CHAPTER 4
ON CONCERN AND CHOICE
It happened at the grocery store. It had been a busy week and I was looking forward to decompressing by way of my weekly meal prep. There was something meditative in listening to a new record while my hands did the tender work of cleaning, peeling, chopping. There’s a mindfulness necessary for cooking—should my anxious mind wander to the challenges at work or the housework left to be done, I might overcook the pasta, burn the temperamental maple syrup roasting on squash, let a sharp blade slice into my own soft flesh. I had to pay attention, had to breathe deeply and stay focused on the task at hand, so I did. It was a welcome relief.
At the grocery store, I happily wound through aisles and refrigerated cases. I spent the most time in the produce section, picking emerald zucchini from pristine piles, papery purple shallots, and perfumed cantaloupe from atop a pyramid display. As I shopped, I noticed another woman stealing glances at my cart, then my face. Like many people in my neighborhood, she was a baby boomer—in her sixties, white, and with the trappings of class privilege popular in a city that eschewed displays of wealth. She looked like many of the parents from the private high school I’d attended on a faculty discount. Her clothing was expensive without being flashy, her graying hair was cropped into a short, straightforward haircut I recognized from so many of my mother’s friends. In the Pacific Northwest of my childhood and young adulthood, money didn’t call attention to itself.
As I moved on, her cart followed mine, her glances turning to stares. I smiled, hoping to nudge her into looking away, but her eyes were no longer on me. Instead, they were fixed on my cart, her brows now stitched together as she openly stared. I turned away from my cart to pull spinach from the refrigerated case. When I turned back, she was plucking the cantaloupe from my cart. Her eyes met mine and she smiled.
“It’s got too much sugar for you, and that’s the last thing you need,” she said happily. Her voice chirped, buoyed by the self-satisfaction of doing such a good deed for a stranger who so clearly needed her help. She turned away with my melon in her hand and returned it to its display, and then she was gone.
I retreated to the baking aisle, pretending to peruse dry spices while I gathered myself and waited for her to leave the small market. I was stunned. Over time, I had become used to long glances, open stares, suggestions, and mandates about my food. I had grown accustomed to catcalls and street harassment. I had come to expect open commentary on what I ate, how much, and how often. But never had I encountered someone who thought to take physical control of what I was eating—much less a fruit—and, more than that, to so clearly think it was a service to me. I wondered if, in the BMW X5 I imagined her driving, she had taped a “my body, my choice” sticker in the rear window.
As the shock wore off, something wilder emerged: a deep and sudden anger. I simmered with frustration and resentment as I drove home, uncertain how to manage such an untamed and foreign reaction. I knew how to handle tears, melancholy, resignation—but what to do with such fresh, live rage writhing so violently in my chest?
The anger stayed with me all day. That evening, I told a friend over drinks.
“Are you sure?” the friend asked, face tangled with skepticism. “Maybe she thought it was her cart.”
“She didn’t. It was mine.”
“She could’ve made a mistake.”
“Then why would she explain that I don’t need more sugar?”
“Maybe she was leading by example—like, ‘hey, neither one of us needs more sugar, so I’m putting mine back.’”
“That’s not any less condescending,” I snapped, voice cracking under the weight of my frustration, anger rising through my shoulder blades once again.
“But you have to understand, it’s coming from a good place,” my friend pleaded, now gesturing with willowy fingers and delicate wrists. “She was just concerned for your health.”
There it was—the salt on such a fresh wound. I was frustrated, deflated, exhausted, and done. So much of my experience as a very fat person had been defined by others’ bias against bodies like mine. And when it came from those closest to me, even the most explicit judgment was reliably shielded by a missionary claim of concern for my health.
As a fat person, I have faced constant judgment, harsh rejection, and invasive questions, which always close with the same stale phrase: I’m just concerned for your health. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you, again and again, that you’re going to die. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you that no one will love you at your size. I’m concerned for your health, so I cannot treat you with basic respect.
But those conversations rarely bear the hallmarks of concern. Concern is curious, tender, loving. Concern is direct and heartfelt. Concern does its work delicately, with great care. It looks after the people we hold dear. Concern is rooted in love—not, as in so many of these conversations, rooted in power, paternalism, and open contempt.
