce society’s focus on thinner bodies?

All sources point back to making sure body positivity retains its origins in fat liberation. While all people can feel bad in their bodies, it is important to acknowledge which bodies in society are the most marginalized, and fight the structures that keep them that way.

As Dr. Nutter explained, “Body positivity should be about accepting all bodies regardless of weight, size, or what bodies look like, and that all bodies have inherent worth and all bodies are beautiful. If that is truly the message, then that should be reflected in the [social media and publicized] imagery and whose voice is heard.”

 

Graphic by Madeline Schmidt

The ethics of altering your photos

Are you part of the problem?

It’s no secret that it’s easier than ever to alter your photos. No need to know your way around Photoshop or Lightroom anymore; with a simple slider, you can adjust your photo’s saturation, contrast, brightness, or even completely change how you look. Whatever it is you’re insecure about — your skin, teeth, stomach, or butt — you can easily fix it without going under the knife thanks to apps like Facetune. Even celebrities and influencers do it, with the Kardashian-Jenner clan particularly guilty of editing fails.

Collectively we seem to agree that it isn’t okay for celebrities and influencers to edit how they look in photos and pretend they look that way naturally. This is because social media has been shown to have a negative effect on body image, particularly for young women. If we agree that it’s wrong for celebrities and influencers to do it, then is it wrong for anyone to edit their appearance in photos?

After all, most of us aren’t famous. So, for example, if you follow 100 people and 10 are celebrities or influencers, then isn’t it more harmful to see the other 90 people’s edited photos? Aren’t we more likely to compare ourselves to our friends and peers than to Victoria’s Secret Models or NFL athletes? I want to know: is it unethical for you and I, “regular people,” to alter how we look in photos?

Geneviève Laforce, a Concordia student with over 35,000 followers on Instagram, and over 200,000 TikTok followers, told me she has mixed feelings about photo editing.

“I feel as though the most important thing is to be transparent with it. Like, if you actually do do it, don’t just do it and then not acknowledge it. For example, if I edit my skin, then I say I edit my skin, I will actively tell people,” she said.

“I definitely think that diving into social media at such a young age really did affect the way that I saw my body and see my body now,” says Amanda Wan, a Concordia student and content creator. “I understand that people want themselves to look a certain way. But on the other side, if they’re an influencer or celebrity, they’re lying to their audience because they’re saying ‘this is what I look like’ when in reality, they don’t.”

Wan says we should hold celebrities accountable for how they can affect followers through photos which portray perfection. These photos can be particularly harmful to the body image of younger people who follow them. In Canada, between 12 to 30 per cent of girls and nine to 25 per cent of boys aged 10 to 14 report dieting to lose weight.

Laforce mentioned the role that capitalism plays in creating a cycle of insecurity and impossible beauty standards.

“I think that we’ve created a problem for ourselves, but it’s like a cog in the 21st-century machine. We’re caught up in it, you can’t really get out of it. I think that it’s a problem that’s deep-rooted into society. And it’s gonna take some time to dismantle. But for now, it’s an issue that we’ve created,” Laforce said.

Today’s marketing is focused on making you insecure about how you look, so you need makeup, clothing, teeth whitening, plastic surgery, a gym membership, or laser hair removal. Insecure about your life so you need a car, a house, a puppy, kids, a big wedding, a trip to the Bahamas, a university degree. Capitalism depends on your insecurity and desire for more.

To help solve this problem, Wan suggests that platforms like YouTube feature more diverse creators. Laforce suggests that Instagram start telling you if an image has been altered, “Because although you may not pay attention to it, acknowledge it, your subconscious does if it sees that.”

However, what if altering how you look in pictures actually hurts your own self-image more than it hurts anyone else?

“You need to kind of know your truth,” Laforce said. “Why do I feel the need to alter this photo of myself? Is it to please the societal regard? Why is it going to, in turn, make you feel better about yourself?”

There are no easy answers; navigating social media is complicated. So I don’t think you should be too harsh on others or yourself. This minimizes larger systemic problems which create this rampant insecurity and desire for perfection. This implies that the individual or even the internet is at fault, which creates guilt and doesn’t lead to real solutions.

The truth is that people were insecure about their bodies before the internet, which has only allowed people to perform perfection for a wider audience. So what I’m saying is: do whatever makes you happy, let’s be more open and transparent about curated perfection, and let’s work on challenging the corporations which profit off insecurity.

 

Graphic by Taylor Reddam

Categories
Opinions

“You like my body the way it is”

A few weeks ago, at The Link’s launch party (no, there is no feud between our publications) BackxWash performed “You like my body the way it is” off her Deviancy album. In a moment that felt like I was in a movie — as if the camera was behind and panned to a POV of me watching BackxWash perform — I latched onto those lyrics and snapped into journalist mode. A story idea (this one) came alive.

BackxWash starts by saying she had a dream she would die and go to heaven, moving into the second verse with, “If he [Jesus] made me in his image/ It’s amazing how I hate seeing my face up in the mirror”. The rest of the song takes you through this sentiment; the feeling of inadequacy, the idea of wanting to change parts of yourself, either partly or completely. Then the chorus shines through: “you like my body the way it is” — you admire it and cherish it and love it just how it is, regardless of how much I don’t like about it or what I want to change.

