Pop star Lizzo said that the “body positivity” movement is “commercialized” and has yet to “normalize” women sizes 18 and over in a recent Vogue interview.
Lizzo said that women featured in the “body positivity” movement are not big enough, and “girls with back fat, girls with bellies that hang, girls with thighs that aren’t separated” are not being featured often enough.
“It’s commercialized,” the 32-year-old singer, who will be on the October cover of Vogue, told the magazine. “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,” she added. “I’m glad that this conversation is being included in the mainstream narrative.”
But in Lizzo’s opinion, the movement is not quite big enough.
“What I don’t like is how the people that this term was created for are not benefiting from it,” she said. “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,” Lizzo continued. “But with everything that goes mainstream, it gets changed. It gets — you know, it gets made acceptable.”
Lizzo went on to say that believes calling herself “body positive” is now a “lazy” sentiment, as she believes the body positivity movement should be normalized to the point that it is no longer considered “body positive.”
“I think it’s lazy for me to just say I’m body positive at this point,” said Lizzo. “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,” she added. “We have to make people uncomfortable again, so that we can continue to change. Change is always uncomfortable, right?”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.