Ep. 95 - The Problem with the ‘Body Positivity’ Movement
These days we are told to embrace and celebrate everything about ourselves and our bodies. Even the morbidly obese are encouraged to be "positive" about a physical state that may well kill them. I think this is the wrong approach. For one, it prevents honest self-assessment which prevents self-improvement. For another, it encourages us to remain obsessively focused on ourselves.
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So I was just reading a really moving and inspirational story.
And I think with all the bad news out there, it's great to have a little bit of hope and to focus on the good things every once in a while.
So I just wanted to start right off the bat by telling you about this.
Here's the headline. This is really great.
It says, Gravitational waves could collide, sucking Earth into a black hole.
So there is hope.
I mean, there's a potential solution to our problems.
And I don't know, I just wanted to let you know, so you could go about your day today with a little bit of a smile on your face.
Unfortunately, the chances are slim of the earth getting sucked into a black hole, but we can keep our fingers crossed, right?
Now, in the meantime, I want to talk about body positivity.
It's a little bit of a weird segue, I get that, but it's hard to segue into anything once you've started with the Earth being annihilated by a black hole, so you just got to dive into it and go for it.
A body acceptance model named Tess Holliday is on the cover of Cosmo magazine.
Tess is morbidly obese, and we're told that this is a historic moment, a great moment.
For the world, for mankind, because it promotes body acceptance and body positivity and so on.
And fat acceptance, you know, is I think the phrase people use now.
Now, I don't want to spend any time dissecting the particulars of this magazine cover, because it doesn't matter.
Cosmo's a trash magazine as it is.
So it's just, it doesn't really matter.
They're a garbage magazine. It doesn't matter what they put on the cover of their magazine.
It's not even legal to buy a Cosmo magazine if your IQ is over 45.
I don't know if you knew that, but you're only allowed to buy it if your IQ is under 45.
If you have an IQ over that of, say, a cucumber, you're not allowed to buy a Cosmo magazine because of the terrible effect it would have on your mental health.
But if your IQ is under 45, then you really don't have much of a mind, so it doesn't really matter.
So in that sense, it makes no difference.
And as for Tess Holliday herself, I wish her nothing but good things.
I have nothing against her personally.
I don't know anything about her.
All I know is that she's a morbidly obese model whose whole mission in life apparently is self-acceptance and self-love and self-esteem and every other word with self in front of it.
What I would like to talk about, though, what I would like to do is talk about just the whole idea of body positivity, this obsession, this thing we do now in society where we insist that everyone love their body just as it is.
We insist that everyone find themselves attractive and beautiful.
We insist that everyone accept and love everything about themselves.
We insist that all body types are wonderful, no matter what, and on and on and on and on.
I want to talk about that because I think it's harmful and counterproductive.
But before we get into that, I should stipulate that I agree that there has been for a long time unrealistic beauty standards imposed primarily on women.
It's something that women mostly deal with.
Men have their own version of it a little bit, but it certainly has a greater effect on women.
The pressure to be beautiful is not something that I myself have Really experienced, and thank God for that, because obviously I missed the beauty train, and it ain't coming back to pick me up, so it's good that it doesn't matter for me.
So I'm a man, and I'm also married, so I really don't care.
It doesn't matter to me. I mean, people in the comments will make, I'll see sometimes, they'll make very insulting remarks about my Physical appearance.
And you know what? Anytime I read those, the only thing I just smile and I think, well, it's a good thing I'm married then, so I don't care.
I mean, it really doesn't make a difference.
I just feel bad for my wife, honestly.
But, you know, joke's on her, I guess.
So there has been in recent times...
And I, you know, if I was a woman, maybe it'd be a little bit more difficult for me to have that attitude, because there's just a general, there's greater societal pressure for women to, you know, be attractive.
And I get that. And it's good.
To the extent that we have reacted against that, that's good.
Because it's ridiculous that women should feel pressured to be a size negative seven and to have no blemishes and no imperfections and all that.
It's good that we've gotten away from this idea that a woman must be anorexic to be beautiful.
And I don't say that as any kind of joke or anything about anorexia, by the way.
I mean, I just mean it literally.
This was the message that we were giving to girls, and that's where a lot of the eating disorders and anorexia, where it came from.
Because we were basically telling them implicitly that, you know, you've got to have an eating disorder to be attractive.
That obviously is deranged and crazy and harmful.
Getting away from that is wonderful.
However, We seem to have gone way to the other end of the spectrum, like way to the extreme other end of the spectrum, going from anorexic models to morbidly obese models, going from only this type of body is good to any body type, any weight is good.
