The Very 2021 Story of Adele and the Body Positivity Wackos
In 2021, everyone wants external solutions to their personal crises
Although I would absolutely agree that Adele is extremely talented and in particular, “Hello,” is a fantastic song, I’ve never much liked her music. It’s too sad and too slow for it to be something I’d enjoy.
If Adele somehow reads this, I’m hoping that her fame and 190-million-dollar net-worth will help cushion the crushing blow of finding out I’m not a fan. Hang tough, sis! In any case, Adele is back in the news again because she has a new album coming out next month, which will be her first release in five years.
That means she’ll be getting a lot more publicity, which will mean that large numbers of Americans will for the first time realize that Adele has lost about 100 pounds since her last album. She has gone from this…
To this…
A decade ago, everyone would have just congratulated her for losing weight, noted that she looked terrific, and that would have been that. Of course, in angst-ridded, reality-denying, self-obsessed 2021, that won’t do because Adele’s weight loss isn’t just something Adele is doing to make herself feel prettier and healthier, it’s some sort of transcendental statement about all overweight women.
Here is some of the initial body positivity nuttery we saw when Adele first revealed her weight loss in 2020:
* “Celebrating Adele’s weight loss isn’t a compliment – it’s fatphobia.” — The Independent
* “The discourse around Adele’s weight loss — without her really saying a single public word about it — is already kind of unsavory. Some people are cheering for her as if her Oscar and 15 Grammys and multiple world records aren’t enough for her to feel like a success. Her weight loss, any way you cut it, pales in comparison to the other things she’s done in the first three decades of her life, yet it’s being framed like the most incredible thing she’s done in recent memory.
….Conversely, there are plenty of people who feel a little mournful about her weight loss since Adele was a hero for fat (or otherwise non-thin) people. She proved you could be successful at a larger size without that weight defining your personal narrative. (It also helped, of course, that she’s white and conventionally attractive and, even at her largest, was not that fat.)” — Buzzfeed
This all ties into an article that’s so 2021 it should be in a 2021 magazine, written by a 2021 bot, designed by a computer programmer that changed her name to 2021 called – “I’m a little bummed that Adele lost weight. Yes, I know this is not about me. But it’s not just about Adele either.”
… Adele is skinny now.
She has been skinny for a while—first, in an Instagram post last year, and then, while hosting Saturday Night Live. This week, we got skinny Adele in a music video, ahead of the release of her album 30.
...And yet, even as I know that celebrating Adele’s weight loss is wrong, I am struggling with something different, which is feeling a little upset about it. Which is weird! After all, Adele is an adult human woman, and I am a feminist. “She can do whatever she wants!!” wrote Katie Sturino, influencer and author of Body Talk, on her Instagram in a post about Adele’s slim-down, adding the hashtag #WeightIsntNews. “The public seems unable to receive it with neutrality,” wrote Scaachi Koul, back when skinny Adele first surfaced.* To assign a value in any direction to Adele’s weight-loss—excitement or disappointment—is to over-involve oneself in the dynamics of a stranger’s body.
...Ideally, I would have no thoughts about someone else’s weight. After all, I am—duh!—firmly in the camp that Adele is a human person and gets to do whatever she wants. But this is the one thing that I think is worth remembering: She is also a highly produced image, and, given the water we swim in, it makes sense if you or I feel a little sad that the image has changed. I’m not sending any “blame” in her direction—that blame ought to be reserved for the faceless mass of people making the choices about whom to give record deals and Vogue covers. It’s a lot harder to feel mad at them—I don’t know who they are, really—but I am trying my best. Until we live in a world where we can comfortably exist at any size, we’re going to inevitably feel things when one of the relatively few fat women celebrities changes. It’s OK to feel a little disappointment.
One of the reasons American society is horrifically screwed up today is that so many people are looking for external solutions to their personal crises.
Put another way, in this particular case, it doesn’t feel good to be overweight.
It’s unhealthy. It makes people feel ashamed. It makes you less attractive to the opposite sex. People make judgments about you based on your being overweight that in many cases are untrue and unfair. Contrary to what you often hear, it’s not necessarily an easy puzzle to solve either. There are an awful lot of people that have spent years and sometimes even decades, earnestly trying to lose weight and failing. It’s also fair to note that when 2/3 of Americans are overweight or obese, that seems like a powerful sign that the advice we give people about how to lose weight is failing on a systemic level more than an individual level.
As I could tell you from personal experience, when you’re faced with all these facts and you are overweight, you have one of three choices in how you deal with it.