Concern for fat people is understandable. Every day, local and national news coverage features stories about the obesity epidemic, accompanied by footage of disembodied fat torsos, presuming that showing our faces—like real people, with real lives—would cause too much shame. After all, who could bear to be seen in a body like ours? Concern has been proposed everywhere, time and time again, as an appropriate and even virtuous reaction to the scourge of bodies like mine. But concern—true concern—shows itself vulnerably. It does not insist upon itself, shouting down the din around it. Concern asks tenderly, walks softly. Concern brings the soft brushes of an archeological dig, not a steamroller to pave over what lies beneath. Concern thrives on love, not shame and preening schadenfreude.
Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Often, we defend ourselves by insisting that concerns about our health are wrongheaded, rooted in faulty and broad assumptions. We rattle off our test results and hospital records, citing proudly that we’ve never had a heart attack, hypertension, or diabetes. We proudly recite our gym schedules and the contents of our refrigerators. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us. Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. We insist on our goodness by relying on our health. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.
These defensive assertions about our health aren’t wrong, but they don’t reflect every fat person’s reality. Some of us aren’t healthy or able-bodied. Some of us struggle with chronic illness, mental health issues, eating disorders, disabilities, abuse. Some of us have hypertension, diabetes, heart disease. For these fat people, happy and healthy is an alienating aspiration and an unreliable narrator of our bodies. And even when we are happy and healthy, we’re still met with the high-minded bullying of concern.
In recent years, Lizzo has emerged as a new kind of pop star, one whose body of work focuses on loving, accepting, and celebrating herself. Lizzo’s presence on the national stage has been enthusiastically embraced, a welcome counterpoint to decades of celebrities who only fit (or strive to fit) an ever-narrowing standard of beauty that is almost always predicated on thinness.
But Lizzo’s rise as the world’s most prominent plus-size pop star has met more than its share of backlash too. And despite her focus on music, the majority of backlash has taken aim at her body. In 2019 The Biggest Loser trainer Jillian Michaels discussed Lizzo’s body on BuzzFeed’s morning show, AM2DM. When host Alex Berg brought up her own excitement at seeing “women like Ashley Graham and Lizzo, who are preaching self-acceptance,” Michaels quickly cut in. “Why are we celebrating her body? [. . .] ‘Cause it isn’t gonna be awesome if she gets diabetes. I’m just being honest. I love her music, my kid loves her music, but there’s never a moment where I’m like, ‘I’m so glad that she’s overweight.’ Like, why do I even care? Why is it my job to care about her weight?”1 Berg had not asked Michaels to “care about her weight” or “celebrate her body”—she hadn’t even finished her question. Michaels, largely unbidden, asserted herself as the authority on the body of a woman she had never met. In that moment, she became one of the country’s most famous concern trolls.
The response to Michaels’s remarks was swift. “Unless Jillian Michaels is holding a chart of Lizzo’s bloodwork, she has no business speculating what diseases the pop singer is at risk of developing,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens.2 Actor and activist Jameela Jamil tweeted, “MY WHOLE DAMN THIN FAMILY HAS DIABETES AND HIGH CHOLESTEROL AND PROBLEMS WITH OUR JOINTS. Why is this woman acting like she’s an MRI? Stop concern-trolling fat people and get in the bin.” One viral tweet described Lizzo’s nightly show as “an incredible athletic feat.” “Try running 7MPH in heels on a treadmill clearly singing the words to Truth Hurts without sounding out of breath. Stop halfway to play the flute for a minute. Now start running again and finish the song. Now do this for two hours.”3
When called upon to respond to the backlash, Michaels doubled down. “I’m a health expert. For decades I have said repeatedly that your weight and your size have no bearing or merit on your value, your beauty, your worth, your ability. Where it does have relevance is your health. To pretend that it doesn’t is not only irresponsible, it’s dangerous—and it’s just not a lie that I’m willing to tell because it’s politically correct.”4 Despite these recent claims of body positivity, Michaels has made a career out of asserting that fat people are failures, as witnessed by her “tough love” physical training on The Biggest Loser. In 2016 The Guardian reported on Michaels’s behavior under the headline “It’s a Miracle No One Has Died Yet” and included direct quotes from Michaels from past seasons of the show:
“I don’t care if people die on this floor. You better die looking good.”
“If you don’t run, I will pull Alex on the floor and I will break every bone in his body.”
“The only way you’re coming off this damn treadmill is if you die on it!”
