Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Dark History of BMI & Fatphobia

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Dark ideas and stigma around different body sizes really took hold in the Enlightenment.Very unenlightened, if you ask us.This started all sorts of awful movements, and one result was BMI - or Body Mass Index - which is still used as a measure of health by doctors today.What even is the BMI? Why are women and people of colour particularly affected by these harmful ideas? And what's the future of fatphobia and BMI?Joining Kate is the fantastic Amy Farrell, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Dickinson College and author of Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, to take us back to the dark origins of BMI and fatphobia.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. How are you? Well, I'm fabulous. Thank you very much for asking. And I'm thrilled that you can join me for yet another episode of Betwixt the Sheets. But before I can continue, and before you can continue,

I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adult you're making a range of adults subject and you should be an adult too. And we have to tell you that, not because we desperately want to, but because the lawyers will tell us off if we don't. that is the fair do's warning. Feel safer? I do.

Right, on with the show. It being a period called the Enlightenment, they didn't half have some unenlightened ideas, and that is putting it mildly. With the transatlantic slave trade in full swing, racial hierarchies were reinforced with insane ideas around categorisation of body types, particularly women's body types.

The way they saw it, If you weren't white and thin, then you were uncivilised and well, unworthy. But the damaging impact of these ideas, as we are going to find out, was enormous. And it's something that we can still see the impact of today. Today we are talking about the history of fat phobia and the history of the BMI. And the journey that those two things have been on throughout history is staggering. Curious to know more? Well, buckle up those belts because I am too.

What do you look for any man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister.

The term BMI, which I have heard, far too much of in recent years, means the body mass index and it has become so commonplace that it is now accepted as a general marker of health. When you stop and think about it, the idea that you can work out how healthy someone is just by looking at how tall they are and how much they weigh is, that's kind of bonkers, isn't it? At worst, it's discriminatory and dangerous. And yet, this is an idea that has stuck. but it also has approval from the World Health Organization, the highest health authority we have.

The history of the BMI is fittingly absurd, and that's putting it nicely. Joining me today to explore the dark and fascinating history of the body mass index is author and expert in all things fatphobic, Amy Farrell. Where did the idea of measuring health like this come from? How did it inform the eugenics movement? Of course it did. And why have the effects to disprove it,

been shut down so rapidly by the medical community. Well, without further ado, let's crack on. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Amy Farrell. How are you doing? I'm doing well, and it's really wonderful to be here. My students were very excited that I was coming out to your show. Oh, yeah.

That's so lovely. Hello, students. You are the author of Fat Shame, Stigma and the Fat Body in America. culture. That is amazing. What made you want to write that book? What was its origin story? That's a great question because it actually goes back to my students. I had finished my book on Ms. Magazine, yours and sisterhood. I had kind of had a bit of a tussle with Gloria Steinem. And I was seeking a new project. And I was reading in the intro to women's studies, it was called at the time. We read a history of anorexia by Brumburg. And in there, she said there had never been

a good history of dieting. And my students said, well, that's your next project. And I thought, well, that's actually interesting because I'm an American white woman born in the 60s and my whole life has been being told to diet. So I thought very interesting. I started that research and pretty quickly got bored because what I realized was I needed to be great with Excel spreadsheets. The diets had all been the same. They just repeat it. So it was like, you know, the cabbage diet keeps coming back, the rice diet, the meat diet. They all keep coming back. The exercises look very similar as well. As I was doing that, though, I became more interested in fat. And the way that fat was really a protagonist in all of that dieting material. And I realized that fat stigma went back much

longer than my understanding of it had been. I had thought it really started in the 1920s. What started then was the advertising industry. So we see lots of evidence of it. But it went back much further. And I realized, too, that it was so connected to ideas about race and ideas about gender. And so that's really the origins of my project. was also a fat kid, experienced a lot of bullying as a fat kid. So as I got to know the work of fat activists, many of whom really schooled me, I have to say, do you know, they, you know, just me down a little bit, but in very useful ways. I mean, very generous ways, I would say, actually. I realized that the experiences they were talking to me about resonated with me so much

