Why "Body Positivity" Was Always the Wrong Word

Here is a piece of trivia that deserves to be better known: the organization that started all of this changed its own name, and the word it dropped was Aid. When Bill Fabrey founded it in 1969, it was the National Association to Aid Fat Americans. Today the same acronym stands for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Aid, then Advance. Almost the entire argument about what to call any of this is compressed into that one substitution.

Photo by Una Laurencic on Pexels

Fabrey was a New York engineer who, by NAAFA's own account, started the group after reading an article about anti-fat attitudes in American culture and getting angry about the way the world was treating his fat wife. The writer Lew Louderback helped him. Within four years the organization had already produced a splinter: a circle of California feminists who found NAAFA far too polite formed the Fat Underground, and in November 1973 two of them, Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran, published the Fat Liberation Manifesto. Read what they actually asked for. It is not confidence, and it is not self-love.

Artwork — The Toilette of Venus, François Boucher — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain)

Employment. Education. Public facilities. Health services. That is the vocabulary of a civil rights claim, and it is the same list you would find in the founding documents of any other rights movement of the period. The manifesto named an adversary, too — "the so-called 'reducing' industries," its authors wrote, itemizing diet clubs, fat farms, diet doctors, appetite suppressants and "reducing machines." And it signed off with the full theatrical confidence of its decade: FAT PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE.

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Artwork — Venus and Cupid, Lorenzo Lotto — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain)

The phrase body positive, as an organized thing with an address, arrives later and from a different tradition. In 1996 Connie Sobczak and Elizabeth Scott founded The Body Positive in the Bay Area — Sobczak after her own adolescent eating disorder and the death of her sister, Scott a psychotherapist who had spent years treating eating disorders. Their work was, and still is, about self-image and recovery, and it has genuinely helped people. But notice the register. It is a fundamentally internal project. It asks what happens inside a person. The manifesto asked what happens in a hiring office.

What the phrase turned into once social media got hold of it is not a matter of impression — somebody measured it. In 2022, researchers Meridith Griffin, K. Alysse Bailey and Kimberly J. Lopez analyzed 141 Instagram posts tagged #BodyPositivity and #BodyPositive for the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. The bodies they actually found under the hashtag were, in their words, "those of (now) lean, white, cis-gendered individuals, many of whom were engaged in bodybuilding."

The same authors are clear about where the idea came from to begin with: body positivity, they write, "was rooted in Black fat activism to resist the rise of anti-fat discourse in North America." Roughly fifty years after the manifesto, the word had drifted far enough from its own origin that the people it was built for had largely disappeared from underneath it.

None of this would have translated well to the societies this desk usually covers. The Ice Age carvers who made the Venus figurines, the Tang court that adored Yang Guifei, the Efik families of Calabar, Rubens working in Antwerp in the 1630s — none of them had a term like body positivity, and it is worth being precise about why. It is not that any of them were more enlightened than us; several were considerably less so, and the historians still argue about what those figurines were even for. It is simpler than that, and it is a fact about the word rather than about them. Positivity is a stance you take toward something. You only need to adopt a stance toward the standard once it has stopped being the standard.