Tag: 240321

Unshrinking, by Kate Manne (Crown, 277 pages)

The national airline of Finland announced recently that it would ask passengers to step on a scale with their carry-on luggage in order to get an accurate assessment of the plane’s load and ensure a “safe takeoff.” It’s voluntary, inasmuch as is possible with the airline essentially saying we could crash if you don’t comply.

There was immediate backlash, with some calling the policy “fatphobic,” which is the popular catch-all term for any sort of perceived discrimination or cruelty against people with overweight or obesity (to use the preferred medical terminology these days). But it’s great timing for Kate Manne, a philosopher and associate professor at Cornell University, who has taken up the crusade against fatphobia in her third book, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia.

In Unshrinking, Manne brings a philosopher’s take to a subject that Roxanne Gay, Lindy West and other writers have tackled: the hardships and cruelties that people with large bodies suffer as they navigate a world that prizes thinness. The solution that fat people (her preferred term) are usually offered is the suggestion to lose weight. But Manne believes it’s the world that needs to change, not people who are overweight. People should have the right to be any size they choose without the expectation of discrimination or mockery, she says; in fact, she argues, being a hundred, or a couple of hundred, pounds over what the doctor says we should weigh is another form of diversity, like skin color or the shape of our nose.

While Manne has been a range of sizes over the course of her life — she says almost apologetically that she is not currently significantly overweight — she was overweight enough as a child to endure the frequent casual cruelty that can stay with a person for a life. She recalls, for example, the boy in fifth grade who said “Fat little Kate-lyn” to her in P.E. class and another boy who ranked her attractiveness saying her figure “left something to be desired.”

Internalized, these sorts of insults convince a person that their body is something to be ashamed of, leading grown women with graduate degrees and good careers to still feel inferior when it comes to their body.

“I have been swimming just once since the age of sixteen. (I wore leggings and an oversized T-shirt.) I haven’t been dancing since I was twenty. And nobody, save my husband and doctors, has seen the dimpled, stretch-marked backs of my knees over the same time period,” Manne writes.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried to lose weight, and at times, she had done so successfully — as when she developed an Adderall addiction and once didn’t eat for a week, causing her to nearly pass out during a doctor’s appointment. But her weight would go up and down, and when in 2019 she was offered an all-expenses-paid book tour in Europe in conjunction with the paperback release of her book Down Girl, she refused to be photographed. It was a time when her doctor’s chart categorized her as “severely obese” and she couldn’t bear for photographs of her at that weight to go out into the world.

Then came the pandemic, during which she began to imagine a world in which she didn’t always feel the need to hide. This did not involve a diet — Manne argues, with lots of science to back her up, that diets don’t work and instead inflict suffering. Instead she imagined a world in which the word “fat” is a neutral term, not an insult, and in which large bodies aren’t judged.

Fatphobia, Manne says, is a “feature of social systems that unjustly rank fatter bodies as inferior to thinner bodies, in terms of not only our health but also our moral, sexual, and intellectual status.” The book catalogs many of these from Jordan Peterson’s “Sorry, not beautiful” pronouncement about a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model to examples of professional women viewed as less intelligent than their peers because of their weight. In these sorts of stories, Manne has a slam-dunk case; there is no question that fat-shaming is one of the last kinds of shaming that are permissible and Hollywood has helped perpetuate this idea.

Manne also deftly pokes holes in the arguments that defend treating large people differently from others. Her fellow Australian philosopher Peter Singer, for example, argues that airlines should set fares based on the weight of the passengers. “In terms of the airplane’s fuel consumption, it is all the same, whether the extra weight is baggage or body fat,” Singer has written. Manne counters with a calculation that shows it would cost just a few dollars more in fuel to transport an overweight man than a thin woman. She is at her best with this kind of sparring, and Unshrinking is thoughtful and deeply researched, belying a cover that suggests otherwise.

Ultimately, though, this is not a book that solves arguments, but rather raises them. Obesity is surging not only in America but in other parts of the world, and health experts say that excess weight is a factor in many types of cancer and other diseases. Yo-yo dieting is certainly not the answer, and weight-loss surgeries and drugs carry risks, as Manne points out. She wants a society where there is no pressure for people to lose weight — even at the doctor’s office — and where we don’t have to feel shame for succumbing to our appetites, for choosing lasagna over grilled vegetables. But with mounting evidence that restricting calories improves health outcomes — even for people who are not overweight — it will be hard for some people to accept her defense of hedonistic eating. Grilled veggies are better for the human body than lasagna, and no amount of fat acceptance can change that. B —Jennifer Graham