00:00:25.740And whether we like it or not, we're in bit with the right.
00:00:27.920So Adrienne, today we are joined by the brilliant, the illustrious, the gift to American intellectual life, Kate Mann, who is a moral philosopher from Cornell, and she is most recently the author of Unshrinking, How to Face Fat Phobia.
00:00:44.280Kate is the author of Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny, which did this kind of insane thing, or at least a very rare thing, which is it is a book of academic philosophy that became a mainstream hit.
00:00:58.000I use this book a lot. I think a lot of people use this book a lot to elucidate the meaning of misogyny in the wake of Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss to Donald Trump.
00:01:07.220And I find myself continually going back to Down Girl to explore Kate's really systematic approach to how misogyny functions and its disciplining role in women's lives and in our public life.
00:01:23.000And now she's turned her same critical eye with unshrinking to the phenomenon of anti-fatness, which I think normally gets understood as a manifestation of misogyny.
00:01:35.520but Kate makes a really compelling case in this book for understanding anti-fatness as a broader
00:01:40.760phenomenon that affects our politics on its own terms. Kate, thank you so much for being with us.
00:01:45.720Thanks so much for having me. It's great to connect again, Moira, and great to meet you,
00:01:49.620Adrian. It's really lovely to meet you. And in discussing the episode beforehand,
00:01:54.020you already mentioned that the book feels like a tougher sell than Down Girl, for instance. And
00:01:59.720this is something that I think the book kind of anticipates. And I thought maybe we could start
00:02:19.780It's actually integral to all these other forms of bias and of domination.
00:02:25.620You dash off this sort of point where you're like, you know,
00:02:27.880there are plenty of left-leaning folks who would want to correct themselves
00:02:32.180the moment they make a racist or homophobic point but who will indulge in fat phobia you know uh
00:02:39.420kind of reflexively and unreflectedly and will in fact defend that when they're called out on it
00:02:43.720and i'll say that that landed that it definitely is that that squares with my observations i thought
00:02:50.080maybe you could say a little bit about that that third point that to me was the one that sort of
00:02:53.820jumped out we're like okay now we're cooking this is why this maybe even more so than down girl
00:02:58.680needed to be needed to be written can you say a little bit more about it yeah i'd love to thank
00:03:03.140you i mean that really goes to the heart of what i think we're often up against with this issue which
00:03:08.260is there is a kind of complacency about fat phobia on the left and even amongst very progressive
00:03:16.160people people of my political genre broadly speaking there is this sense that it doesn't
00:03:21.460really matter and we see this in certain statistics you know one of the really striking
00:03:27.000studies that I looked at when writing this book showed that fat phobia was really the only form
00:03:33.060of implicit bias that they studied. And they didn't study every form of bias, but these Harvard
00:03:39.300researchers studied race, skin tone, disability, sexuality, age, and weight bias was the only one
00:03:47.180that was increasing when it came to implicit bias. And it was also the form of explicit bias that was
00:03:53.120decreasing the most slowly. And I want to be really careful here because there is no such
00:04:00.020thing ever, unfortunately, as a last acceptable prejudice, if only. But what I do think is,
00:04:06.760yeah, there is this sense of complacency and also complicity among especially left-wing people
00:04:13.300about fatphobia, which really doesn't make sense when you think about the way that not only is
00:04:19.620fatphobia something systemic and structural, as I argue in the book, but I think it also intersects
00:04:25.280with every other major system of oppression. So I think wonderful work by Sabrina Strings and
00:04:31.320Deshaun Harrison has shown that fatness is something which has had an association with
00:04:37.780blackness and that fatphobia in fact has its origins in anti-black racism. There's also a
00:04:44.460potent intersection that I've been very interested in, given my background of misogyny and fat
00:04:50.700phobia. So the way that girls and women being asked to shrink ourselves continually is a powerful
00:04:56.220weapon in oppressing girls and women and making us small, meek, quiet, pliable. And there's also
00:05:04.360a really powerful intersection, just to name one other, between fat phobia and transphobia,
00:05:09.740where trans folks' bodies are policed, and one of the huge forms of gatekeeping to which trans
00:05:16.440folks are subject to is being denied access to life-saving, gender-affirming care on the basis
00:05:23.200of BMI. So yeah, I think we really need to take fatphobia seriously, both in and of itself, but
00:05:29.180also because you really can't address these other forms of oppression that people claim to care
00:05:34.800about without also addressing fatphobia. I'm grateful that you touched on Sabrina Springer,
00:05:39.520whose work I think really gets a lot of grateful recognition in your book. I was struck by that
00:05:46.720passage because, you know, there's a moment that I had as, you know, an American high schooler,
00:05:53.520right, where I was taken on a tour of an art museum. And, you know, we're exposed to these,
00:05:58.540like, Raphaelite nudes that look, you know, different than the sort of, you know, ideals
00:06:05.000of female beauty were being i was being presented in the 2000s and like a calvin klein ad right
00:06:09.740and you know this this museum docent explains that the ideal of beauty was you know different
00:06:16.600at that time and it's just like thunderclap it's like oh my god desire what if desire is
00:06:20.400historically contingent oh my god um uh what if it's shaped by these social factors uh
00:06:26.800And I think you do a really elegant history of how historical conditions created fat phobia
00:06:37.160through the sort of necessity of creating a moral justification for anti-Blackness, right? Could
00:06:41.840you walk our listeners through that really quick? Because I think it's so useful.
00:06:44.860Yeah, I'd love to. I think it's really interesting to look at how recent fat phobia is. I mean,
00:06:51.800look, there are dribs and drabs of fat phobia. And by the way, I use the terms fat phobia,
00:06:56.800and anti-fatness interchangeably just for any listeners wondering about the terminology here
00:07:02.200but yeah there are dribs and drabs of fat phobia throughout human history but oftentimes the
00:07:08.200relationship to the fat body was really quite positive at least ambivalent but often pretty
00:07:13.860positive fatness was often seen unsurprisingly as a sign of wealth and luxury and abundance
00:07:20.500especially in food environments where calories were kind of in scarce supply it was a sign you
00:07:26.340had enough money to make your body larger. And that really changed very, very recently compared
00:07:33.840to something like misogyny, which, as you both know, misogyny is kind of as old as agriculture.
