Is The Body Positive Movement Keeping People From Getting Healthier?
What’s In This Issue?
This Week’s Main Stories
Story 01What Human Jobs Should We Still Value?
Story 02"Pimples Are In" - Inside The Positive Acne MovementEven More Stories
- Sake-flavored Kit Kat Is Here, Japanese Wonder What Took So Long
- Fortnite Cited As Cause In Over 200 UK Divorces
- Brilliant Chef Gets Lobsters Stoned To More Humanely Kill Them
- New Study Finds Scent Of Sandalwood May Cure Baldness
- Google Assistant Lets Parents Turn Off Teen's Phones For Dinner
- L.A. Metro Gets Danny Trejo To Remind Riders Not To Be Mean
What Human Jobs Should We Still Value?
On September 13th Time magazine ran a cover story on the plight of underpaid teachers in America. A few days later, an Amazon worker published an expose about inhumane working conditions and low pay in Amazon's warehouses, while Bloomberg reported that the retailer is considering opening 3,000 cashierless stores by 2021. To cap off the week, the World Economic Forum published a report that predicted robots are going to steal 75 million jobs by 2025.
It was a worrying week if you're a human. Yet also on September 13th (coincidentally?), Jeff Bezos announced the creation of a $2b fund to create a network of nonprofit preschools in low-income communities. Rice University also made the bold move this week to offer a free education to Middle-Class and Low-Income Students, and even the concerning report from the World Economic Forum suggested that all the automation might also create 133 million human jobs in that same period.
So should we panic or not? I think the answer might lie with Hal, the medical training robot who can cry, bleed and urinate like a real boy to help train doctors. It took humans to make him and it will take humans to interpret his emotions too. In a world where we can automate all the things no human wants to do (like shit warehouse jobs), perhaps we will finally assign more value (and salary) to the things that we should want more humans to do. Like teaching our children.
"Pimples Are In" - Inside The Positive Acne Movement
Today there are plenty of examples of campaigns to help people become comfortable with their own bodies. Yet some have criticized this body positive movement as perhaps keeping people from admitting they are obese. One Newsweek article worried that people may use it as an excuse to justify their weight.
This movement has also gone far beyond only body weight. American Apparel has created a line of clothing for any of 27 different skin tones, and there is a lingerie brand focused on women who have smaller sized breasts. The "acne positive movement" is another example that is covered in this feature piece, where people find more confidence in facing the world showing their pimples without lots of makeup.
There is a fascinating conflict right now between accepting yourself as you are versus trying to improve yourself (in the case of losing weight) or treating your condition (in the case of acne). As one expert shared in this article on Refinery: "Body acceptance is not at odds with motivation to engage in healthy behaviors." In other words, the quest to be better shouldn't keep us from being happy with who we are right now.
