Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

The lessons are clear: First, people routinely misinterpret their visceral disgust reactions as moral disgust, leading them to judge morally bad actions more harshly, and even to deem neutral actions morally problematic. Second, when this occurs, people reach for reasons to justify their moral ill feelings, engaging in post hoc rationalization of a

This is how misogyny works: take a hierarchy, any hierarchy, and use it to derogate a girl or woman.

The thought that has helped me the most, in navigating all of this, is that my body is for me. Your body is for you. My body is not decoration. Your body is not decoration.[4] Our bodies are our homes, as the slogan has it.

Body reflexivity offers an escape from the apparently exhaustive options of positivity, negativity, or neutrality, by proposing a different focus. Rather than changing how bodies are assessed, it urges us to transcend the mode of assessment entirely. (“I don’t look at you with a critical eye,” is something often said to me by my husband—which means

And it’s not that we abhor fatness because we discovered it is unhealthy. By and large, we decided it is unhealthy because we came, over time, to abhor it—for

The diet, fitness, and so-called wellness industries hence profit handsomely from the fatphobic hierarchies that make certain body types highly desirable, yet unachievable, for most people in our calorie-abundant social environment.

There’s also an individualistic—and, arguably, masculinist—assumption at work in diet culture, which minimizes the role of food in shared pleasures, both daily and during special celebrations. But there is something immensely valuable about being tied to the world, and our bodies, and each other, by the thrice-or-so daily practice of satisfying our

Fatphobia can be defined as a feature of social systems that unjustly rank fatter bodies as inferior to thinner bodies, in terms of not only our health but also our moral, sexual, and intellectual status.

It is indeed an example of what we might call the “harder-better” fallacy: that which is the most difficult to achieve is judged the most praiseworthy, regardless of its actual desirability or value.