00:07:39.420And so it's very hard to kind of figure out where it came from. And that contrasts with fat phobia,
00:07:44.120where Sabrina Strings, this brilliant UCLA sociologist has shown that it was in the mid0.76
00:07:50.72018th century that this association between fatness and blackness began to be drawn by these white0.98
00:07:58.200racist garbage pseudoscientists who were coming up with a pretext essentially from distinguishing0.99
00:08:05.520white bodies from the black bodies who were being enslaved so brutally and in ever-burgeoning1.00
00:08:11.800numbers in the transatlantic slave trade. And so once the association between fatness and blackness0.97
00:08:19.460was drawn, which, by the way, wasn't based on any empirical data or even observation. This was
00:08:24.240armchair garbage science by people who had never been to the relevant parts of Africa.0.96
00:08:29.820But once that association was drawn, fatness came to be derogated shortly thereafter,0.97
00:08:35.280and associated with things like being primitive, quote unquote, or being depraved and being0.93
00:08:41.260basically deserving of the horrifically racist fate that black bodies were being subjected to0.96
00:08:46.980under white colonialism. So yeah, what I think String shows so powerfully is that it wasn't that
00:08:55.240fatness was derogated and then association with blackness, it actually went the other way.0.57
00:09:00.520Fatness was quite positive until we had this association drawn between fatness and blackness,0.65
00:09:06.280and then fatness came to be derogated shortly thereafter. And then that kind of created a very0.82
00:09:12.040new aesthetic for especially white American Protestant women throughout the 19th century0.99
00:09:18.360and then into the 20th, where it became a sign of being kind of refined of mind, of being physically
00:09:24.460dainty and frail and vulnerable. And it was really tied to a kind of misogynistic beauty ideal that
00:09:30.760has remained in place throughout the 20th century with, again, minor variations. We see with that
00:09:37.740There are some eras where slightly curvier bodies are in fashion, but really it's an enduringly thin body throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that has been celebrated with, again, minor variations in fat distribution.
00:09:51.240Right, which is always an index of extreme amounts of work, right?
00:09:54.300It's never the voluptuous body as such.
00:09:56.760it's always like very select places and you have a beautiful part of the book where you talk about
00:10:01.400the redistribution of fat through surgery which like goes in different directions at different
00:10:07.320times right and it's like you know and it's it's a sign of it's supposed to be a proxy for effort
00:10:12.600for accommodation it's really a form of pliancy yeah it's compliant kind of voluptuousness that0.81
00:10:19.800we see in someone like rubens that's exactly right i mean sucking out someone's buckle fat
00:10:26.000which is basically your cheek pads for those listeners who don't know it's now a trendy
00:10:30.580surgery and you know taking out that fat in the face and having recently the trend has reversed
00:10:38.600but for some time the BBL was quite a popular surgery where fat would be inserted into the
00:10:44.700buttocks in a way that was reflective of a kind of new norm or at least style of fat distribution
00:10:51.320but yeah it really is about showing yourself to be willing to be compliant with these kinds of
00:10:58.200fat distribution trends regardless of the natural size and shape of your body which is tremendously
00:11:03.300variant in ways that yeah show that you're willing to spend the coin of your capitalist dollar in
00:11:09.600order to make your body conform to these pernicious and very mercurial norms but that's
00:11:17.120the other part of it too. I think these trends in increasing thinness also have a lot to do with
00:11:22.640the fact that in a calorie abundant social environment, it's increasingly expensive to be
00:11:28.440thin. So part of what we see in terms of the fat phobia increasing in the 19th and 20th century is
00:11:35.840also just as you get more calories widely available in society, it's no longer a sign of wealth and
00:11:42.100elitism and just sheer abundance and luxury to have a fatter body. Instead, it's a sign of
00:11:49.020actually low socioeconomic status. And elites, especially white elites, are increasingly wanting
00:11:56.760to spend their money to show signs of social prestige by doing the things that increasingly
00:12:04.700need to be done to get a very thin body, like the expensive Peloton bike, the overpriced salad
00:12:10.380delivery kit service. And increasingly too, weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovi are also a sign
00:12:17.460of this social status and this ability to invest in your thin physique. So yeah, that's been part
00:12:24.260of the changing norms of beauty as well. What is easiest to do, namely oftentimes for many people
00:12:32.120to gain weight tends to be the thing thought of as less than, whereas what's harder to do, namely
00:12:37.480to make ourselves very lean, especially for those of us who aren't genetically predisposed towards
00:12:41.920that, that's thought of as better. So I call it the harder, better fallacy. That which is harder
00:12:47.460is seen as more worthy, despite the fact that that's really fallacious. It doesn't follow.
00:12:53.900Yeah. I really like, there's a moment in the book where you point out that, you know,
00:12:57.380one thing that clearly gets routed through anti-fat bias is, I think you make the point
00:13:02.500that like, if you look at Victorians looking at the poor, right? Like we would be shocked at the
00:13:07.060level of disgust they were able to muster but then you point out that like the level of disgust
00:13:11.540people routinely muster and are supposedly mustering for a good cause for some bizarre
00:13:17.560good cause today it's the same thing we're just we've we found a way to route it through bodies
00:13:23.440and not to say we're horrified at immiserations like we're horrified allegedly at their lack of
00:13:29.640health or their poor health outcomes etc etc which are empirically not given but like it is a place
00:13:34.760where we sort of where class becomes spectacular, where it gets written on the body in ways that
00:13:39.800like we normally associate with Victorian England, basically. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I
00:13:45.720mean, fatness is a powerful proxy and marker for certain kinds of marginalized racial and class
00:13:53.200statuses. And so the way Paul Campos put it in his fantastic book, The Obesity Myth is kind of,
00:13:59.180I think very telling and revealing and just true, which is for a thin white elite, many people at
00:14:06.800least wouldn't feel comfortable jeering at a Mexican American woman going into Walmart as
00:14:12.720such, but they feel totally fine showing contempt and derision and even jeering at her body and
00:14:19.420calling her quote unquote morbidly obese. And the pretext for that is, oh, we're so worried about
00:14:25.160her health but really it's about an excuse to indulge in a kind of classism and racism
00:14:31.640that is veiled in the more acceptable garb of fat phobia and oftentimes like there are stereotypes
00:14:38.520about this that are incredibly powerful again even among liberals and progressives that according to
00:14:44.980this common narrative poverty and obesity quote unquote because it's a word i don't love um are
00:14:51.900in lockstep. And it's just not true. It's actually not true that the fattest people in America are
00:14:59.140the poorest ones or that there's a reliable relationship between getting richer and getting
00:15:04.180thinner. It's true for some demographics, but not most. So for example, amongst men,
00:15:10.540the fattest group of American men are in the middle income bracket. And the thinnest group0.98
00:15:15.060is actually the poorest men with a similar amount of so-called obesity prevalence. Again,
00:15:21.320And it's a stigmatizing word I don't use.
00:15:23.380I use in scare quotes when I'm reporting scientific and epidemiological studies.
00:15:28.920But yeah, the richest men have a similar quote unquote obesity level.
00:15:33.420And for women, it's a different picture.
00:15:35.760But the only group of women who reliably and statistically significantly get thinner as1.00
00:16:43.160Well, exactly. So the question is, and I think, to be clear, this goes both ways,
00:16:48.140but are white women fatter because they're poorer or are they poorer because they're fatter?
