Today is International Women's Day – a great day to tackle your fatphobia, writes Angela Barnett. Because that stubborn, lingering prejudice has an insidious effect on women of all sizes.
The Ramsden twins called it.
I was walking with my mother and the cool blonde twins who lived down the street said it first with their eyes, then later at school.
“Didn’t know you had a fat mother.”
I didn’t know either. I had a mother. And her body was a soft place for me to land, full of kindness in its curves. Yet, here was another category, and I knew by their tone it wasn’t good.
Our family had moved away from Tāmaki Makaurau to Cambridge, away from everyone we knew, and the local ladies with their tight cliques and gossipy lips were not welcoming. My mother became depressed and the pills she was prescribed caused her to pile on the weight. Then she was shamed for her size. And, confronted by the Ramsden twins that day, I felt shame too.
The assumptions: lazy, stupid, loveless and sexless
For centuries, “fat” has referred to so much more than adipose tissue; it's been loaded with stereotypes, moral judgement and assumptions about habits and health. “Concern culture” – hushed discussion of a person’s weight and its supposed effect on their health – is fatphobia in fleece pyjamas. People in fat bodies are assumed to be any number of the following: lazy, undisciplined, stupid, lonely, greedy, unhealthy, loveless and sexless. And this bias adversely affects women for various reasons: because our bodies, on average, carry more body fat; because in many cultures we are physically objectified whatever our size; and because we’re already discriminated against, so a layer of fat just widens the target. If you take any example of gender discrimination, such as the pay gap, and add another typical prejudice (race, disability, age, and yes, fat) the inequality escalates. Ever heard of the thin ceiling? That invisible barrier between corporate success and the overweight woman? It exists but nobody talks about it.
As a long-time advocate for body confidence, I’ve been waving my arms about fatphobia for years but few seem to care, unless they’ve experienced weight discrimination themselves or an eating disorder. But as Australian activist and writer, Rebecca Shaw, wrote in The Guardian last year, fatphobia is on the rise and it affects everyone. The plus-size influencers who preach body confidence but then can’t get their hands on enough Ozempic. The teenage boy who swims in a T-shirt to hide his "moobs". The five-year-old who already restricts her eating to stay thin. The menopausal woman finding disordered eating returning as her middle widens. The cis hetero guy who’s been conditioned to think that having a thin partner will heighten his status.
A multi-billion-dollar industry
A Harvard study of over four million people showed bias against race, ethnicity and sexual orientation was declining, but implicit bias against weight was on the rise. That study was 2019 – a few years ago now, but anecdotally fat-phobia has far from abated. Which is depressing. We’ve had the body positivity movement (#bopo) for over a decade (actually, over six decades). It’s been 20 years since the Dove Real Beauty campaign. And we have Lizzo!
It's disappointing to look around and see that, in 2024, underneath the love-your-body memes there’s still a deep fear of fat. That something powerful is still trying to convince us we’re all meant to have the same body – you know the one: it's slim, it's fit, it's toned, it's ageless – the global weight loss industry was worth US$190.35 billion (NZ$310.37 billion) in 2023. It’s projected to grow this year and beyond, reaching US$391 billlion (NZ$638 billion) by 2032. Staggeringly, the wellness industry is worth several times that. And don't get me started on #fitspo.
The link between weight and race prejudice
Once you learn some of the theories on the origins of fatphobia you might think about it differently. US sociologist, Sabrina Strings, who wrote the groundbreaking book Fearing the Black Body, traces fatphobia to the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th Century. British and Europeans wanted to differentiate their bodies, and had noticed, "Africans were sensuous and loved sex and food” said Strings in an NPR interview. So Europeans, to elevate themselves as the supposedly superior race, started categorizing body size to justify the distinction between the enslaved and the free. Europeans had to be slender and watch what they ate. Fatness was associated with blackness. And this, Strings believes, filtered down into art, media, and all the messaging.
Women in places such as Paris and Japan, where the pressure to be thin is equally intense, might have different theories about the origins of the prejudice, but one thing is certain: We learn to be fatphobic, it’s fed to us from a young age. As Rebecca Shaw says, “Fatphobia causes everyone to hate their bodies, regardless of size. You are handing people the tools to destroy themselves”.
