"omg, you look so skinny!"
musings on how we can stop the cycle of fatphobia
It’s a winter night, and a group of my female friends greet one another before heading to dinner together. There are delighted squeals since we’ve not seen each other for a while. There are long hugs, loving hellos, and such genuine “how are you?”s. There are compliments: “I love your new haircut!” or “What a cute dress!” Then I hear these words across the room: “Oh my gosh, you look so great! Have you lost weight?!” This is not an uncommon thing for any of us to hear in almost any setting. But every time I witness it — in any context, whether it’s friends, family, strangers, characters on tv, etc. — I shudder with discomfort and sadness.
In circles where I feel safe (and I’m so grateful I have those!), I dare to speak up to say that I don’t feel comfortable when we comment on one another’s size or weight. Maybe it’s my own sensitivity to our collective social conditioning. Perhaps it brings up my vivid memory of watching a friend slowly die from anorexia in our twenties. Regardless, in said safe circles, I’ve asked what it is that we are perpetuating with these remarks. I generally hear responses like, “It doesn’t bother me; I like when people notice I’ve lost weight.” or “It makes me feel really good to hear it!” I think we all want to feel comfortable, at home, and maybe even attractive in our bodies. I’m not one to decide what that should look or feel like for any individual except myself. And I can certainly understand how it might feel good to hear an affirmation around appearance, even if it involves size, and that’s because it is the automatic, conditioned response to how we’ve all been brought up in this culture… this fatphobic culture.
Fatphobia refers to the harmful stigma that surrounds body weight, where “looking good” is equated to appearing skinny or thin.
, author of Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia and writer of the Substack , says that fatphobia is our last “acceptable” social bias and teaches us about how fatphobia is historically rooted in racism. In her work, Manne also talks about how weight is nearly as hereditary as height, so policing it in ourselves and in others is foolish and can be dangerous.I often wonder: What sort of pressure does it create, within any given group of people, to hear comments on the size or shape of anyone’s body? What message does that send to and about anyone not fitting into parameters that are being praised? What sort of culture does prizing and desiring thinness sustain?
And how does that feel in your own body?
“There’s almost a universal agreement that fat is bad. We have a whole health industry that is set up around making people thinner. We have a self-help industry with scientists and doctors who are devoted to the message that everybody should lose weight. Because we think it’s all under our control, we judge people who are fat, and we think that they are lazy — that their character is somehow represented by the fact that they carry more body weight.”
-Texas A&M University sociology professor Joan Wolf
I’m a white, queer, cisgender, 48-year-old, American woman who was reared under our culture’s impossible beauty and weight standards. As I lie in bed at night, doom-scrolling my socials and telling myself I’m “relaxing” (such an unhealthy addiction I’ll discuss here another time - oof!), an array of ads litter my feed that are designed to make me feel like I need to be fixed — generally in ways to make myself smaller… to inhabit a smaller number in my weight and in my age. Ads are targeted to me for:
face yoga apps specifically designed for double chins and wrinkles
stickers to apply to the eyes and chest when one sleeps to keep skin tight and wrinkle-free
an at-home laser hair removal device so we won’t look like mammals
“shapewear” to snatch that waist, hoist those boobs, and smooth out dimply thighs
a plethora of make-up for contouring and highlighting to create the illusion of sculpted cheekbones, a pinched nose, and big eyes
apps for photo-filtering and AI enhancing, so we can alter ourselves in post-production, should we fail to make those adjustments in real life
I resist any urge to click on these ads, as that feeds into an algorithm I find misogynistic and oppressive. I’m beyond frustrated that some of the products feel quite alluring to insecure parts of me that were created by this very system. It makes me think of that Ani DiFranco lyric from Your Next Bold Move: “It’s as easy as breathing for us all to participate.” In this song, she beautifully expresses the inner dilemma of living in a late-capitalist, patriarchal hellscape. Eventually, I put my phone away. I curl my average, soft, fleshy, aging, not-toned-but-healthy-enough body into a fetal position and go to sleep.
