Kate Manne: Where Does Fatphobia Come From?

Written By Alexandra Brockman

Moral philosopher and Cornell professor, Kate Manne, is one of those brilliant and insightful observers of culture working today. She’s the author of two incredible books about misogyny—Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women and Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny—and has coined mainstream terms like “himpathy,” her word for the way we afford our sympathy to the male aggressor rather than the female victim. The example she uses is the trial of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who sexually assaulted Chanel Miller, and the way the judge and the media seemed more concerned about Turner’s sullied future than Miller’s experience and recovery.


Her newest book is just as essential: It’s called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia and it explores Manne’s own experience of being a fat woman in our unabiding culture. If you read the Gluttony chapter of On Our Best Behavior, some of the material she explores will be familiar—but in Kate Manne style, she drives it all the way home. I love this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: I'm thrilled to talk to you. I'm like every other woman who's engaged with your work, or even been touched by your work, through the chain, so grateful, and I wrote a book that came out earlier this year about women and internalized patriarchy, and using the seven deadly sins as the way we've been coded for goodness.

KATE MANNE: Yeah, it's on my to read pile and is very near the top of the stack. I am so excited to read it. It looks amazing. I'm sorry to be behind in my reading...

ELISE: No, no...

KATE: With a four year old and this semester of busy teaching on top of book prepub, I've been really behind, but it looks so good.

ELISE: You should see my to be read shelves and I like drunk order books. I don't know if you do this, but at the local, I just I'll start like sending them links based on other people's bibliographies, and then you go and you pick it up. I'm not actually drunk, but it feels that way because I don't know what I ordered. What do you have for me? Oh, I ordered this. Okay.

KATE: Hooray, it's like a little present that you, yeah, give yourself unknowingly.

ELISE: Exactly. Like, oh, this looks like really intense and academic. I did not know I ordered this or I didn't realize it was 688 pages. But anyways, whenever I engage with a book like Unshrinking, maybe it's that good girl in me that's like, did I get this right? So my chapter on Gluttony is a very reduced chapter, but have obviously the same themes. And yeah, I was talking to someone last night, she was saying, she was like, I just can't, you know, she was talking about slavery, and she was like, I just can't believe that anyone ever thought that that was okay, and da da da, and I was like, well, you know, culturally, we go through these periods of development, and you can't really take where we are today and put it on the past. Like in ancient Greece, one in three people were enslaved. And I think we'll look back at this moment in time and be like where were we criminal to each other? What was accepted? I mean, fatphobia, certainly, as the one bias that... has it increased? I know it hasn't gotten better.

KATE: Yes, that's right. It's really the one bias that looks like it's on the rise. Yeah.

ELISE: Which stunning. And it's so virulent. And you obviously Explicate that throughout the book because of its attachment, the way that it's medicalized, but in writing and On Our Best Behavior, it was in some ways the easiest. I mean, it's the easiest and most accessible chapter because it's just everywhere. The morality, the goodness of having a thin, conforming body compared to the moral ineptitude and lack of discipline of a larger body, or that's the way we see it.

Well, thank you for this book. I mean, it's obviously far more personal than your other work, but it does the same thing in many ways of sort of identifying what shows up in our bodies and in ourselves and then tracing it back its cultural lineage and identifying where it starts because I feel like you write about this more than anything, but so many of the things that we internalize as normal responses to the world don't belong to us and they don't start with us.

KATE: Thank you. Yeah, that was very much the aim. I think a lot of moral philosophers see their job as to say what we ought to do, but I'm much more interested, as a moral philosopher, in debunking what is it not the case that we ought to do, what pseudo obligations are really leading us to feel this false sense of obligation, this pressure to do things that are really bad for us, really unnecessary, really uncalled for and harmful and toxic systemically. So, yeah, that was a big piece of it. And it does really have that in common with earlier work where I'm interested in interrogating what are these false obligations that plague us as women, as fat women, and obviously these forms of oppression intersect with others, so this is, I think, particularly terrible for women who are vulnerable in multiple ways because of other forms of oppression, like racism and transphobia and whatnot.