from my childhood experiences. So while I couldn't speak about being a particularly fat person as an adult, though those are all relative terms. I mean, I'm not, I wouldn't identify myself as thin either. I was very interested in fat activism too. So I was interested in the history of fat and then the kind of counter movement of fat activism. We're here today to talk specifically about the BMI, the body mass index. But just listening to you talk then, I got a flashback to my own teenage years and my childhood. And being fat was literally the worst thing that you could be. It was the worst insult. It was like, it stalked everybody.

And our perception of fat in the 90s and the 2000s was so screwed up. Yeah. Well, I think so. And it's still the most likely reason a child will be bullied on the playground. Wow. Oh. And I also think with phones today, I say this to my students too. Do you know, I was a bullied kid.

But the one amazing thing about it was, whatever was happening at school, at school and I could come home. And not that home was perfect. I'm not saying that, but it was, it was free of that. And I think that all follows them now. You know, because of the texting and what they're seeing online, et cetera. So I think my generation was like the last chopper out of Saigon when it came to that stuff. At least nobody has documented evidence of what I was doing as a teenager. Thank God. What they're dealing with. with today is unreal. It really is. We're going to talk about all the things that you've said that, but let's just, what is the body mass index? Okay, so the body mass index, I mean, we all know it

just from going to the doctor, right, that we get a chart and we have the body mass index there. And you get a number. It's literally a person's weight divided by your height and meters squared. It's your height and weight ratio is what it is. We think of it as something, it seems very scientific, I think, to so many people, like it's something very real. But it actually was the invention of a mathematician in the 1830s in Belgium. We didn't really use it, at least in the United States, until the 1980s. But we would use the metropolitan life insurance health charts for, you know, height and weight. And you had the little thing there about whether you're,

you were big-boned, medium-boned. I don't want to make this too big, but we can't even understand what that mathematician was doing until we back up a little bit. So before the Enlightenment, so the Enlightenment is really the 18th century, right, where we have the kind of advent of reason, et cetera. We have the rule of the church and of kings, right?

So monarchy and the church. And that really gives way to the rule of more scientists, philosophers, sort of the rule of reason. But here's the interesting thing. That old way of thinking with the monarchy and with the rule of the church, there were really clear hierarchies of people. So some people were better than other people. Some people had more power than other people. And that was God-given, really, right? The idea was that was God-given. What I think is really interesting is that when that gives way to kind of the rule of reason, there were still all these inequities with people, right? Especially the transatlantic slave trade, inequities between men and women,

between poor people and rich people, between, it was certainly like the attempted eradication of indigenous people. But there needed to be a rationale for that because the rationale of this being God given because of God's right to the king or the church is right, that's gone. And so really science and philosophy comes in there and theories, the use of, you know, the use of. of theories of evolution, that some people were simply more evolved and better people than other people. And there's a lot of searching then for what is the perfect specimen of the human being. And it was looking at the physical body for that. So people probably your listeners know the word phrenology, which was like a real 19th century thing of like testing people's heads and

bumps and things. But there was something called physiognomy too, which was just looking at the whole body for signs of whether or not you were civilized or not. And so the man who created the BMI, Catellae, he was just part of a whole bigger school of thought of what makes a perfect human being. And I think you've done a show on Sarah Bartman, for instance, before. We have, yeah. So that's in the early, very early 1800s. We have a scientist by the name of Georges Cuvier. He takes this woman who was an enslaved woman from South Africa after she died. a kind of horrible and early death. He does an autopsy on her,

and he's looking to see if she's the missing link between animals and human beings. He decides she's actually a human being, but she's on the very bottom scale. And lots of people have written about her and how he uses her skin color and her sexual organs as evidence of her being on the low on that scale of civilization.

