The body positivity movement insults women by treating them like they’re too fragile to receive health advice or set high expectations for themselves. Even worse, body positivity puts women’s health at risk.
Body positivity originated in feminist movements aiming to combat negative treatment of fat people (particularly women, who face inordinate pressure to stay thin, and are treated as repulsive, bad, or simply invisible if they get fat) in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The movement is overwhelmingly female, and fair enough: women could use the help. There is a self-esteem gap between the sexes, a difference some studies attribute to Western cultures’ emphasis on the appearance of women and girls. Body positivity activists don’t just give pep talks. They ask companies to get rid of unrealistic beauty standards and use women who look like them in marketing campaigns. The movement recognizes the real harm done by advertising that targets women, making them feel inadequate and hyperfocused on flaws which are often invented by the industry itself, so works to counter messages selling wrinkle-free skin, a slimmer body, or straighter hair.
Meanwhile, men’s wellness focuses more on self-improvement than self-acceptance and isn’t attached to hashtags and politicized buzzwords, like #fatpositive, #EffYourBeautyStandards, and various -phobias and -isms. Physically, men’s wellness addresses common male concerns: hair loss, virility, strength, and fitness. Men’s wellness also addresses the mental: brain function; the kind of worldview men need to succeed in their career, relationships, and fitness goals; things like resilience and determination; as well as, more recently, mental health.
Women need to ask which parts of body positivity are worth keeping, in terms of reducing self-hatred and unhealthy obsessing over physical flaws, and which to leave behind. Inclusivity is not such a bad thing if it means advertisements and product lines made for women of colour, women with disabilities, and other marginalized groups. Normalizing wrinkles and natural hair is also a positive thing. But obesity, eating whatever you want — even if that means overindulging in junk food — and refusing to encourage women to exercise does not help women.
We shouldn’t need to be lied to to feel good about ourselves.
Source: The body positivity movement doesn’t help women — it lies to them
Interesting how research is linking problems managing weight gain (especially in the different chemistry of women’s bodies) to the poisoning of our inbuilt weight management system by ‘man-made’ chemicals – such as glyphosate.
Please provide link.