Music icon and all-round legend Lizzo has graced the cover of Vogue this month, and she’s using the opportunity to talk about a number of serious issues. I simply cannot stress this enough: I love this for her.
Throughout the cover story, entitled ‘Lizzo on Hope, Justice, and the Election’, the musician discusses politics, the Black Lives Matter movement, and a plethora of other things. Heck, she straight-up told Vogue that her hit track ‘Truth Hurts’ is basically a profile on one of her ex-boyfriends and…uh, ouch.
But the real stand out of this story is her words on body positivity.
Regardless of your body shape or size, listening to a Lizzo bop is a surefire way to make you feel good about yourself, so it’s hardly surprising that she’s become synonymous with body positivity. But if you ask the singer herself, she “does not want her message to be boiled down to one of body positivity,” according to Vogue.
If you’re a smaller-framed person, it’s easy to look at the #bodypositive hashtag and feel empowered and good about your stretch marks or cellulite. But as Lizzo tells Vogue, “the people that this term was created for are not benefiting from it.”
“It’s commercialized. 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,” she said. “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.”
Until Lizzo explained it like this, I didn’t really consider it much of an issue. But considering the first comment I read this morning was somebody telling her to “lose some weight” in response to such a powerful article and a fucking VOGUE cover, it’s clear that it *definitely* is.
To put it simply, Lizzo just wants to normalise her body. It’s not about positivity for her, it’s just about accepting that all bodies are normal and acceptable.
“I think it’s lazy for me to just say I’m body positive at this point,” Lizzo told Vogue. “It’s easy. I would like to be body-normative. I want to normalize my body. And not just be like, ‘Ooh, look at this cool movement. Being fat is body positive.’ No, being fat is normal. 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?”
Obviously, we’ve got a long way to go when it comes to just letting people live their damn lives without commenting on their weight. But Lizzo getting a Vogue cover, and being able to use that platform to share a message that would’ve never been promoted in Vogue years ago feels like a step in the right direction.
We simply love to see it.
