And I will remind you that when I was a teenager, white girls like me had Carnie Wilson. In music videos, the lone plus-size member of Wilson Phillips would be draped in an oversize blazer and hidden behind her bandmates, pianos, a boulder on the beach, a convenient passing truck, whatever the directors could plausibly or implausibly find to erase her affront of a body. Message: The way she looks is unacceptable, and if you look like she does, you’re unacceptable, too.

We got that. Kids today get Lizzo, leading a raucous crowd of concertgoers in declaring, “Hey, I’m glad you’re back with your bitch/I mean, who would wanna hide this?/I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be your side chick.”

If I could go back in time, I would inject Lizzo straight into my 14-year-old veins. I would tell my teenage self that she would grow up and see a woman like this owning the stage and not hiding behind anything. I’d tell her that there would be a thing called social media, and on it she could see ads for plus-size swimsuits being worn by actual plus-size women, posing with thinner models like it was no big deal, like having thick thighs was no different from having red hair. I’d explain how she’d be able to load up her Instagram feed with athletes and models and singers and yoga instructors whose bodies all looked, to some degree, like her own and that all of this would help her walk through the world and feel O.K. and hope that things would get better for her daughters.

This I believed, a mere matter of weeks ago.

And then the trailer for the new “Top Gun” movie dropped.