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my issue with the concept of āno body positivity for thin people,ā as someone who has personally struggled with an eating disorder and has known so many people who have, is that it fundamentally misses what body positivity is actually for.
body positivity is not just about pointing out that society unfairly targets fat bodies (although that is a major part of it).
it is not a ledger where we check off āwho deserves validationā and āwho does not.ā
it is a lifeline for people whose brains are telling them to disappear, whose sense of self is actively under attack from the culture around them.
let me be clear, people with eating disorders do not care if society rewards thinness. their brains are not calibrated to fairness or social reward.
they care about the voices in their heads screaming at them, the voices telling them to shrink, to punish themselves, to erase their bodies entirely.
societyās obsession with thinness does not stop being a problem just because some people are rewarded by it. it creates the harm in the first place. society does not make them thinner to make them happy. society makes them thinner and then continues to say that they are never enough, that even the smallest, skinniest version of themselves is inadequate. that is the reality. that is what kills people. be so fr.
and the whole idea that someoneās body hangups are ārooted in antifatnessā? guess what, it literally does not matter. It does not fucking matter babes.
even if that is true, even if their self-hatred is built on the idea that fatness is evil or disgusting, it still manifests as actual risk. it still results in starvation, self-harm, hospitalization, and death.
when you frame body positivity as a movement that needs to exclude people because they are not āthe right kind of person,ā you are valuing ideological purity over survival.
you are prioritizing the comfort of your own theory over whether an actual human being survives the day.
children, teenagers, and adults are literally being destroyed by internalized body hate right now, and yet some people want to gatekeep because the āwrongā bodies might benefit.
gatekeeping life-saving affirmation because of some arbitrary rule about who deserves the movement is ethically bonkers.
body positivity should be about fighting internalized fatphobia wherever it exists.
this includes non-fat people. yes, thin people internalize fatphobia too. everyone internalizes it. everyone is taught that being smaller is better, that self-erasure is acceptable, that punishment via food restriction is a legitimate path to self-worth.
if you want a movement that genuinely combats harm, it cannot be selective about who gets to access it.
to act otherwise is to condone suffering because it does not happen in āthe right body.ā it is like saying, āi do not care if a personās internalized wrongthink is literally killing them; i am too busy policing whether their experience belongs in the narrative.ā christ, that is not ethics. that is cruelty.
somewhere, there is a 17-year-old weighing 80 pounds reading blogs, scrolling through posts, looking for any reassurance that they can exist without punishing their body into oblivion.
somewhere, there is someone who ran miles and lifted weights thinking about whether they deserve to eat tonight.
somewhere, someone has internalized the idea that their body is the enemy, and that self-erasure is the only way to be worthy.
and if your primary concern is whether the āright peopleā are allowed to participate in this movement, you are actively ignoring life-or-death consequences.
gatekeeping in this context is ethically obscene.
and this obsession with policing who counts as āvalidā body positivity participants is a form of intellectual vanity. it is the idea that some arbitrary purity test based on body size, perceived privilege, or adherence to some ideological narrative is more important than actual human well-being.
people die because of internalized fatphobia.
people die because of eating disorders.
people die because thinness is worshipped and punished via the expectation that gaining even an extra pound makes them worthless at the same time, and I know this because even when I was laying there literally dying my mom was still making fun of me for eating on the days I got up the courage to try and nibble a pastry.
I almost died.
and the resulting mental torment is treated as acceptable. and some of you sit there and act like keeping thin people out of your sacred movement is more important than preventing that.
your priorities are grotesque.
your ethics are not built on logic.
body positivity is not a membership club. it is not a handpicked showcase of āapproved bodiesā and āallowed struggles.ā
it is meant to be a tool for survival, a shield against the poison society feeds us about worth, beauty, and self-control. it cannot function if it insists on gatekeeping the very people whose self-perception has been poisoned by the same forces it claims to oppose.
that includes thin people, it includes average-weight people, it includes anyone whose brain has been turned against their body by the cultural machinery of shame.
it is about saving people from themselves as much as it is about saving people from society.
so if you say āno body positivity for thin people,ā i am telling you bluntly that you have rotten priorities.
you have an ethics system built on ideological posturing rather than human survival or compassion.
you are worried about purity while the people who also need the movement are fighting to exist in their own bodies.
and if you think that is defensible, you are not arguing in good faith. you are arguing from a place of ego, vanity, and moral laziness.
body positivity saves lives. that is the only metric that matters. not who gets a label, not who is āallowed,ā not who is big enough for you to consider handing them a membership badge.
if you cannot accept that, step back and ask yourself why your moral calculus elevates gatekeeping over human survival. because that is the real problem.
I'm fat as fuck now by the way. And I don't care.
But god the me that existed in my teens, who wasn't fat as fuck, that was the me that would have benefitted most.
And this shit, christ, y'all would have literally killed that me.