But what I found really interesting, and looking at his original materials was that he's really talking about her fatness too. You know, he's talking about the fat, eat of her buttocks, fatness of her breasts. He actually even gives this, you know, name to the supposed excess fat on buttogemia, which is just a normal formation. Different people's butts come in different sizes, do you know? Yeah. And all sorts of people.

So we have him in the beginning of the century. We have Cesar Lombroso at the end of the century. who he was a head case wasn't he yeah so he wrote that book criminal woman his evidence is that you could look at a woman and tell by her thigh size whether or not she was going to be a criminal so women with more hefty butts and thighs were more likely to be prostitutes i mean the ironic thing is it actually throws all women like it says basically all women have the potential to be a prostitute right because or what they really called like literally degenerate traits or adivistic traits, like that you were low on that scale of civilization.

And there was lots of comparing of black women's bodies to sex workers' bodies. It's all coming flooding back to me now, 19th century. Physionomy, this very, very strange thing that I can't remember his name, some physiognomate who was wandering around Paris, looking at the vulvas of sex workers and of black women and attempting to compare them directly. To prove what? To prove, I don't know,

that he shouldn't have a medical license, I think. But that's what they were doing at the time. Well, they were and they couldn't get access to, well, to do white women. Do you know, they couldn't get access to their bodies for the most part. Although sometimes they did, you know, depending upon what kind of access they had. But for the most part, they had access to prisoners and to poor women in all sorts of different contexts, which then included black women. So the BMI was Catelle's attempt to actually somehow map out what he called LaMoyne.

So like the, well, I would literally translate the medium man, but I think he meant more specifically like the perfect man. Like here are the ratios of what the perfect human being is. So that was based on white European men and his ideal of what a perfect ratio is. it had nothing to do with health. It had nothing to do with longevity. It had nothing to do with disease. It fit into this larger picture of these ideals of what makes a perfect human being. And so, and really about the scale of civilization and scale of like who has the least primitive traits and who has the most primitive traits.

So it was just putting by definition what were typical. white European men's like what was their stature, what was their weight, etc. At the top, that was just by definition he's putting it there on the top. And then everyone else is falling in below that. It's mad anyway, because if you're only looking at white European men, you've excluded quite a few people there. But who was his sample size? Where was he looking at? What demographic was he looking at a wide variety of ages or body sizes? No, because his point was really to look at the, what's the perfect one? Do you know? So he already had this preconceived idea in his head already. Well, I mean, that's what I think we have to think about like someone like Cesar Lombroso or George Cuvier,

like all of them, they already have their ideas in their head. Do you know, I mean? And then they're doing the science to follow. I'm putting science in quotation marks. It's really scientific racism. The science is following their ideas as opposed to the other way around. His idea, the other thing that's, I think interesting is it just really gets dropped. It's really just, it's like a mathematician's tool. It's like it's an idea theory of who the perfect human being is. And it's not until there were some people who are challenging whether or not this metropolitan life insurance charts really were that useful for predicting health, that they're kind

of the National Institute of Health in the United States picked up the idea of someone sort of like a few people started to pull back out, like there's these other models, like this BMI. But there was never any studies that explicitly linked that to actually any kind of predictor of health, predictor of longevity, morbidity, mortality. It was just another measure that was pulled out. So every time I've been to the doctor and I've been told that my BMI is in the very 808 to obese category. Really what I'm being told is I don't have the physique of a 19th century

Belgian male teenager. That's what I'm being told. You are being told that. I mean, there's been some fussing with that chart. So in 1998, the National Institute of Health in the United States in conjunction with a lot of international obesity task forces, we have to be thoughtful about those as well because they have lots of people who are involved in the business of weight loss on those. So obesity doctors, weight loss experts, et cetera, they lower the threshold. So they even lower the numbers. So like tons of people become fat just overnight. Yeah. Well, I think I remember reading an article that was really funny that it was something like overnight half of major league baseball players became obese. And there's still some fooling,

with that chart. Now they're trying to use that chart just as an indicator. I saw some movement and then you would just use your waist measurement. So I have a lot to say about that. But at any rate, yeah. I mean, when you think about it, now that I know where it comes from, like the obvious questions around it, well, what about boobs? What about bottoms?