It used to be popular to talk about “body positivity,” but that concept can be difficult for those who find positivity to be an untruthful (and sometimes even harmful) stretch that’s far out of reach from where they are in their own healing journeys and relationship to their bodies. We’ve shifted to talking about body neutrality instead: “Body positivity focuses on cultivating… a positive body image through unconditional self-love. Body neutrality does not involve constant positivity but rather an acknowledgement and appreciation of all the things the body can do, regardless of what it looks like.” -Medical writer and physician’s assistant Barbara Dean, MPAS, PA-C
There are many scholarly pieces of media on sizeism and fatphobia, and it’s not in my specific wheelhouse to write about these things from a psychological, sociological, or scientific point of view. What I do want to say here, simply as a fellow human being, is that each of us impacts the world we are creating for our future selves and for future generations through our language and behavior.
In saying this, it’s not my aim to police how anyone speaks, and I’m definitely not riding around on any sort of high-horse here. I’m sure I participate in this bullshit in ways I’m probably not yet aware, but I’m attempting consciousness about it. Weight is a touchy and loaded topic that women don’t often dive more deeply into with one another. It’s so very delicate that when I heard the brilliant
speak on episode #262 of We Can Do Hard Things about the origins and implications of fatphobia, I immediately had an excited impulse to share that episode with every person I know… then, I’m ashamed to say, I stopped myself. Given the responses I’ve received in the past when questioning fatphobia, I was scared of the rejection of being the odd woman out. Sometimes I’m brave enough to speak up, and sometimes fear keeps me silent.Even though there’s a small part of me afraid of sending this newsletter, I am doing it anyway because I hope things will shift toward a world where we can all feel more free. And I finally do want to share that episode with you all, where Aubrey Gordon dropped serious and beautiful wisdom about how we talk about size. She points out how we might “comfort” a friend who feels insecure about her size by saying “Oh, you’re not fat!" and says our fatphobia is revealed whenever we do that. Here’s a powerful clip from the transcript of that podcast episode:
“My favorite example of this is if I said, ‘I’m Canadian,’ and someone went, ‘You’re not Canadian; you’re smart and you’re beautiful,’ you’d be like, ‘What did you think about Canadians? What is your deal?’ We’re sort of all telling on ourselves about our attitudes toward fat people all the time without really reckoning with how that lands for those fat people. We sort of talk about fatness as a specter without realizing that roughly two thirds of Americans are fat people. So most of the people that we’re saying that kind of stuff to and in front of are feeling personally implicated in some way in that conversation, and if we don’t think about how those messages land, we’re going to keep reinforcing those distances and reinforcing the message that being fat is really a terrible thing to be. It’s a character failing, it’s a moral failing, it’s a health failing. It’s all of these different things.
We’ve all participated in and/or suffered because of fatphobia, in some way or another. It feels important to bring awareness to how it’s impacting us and those in our communities. I’m personally ready to opt out of this way of thinking and speaking and being. If that fits for you, too, we can consider some concrete ways we might do this on a day-to-day basis. We can start close in by honoring our own bodies for what they can DO rather than how they look. We can use mindful language in our relationships and in the way we talk with and about one another. We can try to break a habit that’s keeping us all bound in the smallest of cages.
reading: Unshrinking is certainly on my TBR list now, and I’ve just finished the very relevant chapter on gluttony in
’s brilliant book, On Our Best Behaviortuning into via podcast: Maintenance Phase with
, iWeigh with Jameela Jamil, and I just listened to an enlightening conversation between and on Elise’s podcast, Pulling the Thread while washing the dishes the other night.singing along to: Spotify recently resurrected an old favorite album of mine that I used to listen to in my headphones (on an old iPod?) on the subway when I lived in NYC back in the day: Who is Jill Scott?
snacking on about 5 nights/week: popcorn with olive oil, green chili infused oil, nutritional yeast, and pink Himalayan sea salt. 🙌
trying: to turn toward instead of away from when I’m feeling vulnerable. Gah! 😖
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