*Trigger Warning for conversations of disordered eating and body negativity. All videos and embeds will show body-positive influencers only, but hyperlinks contain potentially sensitive content*
Last month, I wrote a piece on the ability of social media and apps to make positive impacts in fitness for historically excluded groups. Differently-abled, POC, and low-income communities have more access through the digitization of fitness to health building than they’ve ever had before.
That doesn’t mean that the internet hasn’t also made many aspects of “fitness” much more toxic -- in part, because what it means to be “fit” at all is based in a lot of really flawed institutions and histories. I’m a big fan of fitness TikTok, but it’s jarring to see the language that is casually used to promote “getting the perfect body” on the app. It’s even more disturbing to see how often harmful body-focused language pops up in a virtual space that I considered relatively positive, individualized, and healthy.
That definition of what it means to be healthy — how we should look and feel to claim the term as an identity — has changed rapidly for my generation. The Gen-Z/Millennial gray area, born in 1998-2001, witnessed social media explode as they transitioned from middle to high school. Our fitness idols shifted from celebrities to influencers, who were just like us but better. We suddenly had access to not only how we and our friends looked for body-shaming comparisons; we had access to every person in a nearby (or not so nearby) school thanks to Instagram and Facebook.
This isn’t to discredit the work that influencers like Jessamyn Stanley, Keah Brown, and countless others have done to create spaces for true body positivity and healthy body discourse on the internet. At least to some extent, young people today have access to subsets of the web that are accepting of the idea that there is more than one way to look and feel healthy. Perhaps more importantly, there are online communities that subscribe and disseminate the idea that just because you aren’t physically healthy, doesn’t mean you’re any less valuable or worthy as a person of respect, love, and compassion.
But whether you have access to that message largely depends on which virtual circles you fall into, and with algorithms designed to keep you locked in to existing salient messaging, it’s very hard to break out of a discourse or community once you’ve arrived.
And there are some pretty toxic communities to fall into online.
TikTok, relatively new but incredibly popular — particularly among Gen-Z kids in middle and high school today — represents the extreme vilification of most body types that plagued early YouTube stars, television dramas, and Facebook chats in the 90’s through the 2010’s. For every Lizzo on TikTok, there are thirty tween-age boys commenting their oh-so-nuanced opinions of how fat their peers are, how much weight they’ve gained or lost, how pretty they are or how much acne they have on any given day in posts that have absolutely nothing to do with those topics. Or on the other side, there are influencers like Virgie Tovar, who claim that fat acceptance also means criticizing any level of dieting as patriarchal. And all of this hatred for bodies — for skin and muscle and bone that carries and sustains us through our days — is amplified tenfold in a virtual space where, unless you are actively seeking out alternative messages, you are inundated with literally millions of images about what healthy “should” look like.
It’s an image that no one person can ever hope to attain for their lifetime. It is a hopelessly overwhelming mindset — and an incredibly harmful legacy of colonialism — that we view healthy bodies as skinny (but not too skinny), tall (but not too tall), completely free of blemish or evidence of time (or even evidence of our own laughter). Our society hates Black & Brown bodies, but steals their fitness regimens, their cultural perceptions of beauty, and their lives. Our society has sought to eradicate the differently-abled solely because they didn’t fit this transient perception of health or beauty. And social media platforms aid and abet these incredibly troubling historical rhetorics and logics of thought — they reinforce these harmful constructions of fitness for the next generation, almost all of whom are watching.Social media — platforms like TikTok — unify our generation across space, community, time and borders in a way that is truly unprecedented. In a lot of ways, this is mind-bogglingly cool. When it comes to reinforcing the negative institutions we were born into, it really fucking sucks.
I don’t really have a solution to this. There are always going to be internet trolls and there were assholes before TikTok exploded into the mainstream. I also don’t want to spout some platitude about remembering to be kind to yourself, to love your body, etc. etc. There are people articulating that individualized message much better than I ever could.
This is my attempt to remind fitness influencers especially to contextualize what they amplify on their platform. Critically examine what message you are sending to minors in your online communities, and critically examine why you’re saying it in the first place. Why do you think “getting a big butt in time for the summer” is going to be relatable and profitable for your audience? Are any of your routines accessible to the differently-abled? Have you thought about why you, specifically, amplify recipes that “are guaranteed to lose x pounds”?
We’re all human, and we all fall into the logics and institutions that came before us. This isn’t an aim to cancel anyone, or get hate directed to their platform. If it was not abundantly obvious, I fall into these thought patterns too — and I love fitness TikTok. I love the capacity social media has to disseminate different ideas of health, to help you get where you’re going on your fitness journey at your own pace without anyone physically there to make you feel insecure.
I’m asking that in the process accessing so much new information from so many different platforms — often without the same intentionality required of paying for fitness classes — that we attempt to think critically about why we care. My body gets me from room to room. It helps me climb mountains and take walks with friends and soak up sunlight like a plant. And even if it didn’t do all of those things, it’s still keeping me alive. That’s all it has to do, and if I’m going to care about what it looks like or how toned it is or whatever— the least I owe to my body is to ask myself why I care in the first place.
Drop your favorite body-positive TikTokers below in the comments!