What about anybody that isn't a 19th century Belgian male teenager? that it just doesn't make any sense at all now, I think about it. Right. And I mean, I think that's sort of like the language of deotapagia, which is the excess fat on buttocks. That's really just describing a normal place that women will hold fat, do you know? And in European women would tend to have less fat on their butts than African women historically. but that's just a normal spread. And even within there, there's going to be huge variations

where some women will have big butts, some people will have small butts. But my point is it's like the placement of fat itself is being identified as something that's a deformity. I mean, that's really the length of starting in the 19th century is that we're looking, and that's what all of these measurements were really somehow trying to weed out deformities. So I think that when we look at sort of the range of human beings, we need to be really

skeptical about how much of this has anything to do with health and what is this really about saying which bodies are acceptable and which bodies are not acceptable. And the bodies that it seems to target the most as being unacceptable would be who's in your opinion? Well, I think we know that I would say for the most part, it's women and it's black women. Yeah. So I would say it's all women as less acceptable, but then black women in particular. And it gets dragged into the eugenics debate in the 19th century, doesn't it? Well, maybe not the BMI, but certainly this idea around bodies and how you measure bodies.

Yeah, well, it definitely does. I mean, that was sort of like the Lombrozo argument about, you know, which people are more likely to become criminals. I was thinking about it, especially for your podcast, because for me, one of the most interesting things, as I was doing my research was realizing how much men in the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th century. So really up through the 1940s were being taught through these kind of cartoons and, you know, doctors like books that they would publish that would be like how to live a good life, you know, and postcards, you know, postcards as being like the memes of the day that they were not supposed to enjoy the pleasure.

of a fleshy woman. You know, like really mocking men for enjoying a woman who had flesh on her body. Do you know whether she had a big butt, breasts, just overall soft and fleshy? So that there are just these series of cartoons that really mock the only men who are sort of shown as enjoying those women are very working class men or even men who are perceived to be, kind of almost perverts. Do you know, they look really weird and they're very odd. And then you see images of the middle class men, like the men who have the office jobs and who are sort of especially becoming more professional. If there's images like of a fat woman sitting on them, they are sweating.

They're like not sweating in a good way. I mean, they're, they're sweating and they're like looking like embarrassed, you know, and dragged down. They want a woman next to them who, is light and has no flesh on is a status. But what I think is fascinating is like, it's like the men are having to be taught this. Get it out of your system. If you think that's sexy, that is a perversion. It's something that has to be underground or something that's shameful, not just a kind of part of what people might find sexually attractive or not. Whenever you see things like literally phrases like a civilized man knows he doesn't find that attractive. And it's like you just.

It doesn't surprise me, but where would that be written? In the kind of books for health. And there was one, I can't remember the name of the author, but it was called girth control. So it was like a quiet book. So like have thoughts for getting, you know, your exercise that you should do every day. And that was in the early part of the very early, early, early, 20th century, but latter part of the 19th century too. But these postcards spanned, I would say they span from about 1870 to 1940. Do you know the funny postcards that people would send? You get this sort of

the rise of the mocking, the jolly fat woman, and the fat man as well. But I'm just thinking when you're saying this of like every depiction of an angry wife of a shrew, a Harrodin from past films and as you say, postcards. And they're all shown to be. be overweight, not super felt and skinny. The implication being, I suppose, that they've let themselves go. They've let themselves go. They're taking up too much space. By definition, that body size makes them not feminine. Yes, not feminine. That's it. Yes. And I guess I keep coming back to it, but what I find fascinating about it is this wasn't something that was just reflecting what was the common idea. It was being taught to people. Being indoctrinated. Yeah, because especially about