Fatphobia can lead to disordered eating – said to affect 30 percent of girls – including the most extreme and dangerous eating disorders, which skew to women. Even those who enjoy "thin privilege" are often so petrified of putting on weight that it painfully distorts the way they eat and live their lives. Anti-fat bias creates a fear of our bodies as if these complex creations that live and think and feel and experience pleasure are trying to betray us. They aren’t. But the attempt to control our bodies, to subdue their appetites and determine their shapes, takes up precious brain and thinking time. Time that could be spent building rockets or learning to grow tomatoes. It’s a great way to control more than half the population.
Fatphobia a tool for misogyny
Kate Manne, an Australian philosophy professor and author of the terrific book, Unshrinking, talks about the patriarchy and anti-fat bias in the podcast, You Cannot Fight Misogyny Without Fighting Fatphobia. Manne was one of three young women at an all-boys school in Australia and the only girl with a fat body. She received an award for 'most likely to have to pay for sex’ at the final year ceremony. Manne says misogyny weaponises hierarchies. “We value intelligence so call a woman stupid; we value thinness so call a woman fat; we value rationality so call a woman hysterical; and we value sexiness so call a woman someone no one wants to have sex with."
Manne has written that the reason fatphobia is hard to tackle is because people assume fatness is a choice. Unlike, say, skin colour or disability or how many moles you have. “The moral panic,” Manne says on her podcast, “over a supposed explosion of fatness is not just stigmatising: it often overlooks the changing classification standards for fat bodies. Our genes play a huge role in determining body size with genetic factors accounting for more than 70 percent of the variance in body size across the population. This makes weight just a little less heritable than height, which is about 80 percent heritable.”
The pornography paradox
Fat bodies were one of last year’s most popular porn searches, with BBW (big beautiful woman) one one of the six most popular categories on Porn Hub. Yet, as Manne says (and learned brutally at school) finding fat bodies attractive is stigmatised. Clearly, there’s a disparity between what we find attractive and what we're told we should find attractive – by society, the media, our friends at school, and lingerie advertising.
Fatphobia is entrenched in everything – from films to dating apps to family values. Like tackling racism or any other prejudice that has its tentacles deep in our psyche, we have to unravel unconscious bias. After observing my mother’s treatment, I was fatphobic for years, fearful of facing what she faced. This angst would spring up out of the shadows, pouncing, and I was fortunate to be able to spend considerable time on a therapist’s black leather couch getting rid of it.
When something is deeply embedded in culture it's a hard shift. We must be vigilant, like pushing the wrong way through an unruly crowd. But on behalf of my mother and all the women in the world today, this IWD, if we want to tackle inequality we have to change our anti-fat bias, starting with our own thoughts.
Five ways to tackle your own fatphobia
1. Never attempt to compliment someone with “you’re not fat”
If someone in a fat body says "I’m fat” don’t hasten to deny it, and therefore them. If you do you're implying that "fat" means all those negative things (lazy, stupid, unsexy). The late American academic and fat activist Dr Cat Pausé told me once that, "No amount of denying the word fat makes discrimination and judgement towards fat bodies shrink, it makes it worse. It’s like insisting to a trans person they’re not trans."
2. Help yourself to a better feed
Change how you view fat bodies online and it will change how you view them in the real world. A friend got over her internal fatphobia and body hatred by changing her husband’s feed on Instagram to follow sexy fat women in lingerie. This approach won't be for everyone, but for my friend, knowing her husband was enjoying images of women the same size or bigger than her meant she finally believed him that he found her attractive.
3. Check your thoughts
The next time you see a fat person, especially if they’re a woman, and no matter your own body size, check your judgement and assumptions about their lifestyle. They might have been prescribed pills that caused them to gain weight. They might have been put on a diet at seven and developed disordered eating. They might be the 80 percent of fat people whose weight is based on genes. They might do more exercise, eat more kale and have a better sex life than you do.
4. Don’t say you’re having 'a fat day'
New York Times best-selling author, activist, and founder of The Body is Not An Apology global movement Sonya Renee Taylor says there are no such things as fat days because fat is not a feeling, it is an identity like Black or trans or disabled. “I am never having a Black day. I am Black. Nor am I ever having a fat day. I am fat and in order to make a just world for my body, it cannot be seen as simply a metaphor for not liking one's body,” she says.
5. Read to reframe and expand your perspective
There are a lot of excellent books on this topic. Read Landwhale, by Jes Baker. Hunger, by Roxanne Gay. The Body Is Not An Apology, by Sonya Renee Taylor. Body Confident (for parents), by Aotearoa’s Emma Wright. Unshrinking, by Kate Manne. Fearing the Black Body, by Sabrina Strings.
Angela Barnett is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau and co-founder of Like Bodies Like Minds.
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