Is the Body Positivity Movement Truly Over?

We seem to be standing at a crossroads. For a time, it felt as though a collective breath was being released. The movement for body positivity, which had been building for over half a century, finally broke into the mainstream. We saw different bodies, real bodies, on magazine covers and in advertising campaigns. Yet today, a different wind is blowing. The return of the Victoria's Secret show and the cultural obsession with new weight-loss drugs feel like a powerful counter-crusade. It has left many wondering if the era of body positivity has quietly lost the war against an impossibly narrow standard of beauty.

From Protest to Mainstream

The fight began not as a trend, but as a protest. On June 5, 1967, a group of 500 people gathered in New York's Central Park to challenge the stigma faced by fat people. They ate, held signs declaring “Buddha was fat,” and burned photos of the famously slender model Twiggy. This was the seed of what would grow into a global movement.

Contrary to a common modern myth that the idea has been twisted to "justify laziness," its core principle was always about health and acceptance. An early article by Llewelyn Lauder argued that slimness is not an automatic synonym for health and that the relentless pursuit of an ideal often leads to severe mental health issues, like eating disorders. The message was simple: focus on well-being, not just appearance.

This idea inspired the formation of the first organizations for fat people, like the National Association to Aid Fat Americans. Over the decades, these groups evolved. Feminist collectives like The Fat Underground emerged, coining slogans like "A diet is a cure that doesn't work for a disease that doesn't exist." This first wave of activism laid the groundwork for a second wave in the 1990s, where the movement gained international traction. By the third wave, in the 2010s, it had expanded into the "body positivity" we know today, embracing not only size but also issues of discrimination based on race, gender, and disability. This led to tangible change, with plus-size model Ashley Graham on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 2016 and major brands like H&M featuring more diverse models.

The Myth of Promoting Unhealthiness

Despite these victories, a persistent accusation has followed the movement: that it promotes obesity. In reality, body positivity was never about encouraging weight gain; it was about supporting those who already live in larger bodies, shielding them from a culture of shame. The idea that one shouldn't care about health is a marginal view, not a central tenet of the movement. The core appeal has always been to stop judging people on their appearance and to challenge the very standards we call "healthy."

These standards are often punishingly unrealistic. Celebrities like Lily-Rose Depp and Barbara Palvin, who have never been medically obese or even overweight, have faced public criticism for their figures simply because they didn't fit a specific, severely underweight model aesthetic. Society fixates on the health risks of obesity while often ignoring the dangers at the other end of the spectrum. Anorexia nervosa, for instance, has a devastatingly high mortality rate. According to statistics, approximately 10% of individuals with anorexia die within 10 years of its onset from complications related to starvation, such as heart failure and osteoporosis. These problems are deeply intertwined with the societal condemnation of fatness.

The goal of body positivity was to lessen this public pressure, allowing people to address their psychological health without the crushing weight of judgment. While seeing diverse bodies in media helps, it hasn't been enough. In 2020, only around 2% of models on global catwalks were considered plus-size. The very fact that a single plus-size model on a cover generates headlines proves how rare it still is.

The 'Miracle' Drug and the Great Rollback

Just as the movement seemed to be hitting a point of exhaustion, what sociologist Charlotte Cooper calls "burnout," a new phenomenon accelerated a complete rollback: Ozempic.

Originally developed in 2012 to treat type 2 diabetes, the drug Semaglutide (marketed as Ozempic and Wegovy) was found to be highly effective for weight loss. It works on the brain, suppressing appetite and the pleasure derived from food. A landmark 2021 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed stunning results. Overweight volunteers who received the drug, alongside diet and exercise, lost an average of nearly 15% of their body weight over 68 weeks. The placebo group, in contrast, lost only 2.4%.

Suddenly, a "magic bullet" seemed to exist. Hollywood began to shrink, and Ozempic became an open secret. People who didn't medically need it were getting prescriptions, leading to two serious ethical problems. First, it created shortages for diabetes patients who rely on the drug for their health. Second, people were willingly accepting the risks of side effects—from severe vomiting to other long-term unknowns—for the sake of weight loss. This rush to use a prescription drug off-label is a grim symptom of societal desperation, proving that for many, the desire to be thin outweighs even the fear of harming their own health.

The Capitalist Ideal: Manufacturing Insecurity

This isn't a new story. Human bodies, particularly female ones, have long been shaped by the cultural and economic forces of their time. As philosophers of the Frankfurt School observed, capitalism turned beauty into a commodity. The beauty industry doesn't just sell a product; it creates a need. It establishes an ideal and then sells us the tools to chase it.

New insecurities are constantly invented. In 1915, a razor company launched a campaign in Harper's Bazaar to convince women that underarm hair was unsightly. Cellulite wasn't widely considered a flaw until an entrepreneur marketed a salon treatment for it. As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek might argue, capitalism sells a fantasy that, by its very nature, can never be fully achieved, ensuring continuous consumption.

Feminist thinkers have identified this as a tool of social control. Simone de Beauvoir argued that these standards, largely created by a male-dominated culture, keep women in the role of "object," directing their time and energy toward appearance. In her seminal book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf asserted that as women have gained more social and economic power, the pressure of beauty standards has intensified to distract them and sap their strength. When a woman who wears a size L struggles to find clothes in a mainstream store, her "choice" to conform is revealed to be an illusion.

A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with her body. But when she feels compelled to risk her health to meet an external ideal, we can no longer call that a truly free choice. Perhaps this isn't the end of body positivity, but a crisis point in its long history. The problem of obesity is real—the WHO reported that in 2022, 43% of adults globally were overweight and 16% were obese. But the shaming, judgment, and rejection of fat people only exacerbate the issue, fueling the very psychological distress that can lead to unhealthy relationships with food. The plastic world may seem to have won this battle, but the war for a more humane and accepting vision of the human body is far from over.

References

• Wolf, N. (1991). The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. William Morrow & Company.
  This foundational text provides the framework for understanding how beauty standards are not arbitrary but function as a political and social mechanism. Wolf argues that as women achieved greater liberation in other areas of life, the cultural obsession with physical perfection intensified, serving to undermine their progress. This directly supports the article's discussion of beauty as a tool of control and a manufactured ideal.
• Wilding, J. P. H., Batterham, R. L., Calanna, S., Davies, M., Van Gaal, L. F., Lingvay, I., ... & Rubino, D. M. (2021). Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Adults with Overweight or Obesity. New England Journal of Medicine, 384(11), 989-1002.
  This is the primary scientific paper detailing the results of the STEP 1 clinical trial for Semaglutide. It offers the concrete data cited in the article regarding the drug's effectiveness for weight loss (a mean change in body weight of -14.9% in the semaglutide group versus -2.4% in the placebo group, as detailed in the abstract and on page 995). This source validates the claims about the drug's powerful effects that have driven its widespread adoption.
• Cooper, C. (2016). Fat Activism: A Radical History. HammerOn Press.
  Authored by the sociologist mentioned in the text, this book provides a detailed historical account of the fat acceptance movement, from its origins in the 1960s to its modern iterations. It chronicles the key figures, organizations, and ideological shifts discussed in the article. Cooper's work confirms the timeline of the movement's "waves" and explores the concept of activist burnout, lending academic weight to the idea that body positivity is currently facing a period of crisis rather than a definitive end.