Cornell Sage School of Philosophy Associate Professor Kate Manne shares her examination of fatphobia as a form of structural oppression with guest host Amanda Recupero.
Our society often equates worth with size, especially for women. According to Kate Manne, associate professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at the Cornell College of Arts & Sciences, fatphobia is a function of misogyny, and the repercussions across all areas of life—from education to healthcare—are numerous and dangerous. Manne joins Amanda Recupero, guest host for Cornell Keynotes, to examine the complex cultural dimensions of fatphobia.
In this episode of the podcast, brought to you by eCornell, Manne discusses topics from her latest book Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, including:
Register to hear more from Kate Manne in our upcoming full-length Keynote “Fatphobia: Our Bodies Are Not the Problem” on Jan. 10.
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Amanda Recupero
On today's episode, we'll discuss redefining our relationship to body size with Dr. Kate Manne, associate professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell. Kate Manne. Thanks so much for being here.
Kate Manne
Thanks for having me, Amanda.
Amanda Recupero
So I thought we would start off with your new book Topic. That's titled On Shrinking and the theme of Fatphobia that you talk about within it. What brought you to this theme?
Kate Manne
You know, it was interesting. When I was in the publicity phase for my last two books, which have been on misogyny. So I wrote a book called Down Girl in late 2017, right as the MeToo wave hit when Tarana Burke MeToo movement was popularized by celebrities. So I was getting a lot more interviews, requests and offers for things like television appearances than I had expected.
And I found myself incredibly reluctance to appear on camera or even to have a photograph taken of me. And I found myself kind of literally shrinking from the chance to talk about a topic that really mattered to me. And I've now written two books about that is misogyny and the way that girls are minimized, silenced, erased. And it seemed like a kind of ironic twist that when I was asked to speak out about misogyny, which I really wanted to do, I felt like my body was too fat to really be comfortable in the limelight.
So yeah, that made me really dig in, so to speak, and look at the ways that misogyny and fatphobia have this very powerful intersection. I think one of the most powerful ways misogyny works is by asking girls and women to shrink ourselves. So that was really what started me off on this book project. And from there it kind of unfolded into a more thoroughgoing analysis of the way I think Fatphobia is this really powerful structural form of oppression that is somewhat underestimated and under theorized amongst progressives like me.
Amanda Recupero
I guess having written both of these books now, do you see more of a relationship between the misogyny and the kind of logic behind it and kind of logic of fatphobia that you're that you discuss in this new text?
Kate Manne
So I think it actually long predated my interest in Fatphobia. And in a way, the story behind my interest in misogyny really is a story partly about fatphobia and how the intersection of fatphobia and misogyny is really inextricable. So I was 16 and one of three girls at an all boys school in my home country of Australia. And I know it was a lot, and the reason my parents sent me there was slightly complicated to do international baccalaureate rather than the local high school leavers certificate in Australia because I wanted to come to the states to study.
So yeah, a kind of complicated backstory. But the upshot was sending me to this. Previously all boys school the year it integrated. Wow. And it was an environment of such rampant misogyny that I didn't have the word for. I mean, I was a precocious kid. I knew the word misogyny, but I associated it with hatred for women. And I didn't really feel hated.
I felt a confusing and piecemeal set of factors that was suddenly hostile. But there was bullying, there was teasing. There were incidents like scrolling fat bitch on my locker. There was, you know, and I was at that time, I suppose, merely chubby adolescent. You know, I've been much fatter in the interim, but at that point, it was one of the primary ways that misogyny kind of manifested itself and which I found very hard to name.
But it was via this sense that my body was too big to be at pass muster, that I wasn't kind of serving the only acceptable role for girls and women in that environment, which was to be pleasing to boys and men. So it was a kind of rude and very sudden introduction to a powerful form of misogyny. And what happens when women and girls stray on to men's turf, their previously designated turf in this male dominated environment.
And I think what became salient to me was the way that misogyny can really invoke a hierarchy, any hierarchy, and derogate a girl or a woman in terms of it. So we value morality. So call her a bad person and call her a liar or mean and cruel. We value rationales and intelligence, so call his stupid and hysterical.
