Saying and doing nasty things to people who are obese is one of the last outposts of bigotry. The incidents of abuse are legion.
During the confirmation process for appointment to the United States Supreme Court, comments were made, without evidence, about Justice Sonia Sotomayer. She was said to be “quite overweight” and might not “last too long on the court.” This despite the fact the justice was nowhere near a level of weight that could indicate health risks – and she certainly has lasted.
In California, a 240-pound female aerobics instructor was fit, had many students and no performance issues. Yet, she was denied a Jazzercise franchise. The company claimed that only “fit, toned” individuals were appropriate. The instructor wanted to be judged “on my merits, not my measurements.” Her size should not have been a barrier to her doing the job. She could have been a model for students struggling with size issues.
These are just two examples of discriminatory comments and conduct. People who are obese suffer from bias in various aspects of their lives, including health care, education and employment. Doctors have given large patients shorter appointments, on average, than others they treat. In the U.S., studies indicate that the bigger a woman is, the less likely she is to gain admission to college. More than 10 per cent of human resource professionals believe employees can be fired because of their size.
Enter Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. The author is a well published philosophy professor at Cornell University. Her account of fatphobia and its impacts is, at once, societal but also deeply personal. She is a feminist and the author of two books on misogyny. Yet, she confesses, she was “… suckered into policing my own body and trying to force it into a size and shape more acceptable…” She wrote Unshrinking 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.” The book is both brilliant and disturbing.
To say Unshrinking is sweeping is to risk understatement. Some of the claims caught up in its breadth are questionable. Manne lays much of the blame for the rise of fatphobia to treatment of blacks in the slave trade, particularly in the United States. But discrimination against those who are obese is so widespread in so many societies and targets so many regardless of race that linking this bigotry to a single abhorrent practice seems too simple.
“Somehow I was ‘less than’ for being fat.”
She is on surer ground as she analyzes health and body size. She has been accused of just denying the negative impacts of obesity on health. Some of the passages in the book, taken out of context, might lead some readers to that conclusion. But others would take her as wanting to explore the complicated relationship between obesity and health, including the deleterious impacts of fat shaming on wellbeing. “… [E]ven if fat people are subject to greater health risks … [w]e still deserve support, compassion, and adequate healthcare. We still deserve to be treated like human beings”. She is not alone in questioning the complexities surrounding weight and wellbeing.
Her prescription of what to do about fatphobia sets off alarm bells. She urges “body reflexivity” that “… prescribes a radical reevaluation of whom we exist in the world for as bodies: ourselves and no one else.”Thus the memorable caption: “Wronged bodies not wrong ones” and her claim that “… being fat … is a valid and indeed valuable way of being in the world.”
Helping people accept their own bodies is constructive but is it the only response to fatphobia? Manne seems to have given up on convincing the rest of us that bias against fat people is wrong and needs to stop. She spends a mere two lines on legislation in parts of the U.S., and efforts in Canada, to ban discrimination against the obese. Even more fundamentally, she dismisses “anything as anodyne as tolerance.” For related reasons, one review concludes that Unshrinking “… fails to convince.”
It may be that, as the politics of hatred is surging, tolerance is becoming a scarce commodity. But the response to this dilemma is not to reduce it to the nothingness of being “anodyne.” Tolerance is foundational to living together in a diverse society. Those of us who believe this need to enhance its value and oppose those who would lessen its power. That understanding of tolerance, backed by legal protections from discrimination, needs to confront bigotry against those who are obese.
Then fatphobia will have met its match.