00:16:54.300And I think that the latter possibility is at least part of the story plausibly because what
00:16:59.880we find is amongst millennial women, and this is true across racial demographics, so I should
00:17:06.080add that as a caveat, but amongst millennial women, between very fat women and very thin women,
00:17:12.920there is a $40,000 annual average wage gap. And so as a woman is in the category of people who1.00
00:17:21.920are very fat, her income, her earning power will be markedly affected for the worse. And so there's0.67
00:17:30.140certainly a possibility, and some fat studies scholars have argued this, that part of what
00:17:35.240we're seeing here isn't getting fatter because poorer, but rather poorer because fatter and just0.68
00:17:41.780not having that same earning power especially as a woman whereas we do see some income gaps for
00:17:47.560fat and thin men but it tends to kick in at much higher weights and it's also not as reliable a
00:17:53.280correlation um for women there just really are these huge effects like gaining even 25 pounds
00:18:00.400as a woman um has been shown to have a causal effect on her earning power to the tune of about
00:18:07.680fifteen thousand dollars annually so yeah this is um this is really stuff that should affect our
00:18:15.240how we think about race and class but in a complicated way not the kind of classic hand0.60
00:18:20.860wringing over oh these poor fat racialized groups who are fat because of this you know inability to
00:18:29.240access fresh food or what have you the actual picture is more complex and is a lot more0.96
00:18:34.340implicating of white elites in perpetuating noxious stereotypes that are racist, classist,
00:18:41.360and fat phobic in a way that they're walking hand in hand and very much in lockstep a lot of the0.87
00:18:46.920time. I can tell you that in your chapter on the discipline of philosophy, where you've spent your
00:18:53.740career, I saw a lot of parallels just anecdotally to my own career working in media, where you look
00:18:59.240at women on an org chart, and the further you go up the org chart, the thinner the women get.0.56
00:19:06.080And there is sort of a moral logic at play that those women's discipline and self-deprivation1.00
00:19:13.460and supposed seriousness that they bring to disciplining their bodies and depriving their0.97
00:19:18.920bodies is a similar ethos to what they bring to their work. And I wanted to tease out this moral
00:19:23.600logic from you a little bit more. We touched on it earlier with your like harder, better fallacy.
00:19:30.100But I think there's something at play that almost valorizes not just difficulty, but really0.90
00:19:36.380suffering and sort of masochistic endeavors, particularly by women and sort of the logic0.98
00:19:44.520of a diet culture. Yeah, I think that's really well put, Myra. And I think being in these spaces,1.00
00:19:51.420I have just long felt so anomalous as a woman in philosophy and as a fat woman. And I should say,0.70
00:19:58.800like I speak now from a place of relative privilege. Like I identify now as a small fat
00:20:03.460woman. And for those listeners who don't know, there is a kind of spectrum of fatness that fat
00:20:08.540activists have long recognized from small fat, mid fat and large fat to recognize relative degrees
00:20:14.380of privilege. So yeah, one way of putting this is even as someone who now identifies as a small fat
00:20:20.560person, my body is markedly anomalous in the incredibly white male and I would say thin and0.52
00:20:28.980non-disabled spaces that I occupy in the discipline of philosophy, which is very much a microcosm of0.98
00:20:37.640an intellectual elite, for lack of a better term, that has so many gatekeeping and noxious1.00
00:20:43.640tendencies that I think are really pernicious. And I do think a lot of it is connected with
00:20:48.920this idea that we're really in tight control of our body size. And the equally pernicious idea
00:20:55.180that exercising control over what you eat in a fine grained and tightly rigorous kind of way,
00:21:04.600that that is somehow a sign of how well disciplined you are as a worker. And also,
00:21:11.940yeah, as a thinker. There was a woman who, a friend of mine who told me when I was writing
00:21:18.920this book and allowed me to include this anecdote that her PhD advisor once asked her or said
00:21:26.420rhetorically of her, if she can't discipline what she eats, how can she discipline how she thinks?
00:21:33.720And that's a really common way of thinking about it. It's obviously kind of false and obnoxious
00:21:39.300when you put it clearly. And yet our implicit expectations about the bodies we'll find
00:21:45.060in spaces like this, yeah, they persist. And I think it's worth maybe just being clear to hear
00:21:53.500about the huge limitations in actually controlling body size that we know people are subject to.
00:22:00.720I mean, study after study after study shows the same thing. Really every study that is longitudinal
00:22:08.700and goes for four to five years shows that people who diet and exercise can lose a moderate amount
00:22:14.860of weight in the short term, maybe 10 to 15% of their starting weight if they're very quote
00:22:20.960unquote successful. But the weight comes back really inexorably for the vast majority of people.
00:22:27.140And so for between one third and two thirds of people who do subject themselves to these diets,
00:22:34.440they'll end up heavier than they started, probably because of overshooting their kind
00:22:39.560of natural set point weight, which I think, you know, reading between the lines has various
00:22:45.100determinants, but genetics is a big part of it. So, you know, another striking finding based on
00:22:51.540identical twin studies is that upwards of 70% of the variation in body mass we find across the
00:22:58.020human population is due to genetics, making the heritability of weight just a little bit less
00:23:03.780than height. Height is about 79%. So it's a bit higher, but not that much. And it just points to
00:23:11.400this, yeah, really persistent myth that we can and should control our body size, in virtue of which
00:23:21.540I think we're being unjust to certain people in really deep ways. But we're also missing out on
00:23:26.520a lot of fat talent. I mean, I think of some of the writers who I most admire and regard as some
00:23:33.300of the most luminary minds in just working in cultural criticism and sociology and journalism0.98
00:23:41.340today and there are many of those people are fat women where if these norms had worked even more1.00
00:23:49.020successfully we wouldn't hear from these voices and so many other fat women's voices are simply0.98
00:23:54.740not being heard because yeah we are being gatekept out of these spaces and these professions in ways1.00
00:24:02.380that are such a waste as well as so unjust.
00:24:06.320I love that you bring up the marginalization of fat voices from the sort of like institutional0.92
00:24:12.260avenues that lift up different ways of thinking, because something that I really was intrigued
00:24:16.720about by your book is that you said you came to fat activism, not through your work as
00:24:21.940an academic philosopher, but like sort of in this personal interest that you discovered
00:24:27.360these communities on the internet from.
00:24:28.920And this is something that, you know, you brought into an academic setting, like Adrienne and I were doing this podcast on conservative understandings of sex and gender, where there's a lot of panic on the right about like ideas from the academy, supposedly corrupting the youth, you know, and filtering down into these internet spaces.
00:24:48.060But what you've identified and done is this sort of like backwards path where you took something that was in these like, you know, nonprofessional vernacular communities of just people trying to articulate their own experiences with similarly situated folks and brought it into like the seriousness of philosophical work.
00:25:08.880Do you have any thoughts on that on that trajectory?
00:25:10.900Yeah, I mean, I wonder too, partly if some of these really brilliant thinkers maybe haven't been given the institutional recognition that is so sorely deserved. I mean, because I, exactly as you said, Maura, I cut my teeth after having been a chubby girl in high school and really mercilessly teased on that basis.
