Factually! with Adam Conover - The Philosophy of Fatness with Kate Manne

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/2vjj5nrh #CashAppPod *Referral Reward Disclaimer: As a Cash App partner, I may earn a commission when you sign up for a Cash App account.Science increasingly shows that we have far less control over our weight and body shape than society wants us to believe. Yet people labeled as “overweight” are often ridiculed, dismissed, and denied basic respect. While some claim fatphobia is hardwired into human nature, its roots are more recent—and more surprising—than you might expect. This week, Adam speaks with Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, author of Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, about the origins and consequences of anti-fat bias—and what it will take to dismantle it. Find Kate's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. I don't know anything.

I don't know anything. Hey there, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, believe it or not, in to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, believe it or not, in the last century, America has expanded its circle of acceptance to bring in more and more people. This has happened over and over again.

We had the feminist movement, which gave women the right to vote and eventually greater control over their bodies and their lives. We had the civil rights movement, which ended the racist Jim Crow system and pushed America to become something like a full-fledged democracy for the very first time in its history. We've also had the LGBT Rights Movement and the Disability Rights Movements, both of which have had huge impacts on our society in a

relatively short period of time. Americans love a civil rights movement, okay? We love living through it and we love accepting people. But that does not mean that we have conquered bias in this country. Clearly, I mean, just read the news or look at society around you. Because we still exhibit bias all the time. And I'll give you an example. Even three-year-olds know you're not supposed to fucking judge somebody by how they look. But we us all the time. And I'll give you an example. Even three-year-olds know you're not supposed to fucking judge somebody by how they look.

But we do all the time. And you are especially open to judgment in our society if you are fat. Some people will assume you're lazy or you're unhealthy, but it's not just microaggressions, okay? If you're fat, doctors are literally less likely to take you seriously when you have an unrelated medical complaint.

Fatphobia, for that reason, can literally be a matter of life and death. And in the same way that racism, misogyny, and homophobia are ideologies, systems of ideas and values, so is fatphobia. The difference is, though, that we had sustained campaigns and legislation to limit the power of those ideologies over the people who are being oppressed by them. But fatphobia is still an ideology that we accept and almost endorse in our society. And no, it's not just going to disappear with the wave of an ozempic wand, even though those drugs have the potential to be very powerful. So we have to ask, what is fatphobia? How deep is it in our society? And what we can do about it?

And you know, we've discussed this subject on the show before with doctors, medical professionals, people like that, but I'm very excited because today on the show, we have a philosopher who is going to help us break down this issue in a brand new way. Now before we get to that, I just want to remind you that if you want to support the show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. You can also join our awesome online community as well. And if you want to come see me on the road, coming up soon,

I'm headed to Oklahoma, Brea, California, Tacoma, Washington, and Spokane, Washington. Head to adamConover.net for all those tickets, and we're gonna have a lot more tour dates announced soon, so keep your eye on that page. And now let's get to this week's episode. On the show this week, we have an absolutely

incredible guest, her name is Kate Mann. She's a philosopher at Cornell, and her most recent book, a finalist for the National Book Award, is called, Un-Shrinking, How to Face Fatphobia. She brings an incredible perspective on this subject that I found really revelatory and I have never heard anywhere else before. I know you're gonna love it.

Please welcome, Kate Mann. Kate, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. So let's jump right into it. What is fatphobia? How deep is it in our society? I think it's very deep. And the way I define it in my book

is the unjust downranking of people who live in larger bodies. So that has a number of dimensions to it. So it is the aesthetic downranking, the health downranking, the intellectual downranking, and also moral downranking, the health downranking, the intellectual downranking, and also moral downranking. We're seen as unhealthy, lazy, lax, irresponsible, often stupid, and as unattractive. These negative stereotypes, I think, go very deep and are very pernicious for people who

I like to just say fat in a non-pejorative way. So like a lot of people in this fat activist tradition, I like to use the word fat as a neutral descriptor of larger bodies. And you know, we're jumping right into sort of your a little bit more academic description, but I'd love to know like, what does that feel like in practice? You know, like what, when you talk about that downranking, give me an example of what folks experience. Well, I have been in my life, historically as an adult, almost always fat myself. And I'm actually not particularly fat at the moment

because bodies are wild and they change in all sorts of ways that are kind of unpredictable. My body is changing day by day. Every day I wake up, I'm like, this is very, I see a photo of myself from nine months ago and I'm like, what the fuck happened? Yeah. Yeah, it's very familiar and it's just bodies being bodies.

It's doing what they do. But yeah, I have felt often in my life really scrutinized like when I walk into a room, particularly as someone who is for better or worse, classified as an intellectual authority figure, as a professor, I just simply don't belong. Having a body that's bigger and softer and also more feminine in a very male coded discipline of philosophy makes me really a bodily anomaly. It just seems weird to stick out in a way that often feels like it's the basis for scorn and feeling derision, feeling people's judgment

that I must not be that smart or I must be lazy and not in control of my life in the way that I should be. So, yeah, it's, it's a lot of stuff that, um, I, it kind of accumulated for me in such a way that I eventually felt like I had to tackle these misconceptions. And I'd love to get even more specific. As you say, you know, you feel scrutinized, et cetera. Do you have any particular like specific, you know, stories or examples, not either from your career or any other place that that really bring that to light? You know? Oh, yeah, totally.

So I remember once I was giving a public lecture, as I often do. And I was very fat at the time. You know, I had a BMI of over 40, which means that you're classified as severely obese or morbidly obese to use a particularly stigmatizing label. I was also pregnant at the same time. That's to say, I presented as someone whose body maybe wasn't what was expected for a professor. And the people who had come to see the lecture at this college that she'll remain nameless had come to see a visitor named Kate give a lecture, right? And so I introduced myself as Kate to one of the people

in attendance, a professor at this college. And he just kind of didn't grock me clearly as the speaker, but not only did he not perceive me to be the speaker, even though he'd come to see a person named Kate give a lecture, he was so taken aback that I was the one giving the talk, that I was Kate Mann, who was meant to be this person coming to share some philosophical insight on a good day anyway, that he took a step back when he was content and he looked me

up and down and was just like, he couldn't, you could see him wrestling in his mind with the idea that I was the person who was going to be giving this talk on epistemic authority and he just couldn't make sense of it in my fat and pregnant body. Wow. Uh, you know, I often, uh, think about how when I became a TV host for the first time, uh, people started treating me like a TV host immediately, you know? And I had this, like, I went from being a comedy writer

to being the executive producer and host of a television show to being the guy on top, right? Yeah. And it really, I remember noticing how quickly people just allowed me to slip into the role and just started treating me the way that they would treat that sort of person, even though I'd never done it before, right?

Yeah. And I remember thinking at the time, oh, not though I'd never done it before, right? Yeah. And I remember thinking at the time, oh, not everybody would, I fit the bill, right? I fit the brief. I look like the outline. I go step into the outline in people's minds and it fits me perfectly, you know? And I'm reminded of that because it sounds like

you had the opposite experience. You didn't fit the outline in that guy's mind, right? Yeah, exactly. In a number of ways. And so he didn't know how to treat you with the social respect that he would normally treat somebody in your position, a visiting scholar, right? Yeah.

Like literally there in a position of authority, someone who should be shown deference and respect, like by anybody associated with the institution. Yeah, or just like a normal handshake and a hello would have been fine. Yeah, it's so funny, we have a phrase in philosophy for this, like a plausible white guy, people who fail to look like a plausible white guy kind of get this reaction. It's not a very philosophical term, but I like it.

