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

by Aubrey Gordon

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...