ELISE: Like the Venn diagram particularly insidious when it comes to women and let's put that in the parking lot because I want to spend time there, but you have this incredible ability to recognize, like I think about the term empathy, right? Which you coined and even people who haven't read entitled or down girl have probably encountered that term and the culture, which is this immediate inclination that we have, right, to sympathize with the male aggressor, perpetrator, over the victim. And I think you wrote about it at least once in the context of Brock Turner and what I find to be so insidious as a woman is the ways in which we are conditioned to believe that what's actually culture is our nature. Right. And that the way that they're conflated and they're made to be the same women are fill in the blank more fill in the blank, rather than understanding the way that we're conditioned or programmed to feel that way. So let's start with the beginning, because as you point out, there have always been fat bodies, and in some cultures they're revered, desired, and or symbols of wealth and power. Will you take us to that point when it started to become weaponized against us, and specifically women? I know men suffer from this as well, but it's far more insidious when it comes to women.

KATE: Yeah, totally. So really, anti fatness is a very recent bias compared to many other forms. It's particularly recent compared to misogyny, for that matter. So misogyny is nearly as old or as old as, agriculture on most reckonings, it's as old as patriarchy certainly, and fatphobia is comparatively recent. It really started, and of course there are hints of fatphobia in earlier work, but people have by and large a more neutral or ambivalent or even as you say venerating relationship towards the fat body until roughly the mid 18th century. And this is where in the book I draw on really brilliant and pioneering work by the sociologist Sabrina Strings, as well as work by the brilliant critic of fat phobia, Deshaun Harrison. And what Strings and Harrison show is that in the mid 18th century, The transatlantic slave trade was burgeoning, and so black people were being enslaved in burgeoning numbers and in newly particularly brutal ways by white, French, and English people, who were therefore on the lookout for a way to differentiate white bodies from black bodies.

And in that era there had begun to be this racist pseudoscience of the body that associated blackness and fatness. And this was based not on data or examination or anything even vaguely scientific. This was based on the supposition, the speculation of white French and Englishmen who had usually never even been to the relevant parts of Africa. But who nonetheless hypothesized that the black body was fatter than the white body. And when casting about for a way to differentiate white and black bodies, this came to be a pretext for holding that the black body was quote unquote primitive and savage and perhaps even evil and deserved the kind of enslavement that would otherwise be completely unjustifiable.

So, let's be clear about the lineage here. It's not that fatness was first derogated and then fatness began to be associated with blackness. It went the other way. There was this incipient association of blackness and fatness, and then fatness came to be derogated shortly afterward in this very opportunistic way that was meant to justify brutal enslavement. And so that led to a development of this lionization of leanness, especially for white American Protestant women. So Strings traces all of this to show that by the turn of the 19th century, slimness was becoming a mandate for white American women in order to be considered refined and beautiful. And this only increased as the gradual medicalization of fatness came to be a thing basically due to the insurance industry getting off the ground in the early 20th century and the medical Industry getting in on the racket of derogating fatness very late in the piece, really just in the early 20th century and onward.

So, yeah, it's a kind of interesting history of holding that fat bodies are somehow defective. It's directly traceable to anti blackness, it's opportunistic, it's not based on anything to do with health, and the health considerations are very, very post hoc. They were about the insurance industry trying to work out which bodies it wouldn't have to insure in the very early 20th century in order to save money, essentially. So that was when the medical industry noted that very thin, as well as very fat bodies, suffered from, and this is pure correlation, it's not causation, but they noticed that there were correlations between extreme deviations from average weight, and negative health outcomes. And so then they wanted to be able to not ensure people who they predicted would suffer from greater health ill effects.

So that's when the medicalization of fatness really came to be a thing. And it converged with these forces, these new beauty norms, these relatively historically new beauty norms for especially white women, these horrifically anti Black norms about embodiment that held that thinness was a sign of being refined and fit for being in polite society. And now this sense that fat bodies were medically defective and pathological, which of course only ratcheted up over the course of the 20th century. So the resulting, I think, very toxic mess is really the product of highly contingent historical forces and not any Objective science that looked at the human body and said how it ought to be based on health statistics or anything like that. It was much more ad hoc, much more exploitative and about capitalist profiteering, and much more about justifying a kind of anti blackness that required this crude differentiation between fat and thin bodies, marking fat bodies as inferior.

ELISE: And the suggestion that somehow size is something over which we have direct and immediate control. And it's also one of those, the fact that so much of this, the medicalization, the systemization happened at the hands of men who are less complex, hormonally, et cetera. But this idea that weight is a factor that should be completely under our control with the right amount of discipline, we obviously don't have those conversations about our height or our bone density or the size of our feet or our other parts of our body. And yet there's this suggestion that we could all conform to Standard sizing and to not fit is deviant. Meanwhile, you know, evidence of all sorts of body sizes and shapes from the beginning of time.

