‘I Love Your Confidence’ And Other Backhanded Compliments

“I just love your confidence!” If you’re a plus-size woman, you know the delivery: love is stretched out and intended to sound more sincere, while confidence brings up the rear, carrying all the weight. 

Gabourey Sidibe recently joked on Threads, “me on my way to have my confidence studied” attached to a viral fashionista video of herself where she struck poses reminiscent of “America’s Next Top Model.” The hilarity is glaring because she is speaking to the countless times the nice-nasty “I love your confidence” exclamation has made its way to her from people who think it takes some form of magical audacity for a Black plus-size woman like her (and me) to fully and boldly enjoy herself.

A (former) friend of mine had said on more than one occasion to me, “You have such a pretty face.” She would always make it a point to include that her compliment started and stopped at my face. My body, with its hills, curves, rolls, and dips didn’t receive her appreciation of beauty. My face had been separated from the rest of me and approved. What was to be said about my body was left unsaid, much like all that lingers before, during, and after the backhanded compliment that is “I love your confidence.”

Sesali Bowen, author of Bad Fat Black Girl, wrote in a 2021 Cosmopolitan essay that the line signals the speaker didn’t expect a fat woman to be capable or attractive, so her “confidence” is a symptom of being well, not the source.

Researchers Nicolas Kervyn, Hilary Bergsieker and Susan Fiske found that when speakers share only positive information on one trait and omit another relevant one, listeners infer something negative about the omitted trait. Praise the face, skip the body. Praise the confidence, skip the beauty. The silence does the insulting.

Within that silence is the disbelief that someone who is so far from the antiquated standard of beauty could love herself and be loud and or whimsical about it. That silence is thick with the feeling that you don’t deserve the levity of loving yourself. That silence houses a concept that researchers call microinvalidations. A 2024 study published in Emerging Media examining fatphobic microaggressions experienced by body-positive influencers and activists identified comments including “I wish I had your confidence,” “You’re so brave” and “You have such a pretty face” as microinvalidations. Researchers found that these seemingly positive remarks can reinforce the assumption that fat bodies are not expected to be visible, celebrated, or comfortable taking up space.

And as usual, for Black women, there’s an added layer. Our bodies have always been graffitied with other people’s meanings. A 2025 Journal of Eating Disorders study found that Black women’s body image is shaped not only by weight, but by racialized beauty standards involving skin tone, hair texture, and body shape. Women in that study described a no-win situation: altering themselves to better navigate Eurocentric standards or rejecting those standards and risking stigma and devaluation.

The zeitgeist isn’t short on examples. Sidibe’s current fashion fair has inspired yet another conversation about her confidence. Lizzo recently said scrutiny surrounding her changing body made her wonder, “Is my brand being fat?” She ultimately concluded that what audiences connected to was her joy, not her size. Danielle Brooks has also spoken candidly about representation, recalling looking around major Hollywood rooms and wondering whether there was another woman present whose dress she could trade with? 

She shared, “There’s 67% of women that wear a size 14 or more, and that does not reflect what we see on television. But in Hollywood, we’re talking about A-listers, big dogs, the ones that are on Vogue and Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair. They do not look like me. And I think that has been one of my main goals is to be able to, like, bust open the box, break that thing down and really allow this next generation to say, wow, man, if Danielle was able to do that, I can do that.” Brooks has also discussed losing weight and using GLP-1 medication while maintaining that loving your body should not require staying the same size forever.

Notice the pattern: when a plus-size Black woman loves her body, we interrogate the confidence with phony praise. And when and/or if her body changes, we interrogate that too. Our bodies become debates while thinner women are more often permitted to simply get dressed and be beautiful, full-stop.

NPR’s Code Switch recently asked why so many GLP-1 ads feature Black women, amid the toxic comment culture around Lizzo and Ariana Grande. Sociologist Sabrina Strings noted that these ads promise weight loss will make you more confident, then asked how a drug company gets to lecture us about self-esteem. Confidence, she argued, doesn’t come from shrinking.

So confidence is now a product line, and the old compliment has quietly picked up a new meaning: you’re brave to stay like this. 

None of this is about shaming women who choose these medications or any other means of shedding pounds. Strings suggested that body autonomy is the point. But history matters here. In Fearing the Black Body, she traced fatphobia toward Black women to Enlightenment-era beliefs that treated fatness as evidence of racial inferiority. That thinking never left; it just put on a lab coat. 

Strings explained that body mass index was devised by a Belgian astronomer and statistician, not a physician, and was later taken up in the 1920s by a eugenicist who believed obesity had a racial dimension. That is the yardstick still deciding who counts as “obese.” And the cost is real: she noted that Black people routinely report weight stigma at the doctor’s office, which can lead patients to delay care or stop going altogether. 

Now add the marketing. Strings says GLP-1 makers are making Black women the face of the product. The pitch, as she describes it, is that Black Americans have long had limited access to healthcare, so here’s something you can finally get. She isn’t buying it: “Weight loss is not reparations.” What Black women are owed, she argues, is real care and respect for our health at every size. She also pointed to the price gap: roughly $25 a month with a prescription, closer to $960 without one. Even the “solution” isn’t equally available. 

That same culture that sells shrinking as care also teaches us to read a fat woman’s refusal to shrink as something remarkable.

Maybe there is also something worth understanding about the person offering the backhanded compliment. We all know the social rules. We know how quickly women can be ridiculed for being too fat, too loud, too visible, too revealing, or simply too comfortable in bodies culture has taught us to apologize for. Some people saying, “I wish I had your confidence” may be expressing their own fear of that punishment. They know what can happen when a woman refuses to make herself smaller, and perhaps they can’t imagine choosing visibility anyway. I have a little grace for that, but what I cannot do is mistake the fear for a compliment.

A fat woman putting on a beautiful dress and enjoying the way she looks should not require extraordinary courage. Neither should wearing a bikini, taking up space in photographs, or walking around and not trying to conceal her body.

So yes, tell me you love my outfit. Tell me my hair is laid. Tell me I’m beautiful with your whole chest, if that’s what you mean. And if the thing you can’t stop marveling at is my ability to feel good about myself, maybe sit with that for a minute. The remarkable thing isn’t my confidence, it’s how thoroughly we’ve been conditioned to believe that someone like me shouldn’t have any.