You can say, “The odds are against me, so I might have to work harder than other people to cut weight. No matter how many times I fail, I have to keep trying until I get there.”
The second choice is to say, “This is too hard. I give up.” Then you blow up and go downhill.
The third and wokest way to handle this is to say, “I don’t have a problem because the issue is THE WORLD, not me.” This is the mentality that gets lumped under the innocuous-sounding term, “body positivity.” Who could have a problem with that, right? After all, whatever kind of shape you’re in, shouldn’t you at least like yourself? Of course, like many terms embraced by the woke, the way it’s practiced doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the way it’s preached. For example…
If a doctor says there’s a weight problem, it must be because of “fatphobia.”
You MUST find overweight women attractive.
Per Demi Lovato, having sugar-free products on sale is triggering.
Then, of course, we can’t forget the queen of “body positivity,” Tess Holiday, the “super-model” who was put on a magazine cover as a marketing gimmick and somehow managed to turn it into a career.
Holliday says it’s not unhealthy to be extremely overweight:
When This Morning presenters Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford asked how Tess felt about critics who say she isn't a good role model because she's overweight, she said: 'I will agree to disagree because I do believe health is not an indicator of size.'
She also unfollowed a plus-sized model who gained weight to be like her idol Tess Holliday, then was diagnosed with pre-diabetes and started losing weight to regain her health. Apparently, it was “triggering.”
On top of this, Holliday also claims that she is…(sigh) anorexic.
I suppose the good news here is that she seems to be recovering quite nicely from her “anorexia.”
The problem with all of this is twofold. It takes people’s personal problems, mixes them with an enormous amount of self-delusion, and requires the whole rest of the world to alter their behavior to fix them. Claiming that being overweight isn’t unhealthy is as ridiculous as claiming that the world is flat or that Israel was behind 9/11. Scientifically, medically, there is just zero doubt that being overweight is physically bad for you. Getting beyond that, let’s be honest. Being overweight makes you less attractive to the opposite sex. Yes, there are some people that can handle extra weight better than others, but there’s no man or woman alive that looks better carrying say 50 extra pounds of fat than they would at a normal weight. It’s not fatophobia to point that out, it’s just noting reality.
Is the world always fair to fat people? Absolutely not. There are plenty of people that will tell you everyone who’s overweight is that way because they’re weak-willed and lazy. Considering that I’m someone who trained for and ran a half-marathon at 290 pounds, I can tell you that’s not true. I’m not going to write about everything I’ve had to deal with losing weight until I have gotten down to the weight I want to be at, but even after working with some of the most accomplished experts on planet earth (not exaggerating), I can tell you it’s about as far from simple as anything I’ve ever done. Still, you know whose problem that is ultimately? It’s mine.
This is where the body positivity crowd, the gender pronoun weirdoes, transsexuals, critical race theorists, and on and on and on go wrong. They have personal problems. They don’t feel good about them. They don’t like how life is turning out. So, they need the whole rest of the world to change to accommodate them. Before you ask everyone else to change to make life easier for you, you should get your own house in order first.
Hey John, I must tell you I look forward to every one of your posts, finding them a welcome addition to my reading selections. You are my go-to voice for common sense advice, observations, and opinions. You bring up important points in today's post. Specifically, this idea that no one should have to take responsibility for their personal circumstances, but instead everyone else must accommodate their weaknesses, lack of ability, bad choices, or anything else, leads to nothing but personal failure, self-disgust, and psychological pain. There is no criticism that is harsher than one's own.
Thank you for making salient and factual points about this subject. Speaking personally, I've always been weight conscious, almost to the point of obsession, forcing my natural set point to adhere to my idea of beauty rather than reaching equilibrium through healthy choices such as good quality food consumed in moderation, daily moderate exercise, 7 to 8 hrs. sleep per night in optimum conditions, and balance between work and personal pursuits to allow my body to be at its healthiest weight. Instead for at least 25 years, I deprived myself of good nutrition and exercised too hard in an all-consuming effort to achieve a body weight that did not match my natural set point. Did I do that to adhere to an artificially imposed standard, or for my own standard of acceptability. Honestly, the latter was my motivation, but certainly I was influenced by the impossible and artificial examples I saw in magazines and on t.v. or movies.
Our culture is consumed with appearance, and judgy about it, too, which can lead to unhealthy extremes, but finally it just comes down to having a larger purpose in life beyond external appearance. Work that engages and inspires you, people you care about and who care about you, and peaceful contentment will most likely take the focus off food. As Matt Walsh pointed out, a beautiful package around a poisonous interior is not a win-win.