KATE: I think that's all exactly right. I mean, listeners may not know this, but human weight is just a shade less heritable than height. So, about 70 percent of the variance we see in the human population in terms of body mass is due to genetics, and about 79 percent of the variation we see in human height is due to genetics. So, to put that in perspective, yeah, weight is just a little bit less heritable due to genetics than height, and yet we rightly believe that we're just simply not in control of our height, and yet our weight is under our tight, long term control via diet and exercise. And study after study, the most careful meta analyses show that Yes, it's true, people can manipulate their weight in the short term a little bit. They can take maybe 5 or 10 percent of their starting weight off through any number of diets. And that might be a little bit more, thanks to the advent now of this new, much hyped class of weight loss drugs, somaglutides, like Ozempic and Wegovy.

But the thing about the diet and exercise piece of it, at least, is the weight comes back really inexorably over a five year period. So weight just doesn't turn out to be under our long term control, and it also doesn't seem very likely that even via this highly optimistic estimate of losing up to 15 percent of your starting weight on drugs like Ozempic, that that is likely to be maintained either because the weight comes roaring back when patients discontinue these drugs. And the vast majority of patients do discontinue them after a year for a variety of reasons, not just the huge expense, but also the fact that messing with the human digestive system comes with prohibitive costs and side effects in terms of our ability to enjoy food, our ability to simply digest food. So horrible digestive distress is what is going on in a lot of cases. And also Being able to absorb nutrients, which people need for obviously living their lives well, as well as staving off pretty terrible mental health effects that we see that are probably also at stake when people have major surgeries to lose weight, such as bariatric surgeries that really just reroute and amputate up to 80 percent of the stomach.

We also see pretty terrible mental health effects after those surgeries too, for reasons that are not fully understood, but probably have something to do with the fact that we need to absorb nutrients in order to function well as a whole human body. So the overall picture that we should be, I think, able to accept on the basis of the empirical evidence is weight is not very manipulable in the long term. People's weight seems to be due to a bunch of unchosen factors and is not something that we should regard as subject to this thing called mastery, this rather suspect thing called mastery. People just come in a bunch of different shapes and sizes. And if we adopt another lens and look at that a bit differently, we could even see that as a beautiful part of natural human diversity. But we don't, because, to look at the other part of your question, it's so advantageous to have a class of people who we basically want to control, namely women, who are constantly devoting their energies to working on themselves and their physique, and making themselves shrink down to size, rather than working on changing the world.

ELISE: Oh, exactly. I mean, when you think about the extreme amount of time, energy, and attention that I don't know any women who have escaped that. Yeah. Because it's twofold and you write about Audrey Gordon's work, but she talks about too, like the haunting, the sort of the way that she's perceived as the specter of what's to come for any woman who, with her fatness that she is I think she calls herself like the ghost of... I can't remember exactly how she describes it, but that women see her as a warning for what's to come for them if they can't control their appetite. And in the book, I write my dad's a doctor trained at Mayo Clinic, you know, got his requisite, I don't know, four hours of nutrition. And my mom's a nurse and they're both just like full of fat phobia and this idea that, exactly what you articulated, that if you gain weight, that invariably you'll continue to gain weight and then you develop type 2 diabetes and then you develop cardiovascular disease, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so there was a sort of. hypervigilant sniper like quality to my house guarding around, for both me and my older brother of like, watching our weight from this perspective of you will slide. You're going to just slide into this reality in a way that I only, in the last few years, have been able to really liberate myself, stop weighing myself. But there's this idea that we're all lunatics, right? That we'll be so out of control, our body, without this constant hyper vigilance, warden like attention to our appetite. And it's So life deadening, it is so unfun, the constant moralizing that I was doing to myself. I was bad last night. I need to be good today. We talk to ourselves in such insidious preschool like ways. Meanwhile, I can rapport, I have no idea what I weigh. And I don't care. I'm not 100 percent there. I know you've been on your own...

KATE: yeah. Yeah.

ELISE: And I have a conforming body, so it's easy for me to say, but to just be like, I don't care.

I'll just welcome stomach. Like, I don't want to live like this anymore.