“It’s fun watching other people suffer like that.”5
Michaels’s unbidden comments on Lizzo’s body illuminate a simple, difficult truth: that no amount of health or happiness will deliver our humanity, our dignity, or a safe haven from abuse. Whoever we are, however our bodies came to be, health does not deliver us from the well-intentioned bullying of concern. Our delivery from concern lies only with the stranger who asks about diabetes or the acquaintance who recommends bariatric surgeons. The family member who believes we will never find a partner because who could love a body like ours. The coworker who offers diet advice that’s never been requested. The friends who complain over breakfast about a friend’s size. The person who removes groceries from a fat stranger’s cart. Our delivery from concern lies with you.
We don’t often ask ourselves what our response to fatness says about us, but it says so much about our empathy and our character. We spend so much time examining fat bodies in front of us that we fail to examine our response to them. We learn not to feel the heat and pressure that so many fat people face, and in so doing, we ignore our contributions to it. We can’t understand how our actions undercut our love for the fat people in our lives.
No, we don’t often ask those questions. Instead, we push away examinations of ourselves in favor of health and concern. Instead, we avoid saying fat. Instead, we defend those who hurt the people we love, insisting on their steamroller of concern. Instead, we push aside the hard work of empathy and opt for the ease and satisfaction of judgment. Instead, we take comfort in thinness, believing it to be a sign of mastery and will. Instead, we walk away from the bigger question: In sickness and health, who do you want to be?
Instead of looking at yourself, you look at me.
Concern for your health is a cardinal sign that a fat person is experiencing what’s often referred to as concern trolling. Concern trolls are a different breed than the gleeful Redditors and 4chan users who so often hunt women, people of color, fat people, autistic people, and disabled people for sport. Concern trolling is defined more by its impact than its intent—many concern trolls would balk at being described as trolls at all. Rather than “playing devil’s advocate” or directly provoking marginalized people, concern trolls position themselves as sympathetic supporters who “just have a few concerns.” Concern trolls are experts at erecting strawmen, insisting that they want to be supportive, as if their support is a vote a marginalized person needs to win. Concern trolls tell people of color that they’ll never win anyone over if they’re so angry all the time. They insist on making sure transgender people are really sure about transitioning, because you know it’s not reversible, right? I just don’t want you to do something you’ll regret. As if the humanity of marginalized people is a campaign and we’ve put our own experiences up for debate. As if our hurt, harm, and trauma were simply fair game.
But that’s just one form that the well-intentioned bullying of concern trolling takes in the lives of fat people. Concern trolls are shapeshifters, changing their arguments and excuses to evade both accountability and direct conversations. Concern trolls talk about tough love as they withhold food, clothing, affirmation, love in the name of pressuring a fat person into thinness. They imagine our bodies as coal and that their pressure will make us diamonds. Concern trolls lament our size, offering compliments only with judgmental caveats attached. You’ve got such a pretty face. If only you’d lose some weight. Their eyes follow our fork from our plate to our mouth and back again, sometimes even freely commenting on what we eat, whether we eat, and how much. When challenged, many become defensive, even indignant. I’m just trying to help. Food surveillance and policing are especially insidious and pernicious tactics of many concern trolls.
For many fat people, concern trolling doesn’t end at overt comments about our food, size, or perceived motivation. Sometimes, that concern turns into invasive, deeply personal cross-examinations that I’ve come to call thinterrogations. Some thinterrogations are confined to dieting. Have you tried paleo? What about keto? Did you track your macros? Did you work out? Did you cut out bread? Did you cheat? You must have been sneaking sugar. You probably aren’t doing it right. Others become deeply intimate, with thinterrogators asking after the trauma they’re certain must be at the root of my size. Were you abused? Molested? When did it happen? How? Are you in therapy? Is it comfort eating? I’m an emotional eater, too, and here’s how I beat it. Have you tried Overeaters Anonymous? EMDR? These trauma voyeurs, often strangers or acquaintances, have invented an etiology of my body: a troubled past, a mental or experiential defect that has led me to maladaptive behavior. A fat body must be the result of some tragedy. A fat body is deviant, aberrant, troubling. A fat body can never simply be. A fat body must be explained, and thinterrogators just ask what everyone’s thinking.
Whatever the behavior—strawman debates, food policing, trauma voyeurism, “tough love,” or “motivation”—concern trolling relies on the logic and tactics of abuse. Concern trolling tells fat people that whatever befalls us is our fault and that no thin person can be held accountable for their own behavior when faced with the sight of a fat person’s body. It tells fat people that concern trolls wouldn’t have to hurt you if you didn’t make me. Concern trolling is the trojan horse of anti-fatness, seductively telling thinner people that everything they’re doing is for a fat person’s own good.