Yeah, it's just the plausible white guy got the job or the plausible white guy was, you know, seen as the person to go after for a hire or whatever. And yeah, there is this sense of if you don't fit the mold, especially for people who are not white and not middle-class or upper middle-class or positively rich. And for people who are fat,

there's just a sense that we don't belong and that we won't have anything to offer. And I guess one of the things that has kept me wanting to do what I do is to say, bodies of all kinds, every kind can be the vehicles for minds that do a bunch of different things and have different things to offer the world. So, yeah, I kind of have a lint into maybe not fitting the mold as a way of saying why would a body be indicative of the kind of mind within it? Yeah. I mean, all of us believe that intellectually,

don't judge a book by its cover, right? Oh, no, that is, people, oh, hot people get so much privilege. Like, people feel that way. They feel resentment towards attractive people, honestly. Or people who fit a certain mold often. And we recite phrases like, don't judge a book by its cover,

but then in practice we sort of have these like deep assumptions that we apply to each other. So why approach this issue via philosophy, right? A lot of folks in the activism world and the medical world have touched on this. What do you bring to it as a philosopher? Yeah, it's a great question. So I'm a moral philosopher specifically,

and a lot of what I do is try to debunk the idea that there are certain moral obligations that I don't think exist. So one thing I've done a lot in my previous work on misogyny is say, women are often held to these weird standards where we have to be submissive and deferential and kind of deliver service with a smile within patriarchy. And that's bunk. Like, that's not a real moral obligation. Everyone should be treated the same regardless of gender

and held to the same obligations. And here there is a very similar thing that goes on with fat people, where we are basically held to be morally obligated not to be fat, to make ourselves thin, or at least to try really, really freaking hard to be thin people. And that if we don't meet that moral obligation, we're seen as like blameworthy. And so as a philosopher, I wanted to debunk that partly on the basis of this argument that is very common to give in my discipline, which is ought in place can. So you're only obligated to do something that you can realistically actually pull off. And it turns out that the empirical evidence on weight loss shows that most of us can lose weight temporarily, but the weight doesn't really stay off for the vast majority of people.

This idea that we're in long-term, minute control of how we look in general and our body size in particular, it's just not true. Most people don't have that kind of control. So yeah, I wanted to intervene and say, I just don't think there's morally anything wrong with fat people and this common sense that we're somehow doing something wrong simply by existing in our bodies, that itself is a moral problem.

Yeah, before we continue on the moral problem, which I find really interesting, I'll say that I've done plenty of work. I've talked to plenty of medical professionals about how possible it is to lose weight and the problems with the sort of biggest loser idea of weight loss and how that weight almost always comes back,

that there's like a rubber band effect. And there are plenty of things one can do to improve one's overall health. Sometimes those have an effect on weight. But I also think that like, if we look at our own experience, you know, I work out a lot more than I used to, you know, 10 years ago. But I was born with this, you know, pot belly

and I will die with it. You know what I mean? It's not going anywhere. I can sort of work on the margins a little bit. I can be fitter, I can be less fit. I can gain, you know, when I quit drinking, I lost 15 pounds, right? You know, like that's that.

And that was a durable change in my life. But the number of durable changes you can make are like not that large and the effect is not that large. And so like in practice, we all know that there are like really strong biological limits on what you can actually do on a personal level. And so let's just accept that as a given for the rest of the conversation.

Great. What I find really interesting that you said is that it is a moral issue because of course so many people think, oh, if you're fat, it's your own fault, you should do something about it. I think it's actually a little bit novel for you just to point out to me, oh, if you're fat, it's your own fault, you should do something about it. I think it's actually a little bit novel for you just to point out to me, oh, we do, without even thinking about it,

treat it as an issue of morality. Like it's about goodness and right and wrong. Not just about you could or you should, but like you're morally obligated to and there is something wrong with you if you don't, you have sinned. If you do not. Like it's moral.

So talk more about why do we treat it that way? Yeah, I mean, there's something really weird and insidious for me as someone who, yeah, tries to think about what moral obligations are real and what ones are false, that every time I went on a diet and I've been on endless, endless, countless diets of every type and variation, I would feel virtuous, like I was being a good person. And I mean, that makes so little sense because nowadays we usually think that being moral is about helping other people and doing something good for other people and also other sentient creatures.

Like making the world a better place is really what morality is about. So I think there are these deep religious sources of the idea that our bodies are the site for purity and morality, and that there is a way that we treat our bodies that will be subject to moral blame and condemnation if we're not in tight control of how our bodies look as a result supposedly of eating habits. Which just belies the facts that you just gave that for most of us, we kind of have a set point weight. And for most of us, that set point is the result, most of all of genetics and that weight is almost as heritable as height. So the amount of variation we find in the human population when it comes to weight, that is about 70% due to genetics.

And to put that in perspective for height, it's 80%. So height is not regarded as something we can control, but weight is almost as heritable. Well, and the other piece of height is what, environment, nutrition, and that sort of thing, right? Which we also can't control. Yeah. And also affects weight. So the fact that someone is like not able to get a lot of sleep

and doesn't have access to leisure spaces and fresh foods and whatnot, that does have an effect plausibly on some people's body size. And it's also not something that they have a lot of control over because we live in a deeply segregated and unjust society where people have differential access to those kinds of goods and resources. Yeah. And then of course, the food environment that we have built for ourselves as a society, with I don't need to get into that, but we all have our opinions about it.

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and you will get $10 dropped right into your account. Terms apply, that's money, that's Cash App. I think it's really interesting that you say cleanliness. Something that I only realized a few years ago is that when we talk about morality and I love that we started by talking about fat phobia, and now we're just talking about the nature of morality, but we have all these, you know, there are the moral obligations that we talk about most often,

like our obligation to help others. But a lot of people do have moral judgments around things like cleanliness. For example, is like a really deep rooted one in human society, that things that are like unclean are also immoral. Where do you feel that comes from? And just talk more about how fatness connects to uncleanliness.

That's actually a brilliant question because there's a really concrete mechanism that makes us confuse these things without our kind of rationally endorsing this, which is that the way a particular emotion works discussed is that if we feel disgusted by something because it's dirty or it's contaminated or we think it will make us sick, like a food, that disgust, once it's aroused in the body, easily becomes confused with moral disgust. So there is a very short route from feeling grossed out by something to feeling morally

judgmental about it. And that is a rational, It often is irrational in that we don't endorse it rationally, and it has nothing to do with an argument or even a particular cultural tradition, oftentimes. It's just that when we feel visceral disgust, that translates into being morally judgmental about things in ways that are really weird. So there's this famous experiment where researchers sat participants at this dirty, disgusting desk where there were like used Kleenexes and like an old disgusting pizza box

and like, and they sprayed a gross smell in one iteration. Can I just say, this is when research is fun, right? Because like you're a grad student and then your supervisor is like, hey, you gotta make a disgusting desk. Just think of every way you can to make this desk gross. You're like, that's a pretty fun Wednesday. I mean, it really was.

