What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

by Aubrey Gordon

Like thin people, fat people can struggle with our body image and self-esteem. But unlike thinner people, that’s only the start of our body-related challenges. As you will read in the pages ahead, fat people face overwhelming discrimination in employment, healthcare, transit, the treatment of eating disorders, and more. While body image is certainly a piece of the puzzle for fat people, it is a relatively small one. While the body positivity movement’s aims are laudable, they’re simply a solution for a very small part of the much larger looming problems faced by fat people—especially fat people at the larger end of the plus-size spectrum.

Harvard University analyzed results from its famed implicit bias tests, looking at data from those who took its tests between 2007 and 2016—during the precipitous rise of the body positivity movement.

They found that implicit bias was on the decline in nearly every category.

According to Harvard’s lead researcher on the study, anti-fat bias has changed the most slowly of all explicit stated attitudes. And when it comes to implicit bias—that is, the bias we unconsciousl...

body neutrality,

fat acceptance,

which seeks to counter anti-fat bias with a tolerance-based model of simply accepting the existence of fat people and ceasing our constant attempts to make fat bodies into thin ones. Some urge us toward body sovereignty, “the concept that each person has the full right to control their own body.”

Together, we can create a tectonic

shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike.

But more than that, we can build a more just and equitable world that doesn’t determine our access to resources and respect based on how we look. We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous.

healthism “emerges as the assumption that people should pursue health.

The term “obese” is derived from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten oneself fat,” inherently blaming fat people for their bodies.13

The term “overweight” implies that there is an objectively correct weight for every body.

In 2019 Harvard University released a study based on the results of their immensely popular online implicit bias test. The test asks participants to move through rapidly flashing slides of words and images to measure their unconscious biases around race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, weight, and other characteristics. The study, published in Psychological Science, reviewed the results of over four million test takers over the course of nine years. On some fronts, the findings were promising. According to the study’s lead author, Tessa Charlesworth, “The most striking finding is that sexuality attitudes have changed toward neutrality, toward

less bias, by as much as 33 percent on implicit measures,” with nearly half of people also self-reporting changes in their own attitudes.25 Similarly, if less dramatically, test takers’ implicit bias on the basis of race also decreased by 17 percent. While most measures of implicit bias decreased or remained stable, one measure exploded: anti-fat bias. In those nine years, pro-thin, anti-fat bias increased by a full 40 percent. Not only that, but weight-based bias was the slowest changing of all explicit attitudes—that is, the attitudes that test takers self-reported. According to Charlesworth: It is the only attitude out of the six that we looked at that showed any hint of getting more biased over time. . . . And of course again the question might be: why? What is specific about body-weight attitude? We can only speculate: Body weight has been the target of much discussion, but discussion in a negative light. We often talk about the “obesity epidemic,” or about “the problem” with obese individuals. Also, we typically think about body weight as something that people can control, and so we are more likely to make the moral judgement of, “Well, you should just change.”

The raw numbers are striking too. In 2016 a full 81 percent of test takers showed pro-thin, anti-fat bias....

But acknowledging our biases isn’t a matter of making ourselves into villains, all black hearts and gleeful misdeeds. Acknowledging our biases is a matter of recognizing the social contexts that encourage them.

In The Obesity Myth, Paul Campos argues that as overt racism, sexism, and classism fell out of favor among white and wealthy Americans, anti-fat bias offered a stand-in: a dog whistle that allowed disdain and bigotry aimed at poor people and people of color to persist, uninterrupted and simply renamed.

Based solely on photographs, 21 percent described the fattest woman they were shown as “lazy” and “unprofessional” more than any other size. Just 18 percent said she had “leadership potential,” and only 15 percent would even consider hiring her.28 A study from Vanderbilt University found that fat women were more likely to work in more physically active jobs behind the scenes and less likely to work in jobs interacting with customers or representing a company.29 Another Wharton study found that “obesity serves as a proxy for low competence. People judge obese people to be less competent even when it’s not the case.”30

But what if, instead of doing what we know how to do—instead of comfortably, distantly blaming fat people—we looked at ourselves?

I was in fourth grade, sitting in a doctor’s office, the first time my face flushed with shame. I was, I had just learned, overweight.

