The word “positivity” can prevent us from seeing body liberation as a civil and human rights issue and that body size should be a protected category similar to race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability. It is not enough to feel “positive” about one’s own body or the bodies of those one interacts with on a daily basis. The now widespread use of the term may also prevent us from seeing sizeism as a social justice issue. “Body positive weight loss” is therefore at odds with the original intentions of body positivity. Some diets, for example, market themselves as involving “body positive weight loss.” Body positivity as a feminist concept stemming from the Fat Acceptance Movement, however, is about radically accepting and making peace with one’s body as is. I prefer the terms “body liberation” and “body justice,” as opposed to the more popular term “body positivity,” because body positivity is increasingly co-opted by the weight loss and diet industry. Toxic gay masculinity functions around the desire to embody the normate gay type and to police those who fall outside the parameters of this cultural ideal, thereby reinforcing structural forms of oppression such as sexism, cissexism, racism, lookism, sizeism, and ableism. Gay men can simultaneously be victimized by toxic masculinity, as expressed by straight men, and perpetuate toxic masculinity against other marginalized men.
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Toxic masculinity, as a set of cultural standards for what men should be or do, is not monolithic. The absence of a sorely needed gay men’s body liberation movement is the product of cultural ideas of toxic masculinity - aspects of masculinity that produce socially harmful effects such as domination, misogyny, homophobia, and violence - and toxic gay masculinity, a subcategory of toxic masculinity that describes aspects of masculinity within gay male culture that are similarly detrimental. In gay men’s culture there is little discussion of diet culture, body positivity, the concept of “health at every size,” or feminism. Yet, despite existing similarities between appearance standards for women and gay men, there is no gay men’s body liberation movement to the extent that one exists within contemporary feminism. Gay men clearly suffer from a host of body image issues, disordered eating, and full-blown eating disorders. Rates of eating disorders and other body image disturbances are high among gay men, which may be taken as evidence that body image ideals exert pressures on gay men similar in strength to those faced by heterosexual women.”
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“The prevalence of these media representations creates an enormous pressure on gay men to conform to this narrow ideal body type, much like the beauty standards that are imposed on women and have been thoroughly analyzed by feminists.
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Though some gay men may embody the normate gay to a large extent, appearance standards are set to create a constant state of lack that aligns with consumer capitalism in the form of diet culture. The normate gay does not, in fact, exist, but is an idealized and unattainable cultural figure. The bodies of gay men who have less social and sexual capital because they are regarded as “deviant” - those who are of color, trans, disabled, fat, or fem - are defined in contrast to the body of the normate gay. I call this ideal gay male type the normate gay: the slim, toned, appropriately masculine, appropriately hairy, white, cisgender, and able-bodied gay man who embodies the collection of characteristics gay culture values most.
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In this column, I discuss culture and politics through a queer lens often absent in the mainstream to help amplify LGBTQ issues and perspectives.