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

by Aubrey Gordon

Bodies like mine are seen by others as an open invitation to express disgust, fear, and insidious concern. They are seen as an invitation to laugh, a prop for hackneyed would-be comics to recite the same punchlines over and over again.

Body positivity has shown me that our work for liberation must explicitly name fatness as its battleground—because when we don’t, each of us are likely to fall back on our deep-seated, faulty cultural beliefs about fatness and fat people, claiming to stand for “all bodies” while we implicitly and explicitly exclude the fattest among us.

Christy Harrison, a registered dietitian and MPH, adds that diet culture “demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hypervigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.”

A stranger telling me, in no uncertain terms, that my body entitled him to treat me however he saw fit. He could complain openly, scoff at the fact of my body, publicly decry it to anyone who’d listen, and he would only be met with sympathy.

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 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.”

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

As if the humanity of marginalized people is a campaign and we’ve put our own experiences up for debate. As if our hurt, harm, and trauma were simply fair game.

Concern trolling tells fat people that whatever befalls us is our fault and that no thin person can be held accountable for their own behavior when faced with the sight of a fat person’s body.

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.

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.

The Root writer and editor Monique Judge wrote, “You look at fat black women as being mothers and aunties. And if we aren’t maternal—because the expectation that we must be is some bullshit—that doesn’t make us any less desirable.”

This is among the greatest triumphs of anti-fatness: it stops us before we start. Its greatest victory isn’t diet industry sales or lives postponed just until I lose a few more pounds. It’s the belief that our bodies make us so worthless that we aren’t deserving of love, or even touch.

When we reduce fat people to their bodies, to “before and after,” or to bellies and rolls, we come to think of fat people as bodies without personhood. Fat bodies become symbols of disembodied disgust.

That our bodies are just bodies, not synecdoche for our character, not a badge of work ethic—just bodies. That our bodies are our own, not subject to street harassment, mandates to change, or unwelcome “advice” no matter how well-intended.