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

by Aubrey Gordon

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.

In spite of overwhelming evidence from mainstream sources that body size is largely out of our control, nearly every concern troll I’ve asked shares one simple belief: that fat people choose to be fat. As a queer person who grew up and came out in the 1990s, I find the contours of this argument are familiar, and they echo ones I’ve heard before. Parents of queer and trans kids don’t want their kids to come out because they’re concerned about their safety. Straight people aren’t homophobic; they’re just concerned about queer and trans people contracting HIV. Homophobic faith leaders love the sinner but hate the sin and believe that queer people will recruit unsuspecting straight children who will then choose a homosexual lifestyle. With a couple of decades of hindsight, many of us can now see these for what they were—smokescreens for straight people’s discomfort with queer people, and their fear of having to accept something they’d so long feared or derided.

In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Wendy Brown describes tolerance as “a discourse of power.”29 Despite its pacific demeanor, tolerance is an internally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness, and conciliation with discomfort, judgment, and aversion. Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist. It involves managing the presence of the undesirable, the tasteless, the faulty—even the revolting, repugnant or vile. [. . .] As compensation, tolerance anoints the bearer with virtue, with standing for a principled act of permitting one’s principles to be affronted; it provides a gracious way of allowing one’s tastes to be violated. It offers a robe of modest superiority in exchange for yielding.

In this way, thinness becomes a system of supremacy—a way of organizing the world around us and once again casting ourselves in a graceful light. At every turn, thin people are defined by their virtue: the restraint and vigilance to stay thin, the tenacity and dedication to monitor their bodies at every moment, the goodness to spread the gospel of thinness to wretched fatter people, and the restraint to stop short of death threats.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone, we are told, has a type. But if a thin person is reliably attracted to fat people, that type curdles and becomes something less trustworthy: a fetish. Fat people are so categorically undesirable, we’re told, that any attraction to us must speak to a darker urge or some unchecked appetite.

Yes, fat stories are rarely told by fat people—but when they are, they’re told by and about those of us whose bodies are, aside from their fatness, already marked by privilege. The stories of fat white women are scarce; LGBTQ fat people, fat disabled people, and fat people of color are exponentially scarcer. Even when fat stories are produced, we’re only offered one standard deviation from privilege.

the fatter a woman was, the more likely she was to internalize anti-fat stigma, to harbor guilt and shame about her own body, and to avoid health-care.

Research has also linked internalized weight bias to prediabetes and “a conglomerate of cardiovascular disease risk factors that strongly increases the risk for diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.”22 That is, what we think of as health risks associated with being fat may in fact be health risks of experiencing discrimination and internalizing stigma.

I told him I was happy to talk about behaviors, and I meant it. I would talk about practices and food, and I wasn’t seeking medication or kid gloves. But the answer to nearly every health problem I had faced had come without investigation, without curiosity, without seeing anything but the size of me. I told him that my body cast a long and wide shadow and that every doctor seemed focused on its silhouette, not the body from which that shadow stretched. If every prescription was to suddenly stop having the body I had always had, I said, that wasn’t going to happen. After all, twenty years of constant, punishing effort hadn’t changed the shape of my skin.

so many thin people’s body positivity came with caveats: As long as you’re happy and healthy. As long as you’re not, you know, obese. As long as you’re not glorifying obesity.

Over time, body positivity has made its constituency clear. It has widened the warm and fickle embrace of beauty standards ever so slightly. Now it showers its affections not only on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 4 but on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 12. Body positivity has widened the circle of acceptable bodies, yes, but it still leaves so many of us by the wayside. Its rallying cry, love your body, presumes that our greatest challenges are internal, a poisoned kind of thought about our own bodies. It cannot adapt to those of us who love our bodies, but whose bodies are rejected by those around us, used as grounds for ejecting us from employment, healthcare, and other areas of life.

When we are left to our own devices, we retreat to focusing on the problem of our own mindsets rather than the problem of our internalized biases, the harms we (often unintentionally) cause to those around us, and the ways in which others’ bodies invite different experiences than our own.

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.

And they will need to come to a place of deep understanding and belief that their body—their very own—is not necessarily an accomplishment, not a reward, not a reflection of a laudable work ethic or intense tenacity, but of a series of factors that are largely out of their own control.

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. That health is multifaceted, made up of a wide range of factors, from our mental health to our dis/ability, our blood pressure to our t-cell count; it cannot be reduced to a single measure, much less a number on a bathroom scale. That health is not a simple or monolithic reward for the penitent but largely an outgrowth of our existing privileges: having access to health insurance, receiving competent care from providers, and being born into able bodies. That illness and disability are not punishments for failing to stay vigilant but are variances in humans that have always existed. That diabetes and heart disease aren’t an opportunity for thinner people to gloat but health conditions that deserve competent treatment and compassionate care. That fatness is not a failure and, subsequently, that thinness is not an accomplishment. The size of our bodies is largely beyond our own control, and even in the few occasions when it isn’t, thinness cannot be a prerequisite for basic respect, dignity, provision of services, or meeting basic needs like getting a job or finding food.

That anti-fatness isn’t the exception; it’s the rule. Anti-fat bias is not the work of a few bad apples or a marginal group that decides to harm fat people. Anti-fat bias is a cultural force that simultaneously shapes and is expressed through our most commanding institutions: government, healthcare, education, and media. Anti-fatness isn’t just something each of us bears—it’s something we become. It takes over us, a virus that infects the way we see ourselves and those around us. It slips into our bloodstreams with ease, latches onto us, seeps into the way we see our friends, our family, strangers on the street. It warps our vision and our relationships. Anti-fatness is not the result of an active choice to wield it, like some biological weapon. No, anti-fatness is a passive default. We are all its carriers. We breathe it in every day.