Body Positivity Doesn't Mean Telling Women to Do Nothing

I want to talk about something that shows up in my comments constantly, because I think a lot of people saying it have genuinely not thought it through.

On one of my posts, someone asked about options for correcting tuberous breasts. A commenter replied telling her, essentially, to love her body instead.

I suspect that comment was virtue signaling rather than sincere advice. I hope it was. But just in case anyone actually believes it, let's have a chat.

This matters to the argument, so let's be precise about the thing being discussed.

A tuberous breast is a congenital deformity of the breast. The patient asking that question has an abnormally formed breast. It isn't a matter of being slightly smaller or a slightly different shape than she'd prefer.

And here's the part that makes the "just love yourself" response land so badly: the options for correcting it are only surgical. There is no cream, no exercise, no acceptance practice that reshapes a tuberous breast. Surgery is the entire list of options.

Walk through the logic with me.

Someone comes forward with a deformity and asks about repairing it. And you believe the right response is to tell her to love her body and do nothing?

Because that's a strange thing to say. And it's an easy thing to say when you don't have a deformity and you feel good about your body. I'd imagine you would feel very differently if you had one.

That's the part that gets skipped every time. The advice costs the person giving it absolutely nothing.

The same logic gets applied to every other kind of plastic surgery, and it's just as thoughtless there.

Whether it's a breast reduction or a cosmetic breast augmentation, patients come to my office wanting to change their bodies. That's what the appointment is. Wanting a change is not evidence of a problem with the person wanting it.

Some of these patients are in genuine physical misery. Some aren't, and want a cosmetic change for reasons that are entirely their own. Both are allowed.

Let's name what's actually being said underneath these comments.

The implication is that there's something wrong with these people — that they don't love themselves, that they don't love their bodies, that they've failed at some self-acceptance test the commenter has passed.

That implication is gross in itself.

It assumes you know a stranger's relationship with her own body from a single question about a surgical option. You don't. And the assumption is almost always wrong.

Here's my actual ask.

We don't need to add more judgment to women. There is already an enormous amount of it, from every direction, about bodies specifically. Adding a layer where wanting surgery is treated as a character flaw doesn't help anyone.

Let women do what they want without judgment of their motivations or their feelings about themselves. That's the whole request. It isn't a big one.

I've written before about the judgment patients face about age, and it's the same pattern every time: a stranger deciding they know better than the person living in the body.

If you want to be useful here, the move is simple: stop making these comments.

And then go one step further and recognize something that the "love your body" crowd has backwards. For a great many patients, plastic surgery is a route to feeling better about themselves. It's a way of arriving at body positivity, not a betrayal of it.

The woman asking about tuberous breast correction is not failing at self-love. She's pursuing it, through the only avenue that exists for her particular anatomy.

Tuberous breasts are a congenital deformity, and correction is surgical or it doesn't happen. Telling someone in that position to love her body and do nothing isn't kindness, it's a comment that costs you nothing and offers her nothing.

The same applies across plastic surgery. Patients come in wanting to change something, and the assumption that this means they don't love themselves is both presumptuous and usually wrong.

Plastic surgery can be how a woman gets to body positivity. Let her get there.