There has been a growth in the body-positivity movement over the past few years, with everyone preaching that you should love yourself just the way you are. The thing with body-positivity is that it can take years for some to actually achieve a state of mind of full acceptance.

If someone has years of issues with their body image, just telling them “love yourself” or that there’s nothing wrong with them doesn’t do much. Sometimes, especially if someone has struggled with loving themselves for a long time, it takes more than simple affirming statements from a stranger over the Internet or kind words from your friends to really spark a change of mind.

BackxWash’s song is a reality check that these thoughts of inadequacy and of wanting to change parts of yourself are still on people’s minds, despite the body positivity movement trying to rid the world of negative thoughts people have about their bodies. Her song is also a soft reminder that having another person love the parts of you that you hate can help you learn to love those parts yourself.

There have been times where I didn’t like parts of my body, either because of the perfect body propaganda on social media and in advertising around me, or because of years of feeling inadequate and inferior to everyone else my age, or even because I was comparing myself to others. All of these added to my already not-so-great self-image. But between those times of self-doubt and of feeling inadequate, there have been people who were patient with me, who took the time to learn what I didn’t like about myself and made sure I knew they loved those parts of me. They made sure to tell me they liked my body the way it is, even if I couldn’t see it at first. And soon enough, because of these people, I started liking the parts of myself that I used to not like so much.

The point of this is that, sometimes, we all need a little help loving ourselves, to see ourselves in a new light and to not feel so alone. As BackxWash says: “But when I’m feeling so cold, you don’t get me a coat/ Your touch gives me the warmth, you don’t leave me alone.” While, no, we shouldn’t need to depend on someone’s validation and idolize their opinions about us, having others’ reaffirmations that they love the parts of you that you dislike can help you in loving yourself. By someone telling you they like your body just how it is – without objectifying you, of course – despite all the flaws you point out to them, you may also start liking your body the way it is.

Graphic by @sundaeghost

Categories
Student Life

Roxane Gay on body image, the #MeToo movement and contemporary feminism

‘This reckoning has been a long time coming’

Professor Roxane Gay delivered The Beatty Memorial Lecture at McGill University on Thursday, Oct. 11. Gay is an internationally acclaimed cultural critic and author the short stories Ayiti and Difficult Women, as well as Bad Feminist, which the The New York Times deemed to be “a manual on how to be human.”

A McGill tradition since 1952, The Beatty Memorial Lecture series annually hosts some of the greatest minds from around the globe. According to The McGill Tribune, the 2017 lecturer was famous philosopher Charles Taylor. Faculty members, students, academics and patrons from all walks of life engage in a public conversation and openly share ideas.
Gay was at Le James McGill bookstore for an hour and a half signing books before the lecture, with more than 600 people waiting for her in front of Pollack Hall. About 200 people tuned in to the live stream that was made available on YouTube.

After Nantali Indongo, the event’s moderator, introduced the lecture, she invited Gay to join her on stage. Gay began by reading pages from Hunger: A Memoir of Body, which spoke about her relationship with her body and weight. An article by Laura Snapes in The Guardian explained that Gay’s memoir “deals with [her] rape at the age of 12 and the lifelong consequences of her decision to make her body as big as possible as a form of self-protection.” @McGill_VPRI tweeted a quote by Gay: “I don’t have all the answers. I just write truthfully about the body that I have, in a world that is often hostile.”

Gay proceeded to speak about the #MeToo movement, Harvey Weinstein, Brett Kavanaugh, Bill Cosby, and the percentage of women who voted for Trump—all significant events of this past year. Twitter user @barbirite shared another quote by Gay: “53 per cent of white women voted for Trump. And I’m gonna say that over and over and over again because it’s a horrifying statistic, because they’re voting their own rights away.”

“Justice felt like a real, tangible thing rather than a vague, illusory ideal. This reckoning has been a long time coming,” Gay said. Victims of sexual violence and sexual harassment continue to await justice, she added, proving that she is more of a realist than an optimist. “Hope is too ephemeral, too inconsistent, too fleeting. This is a brutal time […] Every day there is new information about men who have abused their position or acted inappropriately or committed crimes against women.”

@McGill_VPRI shared a final quote from Gay: “I am often asked to describe #Feminism and I don’t answer that question anymore, because honestly it’s 2018. How can you not know?”

Categories
Student Life

Broken Pencil: Tales from the stall walls

Sneak a peek inside ConU’s washroom stall graffiti subculture

Confession: reading the messages and looking at the rushed art on the stalls in the women’s washrooms across campus is a guilty pleasure of mine—at least it used to be. A little investigative journalism venture in preparation for this article led me to realize how much of the graffiti I’ve been reading since first year has been covered up. Most of the current comments—or “tags,” if you will—I’ve found are in the women’s washrooms on the ground floors of the LB and EV buildings, plus a single, lonely and forgotten anti-Trump doodle in the H building.