We value esthetics. We value sexiness. So call her fat and implicitly or explicitly ugly. So one of the incidents that I recount in the book is at the high school leavers last assembly there was that series of superficially lighthearted awards that went to different students where, you know, one student would be voted the person most likely to become a white collar criminal or another would be voted the person most likely to succeed in scamming people or whatever.
Kate Manne
And I was voted the person most likely to have to pay for sex. And the whole auditorium kind of erupted in laughter. So the punchline was my body, my, you know, at that stage, merely slightly fat body. And yeah, so the way misogyny and fatphobia intersected to make me a target was something that I had to dig back into when I started writing this book.
And yeah, I mean, I think that we'll probably get into this more, but it's a much more personal book than my first two because I couldn't write about misogyny personally without writing about fatphobia that I had long faced and which also has been a really long term interest of mine, even though I haven't spoken about it publicly prior to, I think 2022.
So, you know, I've been someone who discovered fat activism on the Internet fairly early. I discovered it shortly after these horrifying experiences via bloggers like Kate Harding and many people in the kind of fat fashion sphere. And I remember just this electrifying discovery of like, what if we didn't derogate fat bodies and we just recognized people do actually come in different shapes and sizes, and there's just nothing wrong with that, that there's nothing inherently bad or immoral or shameful or, I would add, unhealthy about living in bodies of different shapes and sizes.
So that was a big part of what informed the book, along with the fact that having recently become a parent, I really didn't want my young daughter to see a mother who hadn't wrestled with these issues of body image, but also the fat phobia in the world that had made me shrink away from publicity. I wanted her to see a mother who was someone who had really faced these topics squarely, which is how the book got its subtitle, How to Face Fatphobia.
So it was a kind of mixture of all those forces. My original history with misogyny and the way it exploits Fatphobia to target girls and women, the fact that I'd long been interested in fat activism and the way there is this powerful political tradition of opposing the derogation of people who happen to live in larger bodies together with, yeah, a newfound moral imperative to really face fatphobia for the sake of not having my daughter exposed to a kind of negativity about fatness that I think is uncalled for.
Amanda Recupero
Let me ask you about this idea of not having the word misogyny as you're experiencing those things, and maybe how that experience of having missed that word prompted you to write more explicitly, indirectly, about Fatphobia. Like you just said, facing it head on, squaring up to it. I'm wondering if, you know, in the book you say Fatphobia is a serious and underestimated form of structural oppression.
And I'm wondering if the book and the arguments you make within it, how they square up to the field of philosophy and how they may be fit or responding to things that you've seen as an associate professor in your field, as a writer, in your field?
Kate Manne
Yeah, that's such a great question. I mean, as a philosopher, I think that concepts and particular words that we use to gesture at these concepts, they have a huge amount of unifying power. So what I had faced in high school was a series of kind of piecemeal incidents that felt horrible and alienating and self alienating and embarrassing and humiliating and shameful.
But I didn't have a way of kind of wrapping all of these separate incidents up together and really unifying the way I was delegated in all these different dimensions. Wrapping it up in a bow and saying, this is a phenomenon that's connected with the plight of girls and women, especially more vulnerable girls and women throughout our whole social system, throughout society at large, even if they're not in a particularly male dominated environment.
There are also forms of self-policing that women do. So I ended up for those who don't know, and there's no reason why you should. I ended up defining misogyny as a feature of social systems or environments as a whole, where it's not about what boys and men feel, it's about what girls and women face. So girls and women face hostility and sometimes hatred, too, of a kind that serves to police and enforce patriarchal norms and expectations, including the expectation that we perform various kinds of reproductive, sexual, emotional and material labor.
And so part of that is the labor of being beautiful. Part of that is the expectation that women please and serve and give. And so part of what I'm doing with the concept of Fatphobia is similarly trying to wrap up a bunch of different strands that I think permeate our treatment of people in larger bodies in ways that can be difficult to unify until we have a label like that.
So I should say that I think there are a bunch of ways we can refer to it. Some activists in this tradition prefer the label of anti fatness. I myself prefer the label of fat phobia to sustain certain parallels with transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia. And I don't so much worry that it will have an individualistic or psychological connotation because I think we're familiar with calling various forms of oppression and prejudice phobias.
