Everybody* Is Beautiful
*Some exclusions apply
this is so gross bc the artist uses women w/ disabilities and different body types/appearances as props so that he can complain abt men being excluded from body positive movements. like the focus of the picture is the stereotypical fedora/neck beard guy being pushed out of the frame. I doubt he really cares about the fact that some body positive feminists exclude fat/disabled/dark skinned/not classically pretty women, he just cares that men are excluded. lmao
Can any of my SJ-ish followers explain how you ever get into a mindset like this?
I’m not being facetious: what even *is* the complaint here?? Purity of intent aside, should the artist have only drawn the men as excluded if he only ~really cares about~ them? Wouldn’t that have been even worse to the SJ worldview?
(ps, this kind of complaint surely validates the artists’ choice of focus? many kinds of people are excluded from body positivity, and it’s pointless to compare who suffers more for it… but this kind of exclusion is actively celebrated rather than shamefully left unvoiced. SJ really crystallized this trope.)
Ouch.
There are actually more women and/or woman-ish looking people than men and men-ish looking people in the above cartoon. (and OP probably has a convoluted reason why that is actually worse.)
(I count 4 men, 5 women.)
I dunno. I do not like body positivity, such as the popular form is, very much. This is a shame, because body positivity is a pretty important thing!
And yet….
I really don’t like the “everybody’s pretty, even ugly people” thing – it tends to go into this kinda weird fetishization of any kind of attributes that might be considered flaws, and it kind of ignores 1. people who are interested in something other (like people STFUing about their traits and 2. trying to command what people find beautiful or ugly is pretty futile.
It seems like the “ideal” body positive culture darling is someone who is ugly to high modern ~CONVENTIONAL~ standards, but perfect in all the human-universal and maybe common Western standards.
(and of course this same person is also the hate-target for certain misogynists, the “pink-haired feminist b*ch
I don’t like the “everybody’s pretty” thing, either. It goes out of its way to reinforce the importance of beauty. How about “not everybody’s pretty, and THAT’S OKAY, because that is not the end-all”?
Plus there’s always a sort of… i guess moral imperative is the word I’m looking for? Anyway, a moral imperative to LOVE certain things and NEVER want to change them. It’s an offshoot of the whole “if you shave your legs you’re doing it for the patriarchy and you have internalized misogyny” thing. If you want to lose weight, you’re presumed to be too weak to stand up to “society”, or it’s taken as evidence that you secretly hate fat people. Same thing goes for not wanting stretch marks or opting for plastic surgery. Hell, even fat people who don’t wanna post selfies in a crop top are Bad.
It’s very similar to how SJ types see gay or trans people who want to pass, or just sort of do by virtue of genetics, or general fashion sense or whatever. You’re seen as some sort of traitor to the cause if you don’t dye your hair various colors and deliberately dress in an out-there sort of style.
YES!
And the funny thing about that style is that it’s the uniform of a particular group.
you know what I find hilarious about this post
“why are men included”
where does it say they are?
like, where does it say the dmab looking people in this picture are men? It doesn’t. While a couple of them might be there is nothing that says these aren’t transwomen.
Like when I saw “4 men” I had to scroll up again and count and one of the “men” I had assumed was a transwomen.
But no, everyone assumes they are (probably cis even thought chubby bearded person on the left looks a lot like a lot of transmen, non binary people can look like whatever because there is no actual way to present that consistently) men.
No. We are going to assume gender based on presentation, assume everyone in this picture is cis, and get mad because apparently cismen don’t deserve any body positivity even though I’ve known a lot of guys with serious self esteem problems, usually from being not muscular enough or being short which guys are harassed for a lot.
While chubby/skinny/short guys do get way more rep then women who aren’t conventionally attractive, a lot of the time they are characters who is the butt of a lot of appearance related jokes (like seriously how many fat jokes do homer simpson style characters get?)
So yes. Men need support too. Because usually these self esteem issues hit as kids and children are only privileged over other children, and bullies exist. Sometimes the bullies are adults. How many parents or otherwise adults of authority positions tease kids?
I used to get harassed by teachers over the way I dressed as a kid. I got harassed by kids my own age over everything about my appearance until i ceased to be a kid. At the same time I got told I was conventionally attractive but that doesn’t matter if you are getting called ugly at the same time. I (imo, I like being chubby better then underweight) look better then a did as a kid. But I still don’t have a mirror in my room bigger then a tiny hand mirror for yanking stray eyebrow hairs. I don’t want to look at myself, I had a panic attack over needing my license photo redone recently because I hate how I look.
EVERYONE
NEEDS
BODY POSITIVITY
and while I agree “everyone is beautiful” is just going to feel like a lie to a lot of people rendering it useless, something like “everyone has good features” and “you are worth looking at” are important.
While I get the objections to “everyone is beautiful”, I really don’t understand the standards people use to object to “everyone is beautiful” on “factual” grounds. As in, when you say “not everyone is beautiful,” how on earth do you decide which people are beautiful and which aren’t? Because from where I sit, that’s incredibly subjective. My definition of physical beauty is very different from the standard definition, not because I want it to be, but because it just is, and because of that I strenuously object to any worldview that says that you can just tell somehow who is beautiful and who isn’t, and that “it’s okay not to be beautiful” – well of course it is, but saying that still makes it sound like there’s some group of people who are always “not beautiful”, and given the wide range of standards different people have for who counts as beautiful, I can say pretty definitively that there isn’t a person alive who isn’t beautiful by some standards at least. Whether it matters is another story, but “Not everyone is beautiful” seems to almost have to assume that “beautiful” is actually a trait that you can define in some objective way. And it’s not. Everyone is beautiful by some standard or another. (Everyone is probably also ugly by some standard or another, come to that.) I don’t even always see beautiful and ugly as contradictory, because both are so subjective that everyone can be seen as both, although some people are certainly always seen by our societies at large as more attractive than others. I just don’t see any reason to allow that to define who counts as beautiful and who doesn’t.
Nor do I see acknowledging that everyone is (or can be, at least) beautiful, as somehow saying that beauty is super-important, or more important than some other thing, or anything else like that. Nor does it mean that it’s bad to be ugly. (I think I’m both ugly and beautiful and I’m fine with both of those things. But maybe I’m weird.)