First off, to the pair who, likely separately, tag-team wrote: “In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act … and loving yourself is a REVOLUTION,” in the first stall on the left side of the EV building washroom: thank you. And to whoever wrote: “❤️❤️❤️❤️for the [person] reading this” in the third stall of the LB washroom: ❤️for you too.

While some may view these empowering tags as vandalism, for others, they can be that extra push you need to make it through the day. (Think The Handmaid’s Tale when Elisabeth Moss’s character is locked in her bedroom and sees the phrase about perseverance carved into the baseboards of her closet by a previous handmaid—but the struggling student version).

The stalls also house a variety of art, life advice and stickers. In the fifth stall of the LB building washrooms, there are two Sharpie sketches of people—one with longer hair and the other with what appears to be a hijab on; the sketch is headlined with: “Everyone has their own beauty❤️.” The same stall also has a tag that reads “Work is long when you’re wearing a thong.” Found in some stalls are also the thoughts we dare not say aloud. One person writes: “I’m an attention addict, but I don’t show it,” while another person confesses: “I’m constipated.” The mixture of subconscious confessions, with body positive support and comedic anecdotes that all corroborate the nuanced experience of life is raw and refreshing to read.

Many tags have humourous undertones of solidarity, particularly with comments like “BLOODY FEMININITY,” written on the lid of the menstrual product disposal box in the last stall on the right-hand side of the EV building washrooms. “You are enough,” is written in the second stall of the LB building facilities. For me, reading messages like these warms my heart.

When having a bad day, week, month or whatever, reading an honest tag about something similar, a funny anecdote or even just reading that someone else is also not okay, is oddly comforting. The one, unifying theme found in all the stalls is the need for solidarity and support between women, female-identifying, and non-binary people. Whoever wrote: “To all my sisters, we need to love each other and be there. Stop bitchin’,” in the second stall of the LB building washrooms—you know what’s up.

Note: The Concordian recognizes that the graffiti and art mentioned in this article likely violate vandalism policies at Concordia University, and we are by no means encouraging anyone to go out and start attacking washroom stalls with writing utensils (wink).

Feature graphic by @spooky_soda.

Categories
Student Life

Black, big, beautiful: a “Real Talk” about body-shaming

Photo by Danielle Gasher

DESTA hosted a talk about the preconceived notions surrounding overweight black women

A discussion about the stereotypes and negative connotations associated with overweight black women, and the media’s effect on the way society perceives black women’s bodies took place at last week’s DESTA Black Youth Network “Real Talk” session.

DESTA, an acronym for “Dare Every Soul To Achieve”, is a non-profit, community-based organization that serves marginalized and at-risk youth, aged 18 to 25 in Montreal. According to DESTA’s website, the organization’s mission is to mentor these youths in the areas of education, health, personal development and employment through activities, workshops and mentor support.

Personal accounts, understanding and attentive ears filled the room in DESTA’s basement on Sept. 14.  Sitting in front of a half-moon-shaped crowd of about 30 attendees, 22-year-old LaSalle college fashion marketing student Nyoka Hunter led her first “Real Talk” discussion entitled “Fat Black Women: How We Do Them Wrong.”

The “Real Talk” monthly discussions are part of a new series DESTA has launched.  The discussions are open to the public, with the goal of providing a learning centre, and a welcoming environment to address different social issues affecting Montreal’s marginalized youth. The discussion sessions don’t feature any experts or specialists, but instead have only one facilitator—someone to guide the talk, open the floor for discussion, and to present the matter in a researched, but personal way.

The success of DESTA’s “Real Talk” on cultural appropriation inspired Hunter to create this event. “I heard a lot of different perspectives surrounding the topic, and that motivated me to want to do this event based on fat black women and how they are perceived in the media, [by] their families, friends, just in general,” she said.

Hunter began the discussion by talking about how the media portrays overweight black women. She addressed black women’s place in Hollywood, and the types of acting roles that leaner black women might get, in comparison to overweight black women.

According to a Vice News article released on Sept. 7, a new University of California study found that out of 35,205 characters from the 800 films studied between 2007 and 2015, only 31.5 per cent of speaking characters were female, and only 26.3 per cent of the total amount of characters were racial minorities.

Not only are black women underrepresented on the big screen, but like other minority groups in the area, they are also not necessarily being well represented.

In a 2013 USA TODAY article, journalist Arienne Thompson discussed how the roles available for black women in Hollywood still lack depth. In the article, interview subject Jubba Seyyid, the senior director of programming of TV One, a black-oriented cable network, said the roles available are one-dimensional. She explained how black women are always depicted as aggressive and “bitchy,” creating characters that lack balance.

Hunter also talked about the fashion industry and “fatphobia,” as well as the so-called “plus-sized models” of the industry. “The industry advertises these average-sized girls as being ‘acceptable fat,’” said Hunter. However, she said body-loving and feminist social media personalities and activists such as Ashleigh Shackelford and Mercedes Brissett are shedding light on black women and weight. Hunter said it is important to raise new questions and discuss different perspectives to keep the dialogue rolling.

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