But the use of a label like Fat Phobia or anti fatness does this powerful work in unifying this moral strand to fatphobia in the way people who are fat are disregarded as somehow lazy, weak willed, even slovenly and selfish? All of which I think are incredibly unfair. Stereotypes where disregarded on an intellectual plane and seen as stupid as not intellectually authoritative in ways that have really affected me as someone who thinks and writes for a living.
And of course, there's also this strand in fatphobia that is esthetic or sexual and targets people as not sexually attractive, despite the fact that we know things like one of the most common search terms in pornography is actually for fat bodies. That suggests that there's not actually this inherent dislike of fatness. It's a pretty common sexual interest, actually.
It's that people are not seen as having a high social cum sexual status, especially in the context of heterosexual relationships. So fat women in particular are often disregarded as people who can be maybe sexually accessed in private, but who couldn't be openly dated or regarded as kind of high status marriage material in dating markets. So this. Yeah, a kind of real darkness there.
And of course, it's a really complicated topic of the way fat bodies are automatically seen as unhealthy, where I think the truth of it turns out to be a lot more complicated. And there is no simple causal story that goes from fatness to ill health, and it is much more in the vein of being a kind of loose correlation which owes as much to things like fat people not receiving adequate medical care within a deeply stigmatizing health care system.
That means that fat people do sometimes have a certain health problems, a heavy weight that could be avoided if they were given adequate screening, adequate health care, and were also free from the stress of stigma that has been shown to have really market health consequences along with the health ill effects of weight cycling that is going up and down in weight due to your dieting, which has been shown again to be independently bad for people's cardiovascular systems and immune function and metabolic function and their mental health.
So there's also this health strand of fat phobia that again, I think having a concept like Fatphobia kind of helps us wrap up these apparently disparate strands of ill treatment of people in larger bodies and helps us kind of summarize a bunch of ill treatment that might look disparate, but all has the same effect of setting up this pernicious human hierarchy within people at the top and fat people at the bottom, and people being valued according roughly to their body mass in ways that are inversely proportional to body size.
Amanda Recupero
Thank you so much for that summary because like you said, it's extremely helpful to have the study of the term kind of flesh out this term or use it as a way to get access to or see the kinds of harm that it's actually doing to people and be able to put that into words, put that into a framework that we can then look at and kind of recognize in our own lives and recognize in society or in our immediate environments or kind of social environments.
Amanda Recupero
I want to talk about the terminology you use.
Kate Manne
Yeah, the book.
Amanda Recupero
Because I think it's really powerful and it's really important. And you've also you're doing it right now, right? And the podcast. So you're really, you're pretty direct in the book and, and intentional about the language and terminology you use and make a deliberate effort to recoup the word fat. And as a non non-judgmental descriptor of bodies and say in this work, fat is not a feeling nor an insult or problem.
It is simply the way some bodies are. And that is not regrettable. Or in need of euphemisms like fluffy, curvy or even first person language. So I want to spend some a few minutes on this. I'm wondering what your motivations first for making this decision, and then we should talk about that kind of across the book.
Kate Manne
Yeah, totally. I mean, so part of this owes to the rich tradition of fat activism and people like Marianne Kirby and Kate Harding, who I mentioned, and also current fat activists like Aubrey Gordon and Sonya Renee Taylor and Marilyn, one, you know, many other names I could list and who I draw on in the book. Wendy West And also another powerful influence who really are trying to reclaim the word fat, not as a pejorative, but as just another descriptor like being short or being tall, because I think it is really, you know, partly just a response to the incredibly strong evidence we have that much like heights, people's body weight is really not under their long term control. So study after study shows that when people diet and exercise and try to lose weight, they can usually lose, at least for most people, you know, a small amount of weight. Often, you know, on average between five and 10% of their starting weight on any number of diets. But then the weight comes back almost inexorably.
And it's partly a question of people's metabolism changing in response to dieting. So studies of contestants on the notoriously exploitative reality show The Biggest Loser. It was shown that they metabolisms were about 30% slower on average five years after they had competed in that show. So a real long term reduction in metabolism, meaning that these people needed to eat less and exercise more and more in order to maintain that weight loss.