KATE: That's so great. It's such a journey. Yeah. Because the idea that fat bodies are cautionary tales is immensely powerful in having not just other fat people police ourselves to not get that fat is a really common way that we're taught to think about it, but also this does apply to thin people too, in as much as I think everyone is kind of gaslit into the sense that their bodies shouldn't get any fatter. That they have to, as you say, self surveil, self police, and be hyper vigilant, perhaps even weighing themselves daily and measuring themselves in a kind of intrapersonal hierarchy via the bathroom scales. How good am I today compared to how I was yesterday and will be tomorrow based on my body mass? So we can compare ourselves to each other and we can compare ourselves to an imagined future that is somehow a tragedy and a funeral waiting to happen when that simply isn't accurate, that people can live healthy, happy lives, and we don't actually have particularly alarming mortality statistics. But also this sense that, yeah, by surveilling ourselves, we are doing this Self control, this self mastery and our bodies would otherwise run rampant and become this radically different out of control thing when the reality for those of us who practiced intuitive eating which is pretty much what I practice now and the tradition is not without its problems, but it also, for those of us who do have the privilege to be able to access that way of eating, it is a very healing way of approaching things. It's immensely liberating, and oftentimes we find we simply just have the bodies we have. It's actually not going to be radically out of step with the body you had when you were dieting, because what dieting does is often increase people's weight in the long term, between one third and two thirds of people will regain more weight than they lost.

And when it comes to the health effects here, which you referenced, one thing that even physicians are often not aware of is that going up and down in weight, so weight cycling, which is the typical result of dieting, not the exception, that's actually really independently harmful to our health, regardless of what we weigh. So you get really bad cardiovascular effects from weight cycling. You get really bad metabolic effects, get really bad effects on immune health and mental health. And finally, that encompasses actually increasing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by constantly going up and down in weight that has been shown to be linked to the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in ways that suggest that often just simply maintaining a weight that your body is comfortable at seems to be, according to large longitudinal studies, is often your best bet, statistically speaking, rather than trying to conform to an arbitrary size.

So yeah, I think there's a lot of assumptions in play here that a good body is a thin one, a thin body is achievable, a thin body is achievable for everyone, and that you will be fully in control of your health and your mortality if you're thin, which is also just of course a myth. There are plenty of fat, healthy, happy people, and there are plenty of sadly unhealthy, thin people who Should not be regarded as any more or less worthy than a fat person who suffers from a similar health condition. These people should be receiving, in most cases, just the same treatment. And yet, for the fat person who suffers from the same health condition, the prescription is weight loss, whereas for the thin person, they're given often closer to adequate medical care.

ELISE: Yeah. No, and there's so many factors, like, where is the fat in your body wrapped around your organs? Is it subcutaneous, which is where, for a lot of bigger bodies, the fat is close to the surface of the skin. It's not harmful, it's not unhealthy, but the blanket way, the, you write extensively about the BMI and sort of its racist roots, but also the fact that it was never intended to be a measure of health, but now it's just blanket applied. And I felt like your mind is incredible, but also it all felt so bulletproof. But ultimately, when we think about what's happening in this country, and I know obesity is a terrible word, and we need new language about this anyway, because I think the root of obesity is to eat yourself to death. But also when scientists are trying to understand what's happening. Essentially, they're like, all we can tell you is that people are moving more and eating less, and we have no idea what's happening. But we do know some things, right? Like, you mentioned, I think it was in the 90s when the BMI index Shifted down and suddenly millions of Americans woke up to find themselves classed as overweight.

And we think about the impact of that on people's minds. Like I was interviewing Ellen Langer recently, who's the mother of mindfulness, not meditation, but mindfulness at Harvard, and she was talking about a study, which I will probably miss cite, but essentially it was showing people blood work where they were no statistical difference. It was like 5. 9 versus six and the people who were six were classified as pre diabetic and those who were classified 5. 9 we're told they were normal. And when you track these people over time, those who were told that they were pre diabetic, even though statistically no different than being 5. 9, went on with an alarming rate to develop diabetes. And so you think about the implications of our culture on people's minds and the power that we have over our bodies without understanding it.

KATE: Yeah. It's, I should say a controversial diagnosis because no more than 2 percent of people diagnosed with prediabetes, which is blood sugar or A1C levels that are higher than the average, but certainly not high enough. to warrant a diagnosis of diabetes, those people will develop diabetes at a rate no higher than about 2 percent per year. And so many people in the tradition that I'm working in of being a little more cautious about the alarmism about the so called obesity epidemic, where I agree this is a highly stigmatizing word that just isn't in my vocabulary so I use it, your listeners can't see, but I use obesity in scare quotes.

ELISE: Yeah.