They had this other version of the experiment where they showed participants a picture of a disgusting toilet. Like they really got creative. But anyway, so then they gave people a scenario where someone was behaving in a completely innocent way. So it was actually like a scenario about a student council person trying to bring up discussions of widespread mutual interest at meetings, which is totally

fine to do morally, like he was trying to have good discussions and people said about this council person, oh, I don't know what he's up to, but it just seems wrong. This guy just seems so weird and disgusting. He seems like a popularity seeking snob. Like they had all these completely spurious judgments about, again, this completely benign innocent behavior just because their visceral disgust mechanisms got triggered. I think exactly the same thing happens to fat people. Fat people trigger oftentimes visceral disgust, especially if they're portrayed in media like as headless fatties, as Charlotte

Cooper puts it, like they're just like big bodies that are eating too much and not walking the right way we think they should walk and enable a society. And that visceral disgust makes people reach for moral explanations why that person must have done something wrong. Does that make sense? Like there's just this very concrete way in which we're confusing these visceral reactions with moral reactions and coming to have these judgments that are not reflective of rational argumentation, they're not reflective of real values we hold.

They're just based on kind of these very primitive bodily reactions to images or people that are Wrongly portrayed as disgusting what you're saying Just so many things in human society are clicking into place for me while you're saying it I'm thinking about how you know sort of Robert F. Kennedy jr. Types like people who are like I take care of my body, how sort of moralistically they speak to everybody else. Oh, well, I don't do that. Oh, I don't put that in my body.

Oh, oh, well, I work out. Oh, well, I do this, right? And like, it's a sense of superiority and a sense of judgment of other people. And like, that's what is going on there. It's the confusion of, you know, they are treating themselves with a sense of purity. Other people are unclean,

and there's a moral judgment attached to that to them. And I'm also thinking about how many religions end up having moral sort of codes around like food preparation or other bodily things, sort of that kind of moral judgment becoming codified in, I don't know, a number of commandments, say. And it happens really easily for the following reason. So disgust is a weird emotion

because once one person shows it towards a particular thing, other people come to share that emotion. And that made evolutionary sense because like if there's a contaminated food source or a pathogen, it's good that one person getting grossed out by a food can kind of communicate just through their bodies that that food is not good to consume. And so disgust, if one person shows disgust towards a particular kind of person or a particular kind of even like practice or policy or yeah, kind of food that you

might consume, other people will often come to share that disgusted response. And that's how these social norms that are often, yeah, very big part of religion, very big part of purity culture, and a very big part, I think too, of secular culture, they get going quickly and they stick. Because the other thing about disgust worth knowing is it's very hard to eradicate. Once you feel it, like if you've ever had the experience of like consuming a food and then getting sick afterwards, that is one shot conditioning.

You'll often be disgusted by it for the rest of your life. Right, yeah, I can never have a white Russian ever again because of what happened to me in college, you know? Guava juice for me, yeah. Guava juice? I know, I mean, that's not like a huge source of nutrition to knock out of your life. Yeah, luckily you don't encounter it that often,

but still, yeah, it like becomes deeply rooted. So why do you think that if we're having that immediate bodily reaction of disgust, why do people have that when simply being near a fat person? Is there something natural about that feeling? Or, I mean, you also said it's caused by depictions in the media, right? And so, yeah.

So there I think the answer is actually racism. So there's this really important natural question that you just brought up of, well, why do we find fat bodies more disgusting? Because they're just bodies. People, in my view, just come in different shapes and sizes. Bodies not only change, they're very various. And why are we like prone to be disgusted towards the fatter ones? And what I think the sociologist Sabrina Strings has shown is that fatphobia is this very recent historical bias. So compare it to misogyny, which is about as old as agriculture and no one even knows where it comes from because it's just so old. Fatphobia is basically a kind of 18th century invention, at least in its modern form. It's not to say that everyone has always been

totally cool about fat bodies, but there was a lot less judgment about them and often to positive judgments that would attach especially to white women who were fat. And you see this in like 16th century art where you often have like bigger fleshier body like, you know, prototypically like a Rubens painting where the body is actually being appreciated for being a body that like mine has been like historically. And that shifted in the 18th century. And what string shows is that what happened was

racist white colonists had to find a way to separate out white bodies from the black bodies who were being enslaved so brutally and in ever burgeoning numbers in the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century onwards. And the way they did that was to say purely from the armchair that black bodies were fatter. Now, this is not based on like observation. Often these were just garbage scientists who had never been to the relevant parts of Africa. But it was a pretext for saying white bodies and black bodies are more quote unquote primitive and animalistic, closer to nature, and are kind of suitable for being put to work because they're kind of so fat and sturdy. And so basically what happened was it wasn't that fatness was seen as bad and then associated with blackness. It went the other way historically.

Blackness was associated with blackness. It went the other way historically. Blackness was associated with fatness and that's when fatness began to seem disgusting to people. So it comes from anti-black racism. And how do we know this? I mean, does it show up in literature or are there any examples of how we know this? Yeah, so Strings' book, which I really recommend to folks.

It's called fearing the black body, the racial origins of fat phobia documents like this shift in the discourse. And you see it in encyclopedias. You see it in letters. You see it in, um, the way that particular bodies, like the so-called hot and hot Venus were depicted, shifting at this time where suddenly there was this emphasis on the fat black body and fat black female bodies such as that of Sarah Bartman, the real name of the woman who was enslaved and

called the hot and hot Venus and displayed as like almost a circus freak in London and Paris during this period. People began to see that kind of body as like worthy of gawking at in a disgusted way, but also kind of fascinating in that way. Disgust can often make us fascinated with particular things that are deemed disgusting, but also repelled by them. So it's a kind of push-pull emotion where we're drawn to the disgusting object.

We kind of want to gawk at it, but we don't want to tangle with it. And that's actually very similar to the way fat bodies today are often seen as, you know, worth searching for in pornography. So fat bodies are a very common search term in pornography. But fat women who are searched for are often not deemed suitable partners for dating and marriage and so on. So it's like an attraction, but also a disgust.

It's like push call. Yeah. I mean, I believe that the story that you're telling is like, has causal weight and is like part of the story. I guess I'm like, I'm searching also for more, right? I mean, racism. Yeah, there's another piece of it. Do you want the other piece?

Please. It's class. Oh, yes. So this is what I call the harder, better fallacy, which is we have this idea that's kind of enshrined in, again, religious thought, cultural practices, that if something is hard to do, then it's morally superior. Now, historically, before the advent of easy access to calorically dense foods, it was

actually hard to get a fatter body. It cost more money and thus fatness was a sign of wealth and prosperity. So yeah, the harder thing to achieve, which was being a plump woman because food was scarcer and there wasn't as much sugar and access to this calorically dense food, that was seen as the good way to be, the cool way to be because it was a sign of being high class. Now, that has reversed. In a food environment where calories are abundant and there's very little in the way of absolute food scarcity, so of course there's a lot of deprivation, but it's often deprivation of fresh foods in say the Anglo-American context rather than just sheer cal of deprivation, but it's often deprivation of fresh foods in say the Anglo

American context, rather than just sheer caloric deprivation. What you find is that people are now drawn to bodies that are harder to achieve that are the advent of diet, exercise, expensive meal kits, peloton bikes, and all of these forms of investment, now as Zempik too, that are very much more accessible to wealthier people. So it's that harder, better thing, the thinner, the harder and thus the better in our eyes. Okay. That, that really completes the puzzle for me. Look, the, the advent of slavery and the,

the specific racism that came along with it, explains so many things in our culture. And I believe that this is one of them, but I was like, I also feel like there must be more going on than just that. And, but I think the combination of these forces together really makes it add up to me, especially because,

look, I said I work out more than I did 10 years ago. Part of that is because I can now afford to work with a trainer, which I was not able to before. And I now set my own schedule, whereas I did not before. And so I have, you know, twice a week, I go work out at 10 a.m. where most people aren't able to. And I'm able to shop at the fancy grocery store and et cetera. I feel very lucky to be able to do those things.