And the result was a lot of them didn't. A lot of them went back to their starting weight or even more. And similarly, longitudinal studies have shown that when people diet between one third and two thirds will regain all of the weight and then some. So people often will end up, you know, at least, you know, a few pounds, often quite a bit more over their starting weight because in a way, this is the body's brilliant defense against starvation.
This is one way of looking at what the body's doing. It has a set point. It has a way of being comfortable at a particular weight that varies depending on a bunch of factors, but predominantly genetics. And when people try to shrink themselves down to a sudden, more socially acceptable size, you can do it for a little while, but the weight comes back really reliably.
The statistic that you often hear quoted of between 95 and 98% of people's diets fail. I prefer to say people's diets fail rather than that they fail on the diets. That's very accurate. And, you know, it's a really well established mechanism which, again, owes to the fact that human weight is only a little bit less heritable than height, meaning that upwards of 70% of the variation in body size we see across the human population is due to genetics.
It's about 79% for height, so just a bit higher. I think that puts in perspective that we're long overdue socially for a reframe of body size and acceptance that just as people come in shorter and taller body types, people come in larger and smaller body types. And the idea that we don't need to be embarrassed or ashamed of having a larger body type is, I think, a powerful reason why fat activists have long wanted to reclaim a term like fatness.
And just to be really frank about it, rather than saying you're not fat, you're beautiful, or you're curvy. We can recognize people can be fat and beautiful, fat and smart fat and any number of positive qualities that human body size doesn't determine people's value and that there's no reason to shy away from terms like fatness. So that was like part of what went into the decision together with a sense that there is this tendency to over medicalized lots of things in human life.
And I think fatness is one of them. So, I mean, certainly there are lots of well-meaning researchers out there who have decided to refer to people as using person first language as a person with obesity or a person with overweight, which is a very awkward term that doesn't you know, Yeah. Doesn't follow very nicely. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it's also invoking these categories that stem from the body mass index, which, if listeners don't know, is an incredibly retrograde way of classifying body.
So, you know, it's just a product of your height and your weight. It's just a simple equation, but it derives from research that was done in the 19th century by Adolphe Calais, who was a Belgian astronomer who conflated the average body with the ideal one. He thought that the average man was the ideal man, which just doesn't follow logically.
And he also his average man was a 19th century Belgian white military man. So why we should be using these categories for human classification now is just there's no good answer to that question. We shouldn't be. I mean, statistically speaking, the healthiest BMI category to be in is the so-called overweight category. You have the lowest mortality risks in the overweight category.
So why we call it overweight and hold that it's over a certain something. There's just no non bigoted, non retrograde answer to that question as far as I'm concerned. So I'm also in the tradition of people again, this is a rich tradition that I'm drawing on all of that activism, he says. We don't need medicalizing terms like overweight or obese.
These are stigmatizing. They're often cruel. They're pathologizing something that is just a normal human variation. So that's kind of what went into my choice of terminology here, to just say fat or larger body in a way that is completely neutral.
Amanda Recupero
So you mentioned how there's some well-meaning health practitioners that also are using these person first terms in a way to avoid any extra stress or, you know, discomfort that they might cause in the in the doctor room, which is already an uncomfortable setting for people. Can you say a little bit more about how you see Fatphobia intersecting and the kind of the dangers of it intersecting within medicine or health care?
Yeah, it's such a great question, Amanda, because I think it's one of the areas we have to be most concerned about. Fatphobia And here it's partly about the material structures which don't support fat bodies in just how we move through the world and how we have access to things. So often doctor's offices won't have chairs that accommodate fat patients in the waiting room.
People are automatic asked to weigh themselves, which while it's going to happen to most people in the doctor's offices, it's a particularly fraught experience for patients who are, you know, larger body or fat. And often there is a lack of equipment like suitable gowns, suitable blood pressure cuffs, suitable needles, suitable examination tables, CT scan machines that don't fit a person's body.
There are just these huge areas where people are really not being accommodated or having access to adequate medical equipment, despite the fact that, as is much heralded by nearly three quarters of Americans are classified as either overweight or obese, according to current CDC statistics, this is not a niche problem. This is affecting a great deal of Americans, and the reasons for that are complex.
