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

by Aubrey Gordon

Suddenly, people who otherwise relish complaining about delayed flights and cramped legroom become airlines’ staunchest defenders.

As of 2018, people who wear plus sizes have just 2.3 percent of the clothing options that thinner people have.11

very fat people internalized anti-fat bias, leading to low levels of self-acceptance and self-esteem,

purportedly due to their experiences being mistreated due to their size.

“Among those who are not overweight and who have a hard time understanding what it is like to be overweight, stigma feels like it would help strengthen other people’s resolve to eat less because it strengthens their own.”24

Thinness takes so much, and we deserve to take it back.

Regardless of the topic, shame doesn’t motivate change; it instead conveys that the shamed party is simply a bad person, and nothing can be done about that.

Besides, if we acknowledged that fatness might not be a personal failing, we might have to treat fat people differently, with less condescension and disdain. And if we couldn’t look down our noses at people fatter than us, how will we make ourselves feel better about our own bodies? Who would we pity, lament, mock, malign? And what would become of our lesser selves?

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.

Like street harassment facing thinner women, fatcalling is also rooted in a deep sense of entitlement to others’ bodies—an entitlement that is affirmed in nearly every aspect of our culture. Women’s bodies are always at men’s disposal, there to comment on, to ogle, to touch, and to take. Women are expected not to “provoke” men with our style of dress, expected to take men’s constant come-ons as compliments, because boys will be boys. Women carry mace, learn self-defense techniques, develop networks to notify other women of men who assault and sexually harass us. Catcalling, like assault and harassment, are facts of life that we’re expected to account for in our daily lives. And we do, often as a matter of survival.

Instead, I face the grislier side of sexual harassment: unsolicited disclosures of men’s rape fantasies, a violent expectation of full access to my body, and the certainty that any assault will be met with my gratitude.

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.

To those feminists, my question is this: Can you love fat people enough to sacrifice your comfort?

In the years since my first breakup I had struggled to accept interest where I found it. No matter how a potential partner looked, no matter how enthusiastic they were, I couldn’t trust their attraction.

believing their interest to be impossible

Any intimacy required vulnerability, and vulnerability inevitably led...

(Note: all available research indicates that fat shaming leads to weight gain, not weight loss, and worse health outcomes—as do shaming and bullying for any reason.)

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.

“obese patients were 1.65 times more likely than others to have significant undiagnosed medical conditions [. . .] indicating misdiagnosis or inadequate access to healthcare.”

when participants experienced anti-fatness, “their eating increases, their self-regulation decreases, and their cortisol (an obesogenic hormone) levels are higher relative to controls, particularly among those who are or perceive themselves to be overweight.”

Another found that experiencing anti-fatness led to avoidance of exercise.39 Most damning of all, a study engaging 13,692 older adults found that “people who reported experiencing weight discrimination had a 60% increased risk of dying, independent of BMI.”

Anti-fat bias, not fatness itself, may be fat people’s gr...

In 2011 researchers found that just one lecture on weight stigma and weight controllability significantly reduced psychology students’ anti-fat bias.

A meta-analysis of weight bias interventions found that, while none fully eradicated anti-fat bias, many led to a “small to moderate” shift in attitudes.

This newly popularized body positivity drowns out so many of us, reducing problems of social exclusion to issues of self-esteem and body image. It focuses on normalizing the moments in which thin bodies appear fat, rather than tackling the more intransigent and troubling systems of privilege and oppression that marginalize those of us who are fat. It disproportionately centers the experiences of cis women who are thin, white, Western, abled, straight. And

in so doing, it writes out those of us more than one standard deviation from the mean—we can be people of color, or we can have a disability, or we can be transgender, or we can be fat, but we cannot dare be more than one.