Body positivity is such a strange concept to me. There’s efforts to reclaim words while simultaneously calling them bad if used as an insult. Ideally, people wouldn’t be offended by someone describing their body with common descriptors, but socially there is so much value attributed to certain body types that it’s almost impossible to avoid having an emotional response of some kind to various descriptors.
For example, It’s not bad to be fat, but calling someone “fat” is almost universally considered a bad thing. The same definitely seems to go for the idea of being “short.”
I’m asking this question because I can’t put my finger on why but something seems to be different about the use of the term “short” from the use of the term “fat.” I think that part of it is how, to me at least, the term “fat” is so generic and hard to nail down to a discrete definition, implying that the word really doesn’t have a clear connection to reality. On the other hand, height is a single-dimensional number. You either are above a certain threshold, or you aren’t.
I recently learned that May 6th to May 10th is “short king week” because it’s 5’6" to 5’10" which then prompted me to search for the origins of “short king” and apparently the person most-credited with popularizing the term is Jaboukie Young-White who claims the term was meant to include all men under 6 feet tall. The average adult male height is 5’9" leaving men considered roughly average to be called “short” which is still considered an insult by many.
I dunno. As a term that was intended to champion body positivity compared with how the term is actually used, what do you think of “short king?”
I think that “championing body positivity” for any class of adult humans is undignified. I think that doing a special extra thing for people in order to reverse the polarity of a judgment about that aspect of them is cruelly mocking them for that aspect of them.
Perhaps there’s something about that short guy that’s actually awesome, and doesn’t require childish lies and role-playing to communicate.
If someone called me “small dick king” I would hate them forever, despite whatever positive intentions they might have had when they said it. Do not make my weakness the key point of my persona, even if you include that awkward attempt at “positivifying” it. Just call me “Intensely Human, master wordsmith” or something that’s actually positive. Don’t treat me like I’m a five year old, using keywords to remap my negative qualities into positive ones.
The whole idea of using a term, that’s special to short men, to “champion” (verbing nouns is horrible) body positivity in short men, makes me feel nauseous.
If we want to respect short men, let’s do so in action, not in word choice.