for the men what their sexual pleasure needed to be. That it was like you're not, if you thought that was sexy, just take it on the down low maybe, but don't acknowledge having a fat girlfriend or that that's who you find attractive. In the 19th and the 20th century, as the sort of diet culture is emerging, you do get a kind of an emphasis on, I don't know if I'd call it fat in women, but like shape in women. I've seen all of these adverts for ionized yeast so you won't be skinny and you can put weight on. So that seems to have been a concern as well that if you go too far the other way, then you're not womanly anymore. Yeah.

And I'm glad you're bringing that up because nothing, I think nothing in history too is a straight line. Do you know? So it's like all of these things are kind of warring with each other. And the reality is there's still, especially in the 19th century, they're still wasting diseases. if you get tuberculosis, you're going to lose a lot of weight. It's still seen as a sign of fertility, to have a little bit of weight on you if you're a woman, that you're young and you're juicy, you know,

and you're going to be able to have babies. For a man, you know, just that work was still hard for many people. Food could be scarce. So it was still a sign of wealth in a certain way. Do you know, I mean, but that was shifting, do you know? So I think it was always about a little bit of balance. And also, do you know, like, what is a bustle but a fake butt? Do you know?

So there's things like, you know, you're encouraged to wear that, but not to actually have a hefty buttocks. When I think about like, you know, the paintings of Rubens and Renoir and the classical world and all of those women, they certainly didn't have rail thin size zero bodies. They were quite voluptuous. But, and a lot of people looked to that as like, oh, look, look, it's so great that they were bigger women. but they weren't really big, were they? Like, they have a bit of a wobble.

And I think they might have been more of a kind of sexual fantasy and a lot of them, not necessarily the men who Rubin's, like, colleagues would have been actually married. You know, so I think it's about sort of the different classes of women, too. I'll be back with Amy after this short break. Has this ever impacted men in the same way? I know this, fat is a feminist issue. and we'll certainly get to fat and the feminist movement.

But fat men, is that? Like, what's the history of that? Yeah, I mean, it's not nothing. And in fact, the very first diet book was written by William Banting. That's a phrase that was common in the United States and in England, I think, really until even the 60s to say your Banting meant you're dieting. So he wrote a book called Lessons on Corpulence. he was a really fat, well, he identifies himself as a fat man.

And he went to his physicians and they were like, this is just normal. You're aging. Just get over it. You're well to do. He was a casket maker. He had a wonderful business as a casket maker. But he hated being fat. Like he thought it was, he called it a parasite of barnacles.

He really thought himself as, I think, not having the status he wanted to have because of being fat. So he wrote this diet book that was just basically eat less, eat more meat, don't drink, not just meaning don't drink alcohol, like almost don't drink. But then people would become really constipated. So he sold a cordial with it that was basically some kind of laxative. He really made a lot of money from that. So my point is it's not like it's only women.

I think what is different is that historically body size men are able to take up more space and that that scene is masculine. And that goes for much longer than it does for women. What I mean by that is they're going to not be seen as fat or not recognize as fat and inappropriate. They have a bigger leeway for that, you know, whereas that line is going to stop for women and especially, I think, for white women or actually I would say for black women of a certain class, that's going to stop much earlier.

The other thing I think that's connected to that is that we have a really powerful idea of the fat cat, you know, so like the fat cat is a man who's powerful. I mean, the current U.S. president, I would say, is. I was just thinking of him, actually. Is that kind of fat cat image that no one's going to mention your weight, do you know? I mean, and you will have clothes that will fit you because you have. plenty of money for that. And it's a sign of your wealth and power that you have that body size. It doesn't mean you're a nice person. It doesn't mean you're a good person. It doesn't mean people

like you, but it means it's a sign of wealth and power. No, you can at least have the good decency to be jolly with it, couldn't he for good sake? Yeah, well, no, not at all. So it's not that it doesn't affect men. And there's been lots of studies that actually have been done within gay male communities that actually the kind of focus on thinness is pretty important. Do you know, I think it's sort of, some have argued that it's whoever the male gaze is falling upon. Yes. Yes. You need to have these kind of standards. But and even, you know, some people have argued, so does that mean within like African American communities, for instance, the United States, that there isn't this kind of weight emphasis.