I'm also very aware while I do them, not everybody can. And that like, I could look at that and say, oh, well I'm able to do the hard thing because I'm so great and successful and hardworking, but I have a little bit more awareness than that of how lucky I am in this life. And so instead I see it as being, oh, this is something that I'm fortunate to be able to do. Yeah. And I mean, me too, like I'm thinner than I would be now because I get a lot of sleep. So one thing that is like underestimated in all of this is it's not just food and exercise,

although that's part of the picture that determines body makeup. A lot of it is also just random aging, changing our, like, you know, way our bodies are constituted at any given time. But people who are sleep deprived are often like really much hungrier, crave particular kinds of food. I experienced this myself when I am sleep deprived. I'm ravenously hungry the next day. Like if I get two hours of sleep, I am, like we have to get up early and go to the airport, right? And I got like three hours of sleep.

That is when I'm like, yeah, I'm having a fucking five guys breakfast in the airport terminal, right? I don't give a shit, I need to eat it. So- And now compare someone who works three jobs, is working minimum wage, doesn't have access to a lot of pleasures and comforts, and so might be looking for a relatively cheap source

of a break, a relief, something fun. And yeah, that will contribute to being in a phase of life or maybe even for a lifetime, having more disposition to go after like the candy bar rather than the, I don't know, overpriced Air 1 snacks that you have access to and I have access to the Ithaca equivalent. Yeah. So yeah, there's just a level of class privilege that makes certain bodies read as rich and privileged in a way that does reflect the social structures and the accessibility of certain goods that makes them also aesthetically kind of prestigious.

Yeah. So that's a big part of it. And I think that's a great point that you raised because we talked earlier about the limited effect that personal choices can make on our weight, which we've talked about extensively. But then we don't talk often enough about how the structure of a society

means that certain people are also not able to make the good choices that are available to you, right? Like there's plenty of people who have privilege and money and time and good sleep, who still don't get good sleep and money and time and good sleep, who still don't get good sleep and they don't, you know, like they have the option of doing all these things, but they don't. But there's far more people who just because they work so many jobs, they, they make so little money, they have so little time.

They're not able, not able in their lives to do these things. Yeah. And look, I want to make it clear. I think a bigger factor is still genetics. I think the evidence points to the fact that most of us have a certain body type, and also certain ways in which fat accumulates. You talked about, for you, it sounded like fat accumulates more in the abdominal region.

For me, it's like hips and butt, and that's the kind of shape that I was born with or rather had since puberty, at least. And- You haven't seen my hips and butt yet, all right? So I'm not, I'm sitting down, but- Well, same, but that kind of thing, I think, is really genetically determined.

But then, yes, at the edges, there are some people who through the advent of like huge amounts of time, money, effort, bandwidth, and also yeah, that, um, that sheer degree of privilege can make themselves thinner than they otherwise would be in ways that are just simply unsustainable for the vast majority of Americans in ways that, yeah, really mean that very thin bodies in particular, and this is more true than ever with the advent of GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic and Wigovi and Manjaro and so on, those bodies are coded as super wealthy, super elite, and thus the kinds of bodies we aspire to, because they signal wealth. And we always like the bodies that signal wealth.

It's just that that used to be fat bodies, and now it's very thin bodies. I imagine some people listening might say that, well, another reason we might have that reaction to fat bodies is because they signify health, right? Or lack of health, and that we have that, a disgust reaction or a moral reaction for that reason.

And I just wanna voice that because some people might be thinking it. And what would you say to it? So the relationship between weight and health is complicated, but one immediate problem with that understandable question is that on average, underweight bodies have real health problems. And yet they're often the bodies that we hold up as the healthiest in ways that don't reflect the

actual statistics on mortality and morbidity. So the relationship between weight and health basically looks like a U-shaped curve. And one fact that people often find surprising is that the healthiest place to be at in the BMI charts, which are very problematic, have a gross racist history that I can get into later, but let's use them as like a reference point. The healthiest BMI to have in terms of mortality on average is an overweight BMI. So people who have overweight BMI. So people who have a BMI between 25 and 30, which includes me for the record,

we're in the healthiest weight class in terms of overall mortality statistics. Why is this weight class called overweight? If it's Exactly. Medical researchers and epidemiologists decisions about what they think people should look like is the answer. It's not to do with over weight where you start to get health problems. That is just not the case. It's a common misconception. The healthiest people are the ones right here, but they're not the hottest. So we'll call that overweight. It's basically what's going on.

It's pretty much exactly what's going on. I mean, it started with insurance tables and people trying to estimate the healthiest weights to be at for a very particular class of people, namely white men who were employed and thus looking to buy health insurance at the beginning of the 20th century. But those weight classes were never revised to reflect the fact that when you look

at the broader population, there are many classes of people who actually do better at a higher weight, particularly black women do better at a higher weight than any comparable subgroup. And yet, they're still subject to the same BMI classifications, which people have thus, I think, fairly argued that they're just unintentionally racist standards. The other aspect of these tables that people don't always appreciate is that people who are in the moderately obese category, so with a BMI between 30 and 35, have the same mortality risk statistically as people in the normal weight category. So in other words, if you're fat, if you're in the obese category, it takes until you

get to a BMI of about 35 or 40, which again, for the record I have been at, um, in order to see any elevated mortality risks. Whereas people who are underweight, you see elevated mortality risks. Whereas people who are underweight, you see elevated mortality risks pretty quickly after you get below that BMI cutoff of 18.5. Look, I think that almost the beginning of your answer was enough, all that was interesting, but like the moment that you said

that underweight people also have health risks, and yet we don't have that feeling of revulsion for underweight people also have health risks, and yet we don't have that feeling of revulsion for underweight people, right? We don't see someone who is like, I mean, people who have had cancer or other diseases will say, people go, oh my God, you look great, right? But when they've actually lost weight because of a health issue.

And so we don't have that immediate disgust reaction when we see someone who's on an unhealthy part of the chart in one direction. So why do we do it in the other? I think that rebutts the idea that the only reason we have that reaction is because of we have some innate understanding of the health risks of BMI. We clearly don't because we're only having one direction. And, you know, this really affects how people's medical care plays out too. So I open one of the chapters in my book about this by looking at cases where someone had been classified

as overweight or even obese and had lost a bunch of weight. And yeah, it turns out they had cancer. So I look at two of these cases, which are unfortunately quite common where doctors are like, Hey, good for you. You're fine. Even though the person is experiencing pain or side effects or weird blood test results and they need treatment because they're losing weight fast. And that is actually a sign of health problems, not a sign that they're doing something right or going in the right direction. Um, and if a doctor just listened to them saying,

I'm actually feeling ill, uh, they might still be with us. Insane. -♪ Folks, this episode is brought to you by Alma. You know, isn't it wild how the things we turn to for comfort often end up making us feel worse? I mean, I've definitely caught myself doomscrolling or getting stuck in endless social media loops that leave me feeling more disconnected from the world around me. And in a time when we're stretched so thin between our physical and digital lives,

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to get started and schedule a free consultation today. That's helloalma.com slash factually. Do we have an ability to, I know we're really dwelling on this disgust reaction, but it is fascinating to me. Is it something that we have the ability to change about ourselves or about human society or how deep is it? Because it's one of those problems that can be kind of intractable.

