Fat is beautiful too, only thin is sick

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” Kate Moss once said. A supermodel like Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell in the 1990s, Moss was thin. She liked being skinny. And because she was, and because Moss was a role model for many young women, countless girls fell into anorexia at the time.

It’s different today. Thinness is criticized, and sometimes it almost seems as if bullying thin people has become body positivity’s favorite hobby. Body positivity is a movement that aims for everyone to like or even learn to love their bodies. Even if their body shapes are beyond the norms that completely unrealistic ideals of slimness have been trying to squeeze the female body into for decades: 90-60-90.

Chest out, butt out, wasp waist, loll under the gaze of a man, it used to be called. But that’s over. Body positivity is an empowerment strategy trumpeted in hashtags and tweets, which is aimed less at men and more at women and their bodies: I love me, she says, even fat, also lanky, pimply or knock-kneed. Even when I’m sitting at home at the computer, tired, with sagging shoulders and without a bra. After all, who needs them, all the cups, straps, body armor that women put on to please – even if their breasts are resting on the uppermost belly roll. Do I have to like it, and what happens if I don’t like how I “actually” look?

marketing, what else?

Body positivity is well intentioned, but in the form that is often practiced, especially in social networks, it is nothing more than a marketing strategy based on “body shaming”. Of course it is right that outdated ideals, which plunge women and girls into feelings of inferiority and sadness, are being revised. Not only slim is beautiful. But is promoting ultimately unhealthy, severely overweight bodies at risk of heart attacks, diabetes and broken kneecaps really a viable alternative to having some semblance of control over one’s health?

Everything is potentially beautiful, says body positivity, overturning the classic definition of beauty formulated by St Augustine. He understood beauty as an intuitive perception of balanced proportions. From the verses in which medieval troubadours sang to noblewomen to Gustav Klimt’s iconic portraits of women, slender beauty is the privilege—and frequently criticized privilege—of the chosen few. Means to overcome social barriers and to be successful. The loss of beauty can mean social decline.

Slimness once meant beauty, and beauty brought privilege, exalted status in a society of weary and battered bodies. Even if beauty has always been more than slimness. “Beauty,” wrote Andy Warhol, “has to do with the way a person wears it. It depends on where someone is, what clothes they wear and what’s around them.”

Then just oversized

And now body positivity. Loving your own body and flaunting it, on Instagram, Tiktok, in advertising and on catwalks – even if it’s anything but “perfect”: That’s nice. But it has become a pose. To another, new pose next to the obsession with slimming that has become dull, which in recent decades should move people to what positive body perception should also bring them: to buy and consume.

Labels and brands have long advertised with different body shapes. Slightly fuller models are currently doing better than skin and bones. And finding your own body ugly, wanting to become “beautiful” through fasting, sport or surgical corrections is taboo in the body-positive movement. We’re all beautiful, and if we’re not, all the better. Because this is linked to the imperative: Then we buy the fummel or lipsticks that the oversized models and influencers hold up to the camera. Maybe guilty because we still secretly don’t like each other.

Victoria Beckham recently grumbled about thinness and body positivity – as a former Posh Spice, the thinnest, one might say boniest, of the Spice Girls, a former British band. She noted that thin bodies were passé, undesirable, old-fashioned. One would like to imagine how dress size zero Victoria sprawled on the sofa with this statement, balancing a plate of sausage and chips on her knees.

Best not to talk at all

But somehow the idea doesn’t work out. Nobody gets fat voluntarily, right? “Skinny is outdated” is not a body-positive comment, but a form of body-shaming. So is someone who is naturally thin ugly and should they eat up a few kilograms as soon as possible? Someone with a naturally flat butt or a tiny bra cup too? Like the diversity movement, in which the white, straight male became a social stigma, body positivity can’t seem to help but discriminate. Just like the ideals or currents that she wanted to hold up a mirror to.

It’s just not going the way the once cleverly conceived political correctness intended, from which the body positivity movement also emerged. The radical wave of political correctness in the 1990s led to an expansion of the teaching material at universities with new, more diverse works and topics. This soon turned into an almost unmanageable «too much». The reverse logic of political correctness that we encountered in the 2010s was then: radical reduction. Playing around with various positions, views or bodies endangers individual development, while a Jacobin-like conformism protects it.

It made sense: differences of bodies, religions, forms of sexuality, etc. should not be overcome in and with language, but recognized and respected by being neutralized in language and manners. Exactly by not being talked about anymore. Whether fat, thin, naked or clothed: only the ban on language allows the safe, liberated representation of bodies that are no longer vulnerable to terms (trans, bi, hetero, black, white, thin, thick, cis, pan, queer). Colorful radical individualities make becoming the same an illusion. Actually, the following should apply – and that would be the true, radically implemented “body positivity” –: no longer to talk about bodies at all, perhaps not even to look at them properly.

The source of our greed

Body positivity, like any other body ideal, is criticism of the viewer: What am I looking at? Do I like to look at it? Do I have to feel guilty now because I enjoy watching it? It goes without saying that people suffer from the dictates of well-trained perfection and feel unjustly «ugly» if they don’t live up to it. But body positivity, like the obsession with being thin, is conveyed through cascades of images that appeal to our voyeurism, encouraging imitation, commenting, and buying.

Whether slim, fat or body-positive – nothing is talked about more than the body. Nothing puts people under more pressure than the constant banter about legs, arms, stomachs, faces, no matter what they look like. The body is and remains the projection surface of our fears, the object of our narcissistic desires and ultimately the source of our endless greed for products.