There has been a modest uptick in weight over the years, but a lot of this is just due to the fact that the AMA's guidelines for being overweight were lowered in 1998 to a BMI of 25 instead of around 2728. So a lot of this is not actually about increasing body size, it's about shifting classification standards just to get that out of the way.
Yeah. In terms of the medical encounter, there also just is direct prejudice from practitioners. So there's quite alarming and in a way, heart breaking studies show that nurses will openly report about 25% of nurses say that they don't want to touch fat patients, that they're repulsed by our bodies, they don't want to touch us. Doctors will say that we are weak willed, non-compliant, and this is an implicit bias.
This is they will actually go in these surveys and tick the box that says they're less motivated to help the fat patients and view this as a waste of their time. So this is really linked to the myth that fat people are in control of their weight and that there is somehow that we're to blame, that we're weak willed, non-compliant and lazy for having a certain body size, even though we know that, in fact fat people are often incredibly industrious in perpetually trying to shrink ourselves.
But that weight comes back pretty inexorably afterwards. So the prejudice of doctors, the lack of adequate medical equipment and the way we should also look at the overall medical industrial complex, which for a long time this is none of this is new material, but the kind of disease mongering or condition branding that has often meant pushed by drug companies.
Predominantly we get these perfectly benign human variations, such as baldness marketed as premature hair loss. When Propecia becomes available, we get things like short stature just being short, idiopathic short stature labeled as such. When human growth hormone becomes available, we get things like cellulite being more and more medicalised by lotions and potions. That was not so much drug companies as a Vogue editorial, adverting to a special rolling pin.
So it could also be driven by media, by social media, hype, by advertisers. And yeah, we get this sense that certain conditions are really ripe for medicalization that is driven by the availability of supposed treatments. Another really dark one from the perspective of misogyny is hypersexual sexual desire disorder among women where when certain drugs that allegedly treat women's libido become available, we have this marketing of a problem to cure women's libido where, you know, this is really not seen as a medical problem before or even a problem whatsoever that people might be not particularly interested in sex at particular points of their life or even on the asexual spectrum or ace as the terminology goes.
So another way this happens is the expansion of real problems to be more and more all encompassing. So things like osteopenia are new diagnoses for actual risk factors, for potential fractures and osteoporosis later in life, but it's inflated to be kind of any reduction in bone density. Well, that's actually a natural result of the aging process. So similarly, we can recognize that there might be certain risk factors involved, again, not necessarily causal risk factors, but more correlational risk factors that a doctor might be interested in thinking about If a patient is gaining weight rapidly.
However, it's very different to identify a risk factor than to label it as a disease. And that is what is happening now, especially with the advent of drugs like we go V and as MPEG and other Semaglutide and similar drugs like Liraglutide and so on, which are these incredibly lucrative drugs where the manufacturer of Novo Nordisk that manufactures Wegovy and is epic, its annual profitability now exceeds that of its home country, Denmark.
So it is the most profitable company in Western Europe currently. Wow. And so the idea that we're turning so-called obesity via these very well-recognized mechanisms of disease mongering or condition branding from a potential risk factor in complicated ways that we shouldn't be, you know, too quick to make assumptions about to this disease of obesity that needs treating it just in and of itself.
That is a very well recognized process. And as part of medical branding generally, really aiming to make money for drug manufacturers as well as to treat human ailments. So, yeah, there is a mixture of things in the health care system going on, lack of accessibility, lack of adequate medical equipment, Shia provide a prejudice. And also this, you know, drug manufacture, driving hype about weight loss drugs.
And then of course, I won't go on too much longer. You can see my enthusiasm for this topic or rather my horror about what's going on. But another part of it, too, is that when people are stigmatized, they will avoid the doctor. So another big part of it is that people who are larger, it's very well established that because of the stigma they face at the doctor's offices, they will avoid going to the doctor until the conditions are quite dire.
So we find that people are almost twice as likely to have undiagnosed serious conditions on autopsy, such as heart conditions and lung conditions of various kinds when they are living in larger bodies and didn't get adequate medical treatment. They just died with these undiagnosed conditions that might well have cost them their lives because they've avoided medical care, expecting accurately to be stigmatized when they arrived at the doctor's offices.
