On Fatphobia
and the rank acceptability of this discrimination
Many years ago, as a teenager coming into my politics, a fellow volunteer confided in me after an event. We had been in conversation about the discrimination faced in the workplace, and while I can’t remember the exact context, I can recall with surreal clarity the exact moment this volunteer leaned in close, eyes darting to check everybody else had left the room, and whispered:
‘I know it’s not the same as being African, or Muslim, but I do think there’s discrimination against people who are…’
They did not say the word ‘fat’, but that was the clear implication.
It was the first open, honest dialogue I’d had about discrimination against fat people in my life. Until that point, fatness - even in my non-Western, Sudanese family - came with all the pejoratives you can imagine, and I had accepted them as fact. As we talked, I remember being struck by the shame thickening the air, as if the mere acknowledgement of a fatness was somehow ignoble, humiliating —
The texture of this shame was nothing like that of being racialised, gendered, or anything like I had experienced in conversations around disability, etc before. This was a moral shame, swooping in and blocking out the sun, chiding us with darkness and shadow. You do not deserve light, the shame seemed to say.
Reader, this shame was not ours.
While I have thought about discrimination, individual and structural, against fat people for years, this might be the first time I’m writing about it. I’ve been lurking on the margins of the ‘body positivity’ movement, observing, learning, trying to understand my place among the fray, teasing out the best way to be most useful, working on my own internalised demons. I read Hunger by Roxane Gay in one sitting as soon as it was released in 2017, entranced and moved by her scalpel sharp honesty. I’ve inhaled article after article on how doctors fat shame, fatphobia’s impact on women in the public sphere, why the issue is structural and systemic, how fat-shaming is on the rebound.
But I’d (halal) wager that you don’t need articles to know what I’m talking about: According to the Harvard department of psychology, body size is the only form of unconscious bias that is actually increasing. This Guardian piece also notes ‘conscious bias towards larger people was found to be decreasing the most slowly of any of the categories investigated’.
So what’s the deal? Why bring this up now? What are the structural and systemic aspects of this, and what should we even be doing about it?
By chance this week, I picked up Kate Manne’s new book: Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia. (Interestingly, the US cover says How to FACE Fatphobia instead).
Manne’s book builds on the work of many before her, including Sole-Smith, Roxane Gay, Aubrey Gordon and Da’Shaun L. Harrison. She uses her personal experience as an entry point, then branches out into structural analysis, while also asking philosophical questions like ‘is it a moral obligation to be thin?’ (turns out there are few philosophers who are not white men and reed-thin).
The book is not a panacea, but it does a great job of puncturing innumerable myths (conflation of fatness and sickness, fatness and desire, the racist history of fatphobia, etc). It also talks about the impacts; according to Manne there is about a $40,000 annual average wage gap between a very thin millennial woman and a very fat millennial woman. Doesn’t that fill you with rage? It reminded me of last year’s Economist special on the ‘economics of thinness’ which noted ‘it appears to be economically rational for women to pursue being thin.’ Wild.
I have not finished Unshrinking yet, but here are some choice excerpts from reviews to give you a sense:
From the LA Review of Books:
Rooting contemporary fatphobia in its historically racist and capitalist soil, Manne demonstrates how its earliest iterations were instrumentalized to “justify and rationalize the burgeoning slave trade.” She indicts Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of fatphobia’s earliest agents. In 1749, the celebrated naturalist (and proto-eugenicist) published a scientific tome in which his “coding of fatness as a distinctively Black trait […] led to the construction of the fat body as something ‘other,’ as something grotesque.”
In a world where there is no safe or reliable way to shrink fat bodies, it is our moral imperative to recognize body size as a vector of diversity that exists on a spectrum as naturally and necessarily as gender and race. Any other approach is, as Manne argues, a form of gaslighting.
From the Chicago Review of Books:
Fatphobia isn’t grounded in reason, science, or ethics. Rather, its roots are in the dark recesses of the human psyche: disgust. Manne recounts how this aversion to fat bodies was manufactured during the Enlightenment from racist and sexist ideologies, and is operative throughout the world today.
I particularly appreciated her retort to the claim that fat people are taxing on the social system. If it were true and we wanted to act upon it by imposing strictures on their lives, we would also need to include any risk takers in our moral calculus, such as skydivers and mountaineers. It’s a rhetorical point: Manne, along with most of the rest of us, prefers a society that protects these liberties. That we are reluctant to extend such freedoms as easily to fat people is evidence of our bias.