It does feel a bit intractable to me. I mean, here's one reason I'm optimistic. So queer folks in the 70s were subject to a huge amount of homophobic disgust. That really shifted, at least in progressive and liberal circles through the 90s and early 2000s. Unfortunately, it looks like it's shifting back. I don't know how permanent that progress has been, unfortunately. It does look like groups of people who were subject to really horrible and bigoted disgust reactions that are somewhat analogous, people were able to cut through that with rational argument and say, like, who cares about the gender of the person you're sleeping with?

Who cares about, you know, including things like your particular sexual practices, none of my business. And that's not a basis for having a bad visceral reaction or a bad moral reaction. And we made progress there. Maybe we can make it again when it comes to people in larger bodies. That's what gives me some hope on this score.

But you're right, it takes a lot of work and a lot of activism. That is such a good point though, that I don't think we have the limit to progressive circles. I would say across American society, massively less people have a disgust reaction to homosexuality than they used to. If they were to see two men holding hands,

two women kissing, right, whatever. If they're to see it, go to a pride parade, right? And when I was growing up in the 90s, a lot of people would be like, ugh, ugh, you know? And now I just, objectively less, there's objectively less people feeling that way. Now, that's not to say that other communities aren't experiencing that right now,

or that we're seeing a sort of horrifying swing back in the other direction. But I do think that, I mean, I suppose we might, it might be good to see if somebody's measured this, if someone has done any work on how people's like immediate disgust reactions as a measure of the population has been to queer people. But I think your point is well taken

that like this is something that clearly we don't just have to accept that there's this deep down disgust reaction that is part of biology or like innate morality that we can't get around. Like we are humans and we are rational to at least some degree and we can change the way that we feel in the structure of human society via rational argument.

At least that's what a philosopher should hope to think. I mean, that's the only reason for doing what I do, right? And in other ways I would be completely laboring in vain. I mean, they have done interesting studies that show, like it's a mixed bag because measures of implicit bias show that on all of these categories of bias, including homosexuality, including ethnicity,

skin tone, disability and age, people have been getting less biased, both implicitly and explicitly. But the one category where people were getting worse that they measured, these Harvard researchers, was weight. So that was the one form of implicit bias that was actually on the rise. And it was a form of explicit bias that was decreasing the most slowly when they finished the study in 2016.

So yeah, I think that has a lot to do with like stigmatizing and medicalizing and pathologizing fat bodies and the fact that we haven't seen as much uptake of the amazing activism around this issue that we definitely have, but we haven't seen that kind of really cross into the mainstream in quite the way that we have when it comes to queer folks. Yeah, and that's really fascinating because we live in a society in which more and more people are classified as obese every day, right?

More and more people are struggling with their weight. More and more people fall into the category of people who have this bias leveled against them. And yet we are not seeing the sort of cultural turn towards having this conversation in a more productive way. Why do you think that is? That is really interesting question because there's this idea that's very prevalent,

and I think it's a myth that the more contact you have with people who are in some other group, basically the more tolerant you'll become, the less prejudice, less bigoted and so on. That's not true. It's just not true, I think. Look at fat people, we're between two-thirds and three-quarters of the American population, depending on how you slice the data. And yet, it looks like as fat people have increased in number, not as dramatically as is often thought, but there has been an uptick in fatness, people have actually gotten more prejudiced.

And so what I think that is down to is not all forms of difference and marginalization give rise to political solidarity. So especially when you're fat, and I think a lot of listeners will probably have this reaction, when you're fat, you often feel like there's a thin person waiting to get out that you're not like truly fat deep in your soul. It's that you don't really identify as fat. You're just, you have this temporary problem that the next diet or exercise program or course of GLP ones will fix.

And so you don't think of yourself as like in this group in a way that is in reality, pretty permanent for most of us. And if we exit the group of fat people, it'll be probably more accidentally than deliberately. But they think of themselves, yeah, as not really having to commit to a fat politics and a fat solidarity. They think of themselves as having a personal problem that they should solve as an individual rather than being in community with other folks who are bigger.

And that's kind of a big part of why I wrote this book. I want to be in community with, well, everyone who's marginalized, but especially in this context, larger people who I don't want to be fleeing from this category. I want to be saying, yeah, we need to be treated better. You know, what that makes me think is why is why do people treat it as this personal problem? The word that comes to my mind is shame. That people feel shame for being fat.

And that shame is an emotion of, you know, I am wrong, something's wrong with me, and I can't tell anybody about it, right? It's my own problem. And it separates you from other people. That's really insightful. I mean, that's my story. I had like imbibed fat activist content at the age of 20

and really gotten the message rationally that this is a form of prejudice. People come in different shapes and sizes. There's not a huge amount you can do about your body type. And really, we should get over this socially. But I didn't use the word fat about myself, despite being at times very fat and always at least recognizably fat, until I had a kid. And that was my impetus for feeling like the huge shame I had felt that like, it's visceral. It's the internal echo of other people's disgust. And what it does is it bows your head, your eyes lower. You want to disappear if you're ashamed.

Sometimes you even want to like, you know, unalive yourself. Like that's what really, really chronic and toxic shame can do to people. And that feeling of like intense shame can be like a real barrier to the political solidarity that I think is lacking around this issue. Um, and yeah, it was, I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, but it was me having a child in 2019 where I finally thought like, I can't live in this shame faced way anymore and be perpetually trying to shrink myself. I actually need to lift my head, look other fat folks in the eye and try to form like

real solidarity that goes beyond the intellectual and have community with other people who are fat in a way that is a bulwark against shame and is deeply resistant to the shaming of mainstream culture. Yeah, and you know what that connects to is, you were just talking about queer liberation over the last 50 years, it connects to pride, right? Like what is, there's a very clear rhyme there

of gay people feeling, there's something wrong with me, I'm ashamed, I can't tell anybody the experience of being in the closet versus being proud and saying this is who I am and I am proud of it. And here I am and finding community with other people who are declaring themselves to be proud, even if they're carrying a little shame inside. That declaration is really powerful.

It creates the opportunity for solidarity and it tells other people don't be disgusted, right? Because here I am, I got no problem. Why would you have a problem? That's exactly it. Like that's where I end up in the book is thinking, look, it's not that pride will do everything to fix this because we also need structural changes. We need like more accommodating spaces and bigger seats and like doctors that aren't prejudice and whatnot. both queer and trans and black pride movements is such an important part of resisting fat phobia because it is like a way of saying, I'm rejecting the shame that you've heaped on me via your

disgust. I just am what and who I am and that is valid. And that is a really powerful way to push back and resist that shaming. And I do think it has a lot to do with why plausibly we've gotten real progress around queer issues. And until recently, we had real progress on trans issues that was similarly like about resisting a shame that was visited on trans folks unjustly. Yeah. So yeah, I hope that we can, as fat people, kind of emulate and find within a movement

that same spirit of like lifting our heads, looking up, looking at each other. Well, my philosophy about, you know, what's happened with trans people in this country is just the coming out process is happening at a delayed time, right? That like we went through gay liberation, we went through people coming out in the 80s and 90s.

