​I’m Ugly, and It Doesn’t Matter:
Beyond Body Positivity

Botox, fillers, and peptides. Three things that dominate conversations about modern-day beauty. The whiplash of incongruent beauty standards makes self-acceptance feel virtually unattainable. Many of these standards are not spoken of outright but permeate popular culture through celebrities, marketing, and diet trends. The ever-growing fixation on looks pressures children, especially girls, to shape their appearance to meet these impossible expectations. This further perpetuates harmful relationships with food and enables the spread of eating disorders. The proliferation of GLP-1s fuels a cultural sense that extreme thinness is once again becoming the paragon of beauty. 

 

In a climate that feels suffocatingly obsessed with beauty, I long for the digital era that championed diverse bodies and beauty of every size.

 

With a wave of nostalgia, I wonder if it is possible to move forward in the Ozempicdemic era with the empowering messages from body positivity's short stint in the late 2010s. However, the longer I reflect, the more I remember the failures of that seemingly forgotten movement. Now, too, the body positivity movement leaves a sour taste in my mouth. 

 

When the body positivity movement gained traction, it felt like a breath of fresh air and a much-needed change; its mission was clear: challenge and fight oppressive beauty standards with radical self-acceptance. It was an inspiring shift away from the toxic ideals of the early 2000s and a wholehearted embrace of inclusivity. Women of different races, sizes, and backgrounds were given a platform in mainstream media and advertisements like never before. In this way, it was empowering for young women and girls to be represented and reminded that their bodies were valid, no matter how they looked. 

 

Yet the movement gradually developed its own contradictions.

 

By the early and mid-2020s, the body positivity movement was on its last legs. While the movement's initial message was well-intentioned, its execution fell flat.  Somewhere along the way, the movement lost a core value – radical self-acceptance. Instead, the message became convoluted. The pursuit of positivity was almost overbearing because it presented itself in an unrealistic way. One impossible standard replaced another. In the early 2000s, the pressure was to look perfect. By the 2020s, the new pressure was to feel perfectly confident, to feel beautiful regardless of how you looked. It is understandable to be dissatisfied with one's physical appearance and not feel beautiful; to force it is dishonest. In a utopian society, perhaps we would all feel beautiful because we would never have learned self-doubt. However, we are naturally plagued by insecurity. Accepting life in all its complexities means taking negative feelings in stride and working through them. Instead of providing relief from constraint, this toxic positivity further suppressed conflicting feelings of body image by glossing over the root cause. By the end of its cultural moment, body positivity became just the other side of the same coin as the oppression it was meant to combat, yet neither extreme taught us how to purely exist in our bodies.

 

Certainly, it is simpler to brush these debates about beauty standards off as futile and vain, but this perspective lacks nuance. Women and men are progressively conditioned to be self-conscious about how they present, as our flesh is treated like a trend, and physical appearances are commodified. When beauty is conflated with value, we all lose.

 

Today, I feel lost. Despite its faults, I agree with many of the body positivity movement's values. In addressing contemporary issues such as the Ozempicdemic, I ask what we can learn from the failures of body positivity. Body positivity worked within the very framework it combated. Both were centered around the concept of feeling or being beautiful. But I don't want to constantly feel beautiful or confident just to accept who I am. Why must acceptance be rooted in our outward appearance? 

 

To break the cycle, you need to break the system.

 

I am tired of chasing after beauty standards that I will never fulfill. Instead of anchoring my worth in how I present myself, I want to adopt a new mindset: body neutrality. Body neutrality means accepting your body as it is, without assigning positive or negative judgments. Your body is your body. This approach allows me to separate from the self-degradation I have grown so accustomed to. Instead of stretching myself thin to try to be all these things I am not, I am trying to view my body in a different light: it is a neutral vessel that allows me to experience life. When I face doubt, I gain perspective by reminding myself that it is a privilege to have a functioning heart and brain. I remind myself that I am grateful for all the amazing things my body does to keep me alive, even the parts I once viewed as flaws. Now, I exercise to get stronger, not skinnier, and I remember that food is fuel, not something to be feared. Undoubtedly, this practice is much easier said than done. It is hard, if not impossible, to fully detach from the societal expectations that enable hypercritical analysis of our bodies. But change happens one step at a time, and an adjustment in perspective could be a shift towards self-acceptance.

 

My journey with body image is a work in progress with no end in sight. This, too, I am coming to accept. Maybe body neutrality begins with recognizing that our worth has never depended on beauty in the first place. When I slip back into old patterns, I am grounded by the words of Cornell professor Dr. Kate Manne: "You do not have to look a certain way in order to have value."