Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

Misogyny, as I’ve argued, finds in fatphobia a powerful and convenient ally: it constructs a ready-to-hand hierarchy among girls and women based on the infinitely gradable metric of body mass, usefully complicated by body shape, breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, and various markers of privilege.

What is called for is a thoroughgoing political reckoning and subsequent moral recognition: being fat, like being trans, is a valid and indeed valuable way of being in the world.

Fatphobia is an inherently structural phenomenon, which sees people in fatter bodies navigating a different world, containing numerous distinct material, social, and institutional barriers to our flourishing.

Your body is for you, and the ways it has been impugned stem from the many people and practices and structures that have missed this fundamental idea, instead perpetuating the lie that your body is meant to please or serve or placate others.

Healthism seems to be less a general moral mistake, then, than an ideological weapon wielded selectively against those who are already stigmatized and othered.

The diet, fitness, and so-called wellness industries hence profit handsomely from the fatphobic hierarchies that make certain body types highly desirable, yet unachievable, for most people in our calorie-abundant social environment.

The lessons are clear: First, people routinely misinterpret their visceral disgust reactions as moral disgust, leading them to judge morally bad actions more harshly, and even to deem neutral actions morally problematic. Second, when this occurs, people reach for reasons to justify their moral ill feelings, engaging in post hoc rationalization of a

Pride says, despite the way we are treated, we have no reason to feel ashamed.

The thought that has helped me the most, in navigating all of this, is that my body is for me. Your body is for you. My body is not decoration. Your body is not decoration.[4] Our bodies are our homes, as the slogan has it.