But I don't think that's true. I think that's more like there's an openness to fat, more fat in certain places. So like fat buttocks or fat breasts, but that the waist still needs to be this tiny size. Yes. That's what some mix lots said, didn't he? The waist is small and your curves are kicking. He wanted the big, but the juicy doubles, but it had to be with a tiny waist as well. anyways, right. So that's getting away from the men. But Bear Bergman did a really interesting piece where before he was living completely and identifying completely as he, he would go out in the world. And if he was dressed in such a way that people recognized him as he, just no one would comment on his weight. You know, I mean, he just was able to go out on the day. Do you know, it was fine. But if he was dressed in such a way,

that people recognized him as a she. They would actually, even if he asked for a Coke, for instance, at a restaurant, they'd bring him a Diet Coke. You know, there'd be comments at the grocery store. There would be not cat calls, but harassing calls or cars. But it really was very clear to him that it was about whether he was being identified as male or female. Could you just clarify for us?

Who is Bear Bergman? He is a cultural study scholar in the United States. So you can find. that essay in the fat studies reader. I'm actually going to. That's a fascinating. Yeah, it's a personal narrative. I mean, he's gone on to write lots of other things. And it's actually a short piece, but I always find it moving myself when I read it. And yeah. So with the rise of second wave feminism in the 50s, 60s and 70s, how did they wrestle with fat? Was fat at the forefront of these movements? Or was it something that they kind of shied, was it like an underground discussion?

You know, a little bit of both. On the one hand, and I think this is true, actually, and I really mapped this in my book from the suffragist movement as well, so in the early part of the 20th century, that fat is such a sign of an uncivilized body. Feminism is in as many things, but it is also an attempt to claim a space as a citizen in the public sphere. Fatness seems to be something that you can change and it can morph into this body that's acceptable, do you know? So I think that's why you see so many, even like someone like Michelle Obama, for instance, do you know, who would have been criticized so resoundingly as a black woman daring to take this public space, do you know, and it's like, but she keeps her body in order, you know, with her really huge emphasis on on the fit body.

So there's that emphasis, which, and even fat as a feminist issue really was focused so much on kind of like the reason women are fat, the mental issues, you know, dealing with abuse, et cetera. But at the same time, there's a whole other movement that starts to challenge that to say, do you know, this is really about the male gays. So a lot, especially among black feminists saying this is another way that we. We are just being targeted. So people like Johnny Tillman wrote in Ms. Magazine saying, you know, I'm old, I'm poor, and I'm fat and I'm nothing, you know, because I mean, and she wasn't saying she was nothing. She was like, you know, but she was saying the world recognizes me as a problem because of all of those things. And there were white feminists who were active in like the fat underground, which I love their acronym was FU.

So it was great. but who really were like, this is about being able to claim space and say we deserve to actually live as fat women. And that was especially fueled by fat white lesbian women, that movement of the fat underground. So we have those kind of two parallel movements there that are challenging. What I would say is that the flip side of kind of mainstream feminism or achievement feminism, which has pretty much kept a focus on that thinness. The other thing that weight in women particularly is associated with is age. Because when we are teenagers 15, 16 is it's much easier to lose the weight.

