To Infinifat and Beyond
28th January 2024
Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia was written by Kate Manne, a feminist philosophy expert and author of two other books about misogyny and “male privilege,” respectively. Prospectmagazine named her one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers” in 2019 alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Greta Thunberg. She self-identifies as a “small fat,” as opposed to a “large fat,” “superfat,” or “infinifat,” and other terms from the “fat studies” lexicon you didn’t know existed.
Manne could have written an interesting book challenging the conventional wisdom that being fat is bad for your health. Most scientists seem to agree that it is, but if the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything it’s that so-called scientific experts don’t really know what they’re talking about and are prone to make authoritative pronouncements for purely political reasons. Manne cites other studies that found the relationship between fatness and health to be more “complicated” than we think, and there’s probably some truth to that.
Unshrinking is not that book. It is simply another data point supporting the argument that academic elites have lost their damn minds, starting with the James Baldwin epigraph and trigger warning about “frank descriptions of fatphobia in its intersections with racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, etc.” Further reading reveals that fatphobia also intersects with classism, ageism, colorism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. It’s bigotry all the way down.
The reason people are averse to fat is because it is unhealthier than not-fat. Fat is not attractive except to people with a political agenda, many of whom are fat already and see no reason why they should be discriminated against (a common attitude in many fields: You don’t get to judge me according to your standards; you have to judge according to the standards I’m going to lay down for you). It’s basically aesthetic fascism.