I’ve always been big. Big-boned, chubby, curvy, fat, obese, whatever I or my doctors called it, I was always bigger than what my BMI said I should be. At first, I learned to love my body in a world defined by words like “despite” and “but” and “still.” I was bigger and curvier, and I still didn’t think I could pull off crop tops, but I was also muscled and an athlete. I played varsity soccer, then rowed crew; my thighs ripped, and I could respond to anyone calling me fat by asking them what they could leg press.
But then I graduated, and there wasn’t time or structure to stay in shape. And chronic illness came for me. And I was out of excuses. I was just going to have to love my body how it was.
Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia is a profoundly healing book. It doesn’t simply argue that it’s not right, the systemic barriers we face as fat people, as plus-size women trying to exist. She goes further than that: as an associate professor of philosophy, she carefully and convincingly pulls apart all arguments that being fat is morally or intrinsically wrong or unhealthy, or in any way something that society has the right to condemn or force to change.
She picks apart the science to show that being fat is not intrinsically bad for your health, showing that all links to diabetes, heart disease, and more are still being debated and that they may be correlation rather than causation. She shows that dieting not only doesn’t work but also is deeply unhealthy. While pulling apart all the nastiness that makes our culture so disdainful of fat people, she makes the philosophical argument that if dieting doesn’t work, exercise is not enough, and almost no one can lose weight and keep it off, it is not moral or responsible for society to demand people lose weight.
And she goes even one more step: even if fat was bad for our health, society lets us bungee jump, ride motorcycles, drink alcohol, and all kinds of other things that are horrid for our health and well-being, but that’s none of our business to regulate. Our obsession with fatness is less about it being a risk to our health and much more about the ways fatness intersects with rape culture, racism, homophobia, and the kind of bodies we’re willing to value.
Manne lays it all out for us and even gives us a framework for how to move forward and make change. The arguments are sound, the studies are accessible, and anyone who has ever been uncomfortable with fatphobia but unsure how to put it into words will devour this book. If I could, I would make it required reading.