And I think that's the wrong approach.
I think the whole body positivity thing is wrong, and I have two reasons for that.
Number one, Not everything about your body is necessarily positive.
Not all of it should be accepted or loved or embraced.
Okay? Morbid obesity, for instance, is an objectively negative thing because it's unhealthy.
It will kill you.
And it will cause all kinds of other health problems as well.
Your body is not meant to carry around hundreds of pounds of extra fat.
We weren't meant for that.
It's just not good for your body.
It has a terrible effect on pretty much every aspect of your body because none of it was made to support that, right?
From your internal organs to your bones, just everything.
So that's not something we should embrace because it's unhealthy.
And it's also something that very often develops through an unhealthy and inactive lifestyle.
So when you're embracing the morbid obesity, you're also embracing the lifestyle which caused it.
And I get it, okay?
Anytime we talk about this issue of obesity, being overweight, and so on, you're always going to have the people who say, well, yeah, but what about, you know, it's possible for someone to become morbidly obese, you know, Even if they're trying to eat healthy.
I mean, someone wrote to me yesterday.
I mentioned this issue briefly yesterday on Facebook.
Someone wrote to me. They're very angry.
And they said, well, there are people who are obese now because they're going through cancer treatments.
Obesity is one of the symptoms of brain tumors, which I don't know if that's true or not.
I'll assume it's true. I didn't look it up.
Okay. And that's obviously an exception.
But we have to ask ourselves, when we look at the overall problem of obesity in America, do we imagine that most of that is because of brain tumors?
That most of it is because of disease, really?
And if so, why is there so much more morbid obesity in America than there is in Ethiopia?
Obviously, clearly, it's primarily, not solely, but primarily driven by lifestyle and by diet.
So we've got a lot of fast food here.
We eat a lot of processed food.
We also, on average, spend five hours a day sitting on the couch watching TV. So that has a lot to do with the obesity problem.
It's not disconnected from it, right?
Clearly. I'm acknowledging that there are exceptions, but the overall problem is primarily driven by poor dieting, poor lifestyle choices, and that's all.
And not something that we should accept.
Now, I'm talking here about morbid obesity.
When you talk about obesity or being overweight, the issue with that is that those terms have brought in so much And become kind of ambiguous.
Like, if you look at a chart of what is considered obese for your height, according to the medical community, you'll see that it's like everyone, you know?
I was looking at one of these charts, right before I started rolling here, I was looking at one of the charts, just out of curiosity, and it said that I'm, I think it said that I'm obese.
Or, no, no, it said I'm overweight.
Let me, I have it right here. Medical News Today has a chart, um, And it gives you the height and then it gives you what the weight range is for normal, overweight, obese and extremely obese.
So I'm six foot tall.
And it says that the normal weight range is 140 to 177.
140 pounds for a 6-foot man?
I haven't been 140 pounds since like 8th grade.
140 pounds for a 6-foot man?
That's emaciated.
You're just skin and bones.
How is that normal? That to me seems drastically underweight.
And then overweight for my weight range.
You know, full disclosure here, I'm being...
I'm being transparent.
So, overweight is 184 to 213.
They're saying that you're overweight as a six-foot man when you reach 185 pounds.
I'm like 195, 200, so I'm overweight.
Like, I'm pushing the scales towards obesity, folks.
I am, according to this.
Now, I don't know. Maybe I am obese.
You know, I run two miles a day.
It's possible that I'm obese at the same time.
I do think that overweight and obese have become categories that are, you know, have maybe been widened too much.
No pun intended. I apologize.
But when you get into extreme obesity, when we talk about someone who is, you know, 5'7 and weighs 275 pounds, well, then it's obvious that it's a problem.
It's unhealthy. It is catastrophically unhealthy, in fact.
Now, If you are morbidly obese, or on the other end, let's say you're someone who is dangerously underweight, if you're massively overweight, massively underweight, you shouldn't try to accept it.
You shouldn't try to fool yourself into believing that it's a positive thing.
You shouldn't hate yourself either.
You shouldn't despair over it.
People shouldn't make fun of you for it or mock you, obviously.
But you should take it as a challenge to overcome, a change to make.
That's all. What's wrong with that?
We really need to get past this idea that we as individuals should celebrate and love everything about ourselves simply because it is ourselves.
The problem is that that philosophy leaves no room for improvement.
It leaves no room for honest self-assessment.
It will prevent you from becoming a better, healthier person.
