Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

This is especially true in leftist circles, where such prejudices are now widely frowned upon, and would be an occasion for guilt, shame, and self-censure if admitted, even inwardly. Hence, as Paul Campos has argued, fatphobia can serve as a powerful proxy—and outlet—for these forms of bigotry: Precisely because Americans are so repressed about cla

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

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.

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

Even if these interventions were perfectly safe and costless and painless—which they’re currently far from being—I would still find them objectionable at a social level of analysis. For they flatten out difference, in the form of human bodily diversity, which I believe we ought to value. They flatten out such difference not at random, moreover, but

What is called for is a thoroughgoing political reckoning and subsequent moral recognition: being fat, like being trans, is a valid and indeed valuable way of being in the world.

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.

Being thin has thus become much harder over the course of the past century—and, at the same time, vastly more valued.

Misogyny, as I’ve argued, finds in fatphobia a powerful and convenient ally: it constructs a ready-to-hand hierarchy among girls and women based on the infinitely gradable metric of body mass, usefully complicated by body shape, breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, and various markers of privilege.