Fat camps,

Farm Bill, whose 2018 renewal ran at over 1,200 pages, subsidized the production of foods that ran directly counter to the PHS recommendations.7 First passed in 1933, the Farm Bill aimed to standardize and steady food prices during and after the Great Depression by offering financial rewards in the form of subsidies to farmers who grew so-called “commodity crops.” Today, those commodity crops include wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans—top ingredients in higher-calorie, lower-nutrient, shelf-stable foods like sugary beverages, chips, and candy bars. Notably, fresh fruits and vegetables are not considered commodity crops, nor are lean proteins, ensuring that healthier foods will remain at a higher price point, reserving the privilege of health for those with the income to support it. While the Farm Bill ostensibly aims to serve consumer interests, the federal government’s left hand aggressively deprioritizes the public health interests promoted by its right. Instead, regardless of its initial intent, the Farm Bill functionally lines the pockets of companies like Frito Lay, Coca-Cola, and other corporate food purveyors. The majority of those same corporations rely on low-wage labor, which means that often their workers are also their consumers. As it happens, over the last fifty years, Americans’ food intake has continued to drift further from the PHS’s nutrition recommendations. While we eat slightly more vegetables and fruit than we used to, we still fall dramatically short of...

But more meaningful, precise reforms would have required a well-resourced, savvy lobbying effort. It would’ve called for an overhaul of a powerful and wealthy industry, and it would’ve demanded money, social capital, and political will to take on the big businesses that had grown wealthy as a result of the very legislation that needed to be dismantled and reimagined. Instead, the PHS opted for a lexicon of personal responsibility—“most people should.” While most people should eat more whole grains, the report didn’t suggest significant upstream solutions that would help people with what they should do. But then, root cause analyses have never been the work of the war on obesity. Even this early in its development, its approach was already a patchwork of individualized solutions to systemic problems.

The war on obesity reached its zenith under First Lady Michelle Obama, whose Let’s Move!

Despite the staggering prevalence of anti-fat stigma, respondents found compelling coping mechanisms, most popularly including heading-off negative remarks, using positive self-talk, and praying.

Seventy-nine percent of respondents reported using eating as a coping mechanism, 74 percent isolated themselves, and 41 percent left the situation or avoided it in the future. Rather than motivating fat people to lose weight, weight stigma had led to more isolation, more avoidance, and fewer social and material supports.

It was developed in the 1830s by a Belgian sociologist, astronomer, and statistician, Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet. Quetelet, in the search for l’homme moyen—an idealized average man—took the measurements of different populations over time, searching for some universal average. For Quetelet, “this average man was hardly the ‘average’ (read ‘mediocre’) that is our present connotation.

31 That is, l’homme moyen was Quetelet’s way of determining bodily perfection for the purpose of creating outsider bodies, the contrasting forms that could be proclaimed diseased or disfigured.

The BMI, then eponymously referred to as Quetelet’s Index, wasn’t used to measure individual health. To the contrary, the calculation was used sociologically, to assess populations overall at a time when sociology, anthropology, and medical science were all rife with racist and misogynist research.

Shortly after the development of Quetelet’s Index, Samuel Cartwright, a physician, wrote Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, in which he asserted that a new mental illness, drapetomania,...

“Researchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics, and has little to do with sloth or gluttony.”

According to researchers, environmental causes have a major impact on our size, and include things like where we live, where we can most easily access food, our income level, and the stress we shoulder as a result of the forms of oppression and discrimination we may face.

puritanical ideals.

proletariat.

Thin people—especially thin women—expect fat people like me to act as midwives for their confidence. How do you do it? Teach me your ways! They expect fat women in particular to become midwives for their waning self-confidence. We are the hired help who never asked for the job and are certainly not paid for it. We are expected to accompany thinner friends to stores that do not carry our sizes, watching as they try on clothing that makes them feel insecure and boosting their confidence with constant reassurances. We become set pieces, two-dimensional props for their more real lives. More than that, we reflect their bodies back to them, their imperfect thinness

made beautiful by its proximity to the abject failure of our fatness. We are reminders of what could be.

Thinner people embrace fatter people as a way of finding their relative virtue. A...

Thinness is a bizarre and alienating construct. Plus size or straight size, seemingly none of us believe that we qualify for ...

Thinness takes from all of us.