Because any positive personal change has to always begin by looking at yourself and saying, this aspect of myself isn't ideal.
I want to change it.
We all have those negative facets of ourselves.
The only difference is that only certain negative personal features have their own lobbying groups and are the subject of marketing campaigns telling us to accept and celebrate it.
For instance, one of my many personal flaws is that I have a bad temper, okay?
So I'm telling you a lot about it.
I mean, I'm obese, I have a bad temper.
For instance, you know, so, but as someone with a bad temper, and I know it shocks you to learn that about me, I know that I need to change that.
That's a flaw that I have.
I need to work on it.
And nobody in society would tell me otherwise, though.
That's the difference. There isn't any bad temper acceptance movement.
They're not going to put me on the cover of a magazine screaming with a headline that says, bad tempers are beautiful.
Okay, that's not going to happen.
Because everyone recognizes that a bad temper is not beautiful.
It's a character flaw.
You got to change it. But overeating, gluttony, sedentary lifestyles, and the morbid obesity that often comes from it, with that, there are people telling us to accept it and love it, and that's why it's necessary to speak up and offer a corrective to that flawed and dangerous idea.
Number two, I go back to something I said when we talked about the idea of self-love.
It applies even more in this case.
Rather than being constantly obsessed with body positivity and with developing a positive image of your own body, maybe the better course is to stop looking in the mirror for five seconds and live your life.
Live it outwardly.
Stop obsessing over how you look one way or another because it's vanity either way.
To obsess over your perceived flaws or your perceived beauty is vanity.
Both are vanity. And it's a shallow Dull, miserable way to go through life.
All this stuff about we're supposed to love our bodies.
Oh, I love my body.
I'm so in love with my own body.
I mean, I guess we consider that healthy for people to go around talking about, I love my body so much.
But if you go back 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and you walk around telling someone, I love my body.
Do you love your body? They'll look at you like a crazy person.
They'll say, what? Love your body?
What is that? It's kind of a weird, it's a weird thing to say, hey, I'm so, hey guys, I love this so much.
I am so in love with all this.
I gotta tell you how much I love.
Just to walk around looking at yourself.
Oh my gosh, I'm in love.
I'm in love with me.
No, that's not, that's not how we should go through life.
And we say that everybody should think that they themselves are beautiful.
Well, everyone isn't beautiful, first of all.
There's a certain objective quality to physical beauty.
If there isn't any, I know people say, no, there's no objective quality to beauty.
Well, then it doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything to say, if everyone's beautiful, then beauty has no meaning.
To take pride in beauty or to feel good about it, it's like you might as well feel good about the fact that you breathe.
You might as well say, I'm a breather.
I tell you right now, you might as well look in the mirror and say, I am a breather.
Because it's the same thing as looking in the mirror and just telling yourself you're beautiful.
I'm beautiful. Everyone is beautiful.
We're all beautiful. Well, then no one is beautiful.
Then beauty means nothing.
You know, all we've done in that case is we have removed beauty from the people who actually have it and from the things that actually have it by trying to give it to everybody.
There is an objective quality to beauty.
I mean, think about art, for instance.
There are certain great classic pieces of art.
The Sistine Chapel is a beautiful work of art.
Now, we like to say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but not...
Now, there are subjective qualities to it.
How exactly it moves you, you know, what emotions, what thoughts it brings to mind, that's all subjective.
But if you walk into the Sistine Chapel and look up at the ceiling and say, yeah, I'm just not into that.
I mean, I think that's good. Or if you walk in and you say, ugh, disgusting!
That is gross! Well, then there's something wrong with you.
You are wrong. You are wrong for reacting that way.
If you look out at a serene, peaceful mountain lake, and there's not a cloud in the sky, you know, it's 65 degrees, which is the objectively best temperature, by the way, and there's birds flying by and everything, and there's trees all around. If you look at that and you say, yeah, you know, doesn't do anything for me.
Don't like it. Nope.
It's ugly. Gross.
Yeah, I'd rather go look at this dumpster over here.
Yeah, that's me. And then you go and you sit in front of a dumpster and stare at it and say, wow, you're wrong.
So beauty is not totally in the eye.
If that's your reaction, there's something mentally wrong with you and spiritually wrong with you.
Same holds true for physical beauty for people.
There are some people who are just physically beautiful.
And that's all.
They have it. That's a quality that they have.
And if it's something that has, if there's an objective quality to it, it means that some people can be physically beautiful and some people aren't.
