Is It Time to Abandon the Body Positivity Movement?

Remember the first time you hear the phrase "body positivity?" It was the time of Tess Munster, when Torrid was owned by Hot Topic and bloggers were slowing becoming social media influencers. What a moment in time, right?

As the years went on, more people started warming up to the idea that, maybe, everyone should be happy in the body they're in. But what does it mean now in 2020?

Writer Marie Southard Ospina wrote a short history about the phrase in Vice. Ospina traced the phrase from its beginnings of a fat liberation movement in the 2010s to a wellness phrase adapted by straight-size fitness gurus in 2020.

Now that "body positivity" now conjures up images of lithe white women doing tree poses on a yoga mat shilling flat tummy tea, what's another avenue for fat liberation to take? Perhaps there's a word to describe our physical condition succinctly?

In a new essay for Medium, Yr Fat Friend has made the case to start using the word fat as an accurate term for bodies. With a nod to straight-size people, YFF writes, "recognize that a fat person daring to name their own body is an act of growth and that when you correct us, you stunt it."

This could be the right time in history to use "fat" as a physical description, taking the sting out of the word still hurled as an insult. Especially when images of bigger bodies are used as clickbait by news organizations for an online story about COVID-19.