Some of the reviews of the book are downright fatphobic in their response, with one critic describing Unshrinking as ‘absurd, self-deluded’ and a ‘super-processed sausage of identity politics and fat activism’ with ‘no curiosity about why people binge eat’. Yikes.
If you don’t have time to read the whole book, check out this conversation with Manne on NPR for a flavour of some of the ideas in the book.
I have no neat conclusion today, dear readers, only the urge to say that if we believe in a world that is safe and fair for all, we should all work on tackling the fatphobia that is embedded into our worlds, pushing back on it when we see it and challenging the stories we tell ourselves.
What do you think? What is your relationship with fatphobia? I mean, this is an intensely difficult conversation so I wouldn’t be surprised if the comment section is *crickets*, but I appreciate y’all engaging on this topic nonetheless!
Listen: Maintenance Phase
Wellness and weight loss, debunked and decoded. One of my favourite podcasts, co-hosted by the aforementioned Aurbrey Gordon. Definitely worth a traipse through their backlist!
Watch: Your Fat Friend
Aurbrey Gordon is featuring heavily in this Substack! But it’s well deserved, and this documentary is most certainly worth your time. Jeanie Finlay followed Gordon for around six years to make this piece, and it’s as funny, moving, insightful and enraging as you’d imagine. Available in lots of places, find out where you can watch it here.
Read: I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine Exists
A gorgeous piece by friend and writer
published by the Atlantic. I’m obsessed with this idea of archiving - given so many of Sudan’s archives have been destroyed, or are strewn across the world in European universities and museums, building our own archives seems like an act of resistance, part of the struggle.
Also, in case you missed it, my most recent piece published by Index on Censorship featuring a new Sudanese digital publication: New magazine Atar fills information void in Sudan.
Thanks as always, readers. Today, instead of calling for more paid subscribers, I’m going to ask you to donate any spare money to the Emergency Response Room in El-Fasher, Darfur. The horsemen of genocide and famine have galloped over the horizon now, and the Darfuris need all the help they can get.
Until next week inshallah,
Yassmin
As someone who was fat shamed when I was going through what I now understand was the standard pre- puberty weight gain in late primary school, I have always been preoccupied by my weight. In my teens and 20s I was thin, hardly ate and wanted to be skinny at any cost. Unsurprisingly I was deeply unhappy- depressed, anxious and lonely. Three decades on I’m three sizes larger and really don’t give a shit. I’m so much happier and healthier. I still love expressing myself with clothes but I have found my own style which reflects my culture, my interests and yes, my hard earned wisdom. What I always say to younger women is that it is hard not to be affected by social and political constructs but do keep trying! I wasted so much time denying and berating myself that I failed to notice the beauty and glow of being young and healthy. My PhD thesis languished as I worked out at the gym and tried to be all things to all people. You owe it to yourself to love whatever you is, because it’s you! Sorry to sound like Oprah, but I guess I’m trying to say that even the smartest, most politically and intellectually inclined fall prey to the distracting and dangerous narrative that thin is better, aesthetically and morally.
And I’m sick of it. Eat the bread, cheese, dessert, live and love your life! And why is it that we love chubby babies, cats and other animals but draw the line for humans over five? 🙏
Much like motherofchucky I was fat shamed as a pre-teen by my parents and their friends. Despite the fact that I was incredibly active at the time (dancing, cycling and the like). This led to a period of disordered eating as a mid-teen, and my default when I am very upset is to starve my feelings.
These days, as a fat, white woman, I do still face discrimination from people, medicine and societal structures. I've had abuse hurled at me from cars, had people suddenly be interested in me when I'd lost weight (due to misery) because I'd reached some kind of threshold of attraction that they had arbitrarily assigned (gross), and had people comment on my weight unasked.
From a medical standpoint, I have been told to lose weight by doctors and specialists for things unrelated to the reasons I've seen them (eg having a cold), and for doctors to suggest that losing weight would help with various conditions (and it might) but not suggest any way that weight loss could be sustainable. As someone with PCOS, the Australian guidelines for weight management actually state that you should drop your daily kilojoule consumption to 30% less than the actual recommended minimum. So starvation and feeling hungry ahoy! All in order to assist in managing fertility - instead of actually looking at potential root causes - and/or to look at whether fertility is someone's main aim.
Structurally, the world is not built for fat people. Airline seats are a classic example, but also most individual seating, clothing availability, gurneys, etc. The world could be easily accommodating of people of all sizes, but because fat is a moral failing, it's easier to punish fat people than acknowledge that fat people have a right to exist without discrimination.