00:25:30.500I discovered somehow, I can't even remember how I stumbled upon it, communities like Fatchinista
00:25:37.560and Kate Harding's Shapely Prose website. And there were bloggers like Leslie Kinzel and Marianne
00:25:44.100Kirby and Kate herself. They were and are such brilliant thinkers, but I'm not convinced they
00:25:50.440have been given the full institutional recognition that they are so owed. And, you know, we see
00:25:56.280some increasing recognition within areas like fat studies of how important this
00:26:02.600school of thought is, but we still don't see the kind of recognized, you know, certainly fat studies
00:26:10.220departments are incredibly thin on the ground. And it's a very, very niche kind of interest.
00:26:16.160Still, I still feel as a philosopher that when I described to colleagues who were fully on board
00:26:22.540with my projects about misogyny that I'm now thinking about fatphobia and the intersection
00:26:27.960of fatphobia and misogyny, they look at me strangely, like I've taken a funny turn. Whereas
00:26:34.100for me, it feels like such a natural transition, because this is something which is such a powerful1.00
00:26:41.360weapon of misogyny, among other things, in keeping women's energy and time and money bound up in a0.99
00:26:49.040futile, ultimately a project that for most people, for most bodies is doomed to fail. And so it's
00:26:55.580just a great way of keeping us from, you know, staging a revolution. But yeah, I think there is
00:27:01.980certainly a sense of this as work that doesn't demand the kind of prestige or recognition
00:27:08.960that would really place it into the mainstream. And maybe part of that too, just to talk about
00:27:15.640one other piece of it is that it is hard to to get that political momentum so part of what we're
00:27:22.260up against here is that for many fat people they don't really want to identify as fat they don't
00:27:27.600really want to think about being in a larger body as something that is likely permanent at least
00:27:36.760will endure for quite a long time and that is the basis for shared solidarity and momentum and
00:27:43.740political activism we tend to have this illusion that there's a thin person waiting inside waiting
00:27:49.780to emerge victorious after the next diet or peloton bike scheme but that is largely illusory so i think
00:27:58.560part of what is going on here too is that although that activism has been around and important for a
00:28:05.640long time it's not quite as mainstream as it deserves to be in many ways i never sort of
00:28:11.140thought about the fact that how doubly ironic it is that you come from from the discipline of
00:28:15.640philosophy right which already has trouble sometimes with the fact that we're embodied
00:28:19.920humans at all when we start working with our concepts and the and of course the the thin
00:28:27.860body is one that we can forget is a body a fat body is one that we that will always impress us
00:28:33.480with its bodiliness right like as a lifelong inhabitant of a body that can't gain weight
00:28:39.040No one's ever remarked on that. I'm allowed to forget it at all times. I sort of experience a weird mirror image of what millions of Americans experience, and no one's ever commented on it at all. I'm allowed to forget this constantly. I'm sure it's an inverse of those biological processes. Unless I read a book like yours, it just doesn't enter my consciousness.
00:29:01.220And of course, so much of our traditional disciplines are, right, they are, the word discipline is there for a reason. It's about abstracting from the creaturely, from the right, and like everything that about the 18th century extraction of fatphobia that you sort of trace so beautifully is about the fact that those who cannot abstract from their body are somehow, or less than, are not quite attaining the Socratic heights of whatever it is that philosophy or what thought
00:29:31.080ought to be doing it's it strikes me as extremely wonderful that that you're coming specifically out
00:29:36.140of that this is this is the these are the the questions that we need to be asking um the other
00:29:42.640thing i wanted to briefly think about just because it's you know this is a podcast about as more as
00:29:47.880saying conservative ideas like i'm not sure fat phobia is ultimately like that conservative in
00:29:53.360where it crops up given that like as you point out like progressive people are perfectly capable
00:29:57.880of being absolutely monstrous about this.
00:30:00.180So it's not sure that a left-wing space
00:30:02.160is that much better on this stuff necessarily.
00:30:04.380But it seems like your book's kind of making the argument
00:30:06.780that in some way, fatphobia is where a very old idea went
00:30:11.080that we're no longer supposed to believe,
00:30:12.880but that clearly subtends a lot of our politics still.
00:30:16.060Namely, the idea that the body you happen to be born with
00:30:19.540constitutes some kind of achievement, right?
00:30:46.820But we can sort of see, we can see that for the noxious drivel that it is.0.75
00:30:51.580Same with, you know, racial animus.0.86
00:30:54.180But like here, it's sort of like still, it can survive and even be even sold as somehow caring and nice and like just telling it how it is or funny or whatever. Is that right? Am I striking too broad an arc here? Or is that what's going on?
00:31:10.600no I think there's really something to that Adrian I think there is I mean first of all
00:31:17.240I was thinking about what you said about whether fat phobia is a conservative idea I just want to
00:31:21.620circle back to that because I must say that when the left isn't great on this but the right is
00:31:27.060so awful and so vicious and it strikes me as really interesting that a lot of the
00:31:33.560worst media around this book has come from like really transphobic sources right which i have
00:31:41.680found interesting just because i thought there were sort of deep links between a trans liberation
00:31:47.220politics and a fat acceptance politics that i explored in the last part of the book like a sense
00:31:54.180that bodily autonomy is where it's at and you know this shouldn't be controversial but that
00:31:59.380the idea that we would try to police and patrol and constrain and control the body like there's
00:32:05.280some deep allyship here between transphobic thought and fat phobic thought yeah and you know
00:32:11.620i think now when i'm looking at the british tabloids especially i think there have been
00:32:18.500two telegraph pieces on my book two or three no up to three daily mail stories
00:32:25.280to Sunday Times or Times, and none of them positive, I should add, all of these Murdoch
00:32:33.160kind of rags have things to say about the book that I find hilarious. Like one of the Daily
00:32:38.880Mail stories was, Kate Mann believes that fat people deserve hospital beds and to have0.77
00:32:47.620uh airplane seats and clothing yeah yes i do believe things0.55
00:32:53.540what's next i mean clothing come on next they'll have to treat trans people like human beings like
00:33:05.280where does where does this end kate where does this end seriously like it feels like a very
00:33:10.480similar and very allied strand in really horrifically noxious discourse that just
00:33:16.300box at the idea that a body might need special forms of support, care, accessibility, compassion,
00:33:23.760and just basic humanity. And that from my perspective, it is so manifestly unreasonable
00:33:30.960to not be like, yes, you know, people should be recognized as the gender that they are and
00:33:36.640respected in terms of their choice of name and pronoun and so on. And similarly, the idea that
00:33:41.660we don't give people hospital beds that fit their bodies or clothing that you know that there's
00:33:46.780something wrong with people coming in a variety of shapes and sizes and needing to wear clothes like
