Body Neutrality: Achieving the Impossible in the Digital Age
McKenna Payne
TikTok ruined me. That is not an understatement or exaggeration. TikTok’s algorithm and the amount of people I saw promoting diet culture, plastic surgery procedures, weight loss pills, and everything else under the guise of ‘female empowerment’ led me down a path that has been increasingly harder to dig myself out of. Around the time I truly started going downhill in my TikTok/self-help rabbit hole, my therapist recommended me a book titled “More Than a Body” by Lindsay and Lexie Kite. The Kite’s propose the idea of ‘body neutrality’ instead of ‘body positivity’. If you’ve never heard of body neutrality it can be summed up as “the ability to accept and respect your body even if it isn’t the way you prefer it to be (New York Times)”. It is examining your body not for looks, but all the things you are able to do because of your body. I am here to explore if body neutrality is possible during the digital age, how this mentality has helped me, and how we can use (or not use) social media to leave behind harmful self talk.
During this paper I will examine body neutrality as a whole and how it differs from body positivity, how this new wave of feminism enforces body positivity but not body neutrality, the affects that social media has on harmful body talk, and my own personal experiences around body neutrality. I argue that body neutrality is only possible if we are able to separate ourselves from the online world and recognize ourselves, namely our bodies, as outside of the “other”. The other in this case is the idealized female-presenting body that we see on social media and can never fully be achieved. We must look at our bodies as a home, not as an item to be assessed and viewed by others.
As I read the Kites’ book I decided to do more research on both body neutrality and body positivity and how these mindsets came to be. It is thought that body positivity came into being after the “fat rights movement” of the 1960s. Around this time fat people started to raise awareness about the way they were being treated and the inequality they faced when it came to healthcare (as they still do to this day). Note that I am not using fat in a derogatory way, it is simply a term that I believe should be used not as a negative adjective but as more of a fact. According to the all-knowing Wikipedia body positivity is “is a social movement focused on the acceptance of all bodies, regardless of size, shape, skin tone, gender, and physical abilities, while challenging present-day beauty standards as an undesirable social construct”. Body positivity focuses on seeing your body as beautiful no matter how you look or feel about yourself. While body positivity is a great place to start, it’s important to remember that it still focuses on looks and what is and isn’t beautiful. I believe that body positivity started off as a great endeavor, one that pushed both men and women to look at what society deemed beautiful and do away with those mindsets. Now though, body positivity has become yet another marketing ploy for corporations to sell us something. Take the Billie razor company, their ads are centered around being positive about your body hair, yet they sell razors and encourage you to buy their product in order to feel better about yourself. I’m not saying that body neutrality will not eventually fall down the same capitalist black hole (let’s be honest, what doesn’t?), but I think that body positivity falls short of being a proper step forward in the right direction in terms of bodily acceptance.
Along the same lines of moving past body positivity and moving towards body neutrality comes fourth-wave feminism. Fourth-Wave Feminism is defined as “a period of political activism and social change seeking to expand women’s civil rights and social equality”. Fourth-Wave Feminism focuses on the empowerment of women, the use of the internet as the primary medium, and intersectionality. I would like to expand this argument to everyone who is female-presenting as many arguments currently around Fourth-Wave Feminism argue against trans, non-binary, and other queer groups who should fall into this category. The internet has single-handedly change how we interact and see others, thus changing the meaning of feminism during our time. Some terms that have popped up in the last couple of years including reclaiming the word “bimbo” and the trends “hot girl summer” and “e-girls”. The idea of re-claiming and creating new terms for women to use is great, and anyone who identifies or finds these words comforting has every right to. But reclaiming a word and identifying yourself as a “bimbo” or that you’re in your “hot girl summer” era (I’m not pointing any fingers, I’ve used all of these terms to describe myself countless times and I still will) still focuses on the way our bodies look and how we present ourselves to the world. It’s all still a way for us to feel better about our bodies without actually recognizing how harmful these things can be when we don’t meet the defined standard as seen on social media. I mean what’s the point of having a hot girl summer if you aren’t getting a million likes on TikTok or becoming an influencer on Instagram? We need to move past the reclamation and baseline empowerment seen in the fourth-wave of feminism and move towards becoming neutral with ourselves and not comparing all the time.
