Social Media Body Positivity and Where More Representation is Needed
When searching the internet for body positive or fat activist work and content there is many uplifting pieces. There are fat women doing yoga for instagram to fight the stigma that fat folks can not be strong or cannot practice discipline. There is fat fashion blogs to show that fat women can look as trendy and fashion forward as thin women and that this would be easier for folks if there was a more widespread availability of fat fashion lines. These are all fantastic things and work that needs to be done!
However, I have found that there are some voices missing in this activist work that should be addressed. I have seen very little in terms of the voices of fat men. Granted, fat oppression and sizeism can impact women in disproportionate ways, however, I think not having any male voices really be in the spotlight on social media about fat acceptance is only making weight seem more and more like a gendered issue when we only hear a kind of single story.
Additionally I found that there were articles in relation to fat and sexuality but this was also very limited. There was an article where a woman discussed being described as BBW like the porn category and how realizing that her body was desired was overall empowering to her. Porn although it can be empowering, has some issues especially in that it is made for the cis, hetero, traditionally masculine male in general. There were also articles that suggested sex positions for fat bodies to bring you Ultimate Pleasure however, all of these positions were for penis in vagina intercourse. Both of these examples are just a sample of the broader body positive movement as being extremely heteronormative.
I think that most movements that are US based oftentimes have a hard time moving away from the white/cis/hetero/able bodied narrative that dominates our society in so many political and social ways. As time moves on with the centering of stories of the folks who live in the margins and the continued work to decenter the capitalist colonized expectation we can look towards more fruitful movements that can represent more folks.