00:33:51.640yeah the alternative is fascism right it's bodily fascism but so yeah I just wanted to drill into0.59
00:33:58.620that a little bit because I think I see a deep connection between fat pride and trans liberation
00:34:06.580movements that could all be kind of put under the umbrella term of body liberation where of course
00:34:13.540there are different groups within that that need to be recognized and respected with of course big
00:34:19.000intersections but nevertheless yeah i see this pretty powerful link between the kind of transphobia
00:34:28.100and the kind of fat phobia which we're up against well that it really brings something out for me
00:34:32.820which is might be kind of crazy and half form but like it also says something about right that there
00:34:37.520there is a mode of critiquing celebrities now on certain certain corners of the internet have you
00:34:44.120seen this where they're basically oh this apparently cis woman uh celebrity is actually
00:34:50.060secretly trans oh yeah and it's like the same gaze that was like oh has she gained weight right
00:34:54.740yeah it's the exact same thing you're absolutely right they're they're like it's transferring the0.94
00:34:59.540logic barely bothering to update it and be like it worked for this so like why don't we why don't
00:35:04.780we just apply it to to this yeah let's scrutinize let's patrol let's speculate on bodily states and
00:35:12.200vulnerabilities and identities that are just none of our business i mean it's it's so alien to
00:35:20.120sensibilities like ours and yet it's so incredibly common so yeah i just i wanted to comment on that0.76
00:35:26.020because yeah I think the left sucks on this but I think the right is even worse and I mean worse0.91
00:35:32.980in terms of more noxious more toxic more ostensibly awful the left has a sort of more subtle thing of1.00
00:35:38.500oh of course we shouldn't fat shame anyone but at the same time fat people are just so unhealthy
00:35:42.840which as I go through in the book is you know it's actually a much more delicate nuanced complex
00:35:49.560conversation on the relationship between fatness and health so the left loves to do concern trolling
00:35:54.960and complacency. But yeah, I just don't want to understate the sort of toxicity that I think fat
00:36:00.200people deal with from the right that does strike me as having a similar flavor to what trans folks0.51
00:36:07.000are up against in these really like just incredibly awful and debates that feel so
00:36:16.320objectifying towards bodies in ways that, yeah, just are incompatible with basic human decency.
00:36:24.960a part of your book that i really loved was uh your comparison at the end of like the fat and
00:36:49.460trans rights causes and you know i think you have evoked really beautifully the like the destructive0.86
00:36:57.520power of like the disgust right the disgusted gaze level yeah at fat and trans people and that's0.54
00:37:03.680definitely i think a um a uniting theme in you know of our podcast like conservative responses
00:37:10.140to these kinds of bodies but i also wanted to draw out the distinction you make between shame
00:37:16.680and pride, right? Because the fact of the matter is that a big part of the like sort of obstacle
00:37:23.080of a fat liberation politics. And I think something, a moral question that you explore
00:37:27.520really beautifully in your book is the question of the self-directed disgust by the fat person
00:37:33.700and the sort of the moral questions that that arises. You know, you were talking about how
00:37:37.940fat people don't necessarily identify as fat people or don't want to understand themselves
00:37:42.700as permanently fat people and something I kept coming back to while I read your book was this
00:37:47.360metaphor that Susan Sontag makes about illness as this like country that all of us visit
00:37:51.300at some point and you know fatness can sort of function a similar way like obviously there are
00:37:58.620people who are always fat and there are people who are never fat and always thin but for the rest of
00:38:05.060us there's this kind of like cycling or like sort of journey that brings us in and out of these
00:38:11.400categories right and i think also something that is very uh influential and like impressive
00:38:17.380part of a lot of women's experiences is noticing the difference in how they are received and
00:38:21.800treated by others based on how their body looks and what size it is yeah and like witnessing the
00:38:27.740disgust of others so i wanted to ask about the sort of like maybe moral or psychological process
00:38:33.460wherein the disgust of others becomes an experience of shame yeah and what do with that experience
00:38:39.080it's just, I got excited because it's such a good question because a lot of this, I think
00:38:45.300a lot of fat phobia is a disgust based phenomenon. And it's sort of an interesting one because
00:38:51.280something else I explore in the book is that there's often this myth that fat people are
00:38:55.440just not found sexually attractive. And I think that's just not true. So I want to be clear that
00:39:00.860I think fat bodies can be found very sexually desirable and that it's in fact a pretty common0.70
00:39:05.240sexual interest. So porn consumption suggests that fat women in particular are being searched0.98
00:39:11.560for a lot. It's one of the most common search terms in internet pornography search term history0.93
00:39:18.040studies. But what it suggests is that a certain kind of sexual desire for fat bodies shows women0.75
00:39:26.480who are in fat bodies to be, if I may, fuckable, but not lovable. And to be subject to a kind of0.99
00:39:33.780veneer of disgust that is overlaid with that desire and has this interesting role in making
00:39:40.440certain women especially not seen as quote-unquote marriage material and having a low social status0.92
00:39:48.420when it comes to dating and again marriage markets and that very prevalent white ableist0.95
00:39:58.040and yeah, often implicitly fat phobic male gaze has this role in making us feel disgusted by0.97
00:40:07.420ourselves. Oftentimes, the way that I look at these men treating women often is sleeping with
00:40:13.760these women or jerking after them in secret, but then not wanting to date, let alone have longer0.99
00:40:20.700relationships with fat women openly. And the analogy that I use there is sort of treating0.95
00:40:26.660women like Korean fat bodies as satiating, but vaguely disgusting, almost like the way some0.94
00:40:32.960people interact with junk food, sort of viewing it as quite satisfying and even delicious, but then1.00
00:40:39.660throwing away the wrapper kind of vaguely disgusted and brushing away the crumbs when
00:40:44.380they're done with us. And so this is the kind of dominant gaze that becomes internalized very
00:40:53.080easily. And the way that I think about shame is it has this second or third person character
00:41:00.440that gives rise to disgust towards the self very easily. So disgust is in a way the internalized
00:41:07.340echo of the shaming gaze from a second or third party saying you're shameful or she is shameful
00:41:15.120or should be ashamed of herself. And so that disgust that many fat people feel towards their
00:41:21.140own bodies. I mean, that's internalized fat phobia of a kind that is enormously destructive and
00:41:26.500powerful. And it has this other effect too, which I think really worries me when it comes to both
00:41:33.740transphobia and fat phobia is when you do have a disgust-based form of bigotry, what happens is,
00:41:40.800and I think a lot of empirical evidence shows this, when people feel disgusted towards certain
00:41:46.080stimuli, they confuse that visceral or aesthetic disgust with moral disgust. And so they come to
00:41:53.820feel like certain people are just doing something wrong and are morally beyond the pale because
00:42:00.480of the visceral disgust being easily confused with finding someone morally abhorrent.
