When I came across the Bustle article titled, “Hunter McGrady Looks Huge in her ‘Sports Illustrated’ Swimsuit Issue Photos,” I immediately felt nauseous. I was prepared to read a scathing piece that tore McGrady’s body to shreds. I halfheartedly skimmed the first paragraph before quickly recognizing that this was not yet another fat-shaming piece, but rather an exclamation of body positivity.
In a nutshell, body positivity is meant to encourage body acceptance at any size. Essentially, we need to stop looking at our bodies as the enemy. The end goal of body positivity is full acceptance and appreciation of our bodies and what they do for us.
As an individual in recovery from an eating disorder, I have had a lot of exposure to body positivity, but the coverage of the topic still fails to capture the full spectrum of shapes and sizes. People understand the idea in theory, but struggle when it comes to fat-shaming in the name of “health.”
When I was in treatment, I had to gain weight to get to a healthy weight for my body. When I found out my ideal body weight, I immediately felt overwhelmed, and I called a friend from home for comfort. She, a product of the same thin-focused media and culture that primed me for sickness, gasped and asked, “Do they want you to be fat?”
And, honestly, who can blame her? We are surrounded by images and body critics that provide such thin parameters for beauty and health. Anything outside the norm is immediately gawked at, and many are unsure of how to approach and describe these outliers.
Many writers skirted around the elephant in the room when describing McGrady, saying the “curvy” model “br[oke] boundaries.” These words suggest a feeling of discomfort in stating the obvious: McGrady is a plus-sized model looking amazing in a photo shoot designed for and largely populated by thin swimsuit models.
I was initially shocked that Amanda Richards of Bustle used words like “huge” and “big” to describe McGrady. The media has socialized us to view them as insults, but they are not. They are merely adjectives used to describe the human shape, and I hope that, with the proliferation of the body positivity movement, we can start to see them that way.
We need to stop looking at our words as weapons and our bodies as battlefields. Accepting bodies for what they are, and describing them as such, is not just acceptable, it’s necessary.