“You are beautiful”: why does body positivity continue to reduce the body to aesthetics?

We know that the media plays an important role in the construction of our identities: it is through the media that standards are established and passed on to people. Therefore, thinking about the issue of aesthetics in this medium can help us have a reference point for establishing a standard. First, however, we need to understand what this term means.

Originating from the Greek term aisthésis, which means "perception, sensation, sensitivity," aesthetics studies, broadly speaking, the definition of what is beautiful, thus distinguishing between what is sublime and what is not. Therefore, it is impossible to separate the concept of aesthetics from the body positivitymovement. In it, the discourse that "every body is beautiful" is asserted as a beneficial deconstruction, as if being beautiful were something intrinsic to all human beings. But why does this thought exist, and why is it directed primarily at women? To answer this, we also need to understand the concept of sensitivity and its historical influence on the media.

In the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries, science began to be seen as a civilizing function, indispensable for the lives of individuals who sought to break with the archaic past and evolve. This period is marked by the human effort to understand and interact with the world in order to improve oneself and increasingly master nature, thus achieving greater autonomy in the face of the physical world. This happens through an understanding of the formation of the senses and sensibilities.

Thus, the realization emerges that individuals appropriate the world in different ways, capturing it through organic bio-psychic apparatuses—that is, through the senses: touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. On the other hand, people also began to believe in the possibility of educating these senses to form certain sensibilities, which, in a civilized world, are the result of the encounter between subjectivity and nature, the social environment, and culture.

Thus, with the development of science combined with structural changes in modern society, the effects of nature on man also change. Technology begins to mediate this contact, providing a new set of impacts that directly interfere with how sensibilities are created.

Since then, the media has become a major apparatus for disseminating Enlightenment thought, which was so highly valued at that time. With technology, the reach of this discourse also expanded, while the press became a resource with a strong capitalist character and a tendency toward the massification of society.

In this context, the women's press appeared with the demand to include women as readers and consumers of this new form of society. And in the wave of renewing habits and creating new practices, the women's press also began to take on the role of outlining women's behaviors and character, while simultaneously encouraging them to consume through targeted advertisements. It is worth saying that, although we are more than a century away from that context, we remain trapped in these principles.

Therefore, when it comes to body positivitybody positivity, when the media brings the topic up as one of its discursive elements, it ends up reinforcing the idea that the body, especially the female body, is always related to the idea of beauty. And broadening the definition of what is beautiful—that all bodies are beautiful—does not remove the aesthetic character of this discourse: in reality, bodies end up being reduced to the idea of beauty, which has no place in a capitalist society, since the goal is to sell the beauty to be attained.

What happens in this discourse of body positivity body positivity is an attempt to construct a new sensitivity adapted to the nuances of globalization, but one that still treats the body, first and foremost, as something strictly related to appearance—a great contradiction, given that the body is the organic part that inserts us into nature. But perhaps that is precisely why the struggle for control over every physical aspect of an individual is so lucrative: it has no natural purpose, nor is it inherent to human beings, despite being treated as if it were.

When it comes to humanity, I always ask myself, "What is natural?"—seeking to glimpse the irrational, instinctive, and wild side that makes us similar to other animals. Today, technology mediates almost every interaction we have with nature, so I understand that nearly everything surrounding and shaping me exists based on sensibilities that have been educated and formed for a specific purpose.

In a capitalist world, even this reflection is corrupted and turned into a product, as is the case with body positivity. We are living in a moment where there is a boom of alternative behaviors, through which people seek to gain greater contact with nature and value their senses, in the hope of being less influenced by how the world works. Added to this are alternative schools, dietary choices, lifestyles, and even modes of meditation that are sold to the upper classes so that they feel even more distinct from the rest of society—more evolved.

For those who cannot pay for the elitist possibility of living pseudo-critically in society, capitalism continues to play its role. Their sensibilities continue to be shaped in every possible aspect, ensuring they remain directed toward mass consumption. More than that: their living conditions are set so that the system can keep functioning, thereby reinforcing privileges and oppressions.

It is in this postmodern chaos that popular education becomes so important, precisely because it does not aim to promote an almost utopian quest for equality or act within the logic of meritocracy. Its purpose, on the other hand, is to make individuals oppressed by societal structures aware of their own conditions.

In other words, liking your own body is not a bad thing, and having various body types accepted by society is even liberating, on a certain level. However, reflection is necessary: why is there an aesthetic condition placed upon your body? Why must you feel beautiful and accepted? What is, in fact, the purpose of your body? Why must you be reduced to it? To what extent does the influence of a capitalist society, which reinforces oppression and privilege, exist in this thought? To what extent is this natural and necessary?

This is why body positivity can be a beneficial movement in many circumstances, but it is by no means a solution.

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