00:42:06.900And I think that explains a lot of the extreme moralism and policing that we find
00:42:11.700within both fat phobia and transphobia where people feel this like weird visceral and aesthetic
00:42:18.220disgust response that's already a bad thing to have people feeling but that gives rise to a
00:42:24.500sense of like oh this fat person must be doing something wrong they're unhealthy they're
00:42:30.000unvirtuous they're out of control they're not disciplined and they're quote-unquote
00:42:34.420glorifying obesity whereas no this person is actually just existing in their bodies right
00:42:39.840Yeah. And similarly with someone who's trans, just being who they are.0.60
00:42:43.600This brings me to a comparison I made to Adrian before we started recording, which is something I keep thinking about is this, you know, and a lot of fat, like sort of fat activist discourses will make the point that you made so eloquently earlier, which is that like, it's actually kind of empirically impossible for somebody who is sort of default, whose default is to be fatter, to become thinner, right?
00:43:06.680So there's that like debunking of the myth of volition around fatness.
00:43:12.840But then there's also like, and I think maybe you just answered this question, but there's
00:43:16.840also the idea of like, it's hard for me to distinguish what a person would be doing morally
00:43:24.360wrong if they were choosing to be fat or choosing to, you know, say like, per the myth, like
00:43:34.860And it reminds me a little of, you know, Adrian and I recorded one of our first episodes on the marriage equality movement, where there was a lot of, I think, like reasonable insistence by marriage equality activists that being gay was not a choice. But it also almost that line of argument almost cedes the ground that it would be a bad thing to choose. Right. And so I think we see this a lot with fat activism. There's a lot of explaining to people who have this moralizing disgust reaction, that it's not a choice.
00:44:01.820but fat phobia never has to justify why being fat is morally wrong. It's just sort of taken
00:44:07.800as a given. Yeah. That's so smart because I mean, the argument has to have this really
00:44:12.800delicate even if structure because look, fatness is very typically not something that's chosen
00:44:20.840because it's hard to be fat in a fat phobic world. And people are actually working super hard to
00:44:26.520be thinner in ways that are just not feasible for most of us in the longterm. If we are
00:44:31.160genetically predisposed towards fatness. However, and here is the even if part of it,
00:44:36.240even if fatness were a choice and people were choosing to eat more adventurously or copiously
00:44:41.220or comfortingly to live their lives in the way they want to and had a fatter body as a result of
00:44:47.820that, that's a completely valid choice as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't need to be subject to
00:44:55.480this, well, it's not a choice, so it's fine kind of discourse, which is problematic, both in the
00:45:00.100case of being gay and in the case of being fat. And one way that we see that it's not a problem
00:45:05.800is, look, again, you know, even if someone does choose to be fatter, and it has something to do
00:45:11.380with their eating habits, and again, I think this is not the case for the majority of fat people,
00:45:16.580but for some, it probably is. People take risks with their bodies all the time in order to live
00:45:23.100the lives that they want to. And we do not see the kind of moralism that we see with regard to
00:45:28.180fat people when it comes to people who do much more dangerous things like grand prix racing and
00:45:33.460mountain climbing and skydiving and deep sea whatever i mean we're trying to lose tons of
00:45:38.820weight which turns out to be seriously i mean people who are going on you know very extreme
00:45:46.120diets are even taking the kind of heavy duty amphetamines that i have very much gone in for
00:45:53.280I mean, that's a genuinely dangerous choice, both in terms of the physical health effects, in terms of the mental health effects. Yeah, but you just don't get this kind of moralism about presumptively thin, fit, non-disabled people doing what they want to do with their bodies.0.92
00:46:10.800I mean, there we have the appropriate attitude that within a certain range, when we're not hurting other people and when we're not doing things that are egregiously imprudent, that we could very easily do something more prudent, like wearing a motorcycle helmet or wearing a seatbelt are good examples of like very, very minor things that we can do to safeguard our own health for the sake of society.
00:46:34.900when it falls outside those narrow parameters we regard people's bodies generally as up to them to
00:46:42.560do what they want with except when we fall into these ways of regarding bodies that are incredibly
00:46:48.880bigoted so yeah I think there is just a really good argument to be made that fatness usually
00:46:54.740isn't a choice but even if it was like what is with the level of moralism that we see
00:47:00.060and it's an immense double standard and a wrong-headed one i mean it's it's also noticeable
00:47:06.480right that like people will then sort of draw in these like frankly fantastical seeming estimates
00:47:11.740of how much it costs everyone right like so much of that is garbage it's costing us this much money
00:47:18.960or whatever and it's like wait what's your solution here what do you what do you think
00:47:23.200it's a way to moralize an issue that's clearly not really readily moralized so many of those
00:47:29.000cost estimates are garbage because what they do is they just assume that either all or a large
00:47:35.960percentage of the health costs of people who are in the overweight or obese categories of the BMI0.95
00:47:40.900are due to weight. And that's just straightforwardly not true. I mean, first of all, between, you know,
00:47:49.400two thirds and three quarters of Americans fit that category, depending on the statistics that
00:47:53.860you look at. So of course, a large percentage of healthcare costs that we have will be attached to
00:47:58.840fat bodies because the majority of americans are in that category but also the idea of assuming
00:48:05.040without argument that someone's health problems or what they need medical support for is because
00:48:10.380they're fat just because they're in a fat body is horribly fallacious especially since we know
00:48:16.560based on major epidemiological work by katherine fliegel and others at the cdc that the relationship
00:48:24.240between weight and health looks like a u-shaped curve with people who are in the quote-unquote
00:48:29.380overweight category actually having the lowest all-cause mortality statistically speaking
00:48:34.900and people who are even in the quote-unquote moderately obese category with a bmi between 30
00:48:40.580and 35 have similar mortality statistics to those who are quote-unquote average weight which is in
00:48:47.000fact a lower weight than yeah i was gonna say right because like those people are also known
00:48:51.920as the average which they're not average people have the most average costs it would make perfect
00:48:57.600sense right yeah so it's just like a lot of this fear-mongering and the excellent podcast
00:49:06.240maintenance phase called these zombie statistics really just they don't pan out and look even if
00:49:14.060they did people cost what they cost medically and we deserve adequate health care and right
00:49:19.020The idea that, you know, the ever rising medical costs of the health care system are the fault of fat people rather than due to horrific medical inflation and a system that is not actually geared towards helping most people in an adequate or integrated way.
00:49:38.040Anyway, you can see where all of this is going.
00:49:41.200But yeah, a lot of those statistics are both fear mongering and really inaccurate and stigmatizing in other ways.
00:49:47.200I too am a fan of maintenance phase and I think I can't read these kinds of statistics anymore without freaking out because I'm like, what's your solution here? If three quarters of Americans weren't around, it would be cheaper? Like imagine if we made that argument about age, right? Like we're entering soil and green territory. It's really weird. Like we wouldn't allow ourselves that thought experiment because it's like fucking ghoulish.
00:50:12.860It's straight up a modest proposal stuff, right?1.00
00:50:14.820It's like, why do we not simply eat the Irish children?1.00
00:53:57.280They could be done as direct health interventions because every community in every circumstance
00:54:02.400deserves food access that is equitable and ready to hand in ways that are not the case
00:54:08.780in America today by any stretch of the imagination.
