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

by Aubrey Gordon

One informal survey of over five hundred hiring managers tested their attitudes toward potential employees based on size. 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.”

Anti-fat bias doesn’t just impact our ability to get hired—it also impacts our wages. Scientists at the University of Exeter found that, in England, women who are just one stone (14 pounds) over their BMI-mandated weight earned over 1,500 pounds ($1,867) less than a thinner woman.31 In the United States, the findings are even more troubling. A 2010 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found staggering salary inequities based on size. “Heavy women earned $9,000 less than their average-weight counterparts; very heavy women earned $19,000 less. Very thin women, on the other hand, earned $22,000 more than those who were merely average.”32 Conversely, men’s salaries increased with weight gain—until those men became fat.

The aftershocks of our bias aren’t just limited to the workplace, either. Fat people feel its effects in the criminal justice system too. A 2013 Yale University study published in the International Journal of Obesity found that men were more likely to find a fat woman guilty of the same crime. “Male participants rated the obese female defendant guiltier than the lean female defendant, whereas female respondents judged the two female defendants equally regardless of weight. Among all participants, there were no differences in assessment of guilt between the obese male and lean male defendants.”34 And the bias isn’t just limited to jurors. In 2017, a Quebec judge made headlines by saying that a fat seventeen-year-old woman might have been “flattered” by being sexually assaulted, saying the...

As of 2020, in forty-eight states, it is perfectly legal to fire someone, refuse to hire them, deny them housing, or turn them down for a table at a restaurant or a room in a hotel simply because they’re fat. Michigan, Washington State, and San Francisco are the United States’ three jurisdictions to ban size-based discrimination.38

A growing body of NIH research, too, illustrates that extreme dieting may permanently damage our metabolisms, in some cases guaranteeing a lifetime of fatness.

The nation’s first amphetamine epidemic was ushered in by the prescribed use of drugs for both psychiatric and weight-loss purposes. Within less than ten years of their introduction, by 1945, amphetamines were in use by over half a million Americans.

What we have long considered the health conditions associated with being fat in actuality may be the effects of long-term dieting, which very fat people are pressured heavily to do. One Yale University study found that adult women (ages eighteen to forty-nine) who have used common, over-the-counter appetite suppressants faced a 1,558 percent increased risk for hemorrhagic stroke.27 Even in the absence of appetite suppressants, weight cycling—that is, a history of gaining and losing significant amounts of weight, sometimes referred to as yo-yo dieting—has been associated with an increased risk of heart disease and cardiac arrest in women,28 and an increased risk of death regardless of gender.

According to a survey conducted by Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, nearly half of respondents would rather give up a year of their lives than be fat.48 “The 4,000 respondents in varying numbers between 15% and 30% also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese.”

We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect.

Ultimately, anti-fatness isn’t based in science or health, concern or choice. Anti-fatness is a way for thinner people to remind themselves of their perceived virtue. Seeing a fatter person allows them to remind themselves that at least I’m not that fat. They believe that they have chosen their body, so seeing a fat person eat something they deem unhealthy reminds them of their stronger willpower, greater tenacity, and superior character. We don’t just look different, the thinking goes; we are different. Thinner people outwit their bodies. Fatter people succumb to them. Encounters with fatter people offer a welcome opportunity to retell that narrative and remind themselves of their superiority. Over time, I have come to learn that these moments—the threats, the concern, the constant well-intentioned bullying—run even deeper than a simple assumption of superiority. It is a reminder so many thin people seem to desperately need. They don’t seem to be talking to me at all. They seem to be talking to themselves. Thin people don’t need me to know about a diet or a surgeon. They don’t need me to hear them expound on the evils of the obesity epidemic or the war on obesity. They need to remind themselves to stay vigilant and virtuous. The ways that thin people talk to fat people are, in a heartless kind of way, self-soothing. They are warnings to themselves from themselves. I am the future they are terrified of becoming, so they speak to me as the ghost of fatness future. They remo...

This desirability myth—the deep-seated, ubiquitous cultural belief that fat people are categorically undesirable—means that our assault and harassment is unthinkable to most. But fat people experience sexual violence, and some are even targeted because of the likelihood we won’t speak out. And who would want to rape you? is more than an anecdotal experience or a cultural meme. Academics at Brigham Young University found that fat survivors of rape were dramatically less likely to be believed than thinner victims.15 In Tipping the Scales of Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination, Sondra Solovay tells the story of one fat woman who was harassed by a physician after surviving rape and another who sought a pregnancy test. “‘My doctor said I couldn’t get pregnant, I was fat, who would want to make me pregnant?’ She was pregnant.”16 The desirability myth ensures that fat survivors will stay silent—and if they don’t, they still won’t be believed.

But today, the average American woman wears a size 16.

Over the last two decades, a growing body of research has indicated a frightening trend of anti-fatness among healthcare providers. In 2001 the International Journal of Obesity published a study that found those anti-fat judgments caused material differences in the outcomes of care received by fatter patients. In office visits with fat patients, the study found that many physicians wrote notes “suggesting a belief that those who are overweight must also be unhappy and unstable,” including comments like “this woman has a very unhappy life,” “suffering underlying depression,” and “most likely a drug addict.”24 Of the 122 primary care physicians who participated in the study, 10 percent suggested anti-depressants for their fat patients. Fat patients also received shorter visits. The average office visit for a thin patient with a migraine headache is 31 minutes. For a patient with an BMI considered as “obese,” that time drops to twenty-two minutes. “Certainly if physicians give additional tests (whether weight-related or not) to heavier patients, they may be giving compromised care—they are doing more tests in a much shorter period of time. [. . .] The pattern of responses seems to reflect that physicians feel more negativity toward heavier patients.”25 The fatter the patient, the more likely the doctor will describe the office visit as “a waste of their time” and the patients as “more annoying.” If a physician saw more fat patients, they said, they “would like their jobs less.”

In forty-eight of the fifty US states, it is perfectly legal to deny someone housing, employment, a table at a restaurant, or a room in a hotel just because they’re fat.1 State and federal judges have repeatedly upheld the right of employers to discriminate on the basis of size. At the most basic level, banning anti-fat discrimination and ensuring equal pay will be essential to helping fat people survive and thrive.

Doctors are free to set weight limits on the patients they’re willing to see, and some do. The FDA doesn’t require testing of drugs on fatter people, which means that crucial drugs like emergency contraception have significantly reduced effectiveness on people who weigh more than 165 pounds.