The simple fact, though, is that concern harms fat people. It wrests our bodies from our control, insisting that thin people know our bodies best and that, like a car accident or child abuse, fatness requires a mandatory report. As if fat people don’t know that we’re fat, and that fatness is at once reviled and luridly surveilled.
Nearly all academic and scientific research that has looked for a link between weight stigma (including concern trolling) and ill health has found it. One such study, published in Obesity: A Research Journal, asked a predominantly white group of 1,013 women about their experiences with weight stigma and stereotypes of fat people. People who had internalized anti-fat stereotypes were more likely to binge eat, and neither believing anti-fat stereotypes nor directly experiencing stigma “motivated” participants to lose weight.6 Another study found that Black and white “adolescents who indicated that the primary reason for unfair treatment was their physical appearance had elevated ABP,” or ambulatory blood pressure.7 A third studied the mental health of ninety-three fat people in a “residential weight-loss facility,” focusing on assessing depression, self-esteem, body image, overall psychiatric symptoms, and how mental health related to patients’ experiences of weight stigma and internalization of anti-fat beliefs. Concern trolling—including “tough love”—was overwhelmingly experienced by participants, with 97.9 percent having experienced nasty comments from family, 89.1 percent reporting inappropriate comments from doctors, 86 percent reporting that loved ones were embarrassed to be associated with a fat person, and 78.3 percent reporting that others had made negative assumptions about them.8 The psychological findings were striking:
Participants’ anti-fat beliefs significantly predicted mental health symptoms. Specifically, the regression models accounted for substantial portions of the variance in psychological outcomes, ranging from 22% in general psychiatric symptoms to 13% in depression scores. Furthermore, antifat attitudes uniquely predicted mental health symptoms after taking into account possible mental health differences due to age, age of onset, gender and BMI.9
A 2014 research review in the Journal of Obesity outlined the health impact of weight stigma, including direct aggression, institutionalized stigma, and even seemingly well-intended microaggressions and “complimentary weightism” (that is, complimenting weight loss).
Schafer and Ferraro found that weight stigma was related to increased health risks that are typically attributed to being obese, such as functional disability and decreased self-rated health, over a 10-year period. The evidence further indicates that weight stigma is related to elevated ambulatory blood pressure, unhealthy weight control and binge eating behaviors, bulimic symptoms, negative body image, low self-esteem, and depression among children, adolescents, and adults.10
Research increasingly demonstrates that fat peoples’ experiences with weight stigma and our internalization of anti-fat stereotypes worsen our health on all fronts, from the functioning of our brains to the very blood in our veins. Contrary to popular belief, the constant stream of cruel and judgmental comments and tactics aimed at fat people cannot be simply brushed off, nor are they without repercussions—even when they’re cloaked in a concern for our health.
Messages seeking to make fat people thin, whether through shame or concern, simply don’t work. One randomized control study from the American Journal of Preventative Medicine assessed reactions to anti-fat health campaigns and found that “stigmatizing campaigns were no more likely to instill motivation for improving lifestyle behaviors among participants than campaigns that were more neutral,” regardless of their body size.11 Another study, this one published in the International Journal of Obesity, engaged people of all sizes and assessed their perceptions of “obesity-related” public health campaigns.
Participants responded most favorably to messages involving themes of increased fruit and vegetable consumption, and general messages involving multiple health behaviors. Messages that have been publicly criticized for their stigmatizing content received the most negative ratings and the lowest intentions to comply with message content. Furthermore, messages that were perceived to be most positive and motivating made no mention of the word ‘obesity’ at all, and instead focused on making healthy behavioral changes without reference to body weight.12
Regardless of the topic, shame doesn’t motivate change; it instead conveys that the shamed party is simply a bad person, and nothing can be done about that.13 The article “Status Syndrome,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, lays out the evidence that stigma and social status are major drivers of health, especially for poor people. “Socioeconomic differences in health are not confined to poor health for those at the bottom and health for everyone else. Rather, there is a social gradient in health in individuals who are not poor: the higher the social position, the better the health.”14 Researchers are learning what fat people have long known—that discrimination and stigma are major drivers of health outcomes and that all that concern is harming us more than it’s helping.