KATE: They're being alarmed about something that is really complex, is not a prediabetes diagnosis is potentially to alarmists, and we're also making people think that it's a simple matter of more weight equals more risk of diabetes, when in fact the science on this, no one knows exactly why people develop type 2 diabetes, it's of course this enormous research question, but some new research into this area, andI'm looking at this research, I should say, very much from the perspective of an educated academic layperson, a philosopher, not myself, an epidemiologist or a medical researcher. But nonetheless, what my medical researcher friends tell me about this is that there's some evidence that although type 2 diabetes and higher weight are fairly highly correlated, not perfectly by any means, but there's evidence that Early diabetic processes are causing weight gain rather than weight gain causing type 2 diabetes.

So again, it's a complex picture that doesn't lend itself to the kind of simple, and I would argue, potentially quite harmful alarmism about, well, if you gain weight, then you'll be set down this path. It's not that simple. But also, the path might be that your being in early diabetic processes might be driving weight gain in a way that, you know, deserves compassion and support and adequate medical care, as do all health conditions, no matter the size and the shape of our bodies when we go to see the doctor. Another part of this is that we also don't have a definitive scientific answer. In fact, this is again a highly disputed research question in the medical community. Well, why has there been a modest uptick in weight over the last 20, 30 years? Part of it is that we have simply started to classify bodies differently. So in 1998, we started to classify overweight as beginning at a BMI of 25, rather than about 27 or 28, depending on gender. So a lot of people, just as you say, were classified as overweight overnight in 1998 on a single day, but there also has been a modest uptick in fatness. And yeah, the reasons for that are not fully understood and probably won't be for a long time.

But meanwhile, we could be dealing compassionately, mindfully, and respectfully with the bodies that we have instead of setting up a system where people who are at a higher weight or who live in larger bodies are treated so reliably, poorly at the doctor's office that there is really definitive evidence showing we'll avoid seeking medical care. Even if you hold that fatness means sickness, and again, I've emphasized that I think the relationship between these two is much more complex and nuanced, and it is very clear that people can be fat and healthy, as well as thin and unhealthy. But even if you think that I'm wrong about all of that when I delve into this complex and quite fascinating relationship between health and weight in the book, even if you think that, Yeah, fat people are just inevitably unhealthy. What follows from that? You would think that we should receive as good care at the doctor's office in order to minister to health problems we might be suffering from, if the world were a just place for all bodies. So, we also have to be very careful, why exactly are people so emphasizing of the supposed unhealthiness of fat bodies, and could that be a dog whistle to just say, basically, we don't like fat people, we don't like looking at them, we don't like touching them, we don't like treating them all of which, by the way, has been shown of medical providers.

Could this be a way of othering fat bodies that is as much about Moralism, is as much about aesthetics, is as much about intellectual derogation as it is about these health concerns that are dominating the conversation, but the actual picture is complicated and nuanced, and even if all of the worst for fat people was true, that still wouldn't be a grounds for treating us unjustly when it comes to our access to the public world, the world of healthcare, and the ways that we want to do things unrelated to health, like getting an education-- where we encounter rampant discrimination in education as well as employment, that we shouldn't be being discriminated against just because of the size and shape of our bodies, fairly obviously. But the health piece of it is used as a pretext for exactly that kind of sheer bigotry.

ELISE: Yeah. And it's one of the few remaining biases where this is still loaded into our cultural systems and it's kind of shocking when you, we start to think about it, that it's so acceptable. And even the word, even the phrase obesity epidemic, which then puts this entirely on weight rather than metabolic functions and makes it seem like something that you can catch just adds to this like general hysteria, I think, and instinct of separation. I want to talk about The explication of this idea of disgust, but before we move on to that, too, I mean, you open the book talking about people who are sort of applauded for rapid weight loss by their doctors, when they're sort of telling their doctors, I don't feel well, only to die because they had undiagnosed cancer, et cetera, that went untreated.

And when you think about mortality and you think about health of larger bodies. And then you think about, I mean, I don't want to get on the scale at my gynecologist, right? Like, I push off my monthly. It's humiliating and, loaded and again, like, I have a conforming body. But you think about the way that is layered onto, like, why would you want to go and see someone for a service who's going to moralize to you absent all other information, why would anyone go to the doctor?

