I was working in a well-regarded newsroom in 2023 when NBC News reported that Lizzo and her management had been sued by three of her former dancers. I was the natural choice to write about the case. I was the office’s de facto culture journalist, a die-hard Lizzo stan, and a plus-size Black American woman. The news was my personal D-Day. At our end-of-week team meeting, I declared the allegations “a devastating loss for body positivity”.
It was hard to miss Lizzo’s meteoric rise to mainstream success at the end of 2019 and the start of the 2020s. Her second album, Cuz I Love You, made her a household name after relentlessly releasing less commercially successful singles and EPs for the better part of 10 years — and her hypervisibility as a dark-skinned Black woman existing unapologetically in a large body made her someone even your offline grandmother had an opinion about. She rightfully won multiple Grammy Awards, achieved a Guinness World Record when her single “Truth Hurts” spent the most weeks at no.1 on the US singles charts for a rap single by a female artist, and was named TIME’s Entertainer of the Year in 2019.
I’ll never forget pushing my way to the front of the mosh pit when Lizzo performed at a music festival in Sydney in 2020, feeling entitled based on our shared identities to the best possible view of her performance, when around four songs in, the crushing weight of white male bodies pressed against me became too unbearable to handle. These were men I’d wrongly or rightly assumed would never spare me a glance because of my weight and ethnicity, and here they were embracing the music industry’s most shameless offering of fat black joy. Her widespread success felt like the reigning in of (a now short-lived) era where embracing your so-called flaws and differences was the secret to success.
Of course, attracting a mainstream and white audience came with its own problems. Lizzo has spoken in depth about the “emotional abuse” she continues to suffer as the target of online fatphobia, misogyny, and racism (all compounded to maximise the pack of their weighty punch).
There are obvious disadvantages to positioning yourself as an alternative to traditional beauty standards while still operating in a world and industry that rewards you for conforming to them and punishes you brutally for challenging them. But that implies Lizzo had a choice. Black and brown bodies are politicised without their permission, and fat bodies are the subject of other people’s insecurities, projections, and feigned health concerns. There’s no simply just existing.
I don’t know what it’s like to shake my fat ass in front of a sold-out audience (here’s hoping) or to bare my back rolls and thigh dimples on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. But I do know what it’s like to struggle deeply with self-image, walk into a room knowing that you don’t necessarily fit its standards and have to bravely decide to rock with the body you’ve got because it’s the only one you have, and you’ll be damned if you let it get in the way of pursuing your dreams.
Both of those decisions are personal choices, rooted not just in self-compassion but survival (a life put on hold for a “better” body is a life wasted). Yet those are two very different situations with very different consequences. As a public figure, Lizzo’s disinterest in playing out society’s narrative of shame and self-hatred to get on with the very important work of living her best damn life somehow made her beholden to the changing whims of a broadly privileged audience (predominately unaffected by the intersection of weight discrimination and racism) of people who gifted her their fickle generosity in exchange for her ability to make them feel better about themselves. Never mind that many of her white or smaller-sized fans never asked themselves how they could make it safer for Lizzo to stand before an unkind public and preach the gospel of self-love and radical acceptance they so deeply craved.
It’s for that reason I experience a complicated mix of grief and understanding when I think of post-2022 Lizzo: the Lizzo whose hero-like image is compromised by allegations (some of which have now been dropped) of fat-shaming and sexual harassment, and Instagram posts detailing smoothie detoxes and (much later) a desire to lose weight intentionally. In the last fortnight, the singer-rapper has addressed at length her experience receiving backlash for these “scandals” in a refreshingly candid weekly Substack.
Her first Substack offered a critique of the “Ozempic boom” as a plus-size woman who has documented their ongoing weight loss journey (at points aided by GLP-1 drugs). She spoke about her desire to “release” herself from her weight while also cautioning that plus-sized models and extended sizes “are being magically erased from websites”. This week, her Substack offered “a cancelled woman’s take on why everyone should get cancelled at least once”. In it, she welcomes being held accountable for the impact of her actions while highlighting the limitations of a culture that “used to cancel convicted rapists and pedophiles and shame the physical abusers and racists” and now shames women “for going back to their ain’t shit exes”.
Her most recent take interested me as an opinion-writer who doesn’t believe cancel culture exists. I’m a small fish in the media industry who could be accused of having tried to ‘cancel’ others, and I made myself vulnerable to being ‘cancelled’ when I made a career out of sharing my opinions online. I’ve called out unnamed people for failing to support their local Black communities during the Black Lives Matter movement, and I’ve also been called out for not being seen to share that same sense of urgency when it comes to supporting the more than 70,000 Palestinians who have been murdered in Gaza.
The point is that no one is perfect, and if you seek never to step a foot wrong, you’ll inevitably disappoint, but that should never stop us from trying to be better. It can be true that the best-intentioned people, like Lizzo, who have objectively done a lot of good for marginalised communities, are also capable of inflicting harm on others, whether they intend to or not.
But that’s what separates the human from the monsters: their desire to do better and their ability to view constructive, fair criticism or accountability as a gift that gets them closer to the type of person or ally they want to be. This is not to offer any verdict on Lizzo or to excuse her from wrongdoing ever, just because she herself faces oppression. However, it’s hard to view the “disappearance” of a messy woman in the public eye as a success when genuinely bad men like Donald Trump, Woody Allen, Chris Brown, and Johnny Depp continue to dominate in their industries, with the support of their peers, despite facing serious allegations and being convicted of others. Why was Ellen DeGeneres hunted off of prime time television for “being mean” when even J.K. Rowling’s sharp turn as the world’s most aggressive transphobe, whose ongoing rants aren’t just “contrarian” but are actively funding anti-trans movements across the U.K., hasn’t been enough to tarnish the legacy of Harry Potter completely?
It begs the following questions: Does “cancel culture” only work when weaponised against minorities? Should all “harms” be considered equal or even forgivable? What are the objectives behind “calling” someone out, to wipe them into oblivion or to encourage a sincerely reformed self? And can someone genuinely be considered “cancelled” if they’re continually given airtime to talk about their own cancellation?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers to those questions. But I do appreciate Lizzo for continuing to facilitate nuanced conversations about the limitations of our culture, whether it’s as a performer challenging the status quo through simply existing or as a writer and human whose honesty about her own weaknesses invites us to look at ours.