In an excellent new article for Bitch Magazine, Lindsay King-Miller argues against body positivity that requires beauty.<\/p>\n
Here’s a taste:<\/p>\n
While I\u2019m in favor of encouraging women to feel confident and happy, I worry that today\u2019s body positivity focuses too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity. Spreading a message that everyone is beautiful reinforces the underlying assumption that beauty matters.
\nRecently, a friend of mine\u2014a fat, queer, thoroughly empowered babe\u2014posted on Facebook: \u201cI\u2019m not pretty and I\u2019m fine with that.\u201d Immediately and predictably, the comments were flooded with well-meaning friends saying, \u201cDon\u2019t be ridiculous, you\u2019re beautiful.\u201d Reading the thread made me deeply uncomfortable, even defensive. Here was a woman moving away from an oppressive and harmful hierarchy, and with the best of intentions, her friends were trying to drag her back in.
\nI\u2019m troubled with using \u201cbeauty\u201d as a synonym for feeling valuable and powerful and magnificent. It\u2019s not far removed from nominally inspiring, but ultimately shallow, slogans like \u201cConfidence is sexy\u201d and \u201cNothing is more attractive than happiness\u201d that treat emotional well-being as an accessory. I seek happiness because it feels good, not because it makes my hair shinier. Happiness, confidence, self-esteem\u2014these things should be ends, not means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In an excellent new article for Bitch Magazine, Lindsay King-Miller argues against body positivity that requires beauty. Here’s a taste: While I\u2019m in favor of encouraging women to feel confident and happy, I worry that today\u2019s body positivity focuses too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity. Spreading a message that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":11157,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[521,1916,502,992,711,533,1917,1808,1918],"class_list":["post-11156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-beauty","tag-bitch-magazine","tag-body-diversity","tag-body-image","tag-body-positivity","tag-confidence","tag-empowerment","tag-fat-shaming","tag-lindsay-king-miller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11158,"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11156\/revisions\/11158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/map.model.world\/directory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}