KATE: Yeah. So some of the incidents that I talk about in the book are, you know, by the way, completely representative of what fat women report about putting off medical care and how they're treated in the doctor's office. And yeah, one of these patients, Jen Curran, has written about how she was told to lose weight when she actually had bone marrow cancer which was missed by a kidney specialist because they just assumed her weight was responsible for her symptoms. Now, fortunately, she has received appropriate care in the form of chemotherapy and now has a fairly good prognosis. But another patient, Jan, Jan Fraser, who I look at through the testimony of her sister, who is a writer in the space. She actually had this massive endometrial tumor invading her uterus. There was cancer spreading to her pelvis, to her bladder, even to her lungs. And doctors missed it because they just assumed she was a fat, complaining, older woman. So she was in extraordinary pain that was just ignored, really silenced and it wasn't until one doctor begrudgingly took blood work that they realized she had really late stage cancer that she died from six months later, while she was subject to praise for losing weight because of the rounds of chemotherapy.

And, you know, I haven't, touch wood suffered from nearly that level of terrible health problem being misdiagnosed, but I have been someone who went to my gynecologist and I hadn't eaten for seven days because I was really in the throes of severely disordered eating, arguably an eating disorder, because I was just so desperate to lose weight. And I was so sick of dieting that I just thought, you know what's easier? I'm just going to stop eating. It just seemed like if I want to do this quickly, and I've been on every diet known to mankind, I have stopped being able to lose weight on them, and I have gotten very good at sticking to diets, but my body is just now very metabolically slow, like most chronic dieters.

I had been dieting so extremely that I had lost a lot of weight very rapidly, and I was subject purely to praise from my gynecologist who then didn't react to the fact that I nearly fainted in the doctor's office, you know, I saw the room go black and then brown and sort of fade out and the edges of my vision start to go fuzzy. And it didn't occur to him to ask me, even just, are you okay? He just assumed that, you know, women faint or whatever, especially since I'd fairly recently had a baby, but didn't do anything in the way of just checking. Was I getting adequate nutrition when I'd lost 20 pounds in a month? I mean, this is very basic medical negligence. And I tell these stories because I guess I really want readers to know that this affects anyone and everyone. This affected me when I have written two books, for goodness sake, prior to this one about patriarchy and about misogyny and about the norms that are so pernicious and really are used to control and police women, including women's bodies, but I was still subject to this relentless pressure to shrink myself that I really had to fully face in order to come to grips with in the course of writing this book.

I guess I would say that, not only are we neglecting people's health, in ways that are really disturbing, but we're ignoring the fact that dieting for so many people is not only ineffective, but it is the number one precursor to eating disorders that are so terrible for people's health. Again, completely regardless of weight, people who are diagnosed with so called atypical anorexia, That's in fact a more common eating disorder than so called typical anorexia. It just happens to affect people at a higher weight who aren't technically underweight. So that's the only difference between typical and so called atypical anorexia. And it's just as lethal, it's just as harmful, it's just as linked to terrible bodily suffering, as well as sheer hunger, at least while your body is still in the defensive mode of making you hungry enough to want food, which is a kind of blessing in a way that your body is crying out for what it needs. But yeah, instead we're just not looking past the fatness to see what people actually need for their health, for their well being, for their mental well being. And Yeah, I don't think that these pressures really spare any of us, particularly girls and women, as well as, according to research by Erin Harrop, who is a wonderful researcher in this space, non binary people are also disproportionately affected by these ills.

ELISE: And I might be summarizing a lot of different studies, but essentially to be overweight has the best health outcomes, right? Then normal weight and then it's the worst outcomes are to be underweight.

KATE: So basically we can represent the relationship between health at least as captured by mortality statistics, and weight using a U shaped curve. And one piece of the history of this that listeners may be interested in is that these BMI categories that we're using are based on the work of 19th century Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quivelet, Who essentially took the bodies of white Flemish military men and held their average weight to be the ideal one. First of all, conflating what is the case with what ought to be, so why should average be ideal? But also, like, why are we still basing the idea of what our bodies should be on? white European men in the 19th century, according to the measurements of some astronomer guy who had these very strange ideas, some of which paved the way for the eugenics movement, incidentally.

So yet another piece of this history is both arbitrary and highly racist, but at any rate, the BMI categories that we have that were based on the Cadillac's index, so now called the body mass index, that was developed by Ansel Keys in the 1970s, we have the category of underweight, so called normal weight, so called overweight, and then categories of so called obesity. And it turns out that based on the work of Catherine Fleagle, who is a really groundbreaking CDC researcher, She showed that in fact, the lowest mortality rate is associated with being in the overweight category of the BMI. So having a little supposedly extra weight and having a little more flesh on your bones turns out to be probably protective against things like the risk of wasting away due to severe illness.

