Body positivity is such a strange concept to me. There’s efforts to reclaim words while simultaneously calling them bad if used as an insult. Ideally, people wouldn’t be offended by someone describing their body with common descriptors, but socially there is so much value attributed to certain body types that it’s almost impossible to avoid having an emotional response of some kind to various descriptors.

For example, It’s not bad to be fat, but calling someone “fat” is almost universally considered a bad thing. The same definitely seems to go for the idea of being “short.”

I’m asking this question because I can’t put my finger on why but something seems to be different about the use of the term “short” from the use of the term “fat.” I think that part of it is how, to me at least, the term “fat” is so generic and hard to nail down to a discrete definition, implying that the word really doesn’t have a clear connection to reality. On the other hand, height is a single-dimensional number. You either are above a certain threshold, or you aren’t.

I recently learned that May 6th to May 10th is “short king week” because it’s 5’6" to 5’10" which then prompted me to search for the origins of “short king” and apparently the person most-credited with popularizing the term is Jaboukie Young-White who claims the term was meant to include all men under 6 feet tall. The average adult male height is 5’9" leaving men considered roughly average to be called “short” which is still considered an insult by many.

I dunno. As a term that was intended to champion body positivity compared with how the term is actually used, what do you think of “short king?”

  • whoreticulture
    1·
    6 months ago

    The body positivity movement is honest, it’s just not needlessly cruel. Obesity is an epidemic caused by our food systems, and body positivity seeks to remove shaming and bullying the individual from our culture. Yes there are actions individuals can take, but those actions are much easier to take the more resources, money, and time you have.

    I listened to a great podcast recently that discussed this: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0hIhaRvji14Xk7xltlfzDl?si=W7Lm9F9ERH2jM_LqdNHleA

    Here’s the most relevant part of the transcript. It’s a bit weird to read, it’s really better as a podcast so I do recommend listening

    … an amazing woman named Shelly Bovee. She’s basically the person who introduced body positivity into Britain. So she grew up in a working class town in Wales where she was, she describes herself the only fat girl in her school. And one day when she was 11 her teacher said to her, Bovee stay behind after class. So she stayed behind thinking what have I done wrong? And the teacher said to her, you’re much too fat, it’s disgusting, go see the school nurse, she’ll sort you out. So kind of shaken Shelly went to see the school nurse. The school nurse said, why are you here? She said, well the teachers are too fat. She said, take off your clothes, I’m going to inspect you. She took off her clothes and the school nurse said, this is disgusting. You’re a greedy pig. Stop eating so much. Just berated her. So Shelly left and her whole life she was soaking up abuse and insults. and it made her hate herself and hate her body. In fact she told me she hadn’t ever looked at her body when she was showering even. She’d never looked at her body naked because she hated it so much.

    And then she learned about the body positivity movement which had obviously begun in the US, that was saying this is just a form of bigotry and bullying and cruelty and we don’t have to take this shit. As Shelley introduced it to Britain Wright I heard of her for the first time. I remember seeing her on TV when I was 10 years old when she was presented as kind of laughable madwoman and she really pioneered opposing stigma and she remains proud to this day of the work she did, rightly so in my view.

    But Shelley also faced another problem. She was extremely obese and she was finding it hard to walk. In fact she was in a wheelchair a lot of the time and a doctor told her she had heart problems. And she really began to wrestle with well am I betraying my body positivity if I talk about the harm caused by obesity to my health? And she began to say well what kind of body positivity would it be that would judge me for keeping my body alive? That doesn’t seem like body positivity to me. She lost an enormous amount of weight through calorie restriction and exercise and became much healthier.

    And she stands by everything she said about stigma but she said it’s not either or. It’s not either you’re against stigma or you’re in favor of reducing obesity where possible. It’s both and. If you love someone who’s obese you want to protect them from cruelty, shaming and bullying.And if possible you want to protect them from diabetes, heart disease, dementia. So to me there’s no playoff between those two