Thinness takes so much from so many straight-size people. It takes their money for diet pills, meal delivery, workout tapes, and weight-loss supplements. It takes away their ability to see their own bodies as they are, replacing that image with some distorted funhouse mirror reflection—and in so doing, it takes so much of their self-esteem along with it. It takes away interesting conversation, relegating us to the rote and interminably boring script of weight loss: who’s on what diet, who was good, who was bad. Thinness takes away so many straight-size people’s ability to hear fat people, to acknowledge our experiences even when they differ from those of straight-size listeners. And when it takes away our ability to hear one another, it slowly erodes straight-size people’s relationships with fat family members, friends, colleagues, and others, quarantining core conversations as off-limits and forever maintaining an unspoken and uneasy distance.

All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness. We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bo...

We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people.

our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too).

The simple fact, though, is that concern harms fat people. It wrests our bodies from our control, insisting that thin people know our bodies best and that, like a car accident or child abuse, fatness requires a mandatory report.

Regardless of the topic, shame doesn’t motivate change;

Concern and choice are seductive. Concern tells thinner people that they are doing me a favor by ignoring my feelings, experiences, boundaries, and needs. Choice tells you that any harshness, judgment, and withholding is warranted—after all, I brought my body on myself, which means I asked to become a scapegoat. Concern is built on the foundation of choice. If a fat person has brought their own ill-fated body on themselves, if she has chosen fatness, then her boundaries simply don’t matter—including asking those around her to withhold their concern. No matter how much a fat person protests, no matter how cogent her arguments or how urgent her pleas, her requests are always belied by choice and overridden by concern. Accordingly, these two insidious forces reliably render thinner people the expert on fat people’s bodies, experiences, and needs. The duetting siren songs of concern and choice lure thinner people into a casual kind of abuse, a ready carelessness and heartlessness reserved for the worst of the worst, and the simple sight of my body proves that I’m deserving of their toughest tough love and all the concern they’ve got. But whatever the explanation, whatever the caveats that follow such intense and constant judgment, pressure, rejection, and discrimination, a simple fact remains: the way that thinner people treat fatter people is abuse. Choice whispers to thinner people that they wouldn’t hurt me if I didn’t make them. It tells them they’re doing me a favor—more ...

If thin people are just concerned with our health, they can tackle the bias that is hurting fat people much more than our bodies themselves.

In order to acknowledge fatcalling and sexual violence targeting fat women, thin feminists would have to acknowledge that bodies like mine should not be publicly shamed. Thin feminists would need to return to the radical root that insists that no survivor of sexual violence deserved what befell them. None of us are asking for it—certainly not for daring to live in the only bodies we have. But somehow, for many feminists, that feels too close to home. Acknowledging the pain of fat women would mean acknowledging their own complicity, often unthinking and unintentional. It would mean implicating their own bodies and sacrificing the privileges they feel certain they’ve earned. If we used the full force of feminist movements to argue against the validity of the privileges that come with living in a thin body, those privileges might fall away. Making space for an emerging constituency in any movement is a straightforward, albeit difficult, task. Its ingredients are simple: listening, believing, adjusting, and collaborating. But sharing power has never been easy, and, like acknowledging other axes of oppression, making room for fat women within feminism will require some discomfort of the thinner women around who it has been historically centered. It will require their willingness to entertain the idea that their bodies are not accomplishments and that fat bodies are not failures. It will call upon the willingness to believe that they themselves might become fat someday and might...

I choose to believe that my body is worthy of love—the electric warmth of real, full love. In many ways, it’s not that simple. But in some ways, it is. I choose to believe that I am lovable, as is my body, just as both are today. I believe that I deserve to be loved in my body, not in spite of it. My body is not an inconvenience, a shameful fact, or an unfortunate truth. Desiring my body is not a pathological act. And I’m not alone. Despite the never-ending headwinds, fat people around the world find and forge the relationships they want. There is no road map, so we become cartographers, charting some new land for ourselves. We live extraordinary lives, beloved by our families, partners, communities. Fat people fall wildly in love. Fat people get married. Fat people have phenomenal sex. Fat people are impossibly happy. Those fat people live in defiance of the expectations set forth for them. Their fat lives are glorious and beautiful things, vibrant and beyond the reach of what the rest of us have been trained to imagine. Let’s imagine more.