So you might not be beautiful.
I'm not. That's okay.
That's fine. Statistically, you probably are not beautiful.
Statistically. Because most people aren't.
Now, which, that's fine.
It's fine. Not everyone has to be.
What about, it's the same thing as like, it's like if I said, you know, statistically, not everybody can run a mile in five minutes and 30 seconds.
It's kind of a, it is rare to find someone who, it's comparatively rare to find someone who can do that.
Someone who has that kind of speed and endurance, right?
And that's fine.
It's fine if you can't run a mile in five minutes and 30 seconds.
Now, what about beauty on the inside?
It's true that the beauty of kindness, the beauty of virtue and generosity, these are far more important.
But Not everyone has that beauty either.
Some people are ugly inside.
Some people are beautiful outside, ugly inside.
Some people are ugly outside, ugly inside.
That's possible too.
There's this dumb cliche where we kind of think that we assume that every ugly person must be beautiful inside.
Not necessarily. What was that stupid movie that came out years ago?
Shallow Hal with Jack Black?
And all of a sudden, he was able to see, you know, Tony Robbins gave him magical powers so that he could see the inner beauty of someone.
And in the movie, every physically ugly person he met was actually beautiful inside.
Well, I mean, it's nice to think that's the way it goes, but it's not necessarily the way it goes.
Some people have it all. There are people who are beautiful outside, beautiful inside.
But the last thing we should do is encourage people to spend time convincing themselves that they are beautiful outside and inside.
People who are beautiful on the inside, and that is people who are kind and generous and virtuous and all of that, compassionate, right?
Those people, they would never go around saying it, and they don't spend time thinking of it.
Because for anyone who really has virtue, there's an element of humility in all of their virtues in order for it to really be virtue.
So the moment someone says, I'm beautiful on the inside, well, then you know that they probably aren't, unless it's a child saying that.
But if it's an adult who goes around saying something like that, they're probably not beautiful on the inside, because lacking humility is ugly.
Preoccupation with yourself is ugly.
Talking about your own positive features is ugly.
Someone who's really beautiful on the inside, they don't think about it.
They don't focus on it. Because they're humble as well.
It's one of the things that makes them beautiful.
Point being, we should try to forget as much as possible about ourselves.
We should look at ourselves and within ourselves only as long as it takes to discover our flaws so that we can correct them.
And then we should live our lives from there, looking out into the world, at our loved ones, at nature, up to God, not in the mirror all the time, not into our own emotions, obsessing over our feelings about ourselves.
What a miserable way!
And this is how people live their lives now.
Where they're not only obsessed with their feelings, but they're obsessed with how they feel about themselves.
And they sit around all day, how do I feel about myself right now?
What a terrible way to live.
Awful. And, you know, I think, I'm not saying that we should have no positive feelings about ourselves at all.
But I think rather than walking around with this sense of our own alleged beauty, I think it's better, rather, to have a sense of our dignity.
Maybe that's what some people mean when they say, everyone is beautiful, or we should all think that we're beautiful.
Maybe, if I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe what they really are struggling trying to say is dignity.
Everyone has human dignity, and we should all be aware of our dignity, because that is definitely true.
And human dignity is a phrase that seems to have been lost.
So maybe forget about your beauty.
Forget about how you look.
Remember your dignity.
Because if you focus on dignity instead of beauty, then I think you'll be spurred on to act with decency and self-respect and humility and virtue and all of that.
Because a person can feel that they are physically beautiful and then go on to be a stripper or a prostitute, so their way of expressing their beauty is to defile it.
That happens all the time in this culture, and people are encouraged to act that way.
People are encouraged to express their physical beauty by desecrating it, and it's a terrible thing.
But if they have a sense of their dignity rather than their beauty, then they would never be a stripper or a prostitute.
And their beauty would be accentuated and highlighted and protected if they really have a sense of their own dignity.
So maybe we should get away from that.
Rather than body positivity, everyone's beautiful, blah, blah, blah, self-esteem, self-love, just self-dignity, the dignity of yourself.
Maybe that's what we should focus on.
And that's what we should instill into our kids.
That you are a human being.
You're a creature made by God.
You have dignity for that reason.
It is an immutable dignity that no one can take away from you.
And you can choose to live And live in a way that defends and protects and cherishes that dignity?
Or not? And that's the choice that we have to make.
All right. So remember your dignity.
And we'll leave it at that.
Have a great weekend, everybody. And if we do get sucked into a black hole sometime this weekend, then I guess I'll see you on the other side.
