Elsevier

Body Image

Volume 41, June 2022, Pages 367-374
Body Image

#Bopo: Enhancing body image through body positive social media- evidence to date and research directions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2022.03.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Body positive content aims to increase diversity and inclusiveness by rejecting harmful appearance ideals.

  • Initial support for the potential for body positive social media content to be beneficial for body image exists.

  • Lower state appearance comparison may underpin these effects.

  • More work is needed to identify individual-level moderators.

Abstract

Body positive content aims to disrupt the monopoly of idealized appearance-focused media and encourage individuals to adopt a positive stance towards their body by increasing diversity and inclusiveness and rejecting harmful appearance ideals. This paper provides an historical context for the body positivity movement, discusses the presence and characteristics of the online body positivity movement, presents evidence of its relationship to body image, and finally offers directions for future research. Findings provide initial support for the potential for body positive social media content to be beneficial for body image, and lower state appearance comparison has received support as a mechanism underpinning these effects. However, efforts to identify individual-level moderators have met with less success, and the research is somewhat confined to comparative effects with idealized social media content, and young women. Additional work to bridge the gaps in the extant data is needed. In particular, expanding the understanding of which types of body positive social media content can be most helpful to both prevent and decrease body image concerns and promote positive body image using a layered lens that considers the interactions of the individual, their context, and the type of body positive social media content will be most fruitful.

Introduction

Highly visual (i.e., appearance-oriented) social media use has been found to negatively impact body image due to the presence of idealized images that (a) lead to unfavorable appearance comparisons, (b) reinforce appearance as a central feature of identity, and (c) promote the pursuit of unattainable appearance ideals (Fardouly and Vartanian, 2016, Holland and Tiggemann, 2016). However, despite the predominance of idealized appearance-centered content on social media, other types of content are also present and may constitute a counter discourse and potentially protect body image. In particular, social media content identified as “body positive” (#bopo) may be beneficial. This paper aims to provide an overview of the historical context, presence, and characteristics of the online body positivity movement, as well as the evidence to date regarding how it relates to body image, and finally offer directions for future research.

Section snippets

Definitions

Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of body positive content within social media campaigns and platforms (e.g., Instagram) that has developed into a body positivity (#bopo) movement. Body positive content encourages body acceptance and challenges the normalization and pursuit of sociocultural appearance ideals, often centering the voices of marginalized individuals and acknowledging their oppression.

The body positive movement was built on the foundation of previously

Presence and characteristics

The focus of the body positive movement on visual diversity and the concurrent rise of highly visual social media have contributed to its broad reach. At the time of writing, the hashtag #bodypositivity claimed 8936,218 posts, of which the top two1 illustrate some of the tensions described above. The first, a cartoon bearing the quote “Don’t hate your legs, they take you places” exemplifies the focus on

Potential effects and mechanisms

The potential benefits of body positive online content are framed within sociocultural theories of the development and maintenance of body image concerns as well as theories of the development of positive body image. Sociocultural theories of body image concerns posit that the unachievable appearance ideals that are conveyed by mainstream media and relayed by interpersonal influences, coupled with social consequences of the oppressive social system of body capital, place strong pressures on

Benefits to positive body image

An accumulating body of qualitative, cross-sectional, experimental, and emerging longitudinal evidence has investigated the relationships between body positive social media content and body image. As described above, body positive social media content is heterogeneous in its imagery, messaging, and philosophical underpinnings, and therefore the types of body positive content considered across these studies also varies, with some studies focusing on a very specific type of content while others

Future directions

Although a growing body of empirical evidence has supported an overall relationship between body positive social media content and lower body image concerns and more positive body image, many gaps in our understanding of the ways in which body positive social media content is related to body image remain. These gaps include clarifying both the types of body positive content and the dimensions of body image that might be most positively associated, as well as the individuals who may derive the

Conclusions

To conclude, body positive content aims to disrupt the monopoly of idealized media on the visual landscape, and to encourage individuals to adopt a positive stance towards their body and appearance by increasing diversity and inclusiveness on social media and rejecting harmful appearance ideals that perpetuate oppressive systems of body capital. The extant research provides support for the relationship between such social media content and lower levels of body image concerns and higher levels

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