So similarly, women avoiding screenings for breast cancer, people in general avoiding screenings for colon cancer. We really get this very direct link between people's body size and their likelihood of avoiding medical screenings that can be important for early detection of and diagnosis of potentially deadly illnesses. And so then we you know, we see these correlations between certain kinds of very elevated body size and ill health.
And we wonder what and when you actually look at the overall system, you can see that the causation may go in the other direction. Being larger may cause or we know it causes medical stigma, which in turn is a potent driver of ill health and even death in some cases. So I think there's a literal way in which fatphobia rather than fatness can be deadly.
Amanda Recupero
And that's again, like we said earlier, like the importance of putting a name to it and being able to say, here's the thing that we need to look more closely at this is more complicated than the simple causality. And I think this text really does that exceptionally well.
Kate Manne
And I think, thank you.
Amanda Recupero
Yeah. Where your readers are going to be thrilled to dive into this before we go, but I wanted to ask you one more thing. At one point you talk about when you lost a significant amount of weight, but felt that this is not necessarily a success story, but you actually felt it more as a failure. Yeah. And you say it's a failure to realize the implications of my own politics and to live by them authentically.
And I was wondering if you could just say some more about the situation, about this feeling of the opposite caused by the actions, you know, not resonating or expressing what you felt your beliefs and your attitude towards these this things would be.
Kate Manne
Yeah, thank you for raising that. I mean, I'm very conscious as I, you know, prepared to launch this book and as I go on book tour, that I am not the size that I expected to be or really that I think my body is most comfortable at at this point in my life. So I lost, you know, around 60 pounds by really severe disordered eating.
And a big part of the book is kind of coming to terms with that. And realizing how self-destructive it was. And, yeah, I mean, I think like almost everyone else who loses weight, the weight is going to come back. But, you know, I'm launching this book as someone who was once classified as severely obese and, you know, is now someone who still identifies as fat but is in the kind of small fat area of the spectrum that has been identified by fat activists.
So, you know, for those of you who don't know, fat activists like to talk about small fat people, mid fat, large fat and infinite fat people to recognize that people like me currently have certain privileges as a small, fat person who largely does fit into seats. And the kinds of areas designated for my body in society includes including clothing.
You know, that's all very accessible to me as someone in that size range. But part of the book, especially towards the end, is recognizing the bodily imperative of hunger and the way it has a certain kind of, I think, real moral authority. So part of what was involved in denying my own appetite and my own hunger through a variety of mechanisms, partly just ignoring it and partly trying to silence it, using the appetite suppressants that have become so popular in this new fangled form of Islamic and wegovy and so on, and other cynical types trying to not listen to that voice or silence.
It, I think is really redolent of self alienation. So this is partly a moral stance as well as a political one. Now I want to be clear. I don't blame anyone who goes down that road. I don't blame my old self for trying to lose a bunch of weight in order to fit into the world better. In many ways, my life is easier at a smaller size now because the world is not made for bodies of a certain size.
But it feels like a concession and it feels like what I did was an incredible form of self violence in a way, when the alternative to listen to your body, to eat, when you're hungry, to eat what sounds good to you in as much as you have the privilege of being able to afford it and access it, that whole way of things.
In the clinical tradition of intuitive eating that has been pioneered by many nutritionists and dietitians as well as psychologists, I think that is the tradition that I want to, you know, teach my daughter to instantiate, to teach her to inhabit her body. Unapologetic early and to eat in a way that is joyful and recognizes it as a very fundamental human pleasure.
And I think the only way that I can do that to help her be that way is to model it for her. And I think the same applies more broadly politically across the spectrum by being ourselves kind of unapologetically in on shrinking weight. I think we can do a lot to collectively reduce the stigma that people in larger bodies face and to say, Hey, there's actually nothing wrong with us and we shouldn't be having to perpetually diminish ourselves in order to fit a certain incredibly arbitrary, incredibly pernicious sense of the size and shape that we should be.
According to a white supremacist, deeply misogynistic as well as ableist transphobic and xenophobic patriarchy.
Amanda Recupero
Well Kate Manne, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to have you on.
Kate Manne
Such a pleasure to be on, Amanda. Thanks for your great questions.
Chris Wofford
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