When I first tried to read Susie Orbach’s 1978 bestseller, Fat Is A Feminist Issue, I was fat. This is not an exaggeration: some people told me this to my face, with a directness I would never have thought possible had I never attained — however briefly — the status of “fat bird” (or sometimes, “fat slag”). It was the late nineties, and I’d only recently emerged from a decade of self-imposed starvation. I started eating, and then I couldn’t stop. The disorientation that came with inhabiting a body which I felt was definitely not mine — with being “an anorexic, but trapped in a fat suit” as Nancy Tucker describes it — only made me eat more. When I picked up Orbach’s book, I was hoping that feminism might save me.
To be more precise, I was hoping it would make me no longer care about my size. I was also hoping that, by no longer caring about my size, I would cease caring about food, and thereby get thin again (not that I’d care by then, obviously). Needless to say, none of this worked. What I wanted from the book — what I wanted from every book of that nature — was something impossible: the key to managing exactly how my body was perceived by and situated in relation to other bodies, or, failing that, the ability not to notice anything to do with my body at all. If I couldn’t starve or binge myself out of being a body, surely I could think my way out of it.
Looking back, I can see that what I wanted was not politics, but the opposite. Political change took too long, and its dependence on so many other people made it too unreliable. Your body is here right now. It is visible right now. You cannot control how others see it, or how it makes you feel. Before long, I’d stopped reading Fat Is A Feminist Issue and taken up smoking instead.
“Our bodies are not the problem,” writes Kate Manne in 2024’s Unshrinking: How To Fight Fatphobia. “Rather, the world is.” The solution, she argues, “is not to improve our self-image or love our bodies better”, but “to remake the world to properly fit fat bodies, and to effect the socially transformative recognition that there is truly nothing wrong with us.” As arguments go, this is not especially new or controversial (though I, like others, would take issue with quite how far Manne goes to deny that there are any real problems with being exceptionally heavy). In most cases, the problem really isn’t your body — it’s how it is viewed and positioned by others. This is true for fat, and it’s also true for femaleness. Nonetheless, it’s one of those things you can know to be true while simultaneously feeling that actually, no, your body — unlike everybody else’s — most definitely is the thing that needs correcting.
Decades into recovery from an eating disorder, I still circle around this knowing/feeling. I’m not fat any more, but being female-shaped — not straight, not thin, not nothing — often makes me uncomfortable. My body feels like a statement, one which I can’t help feeling misrepresents me. There are still times when I think it would be a lot easier to give in to the untruth — that my body is indeed “the problem” — than to try to change the social, cultural and political meanings of the female (or fat) body. Yet I also know that “sticking it out” — prizing the knowing over the feeling — is a preventative measure against the situation getting worse. The more one gives in to diets, drugs and surgeries, the more of a problem — and a statement — the unchanged body becomes.
“We only have one body,” writes Manne, noting that “in living in our changing, ageing bodies unapologetically, we set a personal example with political implications”. In this, she echoes Clare Chambers, who puts forth “the principle of the unmodified body” which “tells us that social-norm change is better than surgery, ethically speaking, even if it is more difficult”. Where Manne differs from Chambers is that the latter also applies this analysis to so-called “gender-affirming” surgeries. For Manne, elective mastectomies and phalloplasties exist on a different plane entirely to stomach stapling and gastric sleeves. It seems there are no “personal examples” to be set by holding out against the pressure to bind your breasts, should you feel your inner self to be insufficiently feminine.
It’s a maddening contradiction, one which captures the degree to which liberal feminism has become unable to develop and maintain consistent principles regarding the body. We are allowed to get angry about the relationship between power and body hatred when it comes to fat. As for the intense distress many individuals feel in relation to their sex, and the way in which this relates to porn culture and sex-role stereotypes? To read Unshrinking, one would think there were no relationship at all, even though Manne’s analysis of fatphobia in relation to fatness maps almost perfectly onto feminist analyses of gender in relation to femaleness. “Fatphobia,” claims Manne, “can be defined as a feature of social systems that unjustly rank fatter bodies as inferior to thinner bodies, in terms of not only our health but also our moral, sexual, and intellectual status”. Now what else does that sound like? What else might we describe as “a misguided ideology, or a set of false beliefs and inflated theories, that our culture holds about fat [or female?] people”?
As a feminist thinker, Manne has a habit of describing structures that radical feminists have previously identified while stripping out the terfy bits — that is, any recognition of the political salience of biological sex or of gender as a social hierarchy. This is very much a feature of Down Girl, which only really works (but works well) if you mentally add in the missing pieces as you go along. With Unshrinking, this tactic is not so effective. We are continually reminded that surgery to modify your healthy body is terrible, unless it is, say, for “bottom surgery”, in which case the only terrible thing is being asked to lose weight before the knife goes into you (“bottom surgery”, by the way, is not considered a euphemism for something far more brutal, whereas the use of “detox” instead of “diet” is).
More than once we are told that “there is currently no known reliable, safe, and ethical way to make fat people thin”. That may well be the case, but I would add that not only is there no known reliable, safe, and ethical way to make female people male — there is no way at all. Diets might be futile for most people in the long term, but they do temporarily make some people thinner. If we are going to go all-out and say that is not enough to justify the harms of diet culture — and I would totally agree — where is the rage at those who offer to correct other supposedly unruly, unacceptable bodies (the female body of one who loves other females, for instance) where there is absolutely no evidence of “success” at all? I am sure Manne would be outraged if children who desperately wished to lose weight were being told that bariatric surgery offered the route to true selfhood, and without it, their lives would be so pitiable they may not consider them worth living. Yet similar messages are, apparently, perfectly acceptable when the child is one who fears the onset of puberty.
I am not asking for feminism to be self-help. It is how many of us (myself included) first come to it, only to be sorely disappointed. Even so, feminism has a moral responsibility to challenge the shame that surrounds bodies that are deemed to be “the wrong ones”. Right now, the “progressive” fight against body hatred has been strictly circumscribed, at least for those who do not wish to receive the same treatment as Rachel Rooney for her lovely children’s book My Body Is Me.
Accepting our bodies as they are requires a rejection of superficial fixes which, unless we are careful, fast become what is expected of us in order to fit in. There isn’t a way around this. You can’t get the answer out of a book. You have to grow into it.
