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Body Positivity: The Commodification of Self-Acceptance Movement

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The body positivity movement that once started to make people with extra weight feel confident in their own skin has long lost its true purpose. With social media at boom and brands using anything in trend to sell their product, the diminishing movement has transformed into a hashtag for influencers to grasp more likes and a tagline for brands to advertise their outputs.

With all the blaze surrounding body positivity movement, things have surely taken some good turn. Not very long ago, media, TV, and commercials showed only a very small section of the body types. Now magazines and ramps are opening doors for plus-size women.

But what really is body positivity? Are the brands actually conveying the message behind the movement? And is body positivity truly commodified?

What is Beauty?

What exactly does the word plus mean? Plus means good when used as a noun; plus means optimistic when used as an adjective; but when the same plus is used in the context of body type, plus somehow becomes a stereotypical stigma. It begins by implying that someone plus-sized isn’t ‘beautiful enough.’ So who gets to say what these perfect bodies and beauty ideals are?

Social media influencers, ramps, and brands have collectively cultivated the body image problem, and then exploit them for skyrocketing their business. If observed closely, it gets evident how the standards of beauty are introduced to us from a very young age.

For girls, Barbie doll defines good look; slim, fair, and tall. When grew a little older, makeup brands showing fair and spotless models expounded the ideal skin. Ramps elucidated the perfect height and body type. Anyone who didn’t fit into these idealized skin and shape was made to feel less.

Impacts of the Unrealistic Beauty Standards

A research’s staggering report published in the Body Image journal dictates that the insanely unrealistic body proportion of the Barbie dolls lowers the self-esteem of young girls between the age of 6 to 8 and they complain about their own natural body not being good enough.

Another research found that images of models, very strongly impact adolescent girls’ perception of ideals weight, and body shape. According to the results, 69% of the girls are influenced by the perfect body shape depicted in the magazines.

Social media and brands have cultured a noxious relationship between us and our natural bodies. But now these same brands are latching out and woke the new movement of body positivity, flaunting plus size models just to sell us a whole new set of products.

A study conducted amongst 2000 women showed that a staggering 89% of the women feel that their body shape is not represented in the main street fashion industry. 74% of the women in the US feel self-conscious when looking at themselves in the mirror. More than half of the 13-year old girls in America are unhappy with their bodies, by the age of 17, the percentage shoots up to 80%.

What Actually is Body Positivity Movement?

Though today body positivity has turned into more of a buzzword used by brands to sell their latest collection; its history is deeply entrenched in revisionist social justice and radical body acceptance. Originally emanated by the 1960’s fat acceptance movement, body positivity is the movement created for embracing marginalized bodies, especially “fat, Black, queer and disabled bodies” says Chelsea Kronengold of the National Eating Disorder Association.

The movement largely encouraging plus-sized women to accept their bodies soon began to steam up on platforms like Facebook groups and Tumblr. Here women suffering from the social stereotype of body shape discussed their problems and how their looks were preventing them from being treated like everyone else. But with the rise of influencer culture, the plus-size model started utilizing the movement to promote acceptance of body positivity on platforms like Instagram, gathering support from the followers.

But plus-size models weren’t the only ones using these hashtags for publically preaching love for their natural bodies. Super skinny influencers also championed body positivity hashtags, flaunting the parts of their bodies which they adjudged to be ‘flawed.’ Despite being inherently correct, these models exhibiting their love handles, hip dips, cellulitis using #bodypositivity was completely contrary to the initial movement’s motivation which focused on acceptance of marginalized bodies.

The Commodification of Body Positivity

In a world ruled by capitalism, the organic social justice movement challenging social stereotypes hovering over body image was soon manipulated, repurposed, and commodified. As brands started seeing the plus-size influencers as a profitable tool to boost their sales, models with some extra pounds were incorporated into the brand’s campaign under the semblance of body positivity.

Clothing brands love to sell the idea of self-love, accepting the body as it is and clothing it accordingly. But are they really promoting body positivity? In reality, they are doing quite the opposite.

The body positivity movement recently again sparked in 2021, challenging unrealistic beauty standards. Numerous plus-size models were hired for spreading the message, Instagram became the platform to advertise the movement. Today, there are more than 7 million posts under #bodypositivity, but most of them have nothing to do with the original idea behind the movement. This hashtag has become just another hashtag for vaunting selfies, gym-wear, and paid posts. Most of them sharing their fat-loss journey.

Body Positivity: The New Marketing Idea

For the fashion industries acceptance of plus-size models is still a long way ahead. Plus-size in the industry means size 8, the average size of women in the US in 14. For them, curvy women with hour-glass waist walking down the ramp are acceptance of women of all sizes.

Research conducted by Florida State University showed that women tend to remember brands showcasing plus-size models in their advertisement, and perhaps add the brand’s product to their shopping cart. This is the psychology the brands are cashing on, and the reason behind featuring curvier models in the name of body positivity.

One-third of the women in the US classify themselves as plus-size. The branding tactics of body positivity turned out to be immensely fruitful for the clothing brand. In the UK plus-size clothing business have almost doubled in just a decade.

© Statista 2021

There has been genuine demand for plus-size clothing and brands have catered it well. Today almost every top brand has a plus-size collection, but astonishingly they do not share the same rack as other sizes. Inclusivity is still missing in the supply of cloth, plus is mostly another section if not another shop altogether. The price range of plus-size clothes also varies from the usual sizes.

A Long Way Ahead

Today, brands are making huge money from what started as a movement of self-acceptance, but the message is yet not conveyed. We as a society still say “Wow! you look great. Have you lost weight?”