And she showed that being even moderately obese, again, quote unquote, is no riskier mortality wise than being in the so called normal weight category of the BMI, and being underweight is actually really risky in terms of, again, the correlation between being a very low weight and your mortality statistics. Now, people have disputed this research, they've said, well, what if you were looking at people who were very thin because they're smokers, she took out the smokers, the same results were replicated in these big meta analyses, and another piece of it is that Even though it's true that being very heavy is correlated with greater mortality, it doesn't follow that the increased weight is causing the greater mortality. That's a correlation, and that doesn't entail causation. It could be, partly, that very heavy people are not getting adequate medical care, as well as being subject to other things, such as the stress of stigma, as well as being, perhaps, confounded with people who might be exercising less, and exercise is very good for us, unlike dieting. So there are big pieces of this puzzle that, again, are not fully understood, but it is not nearly as simple as, you should be very thin in order to be healthier.

ELISE: yeah, no. And as you point out that the fitness certainly has a correlation with better health outcomes, regardless of body size, but that fitness is important, which I think makes sense.

KATE: ...is bad news for me. So, I'm someone now who really detests exercise because I've long associated it with the norm of having a certain body type. So sadly, I don't enjoy moving my body. But what research for this book showed very clearly is that it's fitness, not fatness, that is more determinative of health outcomes. And people can be fit at really any size of body. And that fitness is very important and reduces things like cardiovascular risk factors. It's just not about sheer weight. It's about fitness, which again, in the annals of inconvenient news for me personally ranks quite high because I don't enjoy fitness, but yeah, in a way that the nice message of this is that no matter what your body size, you can take steps towards becoming fitter, which might have really good health benefits, completely regardless of whether you lose weight in the process, which by the way, most people won't by undertaking a fitness regime because people often get hungrier. People often don't burn that many calories, but you know, fitness is a real thing and it's just independent of fatness.

ELISE: Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the priming of disgust, because I think that that explains so much of how we've been culturally primed to see fat people.

KATE: yeah, totally. So one of the other pieces of research that I found interesting and pretty unsurprising when I was writing this book was the finding that fat bodies are subject to some of the most disgust of any class of bodies. So we're on par with people who are incredibly stigmatized, like unhoused people, we're second only to smokers and drug users in eliciting revulsion. So we know that fat people elicit a lot of disgust. It's complicated by the way that that doesn't mean fat people aren't regarded as sexually attractive. So, One complicated piece of this is that porn search term rate usage suggests that fat bodies are often regarded as quite sexually attractive. Fat bodies are one of the most common search terms in pornography, but we'll leave aside that piece of it, it's just to say that it's not inevitable, it's quite recent, and it's also much more about social status than sexiness, that fat bodies are seen as disgusting. But nonetheless, we are. And what psychological research shows by, Jonathan Haidt and collaborators like Talia Wheatley is that when something is regarded as disgusting, people start to become morally disgusted towards it and regard it as morally bad, even when it is obviously perfectly benign.

So they did this really interesting class of experiments where they would give people a completely random benign anecdote, such as about a student council representative who was having discussions often about topics of widespread interest at the meetings. So this is like completely benign, even maybe praiseworthy behavior. But this guy named Dan was regarded as doing something wrong because the researchers had cleverly hypnotized patients, with their consent, to build this pang of disgust upon hearing the word often, or reading the word often. So when you describe this character Dan as often having these widespread topics of mutual interest come up at his meetings, people said things like, Dan seems just so weird and disgusting. He seems like a morally suspicious character. He seems like a popularity seeking snob. So people, because they felt this pang of disgust, Just had this feeling like something was wrong with what Dan was doing, even though his behavior was completely neutral, maybe even good.

And so they came up with these incredibly post hoc rationalizations for why Dan was up to no good. And so what I theorize in the book is that given the empirical evidence that fat bodies elicit disgust, and given the empirical evidence that visceral disgust shades into moral disgust and gets confused with it, fat bodies are being relentlessly moralized. We're regarded as doing something wrong, and up to no good, and a burden on society, and not having enough willpower, and slovenly and lazy, and all these things, despite the fact that, no, we just happen to be, largely based on genetics, a bit fatter than the average. That's all it is. So, yeah, that's part of my explanation of how we got here is this pretty simple psychological mechanism that goes from disgust, That is traceable to anti blackness, as I previously explained, and then makes that into this morally disgusted reaction that means that as someone living in a larger body, you constantly have to defend yourself from the sense that you're somehow doing something wrong, morally wrong, just for existing. I mean, a classic expression of this is, you're glorifying obesity. It's like, dude, no, I just posted a picture of myself living my life. That's all it is. And you had to justify the sense that somehow I am morally beyond the pale, just in my sheer existence.