When it comes to body neutrality, I am very much a novice to the idea. Even while writing this I feel disgusted by the fat I can feel on my body and how much better I’d look if I didn’t have such a round face and double-chin. It is not easy to become neutral with your body, it is hard work and I have experienced this first-hand ever since I learned about it. I have struggled with my body image my whole life. I have always been built a bit bigger and played sports and did activities that put muscle on my body, instead of losing weight. Growing up in Utah made this especially difficult, I was always the odd one out when it came to appearance. The majority of girls in Utah are blond, skinny, and get married at the age of 20. I fall into none of those categories and yet the idea of me being skinny has always been my greatest flaw. Once I got into college I gained more weight and was officially diagnosed with anxiety (something I have suffered with my entire life). When I came back home after my first semester I had a wake up call and lost 30+ pounds, which I made sure everyone around me knew. In order to lose this much weight and maintain it I was worked out 3 times a day and ate about 900 calories, putting me at about a 2500 calorie deficit. My body was not getting the nutrients it needed so it started using my fat as its resource, in short I felt horrible all the time. After graduating and COVID-19 I was able to move past this disordered eating and find a healthier regiment once I started doing CrossFit. But once again I found myself unpleased with how I looked, seeing that I was 23 and had never dated anyone seriously. I blamed (and still do to a degree) the way my body looked and started taking laxatives whenever I felt bad about myself. I still struggle with punishing myself using laxatives, but I through body neutrality I have been able to take a step back and see the bigger picture. I want to become someone that is able to recognize their body as an amazing vessel, but I know it will take much discipline and regiment in order to drill this into my head.
The first step to maintaining body neutrality is to limit your social media so you aren’t seeing harmful thing. I had to delete TikTok entirely to help take my first step forward, but also going onto Twitter and Instagram and unfollowing people who promote harmful diet culture can be a great place to start as well. Another way to implement this is to think about the compliments you receive and give. Most compliments revolve around how you look, when they really should focus on how you act, what you’re good at, and your intelligence (just to name a few). You don’t need to necessarily get mad at others for still complimenting you on your appearance, let’s be honest I still like it when people tell me I look pretty, but maybe start giving compliments like “You are so funny” or “Oh wow, it’s amazing how smart you are”. I would love to see TikTok and other platforms transform into a place where people can discuss things like body neutrality and still have people who promote body positivity in a helpful and non-toxic way. The problem is that this effort becomes increasingly more difficult the more that Instagram and TikTok promotes users who promote dieting, plastic surgery procedures (I’m looking at you buccal fat removal), weight loss pills, and workout plans that get rid of your hip dips and other parts of your body that are deemed unappealing. Capitalism has a tendency to take the best of intentions and turn them into a money grabbing scheme that shifts meaning entirely. I hope we can all take a step back and recognize that our bodies are amazing, and not focus on how they look but instead how they feel.
Become body neutral is so hard, it has been a constant struggle for me to learn to accept that I am more than my body and it is not for others to judge and scrutinize because I am the one who has to live in it. Body neutrality is only possible if we are able to recognize that we will never look like the people we see on social media, because neither is that attainable or real. Looking at these people as a sort of “other” has helped me to realize that my body can do some pretty amazing things and that it’s built how it wants to be. My body is strong, resilient, and takes me to amazing places. TikTok tried to tell me that I was not okay and that in order to love myself I needed to have a body that was thin, tan, and perfectly sculpted. Instagram promoted images and items that would make my jawline sculpted, help me lose my body fat, and make my cheekbones pronounced. I recognize that these platforms are not going away, probably ever, but I can remember to remain body neutral and remember that no matter how much buccal fat is removed from my cheeks, I will never become good enough according to the eyes of social media. My body is my home and I hope to live in it as long as it will let me. Take care of yourself and do what feels best for you and your body.
Some Podcast and YouTube recommendations on this topic:
Works Cited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_positivity
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/well/move/body-neutrality-exercise.html#:~:text=There's%20a%20name%20for%20this,d%20prefer%20it%20to%20be.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/body-positivity-vs-body-neutrality/
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/fourth-wave-feminism