Society still has a long way to understand that beauty is not about being curvy or skinny, tall or short but being comfortable in being your own self.

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Jewish Nazism is reality not fiction

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Jewish Nazism

I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.

Read Also: No forgiveness for Jewish Nazism

These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.

But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.

Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.

Read Also: The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?

The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.

In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.

The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.

However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.

In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.

Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.

For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.

Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!

Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.

To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.

Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.

I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.

A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?

Words can kill; words do kill.

Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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I’m most definitely Palestinian!

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Palestinian

In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.

The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.

Read Also: The age-old Palestinian-fear (of the Israeli thirst)

The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.

Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.

The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.

Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.

I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.

(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.

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The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

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It is really ludicrous to see how dishonest the U.S “mediators” constantly demand that the Palestinians display more “good will” toward Israel at a time when Israel continues to perpetrate a real Holocaust against the hapless and helpless Palestinaians and steal Palestinian land in broad daylight.

It seems amply clear that the current Palestinian leadership, i.e. the Palestinian Authority (PA)  led by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, neither learns from its own blunders nor from other people’s blunders. This is really a gigantic disaster befalling the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause.

How else can one relate to the unrelenting illogical insistence of the the whole world on accepting the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, as “mediator and honest broker” between us and our murderous tormentors and grave-diggers, Israel?

Read Also: The US and IsraelThe dog versus the wagging tail.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on American foreign policy in the Middle East to know that the U.S represents the problem, not the solution, given its long-standing embrace of Israeli fascism and expansion.  After all, it is the US that not only enabled Israel to actively pursue its lebensraum policy at the expense of its neighbors but consistently shield it from any accountability or international condemnation.

Today, the U.S. administration is criticizing Palestinian “unilateralism” in reference to desperate PA efforts to get the UN Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and agree on a deadline for ending Israel’s Nazi-like occupation.

Well, we all know that the U.S. is being pornographically hypocritical when it accuses the virtually vanquished Palestinians of acting unilaterally as if its spoilt nefarious daughter, Israel, were ever acting in full conformity with international law.

Well, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Ereikat: Don’t be too gullible, too sheepish. Ask your American interlocutors, e.g. Mr. John Kerry, the following questions:

Since when did Israel ever behave bilaterally rather than unilaterally?

Was the usurpation of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous people at the hands of Jewish terrorist gangs hailing from Eastern Europe, a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the building of hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the transfer of 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on a land that belongs not to them a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the wanton demolition of some 30,000 Palestinian homes by Israel a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the annexation of the bulk of the West Bank and East Jerusalem a bilateral or a unilateral act?

And what about this ugly structure, called Separation wall, which resulted in the theft of thousands of acres of private Palestinian land? Was it a bilateral or a unilateral act?

I could go on and on and on listing America’s hypocritical and duplicitous stands on Palestinian grievances and Israeli crimes. Indeed, the U.S dishonest stand on the Palestinian plight has only been consistent in its moral depravity. Indeed, hypocrisy in its most brazen form has always been and continues to be the modus operandi of American policy toward the Palestinian issue. I know it is politically incorrect to speak in this tone. However, truth must not be another victim of the dark evil embrace between the U.S. and Israel.

But morality is not and has never been part of American politics or policies, especially foreign policy. This is why the world looks so ugly, so gloomy and so unjust.

The U.S. is insisting that only a “negotiated” settlement to the Palestinian issue would be acceptable to the U.S.

Read Also: The Palestinian Authority: confused, frustrated and corrupt

In other words, Israel must always have the final say as to any possible peace deal with the Palestinians.

But since Israel would never ever end its occupation or dismantle the settlements, let alone allow for the repatriation of the refugees, it means there can be no negotiated settlement unless the Palestinians agree to surrender to Jewish Nazism. But that will never happen as Muslims, including the Palestinian people, would never allow the Ramallah leadership or any other leadership to commit adultery with the honorable Palestinian cause.

Let’s be honest. The purportedly honest American broker or mediator is neither honest nor a broker or mediator. The proverbial American judge is simply telling the insolent rapist (Israel) and the vanquished rape victim (the Palestinians) to sort it out amongst yourselves. Do we have to be the smartest humans on earth to understand the implications of this brutal ugliness?

It is tantamount to a total American embrace of Israeli fascism. It means that the American stance is actually Israel’s stance. It also means that that the U.S. would never accept or condone any settlement that Israel doesn’t accept.

That is why the Palestinians need to have a moment of truth with themselves.
And the message they need to internalize is that they would have to wait ages if they continued to put their trust in the U.S. to pressure Israel to walk in the path of peace.

Let us face it. Israel will never walk in the path of peace unless it is pressured and bullied to do so. However, Israel would never ever walk in the path of peace as long as it continues to receive nuclear submarines from Germany and the most advanced fighter jets from the U.S.

In a nut shell, America can’t and won’t exert any meaningful pressure on Israel to end its N-a-z-i-like occupation. We all know that Israel controls the American government or at least controls those who control the American government. Israel is intoxicated by its arrogance of power and Talmudic insolence. And the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, is not in a position to be an honest mediator and to impose a deal on Israel or even convince her to allow for one that would give the Palestinian a semblance of justice.

What should be done?

We must go ahead with our efforts at the U.N. Security Council, irrespective of American threats to veto any resolution favorable to the Palestinian cause. At least casting the veto would embarrass America itself and its treacherous Arab allies (they are not actually allies but cheap slaves and puppets as we all know).

We Palestinians must be confident of our inevitable triumph over Zionism and its evils. Yes, it may take time, but eventually Zionism won’t live forever in a sea where hundreds of millions live.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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