Body Positivity Is A Cope

Take Lizzo, for example. She keeps showing off her health routines and impressive transformations and how much happier she is now because of it.

Another woman who created videos about embracing her flat chest went viral recently. Despite the content she made embracing her natural body (which is great, by the way – not knocking that), boom, she got breast implants. Influencer Danisha Carter dropped a video responding to it, and she shared what people saw as a “hot take” but is the truth. 

“Are people unaware that a majority of movements are just cope?” she asks her audience. Not the movements themselves, she clarified, but the people who co-opt them. The side-hustlers of social justice, the girlies who hashtag their way into self-love without ever actually loving themselves.

“A large percentage of body positivity influencers are part of the body positivity movement because they don't like their bodies,” she said. “They don't like the circumstances they are in. And therefore, they have to find a way to convince themselves that their bodies and the circumstances they are in are actually likable and good because there's nothing else they can do about it.”

When they finally do have the means to change, they do. Of course they do. 

The specific case Danisha was stitching featured a creator who received backlash for getting implants. Fans who had followed her for “representation” felt lied to.  While Danisha points out that she is “completely fine with plastic surgery” she felt the need to reference her in her video “because she is the 20,000th person I've seen this month surrounded by discourse because she's gotten some form of plastic surgery or has done something surgically to alter her body.”

These women who decide to go under the knife or lose weight are immediately met with seething comments. There aren’t enough criticisms against the beauty standards Hollywood and other influencers have perpetuated, nor are there any addressing the obesity problem in America. And not once does the mob pause to consider that the body positivity movement is less a revolution and more a reflex. When you strip away the IG graphics on “how to love yourself” and the curated vulnerability, what you’re left with is a desperate attempt to make peace with a body and a culture that often feels undesired. All of it is to soothe the dissonance. To rationalize that our bodies don’t meet a standard or that it’s not healthy because facing discomfort head-on would be far too painful.

Danisha bluntly says what we’re all thinking: “They were coping. Much like you were using them to cope.”

The Problem With Outsourcing Your Self-Worth

The reason we cling so hard to influencers is because we’re outsourcing our confidence. We think if we can see someone like us doing "okay," we’ll be okay too. When we watch them binge or give up and call it self-love, we start to believe it too, and that we can do the same and still be content. If they’re lazy and unapologetic about it, then maybe we don’t have to try either.

On the flip side, when someone with a big nose or small chest promotes loving it, we feel seen. That is until the same woman shows off her new Barbie nose or freshly done double Ds and gets flooded with praise. Suddenly, we feel left out. And just like that, we want it too. This is the problem with outsourcing our confidence.

“And there's nothing necessarily wrong with looking towards someone else to feel less alone,” Danisha explains. “I just say all of this to say that it is incredibly important to remember to decide to love your body in any state or stage that it's in of your own volition.”

We forget that the people we worship on our For You Page are just that — people. Just because they received over millions of views, doesn’t make them real. They took multiple takes and spent hours editing their videos. “You don't know strangers on the internet. And as much as you guys would like to believe you can, you cannot sense authenticity through a screen.”

Most of them are, Danisha says, are “struggling in the same capacities you are and are absolutely going to change when they finally have the means to do so.”

Fat positivity and anti-diet content are easier to consume; it’s more gentle on the psyche. No one wants to be told they have a problem. All of it is sold as radical self-love, but often promoting habits that are anything but loving. You can’t ignore the studies linking obesity to depression, or pretend that being severely overweight doesn’t affect your quality of life. But that’s what some media outlets do. They praise overconsumption, demonize discipline, and call it “right-wing.” 

It’s true that the early 2000s and older magazines were toxic, promoting ultra-thin bodies and shaming celebrities at healthy weights. But the body positivity movement overcorrected so hard from the era of thigh gaps, and runway models' starvation plans that we now think wanting to be fit is fatphobic. Now the SkinnyTok girls are receiving hate, and the women who wake up early to reach their 10k steps a day are being called anorexic. 

Sure, the body positivity movement served its purpose for a while. It allowed some people to breathe and made women feel good in their skin. But it turned into exclusively embracing an obese body, even unhealthy ones, and then it turned into a costume. Most of it was a performance to really hide how they felt about their bodies. And when we returned to the desire for beauty, that illusion cracked, and they changed, either through surgery or dieting. 

The problem is that we keep demanding strangers on the internet to represent and validate us. We are so deep in our insecurities that we’ve mistakenly accepted curated posts as truth. It seems like we’re leaving that era, though, and the body positivity era is fizzling out. Women are desperate to feel better, look better, and be more beautiful.  

Final Thoughts

In the end, it's all about balance and finding beauty within yourself and then cultivating that.

The catch is the media and Hollywood’s definition of “beautiful,” which has been warped by women who have been surgically altered. We’re chasing standards set by people who don’t even look like themselves. So yes, women want to be gorgeous – which is great – it means we’re still reaching for something and still invested in ourselves. But we have to recognize that beauty can be aspirational without becoming surgical. You don’t need a BBL to feel worthy. You don’t need filler to be seen. It’s okay to want to improve how you look, but let’s stop pretending the only way there is a MedSpa. We can admire beauty without reconstructing ourselves to match it. 

And if we’re going to ditch the delusions of body positivity, we better make sure we don’t swap one illusion for another.