ELISE: yeah, and the end of your book is such a beautiful rallying cry about what would it be like to abandon beauty standards, abandon Even the way that we need to sort of oppositionally frame ourselves as not something else to compare, to judge, this idea, I mean, it's so odd, once you can actually step out of it and get some perspective that we have such an opinion about other people's bodies and or that we think it's within our remit to comment on them or have feelings about them or quite frankly care. It's not even that it's not our business. It's like, why do we have a stake in this and it's actually quite perverse.

KATE: I guess the controversial part of this is, look, body positivity, body neutrality, they're helpful in some ways, and I don't begrudge their starting points in terms of getting into this idea of body liberation, and they were my starting points at various times, but there's something sort of odd about the idea that we have to be rating people as like, according to, well, Now we're going to make the value positive, or we're going to make it completely neutral and, you know, call everyone a zero rather than giving them a negative number. Like, there's something that still is persisting in that way of thinking about giving someone a value based on their body that is really strange. So, rather than thinking about it like that, like, what if we just threw out the scale, both the bathroom scales, also the idea that our bodies are objects to be assessed, what if we just threw out that idea altogether?

I mean, it's actually a very familiar idea. You know, when I look at the children in my daughter's class, I just think, how lovely. And I don't think that they need some idea like body positivity that I'm projecting onto them, or body neutrality. That's an idea that's a corrective to something really toxic that goes deeper in this idea that we need to rank and compare and contrast bodies whatsoever. So if we thought of bodies as no more subject to comparison, and for that matter consumption and colonization, as The bodies of our kids or the dogs that we can look at appreciatively, but we don't rate dogs. That's why the popular Twitter account that it's title is We Rate Dogs. That's why it's tongue in cheek because we don't actually rate dogs. Like, every dog on that site gets 13 out of 10 because we don't need a number. We don't need a positive number. We don't need a neutral number. We don't need a negative number. Dogs are great. So, rather than, yeah, going for this idea of like, let's be positive about this or let's be neutral, why don't we just be nothing?

ELISE: Yeah.

KATE: Why don't we regard our bodies as just for ourselves and nobody else, and they don't need any kind of assessment, even if it's, I mean, better a positive one than a negative one, better a neutral one than a positive one, but the whole scale is really screwed up when you think about it. There just isn't a need to regard the body in this way, and I think it's really toxic.

ELISE: Agree. Thank you for your work and your brilliance and for moving us forward. You're a legend and you're just getting started, which is intimidating.

KATE: Well, I certainly don't feel like that, but that's so kind. Thank you so much for having me on to this amazing podcast and getting to have this great conversation. It feels really healing.

ELISE: Oh, good. Thank you, Kate.

I’m in awe Kate Manne, such a fan and I’m thrilled that this book will hopefully really penetrate the mainstream and force a conversation that’s long overdo, which again, what Kate Manne is so excellent at is forcing us to question our existing culture and the systems or belief so that we understand 1) how we got there and have been provoked in many ways to get there, but then 2) by being conscious of this programing or patterning, we can change it. And she has certainly managed to do that with her first two books, Down Girl, which is quite academic and them, Entitled, which is really accessible and an essential read, it is not long, it is so brilliant and eye opening. And then again with Unshrinking, which is a 200 page masterpiece and at the end she writes about beauty standards, again pointing to how strange it is really that we have this system of ranking aesthetic preferences that we take wholesale as completely normal and natural and how it’s always been, but is a system that is only getting more pernicious and worse with social media. We think about how Facebook was built on this idea of rating women as “hot or not,” let’s not forget where these systems came from. This is the ground on which they’re built. At the end, Kate writes, in an anthem in the final few pages of the book about these beauty standards: “There should be nothing in it’s place, there ought to be no contest, and there is not contest, no judgement, does not mean there can be no appreciation. Go for a walk sometime, you can appreciate a stone, a leaf, a dog, without ranking it against others, without pronouncing it superior. There can be self expression too, we may feel the most ourself in particular carnations.” Let that be our ranking, let that be what guides us—coming backing to ourselves and our bodies and understanding the world from that place, not always in comparison and judgment. God, I can only image the energy, attention, relief that so many women could find from turning off that loop. Thanks for listening, I’ll see you next time.

Alexandra Brockman
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