Read This If You’re Skinny

Illustration by Lucila Perini

If you’ve scrolled through Tiktok lately, you’ve probably seen some version of a “body-positivity” trend that looks like this: a person stands posed, then unposed while the following audio plays: “Bodies that look like this, also look like this.” The intention behind the trend, pioneered by Tiktok user @marycskinner, was to show how bodies can be manipulated and posed to look differently on social media than they do in real life. This was obviously a sentiment that resonated with many, many people: the original video has over a million likes and the sound has been used almost five thousand times. @marycskinner’s ideas of body normalization and neutrality, I can get behind. She ends the video with something a lot of us need to hear: “It is normal, safe, and preferable that your body makes bulges and rolls as it moves around to allow you the best range of motion that you can have. I love you and please be kind to yourself today.” The execution, however, is where the problem lies.

Much like the original body positivity movement, the trend has been co-opted by thin women, and in many cases, manipulated to serve ingrained fatphobia. Somebody who wears a body that society deems “acceptable”—small, toned, light-skinned—standing in a way that accentuates that acceptability and then in a way that simply sits in it does nothing to challenge the violent ways in which that acceptability came to be. Obviously, thin bodies are beautiful. Fat bodies are beautiful. Posed bodies are beautiful; unposed bodies are beautiful. But the fact remains that in our society, one that evaluates women by the amount of space they occupy, these bodies are forced into a hierarchy with the smallest at the top, and centering ourselves in a movement that began with a midcentury plea for fat acceptance leaves a lot less room for fat acceptance to happen.

Posing on Tiktok merely acknowledges that “desirable” bodies can also look less “desirable” from a different angle. It doesn’t change the fact that we twist ourselves into pretzels daily to fit what we think is pretty. It doesn’t change the fact that my Instagram page—and I’m sure it’s not the only one—is curated to make me look as slim as possible. Lizzo, as usual, said it best in the October 2020 issue of Vogue: “Now, you look at the hashtag ‘body positive,’ and you see smaller-framed girls, curvier girls. Lotta white girls. And I feel no ways about that, because inclusivity is what my message is always about… What I don’t like is how the people that this term was created for are not benefiting from it. Girls with back fat, girls with bellies that hang, girls with thighs that aren’t separated, that overlap. Girls with stretch marks. You know, girls who are in the 18-plus club… I want to normalize my body. And not just be like, ‘Ooh, look at this cool movement. Being fat is body positive.’ No, being fat is normal. I think now, I owe it to the people who started this to not just stop here. We have to make people uncomfortable again, so that we can continue to change.” The singer’s own Tiktok using the sound showed her not posing to look thinner but just relaxing at different angles.

What this trend needs is a little bit of discomfort, and a surefire way of generating that is acknowledging thin privilege. This thread of tweets by Cora Harrington explains the concept of thin privilege with some helpful examples, but the name is pretty self-explanatory.

To be very clear, thin privilege and body dysmorphia are not mutually exclusive. If others saw my body as my dysmorphia-hazed eyes do, I might be able to claim that I don’t have thin privilege. But, although I might whine about how my boobs don’t fit into Brandy Melville or Princess Polly clothes, or that I wear the largest size of trendy, kind of fishy-smelling faux leather pants at Pull & Bear (yes, these are call-outs), and as much as I may not believe much of the time that I qualify as thin, I am. To me, this is exactly what thin privilege is; it is not determined by my skewed self-assessment, but by the perception of others. And, to others, I am a skinny white woman. My weight has not been weaponized against me by the healthcare, fashion, and beauty industries. I am not what you see in the before pictures of diet advertisements. I may yearn to change, but, if I’m being honest, nobody is telling me I need to.

That’s the big difference. You are allowed to dislike the way you look, but you have to recognize when that hatred is imprinted by the weight of an entire disapproving, insurmountable society on your shoulders and when it is simply not. I have always been thin, and I still developed an eating disorder that almost took my life. Still, although I can blame the spitefully fatphobic media and culture in which I grew up as a sort of petri dish of self-hatred, I can’t blame other people for telling me I need to lose weight. Impossible beauty standards affect us all, but it’s on a sliding scale. 

I’m not asking to be saluted for admitting that I’m benefited by my thinness. Instead, I’m asking that we reserve a good portion of the praise we heap on body-positive role models for fat people, the people who created and who need the movement because body negativity is always aimed their way. People like Lizzo, Tess Holiday, and Roxane Gay point out that fat people, especially women, are treated like shit. The way that we, people who can walk into non-specialized stores and buy a pair of pants, or people that can sit comfortably in an airplane seat, react to trends and movements normalizing fat bodies, needs to change. Maybe one day, we won’t feel the need to pose in Instagram pictures or as the faces of the body positivity movement.