Your body isn't fully developed. You're rail thin. And as you get older, your body changes shape. It becomes much harder to lose the weights. Do you think that that plays a part in this as well? Is that fat is also about devaluing women as the age? I haven't really written about that, but I think you're spot on with that. It just popped in my head there.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you're spot on with that. And especially, you know, sort of the how it's found is so unacceptable as women's bodies not just become larger, but actually become their shapes change, right? So a thicker waist, a bigger stomach that is seen as inherently diseased. And it's interesting because I'm not a physician. So I don't like to, you know, I realize sometimes I'm being asked to go down a kind of rabbit hole of medical advice. And I always remind people, I'm a cultural studies scholar. So I don't, it's not my thing.

But I do read a lot of medical materials now, though. And so for instance, you know, there have been people who have done these kind of meta studies. And I was thinking Kathleen Flagle is the one probably the most famous of the BMI. so to go back to the BMI, that really morbidity and mortality only gets associated with the very, very far ends of that. That actually people's healthiest spot appears to be in the overweight category. And that's particularly true for women. And I mean, some of her work, like there are other, there are some of the scholars she's writing with who might speculate on why that might be, but it's really speculation. She's just trying to lay out the facts, like the statistical facts on that.

I mean, maybe it's like I look at my own mother who died at age 90. If she hadn't been a little bit hefty in her 50s, she was the size of a bird when she died. Do you know what I mean? I feel like her, this is my own intuitive sense. I feel like that weight protected her, you know, for those years as she had some health problems. And she was able to live until she was old. My point there is just that we sort of make things. to be a disease without actually looking at some of the more complexities.

I think it has a lot more to do with, I think our cultural ideas get in the way of us being able to think clearly and ask good questions. I'll be back with Amy after this short break. I think that fat phobia is actually incredibly entrenched in our culture. And I think that we all carry it with us in a lot of ways, like to undo that internalizing of shame and that, because we're so quite. to judge people who are overweight. And I'm not even talking about hollering at people in the street,

but the assumption that if someone's overweight, they must be unhealthy, for example. Like, that's a stigma. Because you don't know anything about that person's weight at all. And then also this ongoing thing of, but why do you feel the need to comment on someone else's body when it has absolutely nothing to do with you whatsoever? It's strange the way it works.

It is. And then also, to go back to your question about eugenics, it has such really pernicious effects as well, not just on people's individual lives, like the discrimination they face from the time, you know, there are even babies on the playground, you know, through schooling, workplace, romance, doctor's offices. But I was just actually had a visit in my fat studies class today

by a scholar by the name of April Herndon. And she writes about women with, high BMI's not getting access to either IVF treatments or I know from other studies that she didn't write about this per se, but not being accepted even for adoptions. And some of my students were asking, but isn't that because they would have the success rate would be lower? I think we need to look at like sort of what are the legitimating reasons that people give to to legitimate their fat stigma.

But what that means then, though, is that you are ensuring that fat women don't have access to reproduce. Do you know? And I think that's – so if we think about – she doesn't necessarily make the argument about eugenics. That's me. Yeah. I think in the UK, you can't get fertility treatment on the NHS if your weight is above a certain point. And certainly it used to be the case with – it was featured into adoption as well. I'm not sure if it still does, but that's just,

because it's just that assumption, isn't it? That if you are of a certain weight, then you must be unhealthy and an unfit parent. That's wild. But to return to the BMI and the tyranny of it, when did it get such a stranglehold on us? Because you were saying earlier that there has been work to challenge this.

There have been scientists to lay out all the information and go, well, actually, it's not a good indicator. All it can tell you is how tall and heavy somebody is. That's pretty much it. can't tell you how healthy somebody is. Yeah. I think it's sort of a perfect storm from my point of view of our really strong ideology, fatphobic ideology, that started back really in the 18th century, really gained steam in the 19th century and then into the 20th century. So this idea that fatness is a sign of a deformed body, you know, of a deviant body. And a deviant person.

as well. That association with that. Yeah, absolutely. A person that has atavistic traits, so meaning like primitive traits inside themselves that need to be eradicated, so much so that like a real human being by definition has to be thin.

