In A World Of Watered-Down 'Body Positivity,' The Tess Holliday Self Cover Is A Radical Choice

This week, Self magazine unveiled its first digital cover, featuring a surprising photo choice: plus-size model Tess Holliday, posing in diaphanous fuchsia, her bare back and one of her upper arms forming the center of the image. So it was unexpected to see Tess Holliday’s body showcased on the cover ― and doubly so to see it alongside the headline “Tess Holliday’s Health Is None of Your Business.” As a fat acceptance activist for two decades, who literally wrote a book on the topic and spent several years writing and editing essays about fattery for mainstream media, I was astonished. Body positivity takes a movement that sought to rewrite the conversation about bodies and weight and acceptability, and turns it into a series of marketing catchphrases ― or, as a recent Racked takedown calls it, a “scam” ― while erasing years of effort by activists who laid the groundwork for fat acceptance as a means of improving the lives of actual fat people. Where fat activism interrogates and subverts a culture that tells fat women their bodies are revolting and must be hidden, body positivity lauds average-weight women who advocate for loving your “flaws.” Body positivity turns dieting into “clean eating,” it asserts that no body problem is so great that a solution cannot be bought, and it suggests that literally anything is “body-positive” so long as the person engaging in the behavior thinks she is doing it out of a positive impulse ― even if doing so reinforces damaging cultural assumptions about bodies and weight. From Holliday’s declaration that she has given up trying “prove” her worthiness by asserting that she is one of the “good, healthy” fat people, to the methodical takedown of what we actually understand about the connections between fat and illness, to personal essays from Jes Baker, Sonya Renee Taylor and others, this issue ― guest edited by Ijeoma Oluo ― has been handled remarkably correctly, especially for a magazine that has been responsible for decades of toxic messaging to women about weight and health.