And there's just been a lag with trans acceptance, right? That like I met my first trans person, my first friend who transitioned 10 years after my first friend came out. And T was in the acronym the whole time, but most people did not become aware of the literal existence of trans people. Didn't see one in person,

didn't see someone in the media until more recently. And now we're going through the same cycle again, right? It's like, but my belief has always been, hey, that political process of coming out, pride, right, has to work again because it worked so effectively in the past and it's sort of the tool that we have. I just love the analog here that this same strategy of solidarity, pride, anti-shame could be effective

in this other area. I think it's a wonderful vision. I mean, I think there is this aspect of the lag, but there's also this aspect of backlash. Oh, absolutely. Which, yeah, is such a powerful thing when it comes to misogyny too. It just, there's never a simple linear progress narrative.

I think Tressie McMillan Cardam puts it best when she talks about the do-si-do dance of progress and backlash. Like it's not even that there's progress and then backlash, it's that these things are in lockstep. Like precisely because we've made all this progress, this meaningful progress, say on trans issues, people, some people double down and are deeply bigoted and resistant

to a process that will inevitably keep going, I think, because this is something that's just too important to stop. And yet some people will become utterly violent, utterly irrational, and just kind of fixated on people who, let's face it, are not hurting them at all, are not setting back their interests, are just being themselves authentically. And yeah, similarly with fat people, the very success of the body liberation movement has meant that, yes, we saw some great strides. At the very same time, some people will see a person in a swimsuit who is fat and say, you're glorifying obesity. Go on a diet, you're unhealthy, you're going to die. Not because they have any fucking concern

for the health of that person, but because they just want to insult them. They want to down rank them. They want to say you are less than. So I think it's that same issue where the more progress we make, the more quickly, the more backlash we get, and the scarier it is to come out during that process.

Yeah. And yet we do want to build that movement. Yes, we have to. Yeah. So I'm curious about how do we do that? One facet of this I find really interesting is that you talked about how there is an uptick in the number of fat people,

but maybe not necessarily in the number of people who label themselves as fat. As you were saying that, I was thinking, well, I also know a lot of people who are not fat, but believe that they are on some level, right? Who look at themselves in the mirror and say, I'm fat, right? And that's such an odd facet of this question of self-identification,

that it is so complex. Why do you think that is? I mean, honestly, I get people accusing me of thinking that, and so I'm always very careful to say, I actually don't think I'm that fat right now, and that's an important piece of privilege to acknowledge. I think there is this very common move that is especially made against women and probably also other gender marginalized people, which is what I call like a down girl

move, which is to say like, absolutely regardless of what you look like and the amount of flesh on your bones, you're fat. And it's just a very quick way to downrank you and dismiss you and say that you're not worthy or not valuable. And I do think that can easily become internalized and people almost anticipate it and want to preempt it by saying, yes, I am fat. Even when they're not, they're not in really any position to be claiming a form of oppression because they're not having trouble fitting into spaces in society. They're not having trouble buying clothes.

They're not seen as anomalous when they go out in public. And so that to me is sort of the standard for fatness. Like do you have trouble fitting in because of your breadth or girth or heft, your weight? Like if yes, then you have a claim to fatness. If no, then not really. And so- The airplane seat test. Exactly.

Like as someone who currently has no trouble in that dimension, I feel like I don't really get to claim fatness. You know, even if whatever, like there are ways in which I don't conform to beauty standards in terms of body size or type. But yeah, like basically that's a test for are you substantially able to fit into society, including the proverbial airline seat?

But does that make sense? I do think some women especially, and again non-binary folks, internalize this down girl or down them move of they will admit fatness as a way to preempt a way in which they could be just quickly dismissed as less than even when all other moves fail. So like this is in a way why I originally got interested in fat phobia because I feel like it's one of the best tools misogyny has in its toolkit to down rank women. So my history of this is I was a girl at an all boys high school the year it integrated. Whoa.

So I was, it was really fucking unpleasant. I was one of three girls to hundreds of boys. Three, wow. So it wasn't 50 50 the first year. It was three to unpleasant. I was one of three girls to hundreds of boys. Three? Wow. So it wasn't 50-50 the first year. It was three to hundreds. Hundreds. Wow. And I was smart and capable and like good at debate

and drama and piano. And the best way to down rank me was to point out that I didn't conform to beauty standards and to say she's fat. And I mean, I always, I think, you know, then I kind of merely chubby teen, like I wasn't even that fat at that point, but it was just like, it was so effective. It was just a go-to move. So I had like fat bitch scrolled on my locker that I just had to live with for those two

years. That was the label that made me controllable and someone who could be dismissed because I wasn't valuable in that all-important dimension. And yeah, I can see what people are saying when they say, be careful now, Kate, to admit your privilege because I wouldn't wanna be one of those people who is understandably but unfairly claiming oppression at a moment and in a way that actually reflects more a kind of nervous, anxious preemption

of that criticism than it actually applying. anxious preemption of that criticism than it actually applying. Well, first of all, you went through like a crucible experience at this high school. I was like, holy shit. It explains, I think a lot of, this probably explains a lot about you. I feel like when people learn this about you,

they go, oh, holy shit. Okay, wow. That makes sense. What year of school was this? This is, um, 1999 and 2000. So as class of 2000, 42 now. Okay. So this was like towards the end of your high school experience.

Yes. This is my last two years. The reason I was sent there was I wanted to do IB international baccalaureate and go to Princeton or whatever. And from Australia, that's not so easy to do without getting an international high school leavers diploma. So there was a reason for it. It was the only school close enough to my house that offered this certificate.

It's not that my parents were trying to expose me to this hideous institutional misogyny, but that was the result. And yeah, it really explains like that original trauma is kind of what I've been trying to understand and theorize as a philosopher. Because you asked before, how do we make good on this and form solidaristic bonds? And I think a big part of it is, if you have a form of privilege, like for me now, institutional privilege, like intellectual privilege, we have to use that and spend that coin to try to like form that solidarity between people

and not just like abandon other folks who are in a much more vulnerable position as soon as we can. Yeah, you're describing basically everything I try to do on this show. I've had a very fortunate life. I'm in a very fortunate social position here in the US. And I basically just try to spend that coin on behalf of other people.

I spend it on myself sometimes too. I make use of it. You don't wanna waste what God gave you. But at the same time, I'm like, yeah, that's sort of the goal the goal here, right? Is to, it's the whole thing. Is to, is to make sure that we're standing up for others who, who don't have the same privileges that we do.

Um, is yeah, that that's one of the only ways that we make progress, or at least one of the only ways that's one of the best things I can do in my position to help that progress. Um, so, well, what I'm curious about is, so you describe that sort of feeling of or at least one of the only ways, that's one of the best things I can do in my position to help that progress. So, well, what I'm curious about is, so you described that sort of feeling of a non-fat by any measure person looking in the mirror saying, I am fat, right? That so many people experience.

