The Dark Psychology of “Body Positivity”
The real reason women share fugly pictures of themselves online
There is a trend on the internet women feel compelled to share images of their fat rolls, their body hair, their cellulite, scars and other imperfections. They purport to share these images in order to normalize “normal human bodies”. They seem to believe that airbrushed images of supermodels in the media are the cause of young womens’ insecurities and feelings of inferiority regarding their bodies. They believe that by sharing these imperfections, they can help girls who share these imperfections feel less insecure about them.
However, these women and leftists never clarify how exactly seeing your own imperfections on others can assuage insecurity that may be related to it. If your acne disgusts you, surely seeing it on someone else would be equally as repugnant and make you feel even worse about it. My observation of the effects of such a display of self-deprecation is two fold: first, they gain lots of praise and social affirmation from other women for being “virtuous and real”; second, one feels shock and disgust looking at these pictures. It follows that the complements on the “beauty” of these imperfections are fraudulent lies that women tell each other to feel like they belong to the cult of “niceness”.
When one steps away from it, it is quite a peculiar social phenomenon to observe: women who historically gained power in society through their beauty, now purposefully reveal unflattering pictures of themselves and these images are not ridiculed by rather showered with complements. There are many psychological and social factors at play here which I will disentangle in this essay.
The Elitism of Beauty, the Democracy of Ugliness