Lizzo Wants the World to Know Being Fat Is Normal
Whether she has wanted to be or not, Lizzo has often found herself in the middle of conversations about weight and body positivity, and she has never been afraid of coming for body-shamers. But her thinking on the issue as a whole is, unsurprisingly, thoughtful and nuanced.
“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,” Lizzo told Vogue magazine. (She’s the October cover star.) “I’m glad that this conversation is being included in the mainstream narrative. 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.”
Lizzo added, “I think it’s lazy for me to just say I’m body positive at this point. 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?”
She also spoke out about racial injustice, the Black Lives Matter movement, and being Black in America. “My dad taught me very early on about what being Black in this country is. When I learned about Emmett Till, I was so young. And I have never forgotten his face,” Lizzo said. “They don’t actually care. And ‘they’—I don’t know who ‘they’ are. But I know that they don’t care, because if shit like this is still happening, there has to be a ‘they.’ They don’t care about somebody’s actual life.”
Lizzo is also hopeful about what it would mean to see Kamala Harris as the vice president.
“Having a Black woman as vice president would be great because I’m just always rooting for Black people,” she said. “But I want actual change to happen…in the laws. And not just on the outside, you know? Not a temporary fix to a deep-rooted, systemic issue. A lot of times I feel like we get distracted by the veneer of things. If things appear to be better, but they’re not actually better, we lose our sense of protest.”
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Image Source:*glamour.com
Source:glamour.com