It's like a curse on so many people's lives. This, you know, even if they have no, you know, physically they are not fat, they feel it in this way that is painful. I know people who have grappled with this. As this sort of like preemption of criticism, this sort of internalized misogyny, I'm curious if that is something that we can leverage

to help build that solidarity. If everybody is, or every woman especially, is subject to that criticism, is that something we can use to build solidarity between people on this issue? You know, I think it is. I mean, it's a double-edged sword, again, because we have to be really careful to say,

like, where we're coming from and what kinds of privilege mean that we don't necessarily get someone else's struggle completely. This is really interesting with fatness because fatness is so linear. Even someone who is very fat, suppose they're 300 pounds and they don't necessarily have any idea what it is to live a life of someone who's 600 pounds and struggling with very different challenges and forms of oppression. There's this difficult thing where because fatness can progress from not fat at all to all of these different levels of it from in the parlance of fat activists, small fat,

mid fat, large fat, and then fat activists like Ash Nishchuk, who's really brilliant, coined the term, InfiniFat, to be like, okay, I'm just as big as it gets. That captures the way that I think we both have to form solidarity with each other on the basis of those shared experiences, but also observe correctly that there are limitations to how much I get it. I think Aubrey Gordon has a really brilliant way of just sort of walking this fine line where she both wants to acknowledge that, look, a lot of people, especially people marginalized in virtue of some other facet of their identities

will experience some kind of fatphobia. However, if someone says, oh, I totally get your struggle, Aubrey, and she is someone who identifies as a large fat woman, they are often saying something like, well, I had a bad body image day. I felt fat. And they're not recognizing that she might be marched off an airplane because she's perceived as not fitting or that she might be unable to receive anything by way of adequate healthcare and just dismissed as too fat because in one case she had an ear infection. And as she said to her doctor, my ears didn't get fat. Why are you bringing

up my weight in this context? And so I think we can both observe the commonalities but also the differences. And the way I try to do that is with the metaphor I offer of the straight jacket of fat phobia. So it kind of constrains all of us. And in particular, it's often saying even to small women, do not get fatter, do not get above this size or else. But it's like actively cutting into the flesh of people who are larger and hurting them. And so that's kind of what I try to,

and saying also that they're crazy for being that way. I just love how physical and visceral this metaphor is where you're like, yeah, the straight jacket effect affects everybody, but the straight jacket sucks a lot more of your fat. Yeah, which is true. And also it says that you're crazy. Yeah. I think, I think that it's a wonderful metaphor. Um, I think that to me, I use the word solidarity a lot

because I'm a union guy. I think that true solidarity means acknowledging what we all have in common, the pressures that we are all under together. That is the first step of solidarity to say we're all in it together. And then the second step is to recognize the differences that we have. and to say that, you know, I don't understand everything about someone else's experience who I have solidarity with. Solidarity involves me saying,

you and I are in the same boat and also you have a completely different experience. And so I am going to put the work in to understand your experience and how we differ. And we're both going to give ourselves grace in that interchange, right? To misunderstand or to take a second to catch up, we're gonna stay open-minded. We're gonna, like that's the experience of solidarity

is to recognize sameness and difference together in a way that has capacity for both. Yeah, I love that. I think that's exactly right. And, you know, it's also possible to overestimate how hard that is. It's in a way not that hard to be like, you know, I have friends of mine who are trans women

and we can totally recognize like ways in which we are being over policed and subject to misogyny and trans misogyny and transmisogyny, and there's so much that we have in common. And at the same time, it would be really wrong for me as a cis woman to assume I knew everything there was to know about what it's like to be embodied in that way and subject to say, certain kinds of street harassment and potentially violence that is not going to be my experience walking down the street. So yeah, like a bit of like sensitivity and thoughtfulness is often all it takes to navigate that.

Yeah, but I also think, you know, the fact that you don't understand that experience doesn't mean you cannot be part of that movement or part of the struggle or that you shouldn't speak, you know, at a meeting or something like that. It's a, we are all, solidarity means we're all in it together and we're all gonna give ourselves the grace to get there together in a way that has capacity

for that difference. So. Yeah, I totally agree. So yeah, I think that everybody can be a part of the, of this movement that you're talking about. That's the important part. We all have a part that we can play. I have a really brilliant student.

I mean, all my students are brilliant, but this particular student, Amy Ramirez. Some of them aren't brilliant, but that's nice of you to say. You know, it takes a lot to become a graduate student in Cornell's philosophy department. So, you know, it's like, but this particular student who I'm thinking of,

Amy Ramirez, wrote her dissertation partly on the idea that if we can't speak for other people at all, then some people will never get any advocacy. So she talks about her own experience as someone who is a South Korean adoptee of both Persian and Puerto Rican parents who adopted her. That's a pretty unique social position in terms of ethnicity and race. If we can only speak for people who are exactly the same as us, she is going to get precisely no advocacy. And so this idea that we have to be silent until we have exactly the same positionality

as someone else is so pernicious and false. For one thing, we can listen to each other. That's what we're doing, it's what you do on your show, it's hopefully what I do when I teach scholars who are marginalized in ways that I have never experienced, say as a white person, we're listening, we're hearing testimony, we're trying to get it in ways that are often very achievable just by like, yeah, the act of bearing witness to other people's struggles.

I love that. So let's talk about what we're fighting for here because you talk about remaking the world to fit fat bodies into it, right? What does that mean to you? What is the world that we're trying to build? You know, some of it is like highfalutin and a lot to imagine like total acceptance of

every body size and shape as well as other kinds of diversity. But some of it is so concrete and easy. So I know you've interviewed my dear friend, Matt Desmond on your podcast and we're having this conversation where I was like, Matt, am I asking for too much? Like wanting justice for fat people in my classroom? And he's like, Kate, no, like some things are really hard, like open borders, but you're asking for chairs without arms. We can do chairs without arms.

Like, you know, the idea that we might have just a physical space that needs some basic accommodation because people might not be comfortable in chairs that like cut into their bodies. If they're tall as well as being wider, this is like basic stuff. And yet when I bring it up to people at my institution, which for the record, you know, Cornell is a wealthy place still, at least at the time of utterance, you know, under some federal assault like most of these premier research institutions, but we could do so much more to just think about, okay, what do we have in terms of navigable space? How big is the passage? Is the chair big enough for every size of body? Have we just thought about basic bodily inclusion

that of course includes, but also goes beyond the idea that someone might be a wheelchair user, they also might be a fat person who needs a certain kind of chair that suits their shape and weight. So that's just an example, but again, like this actually is not so expensive. It's not so cost prohibitive. It's not so difficult. It also reminds me of the disability rights movement, which we talked about on this show many times where, uh, you know, part of the, part of the message, uh,

as I understand it is like, Hey, there are a lot of things about the world that if we were to, you know, redesign them in just in the same way we redesign a chair or anything that we build, a lot of so-called disabilities would not in fact be disabling if we were to simply make accommodations, right? Completely. Reasonable accommodations. I mean, and I think the people often ask me about the intersection between fatness and

disability and I don't think of fatness as a disability in and of itself, but there's a huge intersection between fatness and disability. Many fat folks are disabled and many disabled folks are fat. In both cases and in the case of the overlap, we need to think of our job differently. Like the job isn't just to plunk down a room and have chairs that look like standard chairs, it's to think who deserves, needs, and like just as a matter of basic rights should have access to this space and how, what does that look like to accommodate them adequately? Yeah. And sometimes it might surprise us like, you know,

fat folks, for example, need longer needles to really get into the muscle of their arm when it comes to vaccines in order to be maximally effective. Fat folks need different forms of birth control, which are only approved when it comes to plan B for people up to 150 pounds, which is a pretty low weight limit

when it comes to effective morning after pills. These are things that we might actually have to look into and do some research and figure out material solutions that again, are not so difficult, but oftentimes it's just a sense of a standard issue body and that's all we need to accommodate. Yeah. Well, beyond just redesigning the world around us,

like a phrase that comes up is fat liberation, right? What does liberation mean more broadly as something that we can envision ourselves moving towards? So I think it means a lot of things. It means really adequate healthcare, including mental healthcare for fat folks that isn't just mired in the kinds of biases that we've been talking about. Fat people face so many forms of discrimination within the healthcare system, which means