00:54:11.140but yeah having access to fresh food and leisure spaces and the time and ability to rest and get
00:54:18.740adequate you know stress management and all of these things would be so great for our health
00:54:24.040and we don't really know what they would do to our body size and shape at a population level
00:54:28.160but yeah the good news is we don't need to know any of that in order to do the things that would
00:54:33.540be healthier for many many americans living in ways that really demand forms of justice that
00:54:41.060would be very easy to implement without any kind of this discourse about fatness that is so toxic
00:54:47.700and stigmatizing. Wait, Kate, are you going to tell us that weight is neither a proxy for morality
00:54:53.860nor health? It's a very imprecise proxy for health. And it's, yeah, has absolutely nothing
00:55:02.620to do with morality. I mean, the funny thing, and I kind of joke about this in the book, but
00:55:07.380the idea that fat people's will is not sufficiently strong. I mean, I can tell you that as a lifelong
00:55:14.780dieter who, you know, I only gave it up in the last five years or so, my will is iron. I mean,
00:55:20.380a life of dieting will make fat people's will iron in terms of sticking to diets. So even if
00:55:26.960we did care about willpower as a measure of moral character, honestly, fat people are often in a
00:55:32.580good position to tell you um how to do the stick-to-itiveness thing that is so bankrupt and
00:55:39.260such a such a bad ideal i once heard a fat activist and i'm not her name is escaping me
00:55:45.680right now which is very embarrassing but she said something to the effect of it's like well your
00:55:49.860worst nightmare is to look like me yeah which implies not only like the the willpower that a
00:55:57.020lot of people have to cultivate when they're chronic dieters but also a kind of psychic strength
00:56:01.420to endure stigma when, you know, anti-fatness is sort of purged from the sort of approach to
00:56:11.540living in the world that a fat person has to endure. They have to take on this willingness
00:56:16.380to act counter to societal value and to have a sense of personal esteem that is divorced from
00:56:24.600this, you know, like moral hierarchy of bodies that is imposed on them everywhere. And that's
00:56:29.560that's a kind of like profound moral strength right and sort of insight too like i talk about
00:56:34.640this in the intellect chapter and we touched on this before but the idea that fat people should
00:56:40.100be excluded from the academy or from journalism or writing or cultural criticism like what a waste
00:56:46.220because we're the ones oftentimes who are in a really good position to be really smart about
00:56:50.720the vulnerability and intransigence and just frustrating mercurial nature of the human body
00:56:59.160And the fact that we bend, we sag, we break and we die ultimately. And all of that is frightening. But for someone who has had to give up the illusion relatively early that their body is under their tight and conscious control, we'll actually have some insights into that that can be quite valuable for especially a discipline like philosophy that, as you said, Adrian, is sort of prides itself on being disembodied in ways that actually lead to us being kind of thoughtless and insensitive.
00:57:28.380And ironically, not smart about these conditions of human nature that we need to be cognizant of.
00:57:39.720So first, when I read these statistics about, just because this is kind of a theme of this podcast, about the supposed costs of fatness, right?
00:57:46.520The numbers are so large that you would think, why don't we just experiment with giving each American only 38 hours of 38 hour work week and just like cap it at that and see if that does anything.
00:57:55.940that would probably still be cheaper than the supposed costs that they these fantastical like
00:58:01.020estimates like but somehow then it's crickets right it's like oh no no no not like that
00:58:04.820we'll yell harder we'll yell at them right it's like because i mean like if it were really true
00:58:10.400it would be you know that would be actually a winning proposition so like yeah let's all work
00:58:14.84030 hours and see what what that does maybe like yeah watch the price of these much touted and
00:58:20.980much, I think, overhyped weight loss drugs not come down or be regulated and watch insurance
00:58:27.220companies not cover them. Because when push actually comes to shove, again, this is a thin
00:58:32.480pretext for getting to do what people want to do, which is, as you say, yell at and jeer at fat
00:58:37.900bodies rather than actually offer some of the supposed solutions to what, in my view, is often
00:58:44.520a bodily non-problem. But if people were really so concerned, there are things that could be done,
00:58:50.500could be offered could be tried that oftentimes yeah it's the idea that this would actually be
00:58:56.300implemented is a pipe dream yeah and then the other question i wanted to ask so this is something
00:59:01.680that comes through in your book a couple of times but so you write for instance that you know that
00:59:06.320weight sort of becomes not just an assessment but a quote commentary on my character right you talk
00:59:11.900about this kind of weight loss is a kind of reprieve it seemed to you like a reprieve from a
00:59:16.300fate both dire and predestined and like the religious language to me was always very striking
00:59:21.820and i did think about this a lot of the modes by which we read bodies in terms of in terms of
00:59:28.540morality of course are religious and like you know sort of the new protestantism comes up a couple of
00:59:33.200times in the book i also thought of saint augustine is it saint augustine who talks about the monster
00:59:37.260being the monstrous body being coming from monstrare to show it's basically god sending a sign
00:59:43.840I'm wondering, like, is there like, I feel like you tell a thoroughly modern story of this, and I am fully convinced by that. But is there also like an old kind of religiosity that sort of finds its way into that discourse? It just seems like we're just, sometimes we seem downright archaic when we talk about.
01:00:00.680Yeah, I think there is an older story there. But it's mostly as you touched on about gluttony and not fatness as such.
01:00:07.880Right. So I think a lot of this actually comes from the ancient Greeks, and both Plato and Aristotle were so against gluttony. Interestingly, I mean, while they thought of gluttony as a profound lack of virtue, and in a way, one of the greatest threats to philosophical thinking amongst intellectual threats to what they valued and prized the most highly, they said they're very against gluttony as a vice, but they weren't really concerned with the fat.
