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Understanding Body Positivity Movement
Body positivity is a social and cultural movement that seeks to promote and celebrate diverse body types and promote a more inclusive and accepting view of bodies. It encompasses several dimensions, including:
Size Inclusivity: Encouraging people of all sizes to feel confident and proud of their bodies, regardless of societal beauty standards.
Health at Every Size (HAES): Recognizing that health can come in a variety of shapes and sizes and that weight should not be used as the sole indicator of health.
Body Diversity: Celebrating the natural variations and differences in bodies, including race, ethnicity, gender, and ability.
Body Acceptance: Encouraging people to accept and love their bodies as they are, without trying to conform to unrealistic standards of beauty.
Body Neutrality: Moving away from a focus on body image and instead focusing on how bodies can serve and support our daily lives and well-being.
Intersectionality: Recognizing the unique experiences and challenges faced by individuals based on their intersection of identities, including body size, race, gender, sexuality, and ability.
Hijacking of Body Positivity Movement by Clothing, Food, and Cosmetics Brands
What started as a movement seeking to challenge harmful societal beauty standards and promote self-love and body acceptance for all people has turned out to be one of the biggest marketing ploys in advertising history. It has been co-opted by a few clothing and food brands as a marketing tactic to sell products. These companies use body-positive messaging and imagery in their advertisements, but often prioritize profit over the promotion of genuine body positivity.
Examples of brands using body positivity in their campaigns include:
Lane Bryant – a plus-size clothing brand that has used body-positive messaging in its advertisements, showcasing a diverse range of women of different sizes and ages.
Dove – a personal care brand that launched the “Real Beauty” campaign, promoting self-esteem and body positivity for women of all shapes and sizes.
Aerie – a lingerie brand that promotes body positivity and self-love, using unretouched images of models of various sizes and shapes in their advertisements.
Some advertisements use body positivity as a token, featuring one or two plus-sized models among predominantly thin models. This sends the message that body positivity is only for certain bodies and is an exception when it comes to average beauty standards. This may in turn have an effect contrary to the intended messaging.
Advertisements that use body positivity imagery while still promoting products that promise weight loss, such as diet foods and supplements, send mixed messages and can be confusing to consumers. This can decrease motivation to exercise and prioritize appearance over health.
Marketers use body positivity as a way to capitalize on people’s insecurities by offering products or services that promise to fix perceived flaws, such as clothing specific to plus-sized people which will make them look attractive. The campaign to make plus-size people become physically attractive to people by complying to certain fashion sense and dress codes defeats the very purpose of the body positivity movement.
Attempts to glamorize obesity in name of body positivity in marketing campaigns may give an excuse to individuals to overeat and avoid exercise. People with laziness to hit the gym and having unhealthy lifestyles may use body-positive imagery projected through advertising agencies as a defense mechanism to excuse themselves from improvement.
This is why the body positivity movement is rapidly becoming a means to exploit people’s insecurities with a guarantee to make them attractive if they buy certain brand’s products. The trend is going to rise in the future with a big market in place to extract profit from.
It’s for people to be alert to such marketing tactics while embracing the idea of body positivity. Often good movements fail when people outrightly reject them due to misuse by the corporate sector to enhance their profit.