that oftentimes the fact that fat people do have somewhat elevated mortality risks at very high weights could be due to the fact that they're not getting the healthcare they need and deserve rather than sheer weight. That's a possibility worth highlighting. But we also need to have very different conceptions of fat people, that fat people are smart and capable and good and that if we're missing out on fat people, when it comes to employment opportunities, when it comes to education, when it comes to, you know, for that matter, who is able to act in Hollywood, then what we're doing is we're

missing out on fat talent. is we're missing out on fat talent. We're missing out on some of the best minds and most talented people of our generation. I mean, I think about some of my absolute favorite writers like Roxanne Gay and Carmen Maria Machado, who identify as fat women. Imagine missing out on that talent and insight and brilliance because of the size or shape of their bodies. Like it's not just them missing out because of discrimination, society misses out hugely. Yeah. Um, yeah. So I think that's a part of the puzzle. And I think too, you know, you asked earlier

about the shame piece of things. And I do think that as well as these structural and material and institutional changes, there also needs to be a piece of it that is we need to look at bodies differently. And so there's been a huge amount of ink spilled on body positivity and body neutrality. So these are the ideas that we should be positive about our bodies or neutral about them respectively. And I'm not sold on either of those ideas because the idea that we should be like relentlessly positive about a subject as fraught as our own bodies strikes me is like really hard to pull off. I mean, I'm not positive about anything really. So like about my own body, like, no, thank you. And neutrality, like it's a bit closer to what I believe, but it's also, it's a bit

sad. It's a bit worn. It's a bit depressing to be like meh about everything. And so the option that I found liberating in this process is what I call body reflexivity. And that is the idea that a body isn't good or bad or neutral. It's like not in the business of being assessed on a scale at all. We shouldn't be thinking about bodies as having a kind of rank, even a positive or neutral rank. And instead, my mantra in this became my body is for me and your body is for you and like so on and so forth for every person, for every non-human animal.

And yeah, this idea that bodies are really only for their denizen, I think has like far reaching political implications. It's this simple idea that it makes me feel less self-critical when I look in the mirror, because if my body is for me, then like judgment just becomes audio, surplus to requirements.

Like it doesn't even make sense to be judging your body in this way. See, this is what a philosopher brings to this conversation. Right? We're talking about body positivity or body neutrality. Well, those, those terms still have a judgment in them, a value judgment, a ranking. They are simply enforcing

that you make a particular judgment. Well, you just better judge them well. Hey, what if we didn't judge them at all? What if we said these things are not in fact ranked? They simply exist. And they exist, to whom do they exist? The person who is the body. You're not just in the body, you are the body.

Which is, look, when I was, normally I don't have a conversation with a philosopher on this show without mentioning, I do have a bachelor's in philosophy myself, the worst possible degree in the subject one can have, but my whole, the thing I studied at the end of my four years was the mind body problem. The problem of identifying yourself with your body

is like a very difficult problem in philosophy, just to simply say, I am the meat that is walking around. It's really difficult to internalize that. And yet we know it to be true. And to really internalize it would be to say, yes, I am my, I am the body. The body is me. And how could it be ranked? Like we don't rank people.

People aren't things that are ranked up and down. They simply exist. That's beautifully put. That's it's so well put. And it's, you know, sometimes I get people saying to me like, well, this is such a strange idea. How could we start ranking bodies even positively? And it's like, I think we do this all the time. Like there's a reason why the Twitter account, we rate dogs is a parody account. We don't rate dogs. Like every dog gets over a 10 out of 10

because dogs are just like, they're great. They're for themselves. It's not about that. Like similarly, we don't rate sunsets. I don't even think we rate kids bodies and we don't rate all human beings bodies. It's actually like a very select class of people, girls and women for the most part, who at a certain age, we suddenly think

that, okay, there's this valid prospect of negativity and we have to have this antidote, which is positivity or neutrality. It's like, we don't have to get into that game in the first place. The idea that you kind of have to have body positivity say, imagine how odd it would be to be body positive about three year olds. We don't need it because there's no prospect of negativity. They're just like doing their thing, running around or whatever it is. And that's what I want for all of us. Like a kind of, we don't judge, we don't rank.

It's just like a silly idea because we are our bodies. Yeah. You know, I can't believe this popped into my head, but I think that's true. I think it's hard to remember it. One of the best t-shirts I've ever seen, my friend Dave, who I believe has a company called Things by Dave. He makes t-shirts. He makes bumper stickers.

His most famous t-shirt. He made a shirt that said in big block letters, I'm fat. Let's party. Right. That's the shirt. I've known many people to wear that shirt. That shirt communicates a wonderful thing. Yeah. Right. I'm fat. Let's party.

It's like, here I am. This is what it is. Now we're going to party, you know, and that's so good. Yeah. It just got like, let's move on. It's just, it's not about that. Like, it partly captures this idea that we can be joyous in our bodies and that has absolutely nothing to do with the size we are or what we look like or anything. It's just the internal and the feelings that our bodies can provide and how we can enjoy them. Also, sometimes how they can betray us and how it can be hard to be in a body. That's what it's about. Not the sense of this really, as Marilyn Fry, the feminist philosopher calls yeah, the sense of this really, uh, as Marilyn Fry, the feminist philosophy calls it the arrogant eye of like, especially the male gaze that we

internalize and say like, well, how do I measure up? If we could just jettison that we would be so much better. We could party. I'm going to have to let Dave know that his t-shirt, which I don't know if he makes anymore, but that his t-shirt is philosopher approved. You should do another print run, uh, based on this episode. Um, and it's a wonderful note to end on Kate. It's been absolutely incredible talking to you.

I love your insight on what you bring to this topic. I love applied philosophy in any dimension. And I love hearing insight on what you bring to this topic. I love applied philosophy in any dimension, and I love hearing it here. The name of the book, if people want more, and I hope they do, is Un-Shrinking, how to, wait, Un-Shrinking, what is it? Face fat phobia. Un-Shrinking, how to face fat phobia, thank you.

You can, of course, get a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books, if you wanna support this show and your local bookstore as well. Where else can people find it and where can they find you on the internet, Kate? Yeah, the best place is my sub stack. So I stack at More to Hate.

And you can also just Google me and it'll pop right up. But I write weekly or bi-weekly essays on misogyny, fat phobia, their intersection and the current political shenanigans. So yeah, I would love to see people there. I'm sorry, more to hate is an incredibly fucking funny title. It's good, right? I mean- It's really funny. I mean, more of me to hate,

and I've gotten my fair share of haters on the internet. So I really appreciate that. I couldn't resist. It's incredibly funny. Kate, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been a delight. Thanks for having me. One of my favorite conversations in ages.

Thank you, Adam. Thank you so much. Yeah, you are so insightful. Well, thank you once again to Kate for coming on the show. I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. Once again, you can pick up a copy of her book at factuallypod.com slash books. Every purchase you make on that site supports not just the show, but your local bookstore as well.

If you would like to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month, you know it. It gets you every episode of the show ad free. But for 15 bucks a month, I will thank you personally by reading your name in the credits and putting it in the credits of every single one of my monologues. This week I got a bunch of names I want to read to make sure that everyone gets recognized here. We got some new supporters. We got Joseph Mode, Rodney Pattenham, Greg0692, Rick Cartayus, Rick Cartayus, uh, Marcella Johnson, uh, Matthew, my handwriting is terrible, Matthew Berthelsen, aka The Bunkmeister, Kelly Nowak, Anthony and Janet Barclay,

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