Lizzo Pushes For Change From ‘Body Positivity’ to ‘Body-Normative’
While Lizzo may not have been too active on the music front over the past couple of months, that hasn’t stopped her from keeping the momentum going on the body-positivity movement she spearheaded in 2019. The young star’s known to craft her music around ideas of self-acceptance and in a recent interview, she emphasized the importance of this movement.
Lizzo made it a point to highlight that the body-positivity movement wasn’t meant to just target plus-sized women. It was launched to be inclusive of women of all shapes and sizes, the aim being to simply encourage them to accept and be comfortable in their own skin.
“Now, you look at the hashtag ‘body positive,’ and you see smaller-framed girls, curvier girls. Lotta white girls. And I feel no ways about that, because inclusivity is what my message is always about. I’m glad that this conversation is being included in the mainstream narrative,” Lizzo articulated.
She then continued, “What I don’t like is how the people that this term was created for are not benefiting from it. Girls with back fat, girls with bellies that hang, girls with thighs that aren’t separated, that overlap. Girls with stretch marks. You know, girls who are in the 18-plus club. They need to be benefiting from…the mainstream effect of body positivity now. But with everything that goes mainstream, it gets changed. It gets–you know, it gets made acceptable.”
Further, today marks an important day as Lizzo becomes the “first big black woman” to feature on the cover of a major publication. Lizzo took to Instagram to share her thoughts with a brief caption that read, “The first black anything feels overdue. But our time has come. To all my black girls, if someone like you hasn’t done it yet— BE THE FIRST.”
The star finally concluded with a call for change, “I think it’s lazy for me to just say I’m body positive at this point. It’s easy. I would like to be body-normative. I want to normalize my body. I think now, I owe it to the people who started this to not just stop here. We have to make people uncomfortable again, so that we can continue to change. Change is always uncomfortable, right?”
By: Nina Karun