Why body positivity has become another way to control women

“Love your body. Embrace your curves. Accept yourself the way you are”. Don’t these phrases ring a bell? They flood our timelines, our adverts, our conversations. However, what happens if I cannot (or don’t want to) do it? Would this make me “less feminist”?

For centuries, women’s bodies have been regulated, scrutinised, and controlled. From rigid standards of beauty to prescriptive ideas about femininity, society has long dictated how women should look, move, and even feel about their bodies. Patriarchy told us to shrink our bodies, discipline them, conceal them, beautify them.

The message was clear: if you did not fit the ideal, you did not belong.

Recently, however, the narrative has broadly shifted. The “change your body” has turned into a “love your body” discourse. Media campaigns, influencers, and brands are telling us to accept and love our bodies the way they are and to “be body-positive.”

On the surface, this seems like a radical reversal, a feminist triumph against impossible ideals and subversion of norms. But what if these calls turn into another form of body regulation for women, instead of liberation?

Cool capitalism

Scholar Rosalind Gill explains post-feminism as a sort of “sensibility”, a cultural climate where women’s bodies remain the centre of the discourse, shifting from “objectification to subjectification”. Women are no longer “looked at”, but rather actively participate in crafting and monitoring their own appearance, confidence, and desirability under the guise of empowerment and self-love.

This is why the “love your body” narrative and its derivatives feel contradictory. On the one hand, they appear to offer a counter-hegemonic discourse that resists the cultural norms about women’s bodies. On the other hand, they insert a new moral demand on women, to display confidence and embrace themselves.

As someone who comes from an African country, the story of curly hair offers a striking example of this. For decades, we were told as women that naturally curly or textured hair was unruly, unprofessional, or unattractive, falling outside the beauty standards. When I was younger, I used to watch the beauty industry thrive on products designed to tame, straighten, or chemically relax curls, presenting straight hair as the only legitimate form of beauty. Yet, currently, as the “love yourself” narrative gained traction, the very same industry pivoted.

Suddenly, curls are celebrated. Entire product lines have been launched to “embrace your natural hair” and “celebrate your curls” which may apparently appear as a victory for diversity.

Likewise, campaigns related to skin products, that used to promote whitening creams and bleaching treatments for darker-skinned women, making them feel inadequate, are currently thriving on that insecurity by carefully rebranding their products in alignment with the “love yourself” discourses.

In all these examples and others, the goal remains the same: profit. What appears to be empowerment is often just the market repackaging itself to monetise new ideals.

Gill and fellow academic Ana Sofia Elias aptly describe this as “commercially-motivated love your body discourse” which could be perceived a part of “emotional capitalism” and “cool capitalism”. They argue that instead of breaking the cycle of women’s body commodification, these narratives “may in fact instantiate new, more pernicious forms of power that engender a shift from bodily to psychic regulation”.

Accordingly, these capitalist neo-liberally informed systems absorb critique and repackage it into new ways of selling in manifestation of a “distinctively postfeminist articulation of sexism”.

When empowerment becomes compulsory

The problem is not that women are encouraged to accept their bodies. Many women find genuine relief and joy in these messages, especially after a lifetime of being told they are never good enough. The problem arises when self-body acceptance becomes compulsory.

If I cannot, or simply do not want to, accept my body as it is, why should that make me a failure? Why should I feel guilty for struggling with body image, or for wanting to change something about myself?

On top of all the pressures women already face, we are now required to love ourselves unconditionally. If in the past women were told to fix their bodies, now we are asked to fix our feelings about our bodies.

Within this framework, body acceptance becomes a personal duty: if you don’t love yourself, it is your fault. Structural issues such as sexism, racism, fatphobia, class inequality, are now replaced by a focus on individual psychology. As such, these discourses rather intensify the burden, extending regulation from the body to the psyche, from appearance to emotion.

The neoliberal logic underlying this shift also cannot be denied. As María José Camacho-Miñano and Shirley Gray argue, “postfeminism is understood as gendered neoliberalism”. They both go hand in hand, encouraging women to constantly manage and improve themselves while still keeping within traditional expectations of femininity, and thus, “reproducing normative ways of doing gender”.

The scholars emphasise that such pedagogies “homogenise young women’s desires and affects around their bodies” and therefore, a feminine subject is “called into being” which is complicit with both neoliberalism and patriarchy”.

This produces a new hierarchy within feminist spaces. Women who embrace their bodies are celebrated as strong and empowered, while those who cannot are marked as lacking, as “not feminist enough”.

This “enoughness trap” silences ambivalence and struggle, creating a narrow vision of what feminist embodiment should look like.

Towards structural change

But what if feminism could make space for ambivalence? What if we allowed women to have complicated, contradictory, or even negative feelings about their bodies, without shame?

The “love your body” imperative is almost impossible to live by. It demands a psychic makeover that few can sustain. Instead of forcing women into yet another impossible standard, feminism could embrace a politics of multiplicity, recognising that women’s relationships with their bodies are diverse, messy, and deeply shaped by social structures.

We should not be dictated by how we must feel about our bodies. True autonomy means the freedom not only to accept or reject one’s body, but also to be indifferent to it, to struggle with it, to change it, or to refuse to engage with it at all. It should resist both the patriarchal demand to discipline and the neoliberal demand to unconditionally love.

If women are encouraged to see body dissatisfaction as their own failure of self-love, they are less likely to challenge the industries and ideologies that profit from insecurity. If the focus is on “confidence,” then attention is deflected from the sexism, racism, fatphobia, and classism that shape how bodies are judged and valued.

Ultimately, it is neoliberal systems that prefer to locate problems in individual responsibility and self-management, rather than structural inequality.

A more radical feminist politics would therefore re-centre those structures. Instead of asking individual women to shoulder the burden of positivity, it would be better to challenge the media, industries, and cultural practices that produce body dissatisfaction in the first place.

This would lead us to better understand how power works differently across race, class, sexuality, age, and disability, all dimensions too often glossed over in mainstream body-positive messages.

The shift from “fix your body” to “love your body”, despite seeming like progress, has another side that we must take seriously. When body acceptance becomes an obligation rather than a choice, it functions as yet another form of regulation of women’s bodies.

Esra Saleh is an Egyptian feminist journalist and media researcher, and the producer and host of Salmon Podcast. Her work explores how gender, media, and social change intersect, combining research, storytelling, and activism. She holds a Master’s in Gender and Media from the University of Sussex, UK, and a Master’s in Journalism and New Media from the Jordan Media Institute. An experienced gender and media consultant and trainer.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.