01:00:37.400or mega body as such because they did actually have the insight that people could be
01:00:42.620gluttonous but not fat and fat but not gluttonous right and so it's yeah i think there are earlier
01:00:49.680strands and this very much leached into early christian teachings on the vice of gluttony and
01:00:56.180it certainly has a long history of being frowned upon but there was actually an earlier wisdom
01:01:03.100that this, that gluttony was one thing and fatness was another, um, that has been kind of
01:01:09.460stripped away. So yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I am also, you know, one line on this that I don't
01:01:17.080like as well, fatness is fine, but gluttony really is a problem. And I think in fact, there is
01:01:23.360contemporary evidence that while moderation and temperance are good for many things, like I would
01:01:29.480nap all the time given the opportunity and i have to restrain myself but food restraint is actually
01:01:34.940something that makes our brains go a little bit haywire yeah so most people who restrict and
01:01:40.220watch what they eat and are try to practice temperance or moderation actually don't do very
01:01:45.480well there is a big body of studies that go under the name of the milkshake studies that show that
01:01:52.680if someone is trying to restrain what they eat and they're not necessarily dieting but they're
01:01:58.040practicing supposed moderation if you give them a big fatty sweet sugary milkshake they will then
01:02:05.000go on if given the opportunity to eat more ice cream than a non-dieter or a non-abstemious eater
01:02:13.800because they have a kind of screw it mindset so someone should feel fuller after this very big
01:02:20.880and large and satiating milkshake, but instead they actually eat more because they have this
01:02:28.080sort of, I think somewhat desperate, yeah, like sense of, well, now I can eat what I've been
01:02:34.740restraining myself from eating. So I may as well, because screw it, the diets or the abstemious
01:02:39.340eating is out the window. So I can just do this now. So it's part of a large literature suggesting
01:02:45.740that, yeah, this frowning upon gluttony from the armchair of a Plato or Aristotle is actually
01:02:52.600not borne out by the modern wisdom we have about people doing better when they're not restricting
01:02:58.820access to food. Of course, this is dependent on a lot of privilege, a lot of access that many
01:03:04.440people lack. But when people do have the means and the privilege to have ready access to food,
01:03:09.480people tend to get less food obsessed and less fixated and less likely to binge and engage in
01:03:15.060harmful behaviors if they're allowing themselves really to eat in ways that are not restricted
01:03:21.480but then that's because gluttony is linked to other pleasures that people are even far even
01:03:28.080more anxious to control right like such a sexual pleasure right like that totally it was very
01:03:32.820linked especially for aristotle to the idea of indulging in both sexual and food-based appetites
01:03:41.320that yeah there was you know a real anxiety about that christianity especially only ratcheted up
01:03:48.720i think this idea of the appetite fulfilled and and to whom that reflects poorly and to whom it
01:03:58.360can reflect quite well you're talking about you know the classical confluence of like gluttony
01:04:05.180with lustfulness and the desire to control them and that has come in for sort of like a reconsideration
01:04:11.060in some you know like sex positivity politics but also in some like conservative visions of
01:04:16.760masculinity right like i'm thinking right now about helen rosner's i think excellent essay
01:04:20.780on mario batali from the me too era and how mario batali is you know ethos of like indulgent
01:04:29.840gratifying sensuality that he cultivated around his restaurants and food extended to this kind
01:04:36.100of like incurious consumption of women as like another sort of thing he could imbibe you know0.99
01:04:43.100or intake which is would be fine if they were not people you know yeah but that that's a model that
01:04:51.480kind of like almost falstaffian largeness of body and defiant indulgence and and like life of1.00
01:05:00.460pleasure that's that's not really something that women get to do right at least not they don't get0.96
01:05:04.940to do it and also be sort of praised for it and seen as as virtuous in their like cultivation of1.00
01:05:11.440a sensuality right so like i think this like comes back to your very useful point that like fatness
01:05:16.900gets mitigated and refracted through these other kinds of hierarchies i think you conventionally
01:05:24.100argue that it is a sort of oppressive framework on its own but it's also something that gets used
01:05:29.340against people for whom there is already sort of a um like incentive to punish yeah i love that0.96
01:05:35.680it's a really nice point about the kind of batali partaking of people like one might partake of food
01:05:43.260in a way that isn't problematic but when it comes to other human bodies that is a very different
01:05:49.720proposition and i think part of what is an issue here is for girls and women one way to think about
01:05:56.520it is girls and women are meant to be human givers not human beings so you know this is what I
01:06:03.480argued in my first book Down Girl and it really has implications for the fact that we're meant to
01:06:09.360be givers of pleasure and we're meant to feed people we're meant to cook for them and we're
01:06:15.480meant to really be kind of cultivators of community and connection and all these things that are
01:06:22.020associated with the family dinner table. I mean, women and in general and mothers specifically are
01:06:27.320overtasked with food preparation and having the family meals go off smoothly and all of this.
01:06:34.720And yet partaking ourselves is seen as antithetical to our roles. We're meant to be the givers of this
01:06:40.780kind of food pleasure and not the partakers of it in ways that, yeah, really, I mean, it points to0.97
01:06:46.100this kind of deep ambivalence we have about women in relation to food, which is in some ways our
01:06:51.220lives are extremely tied normatively to all of this but we're not really meant to be able to
01:06:59.180enjoy it ourselves in ways that feel almost cruel to me and i mean like one one other way of putting
01:07:04.960the point would be that in some way the body that rests in itself and that says i will do what i
01:07:11.000enjoy and i do not need to suffer it's not a shock that women are the ones who are told well your
01:07:17.620natural lot is to suffer you're opting out of that through your fatness right i mean like it's
01:07:22.720it's like the idea that the constant dieting it's also just it's torture it's torment it is it's a
01:07:29.260way to naturalize and to plausibilize a definition of femininity as justified suffering basically
01:07:36.740yeah completely and we're meant to give and give and give in terms of not just you know food and
01:07:42.420connection and pleasure but also we're meant to give visual satisfaction and right the biggest1.00
01:07:48.960ways to do that as a woman is to give enormous amounts of energy and time and money and bandwidth1.00
01:07:56.720in service of making your body small and as conforming as possible to pernicious aesthetic1.00
01:08:03.860ideals where that is to give visual aesthetic sexual and you know sometimes reproductive
01:08:11.180labor in ways that are endorsed, rather than taking anything from the world.
01:08:17.380Well, I mean, the pursuit of thinness sort of collapses a lot of these, like moral demands
01:08:22.440of femininity that you're talking about, right? It's about making yourself desirable. And
01:08:26.780simultaneously, it's about denying yourself pleasure and nourishment. It's about making
01:08:30.900yourself desirable at the expense of your flourishing. It occurs to me that one of the,
01:08:36.220you know, common symptoms of eating disorders, which are, you know, predominantly, though,
01:08:41.340of course, by no means exclusively, pathologies exhibited in women, is to actually create0.65
01:08:47.300elaborate meals for other people, in which the, you know, suffering, disordered eater
01:08:53.640does not partake, right? It is almost this like cannibalistic ritual, like, you know,0.98
01:08:59.300eat of my body, because I'm not eating anything.
01:09:02.720Yeah, I mean, that really has eerie echoes of Ansel Keys' Minnesota starvation experiment where he did it to men, but this is men in the 1960s, who were put on a low-ish calorie, 1,600 calories a day.
01:09:17.580They ended up licking recipe books and fantasizing about their next meal and often got very into cooking and really fixated on food in ways that are incredibly common for people who are constantly subjecting themselves to what you both said.
01:09:34.380Exactly right. It is a kind of tormented, sometimes even torturous relationship with constantly denying yourself these very basic appetites, hunger that demand satisfaction. Our bodies being so geared to get not just adequate calories and nutrition, but also we're so geared to seek tasty, delicious foods.
01:09:55.240This is a big part of our, you know, very basic drives.
01:09:59.500And to be constantly in denial of that is to live in ways that are so energy sapping,