As you, I think you put it earlier, like the water we swim in or the air we breathe. That coupled with now in the United States, so I don't know what it is in the UK, but in the United States, we have a $90 billion dollar weight loss industry. There's a lot a vested interest in not letting go of this.

So if you have money and ideas that merge together, it's difficult to get that to release. The bottom line is if I'm supposed to be in a natural, naturally thinn state, much thinner than I am now, to be healthy, why is it so hard to get there? Like if that's supposed to be my natural state that I'm supposed to, you know, go and glow with health, why do I have to stop eating in order to get there?

That doesn't make any sense at all. Well, and what's interesting now, too, is all the new medications, you know, the injections. I was just going to ask you about that. What's your take on that? Well, I want to put a caveat out there that those drugs, I think, have been found to be really successful for people who have diabetes and a few other health problems. You know, and I also would want to put a caveat out there that individual people are making their own choices. And I don't think it's useful for us to get involved in, like, blaming people for making the choices they make within the culture. that we live in. Okay, so I'm going to say all that. And then I'm going to say, I think it's going to be

really difficult for a person now to quote unquote choose to be fat, that there's going to be so much pressure and there already is pressure to have younger people taking it. And we don't really know what the effects of that are long term. But also like we just don't know. Like I just find it like it's it really is about i remember some fat activists who i was reading who were like the fat underground in the 1980s and and then other activists in the 90s saying this war on fat is really a war on fat people and it's about a desire to eradicate the existence of fat people and so many people reacted to that like these people are so radical and out there and i just think were they really do you know like were they really that extreme and that idea when you look at now like

like, is there going to be a pressure that if one shows any signs of, as they used to call it, adiposity, if any signs of adipose tissue, that you're going to have to take that medicine? It's like the ultimate challenge to the body positivity movement. It feels like having come through the early 2000s, when I look back now at the news stories around women that we were told were fat, and that's insane. that like Bridget Jones was supposed to be fat and Kate Winslet and Titanic got mocked for being fat. And now I look at them like, my God,

but it felt like we did a lot of work to get to the point where it's like actually that rail thin size zero, I'm not sure they were very healthy or happy and we would be more inclusive and then all of a sudden Ozempic hit and now like everyone's shrinking again. Yeah, really shrinking, like really shrinking to the point where you don't recognize people.

I think you find it. You know, they look completely different. So as a final question then to all of this, what do you think is the future of the BMI? Do you think that we'll get rid? Because it has been discredited, hasn't it? Like, we know now. We know that we're not supposed to weigh the same amount

as a 19th century Belgian teenager. Yeah, it's a really good question, though. It might disappear, but I think something else will take its place. I don't see it disappearing. And I don't want to be negative. I don't, but I feel like, like there's such a desire to map our bodies in ways that it's about mapping our individual

bodies and somehow our individual body needs to be then treated and targeted as opposed to, you know, I look around and think of everything that is making us sick right now, wildfires, microplastics, lack of just basic health care, war. And I don't mean, I mean like how many people does it kill, do you know? And then we go to the doctor and we get targeted for like our body's being mapped again. To me, it's a bigger question than just because it might disappear, but there'll be some other way of measuring. It feels more like we need to have a whole new way of thinking about what would be health. Amy, you have been marvelous to talk to you. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, and frankly, they should. Where can they find you? Well, you can look at my

book, Fat Shame. I also have a new reader out that's called The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies. And that's actually open access. So you can just look that up and get that. And that has so many different great authors in there. And I have a new book coming out next October, Change of Subject. It's called Intrepid Girls, the Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Well, you come back and speak to us about that. That sounds fascinating. Love to. I would love to. Amy, thank you so much for joining us. You've been brilliant.

Great to talk to you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Amy for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancied saying hi, you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we've got episodes on the biggest red light district in Europe and Michelangelo's Sex Life, all come in your way.

way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy and produced by Stuart Beckworth. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheet, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.