Kate Manne wrote 'Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia' to wrestle with body image, racial justice, women's health and feminist philosophy.
to “come to terms with some of the most deep seated aspects of patriarchal culture … that said that somehow I was ‘less than’ for being fat.”We live in a society obsessed with fatness. Or, perhaps more accurately, obsessed with fighting it.
So one study that I draw on in the book compared a thin man, a fat man, a thin woman and a fat woman, and compared them for four different employment opportunities: an administrative assistant, a university lecturer, a sales person and a manual laborer. And surprise, surprise—the thin man was judged the most suitable employee, and the fat woman the least suitable employee for each and every job opening, despite the fact they had identical CVs.
Can you explain how fat became medicalized? And what do people get wrong when they assume that fatness is some sort of disease?: That is a really excellent question. The brilliant work of the sociologist Sabrina Strings has shown that fatphobia really wasn’t medicalized until the 20th century. Fatness wasn’t even seen as really a problem until the mid-18th century.
So that happened and a kind of gradual norm of beauty set in for white American Protestant women … it didn’t become medicalized until the beginning of the 20th century, when health insurance companies began to be interested in deviations from the norm and wondering when human bodies are liable to suffer greater mortality risks.
People who are either “underweight” or “over moderately obese” do have greater correlations with health risks, but that’s not necessarily causation. Even if it turns out that it is causal, of course, no matter what your size, you deserve compassion and inclusion and adequate healthcare. So whatever we find out on that score, often health becomes a pretext for excluding people and ironically denying them the healthcare and the health interventions that would be more appropriate, not less, if someone is in poor health. If the idea of restricting someone’s access to healthcare because they’re unhealthy sounds wild, it’s because it is.
The way the fat Black female body is held up for derision, disgust and contempt has potentially fatal consequences for the women on the receiving end of that disgusted moralizing and deeply racist gaze.: In the book, which is really a personal one, you talk about noticing that there was a gap between your own ideological rejection of patriarchal norms and the way that you’ve been dedicated to shrinking yourself.
Or, in this case, just the feeling of having certain bodily appetites—you feel defective, you feel greedy, you feel immoral, you feel ashamed, and oftentimes like you’re out of control for just having a normal, healthy human appetite for food and for foods that are pleasurable and comforting and satisfying to eat rather than sheer nutritionIn terms of self-gaslighting, the self-talk plays the role in making us feel this sense of being defective.
: I want to ask you more about the pleasure-denying element of fatphobia. You write about the pervasive belief that fat people, fat women in particular, aren’t entitled to pleasure of all kinds—in the form of good food, enjoyable sex or risky behaviors. Can you talk about like that specific kind of cruelty? Because it feels like a cruelty to deny people entitlement to any sort of pleasure at all.
There is this other parallel too—this worry that, ‘well, are you doubting the lived experience of a trad wife?’ Or ‘are you doubting the lived experience of someone who has decided that their appetite is not to be satisfied?’ Get angry … Think about how much money and time and effort and energy and bandwidth has been taken from me, or could be taken from me, that I could reserve for things that I value more than making my body a slightly different size or shape: In your conclusion, you write, “We are wronged bodies, not wrong ones.
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