the people who are criticising jameela for calling herself “life positive” have clearly never read anything she’s ever written. the point of life positivity as opposed to body positivity is that body positivity says that all bodies are beautiful and is geared towards making different body types more socially acceptable and making people feel better about how they look, which absolutely isn’t a bad thing and does help a lot of people! but it doesn’t help everyone because it’s still geared towards making people see themselves as beautiful which a lot of people still won’t, regardless of how much body positive content they consume. it challenges beauty standards, yes, but does nothing to challenge the idea that being seen as beautiful is a goal everyone needs to work towards.
life positivity/body neutrality is different because the message isn’t “everyone is beautiful” but “everyone has value regardless of physical appearance” and “there are so many things in life that are more important about you than the way you look”. as someone who has hated how I look for pretty much my whole life it’s life positivity that has helped me more than body positivity, because I can look at people who look similar to me and look at endless body positivity content and think how great everyone looks and then look in the mirror and still only see all the things I hate. but life positivity helps me to remember that i’m not defined by how I look, and that I have so many things that I love about myself and am proud of and make me happy that aren’t related to how I look and those are the things that are most important. I’ll still look in the mirror and see things that I don’t like about myself but life positivity movements have helped give me the confidence to not give a fuck because I don’t have to look beautiful to be worthy of respect, because there are so many things about me that are more important.
I’m not trying to shit on body positivity because, as I said, I know it helps a lot of people, so I have no problem with it! My problem is people acting like it’s the be-all-and-end-all when in reality Jameela is an eating disorder survivor and is probably just trying to spread the kind of positivity that actually helped her, and people are attacking her for it because they don’t realise that body positivity doesn’t necessarily help everyone.
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