Alli Adams
Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.
Today, we see a resurgence of people feeling more than comfortable in sharing their anti-fat bias online. Smaller and smaller women become the target of tabloid-esque judgements about their weight, and clothing brands are getting narrower and narrower in their range of clothing size.
So what happened to the body positivity movement?
Body positivity, the true movement for fat liberation, began in the late 1960s. Fat activists, especially Black women, demanded equality in all areas of life and for a boycott of industries like dieting. They would design and carry out protests and spread their message wherever they could. When the age of the internet came, that message spread across forums and chat rooms.
However, the body positivity you and I know today began in the 2010s on social media — and this movement was led by very different people. These were women who were predominantly white and significantly smaller than the women who the original movement was made for.
Body positivity today is very individualistic. Whereas the fat liberation movement of the ’60s and ’70s focused on the systemic issues fat people face regularly, the modern body positivity movement is focused on loving, or even just being alright with, your body. Fat activist Tess Royale Clancy pointed out the issues with this framing in an article with the Australian Broadcasting Company: “How can you be OK in your body when the world is constantly discriminating against you?”
Fat people, for a very long time, existed in a world where they were told their bodies were unacceptable. Asking fat people to love their bodies while society simultaneously says they need to change is both patronizing and insensitive. It places all the blame on fat people for having self-esteem issues rather than blaming the society they exist within.
Much of the body positivity movement has been co-opted by influencers and the fashion and beauty industries. One of the first “body positive” ads came out in 2004. Dove’s Real Beauty campaign was supposedly to promote acceptance of all bodies. In reality, it’s a bunch of skinny women and most of them are white. This is not a radical ad campaign, despite the very positive press it got.
The clearest and most obvious place to see the absolute nothing sandwich that is the modern body positivity movement is on runways. Vogue Business puts together a report of the sizes of models in a fashion season. The most recent report, which was released October 2024, reported a whopping 94.9% of models wore straight sizes. In this particular case, straight size refers to a US size 0-4, which is significantly smaller than the straight sizing displayed in stores.
Only 0.8% of models were plus sized, here defined as a US size 14 and up. In most cases, a size 14 is a large, maybe an extra large. In no way is a size 14 plus sized. Even then, less than one percent of models wore that size or anything larger.
A lot of the body positivity online comes from mid-to-small-sized women. A post from exercise influencer @laylahlifts is the first or second post under the hashtag #bodypositivity, where she posts photos of her skinny body talking about why she didn’t like certain photos. Laylah is clearly a very skinny woman who has used the body positivity movement to talk about her own insecurities unrelated to weight, decentralizing the very people the movement was made for. A majority of the photos posted under #bodypositivity are skinny women who don’t seem to realize that this movement isn’t about them.
What happened to the whole body positivity movement? The truth is, it was never there. Body positivity came about after the work of fat, queer Black women and was taken over by thin white women. Body positivity was never about trying uplift the fat community and challenge the stigmas they face. It was about highlighting already accepted bodies in order push those in need of real acceptance to the sidelines.
Reach Audrey Weishaar at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.