Ultimately, anti-fatness isn’t based in science or health, concern or choice. Anti-fatness is a way for thinner people to remind themselves of their perceived virtue. Seeing a fatter person allows them to remind themselves that at least I’m not that fat. They believe that they have chosen their body, so seeing a fat person eat something they deem unhealthy reminds them of their stronger willpower, greater tenacity, and superior character. We don’t just look different, the thinking goes; we are different. Thinner people outwit their bodies. Fatter people succumb to them. Encounters with fatter people offer a welcome opportunity to retell that narrative and remind themselves of their superiority.
Over time, I have come to learn that these moments—the threats, the concern, the constant well-intentioned bullying—run even deeper than a simple assumption of superiority. It is a reminder so many thin people seem to desperately need. They don’t seem to be talking to me at all. They seem to be talking to themselves.
Thin people don’t need me to know about a diet or a surgeon. They don’t need me to hear them expound on the evils of the obesity epidemic or the war on obesity. They need to remind themselves to stay vigilant and virtuous. The ways that thin people talk to fat people are, in a heartless kind of way, self-soothing. They are warnings to themselves from themselves. I am the future they are terrified of becoming, so they speak to me as the ghost of fatness future. They remove food from my cart as if it is their own. They offer diet advice forcefully, insisting that I take it. If I say that I have, they insist I must have done it wrong, must not have been vigilant enough, must not have had enough willpower. They beat me up the way most of us only talk to ourselves. As if in a trance, they plead with me, some terrifying future self.
Sometimes, the trance breaks. Maybe it breaks because they realize, with great discomfort, that they have made extraordinary judgments, issued intrusive mandates like some petulant prince. Maybe it breaks because a fat person asks them to stop. But whatever breaks the trance, the thinner person seems to return to themself, recognizing that they may have overstepped. And without fail, they will offer the same rote caveat, a hasty waiver, unsigned, disclaiming any injury caused: I’m just concerned for your health. And just like that, all that judgment, all those assumptions, all that cruelty suddenly becomes a humanitarian mission. Concern for your health is yet another example of the superior nature of thin people. They look better because they are better, and they’re even generous enough to publicly shame you into being better too. It is the burden of thinness, saving so many poor, wretched fat-asses. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Each time I ask a concern troll what’s behind their comments—why they see themselves fit to so readily judge fat people, then somehow transform that judgment into a public service—their responses echo one another. “Maybe it’ll motivate you to change.” As one commenter wrote in response to one of my essays, “People are born Black or white, gay or straight, but NO ONE is born fat.”15 In spite of overwhelming evidence from mainstream sources that body size is largely out of our control, nearly every concern troll I’ve asked shares one simple belief: that fat people choose to be fat.
As a queer person who grew up and came out in the 1990s, I find the contours of this argument are familiar, and they echo ones I’ve heard before. Parents of queer and trans kids don’t want their kids to come out because they’re concerned about their safety. Straight people aren’t homophobic; they’re just concerned about queer and trans people contracting HIV. Homophobic faith leaders love the sinner but hate the sin and believe that queer people will recruit unsuspecting straight children who will then choose a homosexual lifestyle. With a couple of decades of hindsight, many of us can now see these for what they were—smokescreens for straight people’s discomfort with queer people, and their fear of having to accept something they’d so long feared or derided. As comfort with LGBTQ people continues to grow, these concerns have largely fallen away. Worries about LGBTQ people “recruiting” children are now largely laughed off as relics of a bygone era. HIV is understood to impact people of all sexual orientations; indeed, according to HIV.gov, the rates of new HIV diagnoses are falling nearly twice as fast in queer communities than straight ones.16 Policy changes, culture changes, and large-scale public education campaigns have allowed many straight people to change their attitudes toward LGBTQ people, while simultaneously freeing themselves from any reflection on the impacts of that behavior. Culturally, it’s allowed many of us to identify homophobia and transphobia in the rearview mirror as it recedes into the distance, some nasty force tied only to the figureheads of anti-LGBTQ movements and not to the many straight and cisgender people whose discomfort allowed their leadership to thrive.
We don’t have the benefit of that distance when it comes to understanding anti-fatness. It is the polluted air we breathe, invisible and everywhere. Over time, its ubiquity changes how each of us operates, and we reproduce anti-fatness everywhere: in our internalization of anti-fat stereotypes, in our treatment of fat people, in our assessments of our own bodies, in the media we consume, and the stories we tell. Anti-fatness has turned so many of us into perpetual-motion machines, forever doing its work on its behalf, all of which is powered by the certain and baseless belief that being fat is a choice.
For some fat people, being fat is a choice. Gainers proudly and intentionally get fatter, with many saying they feel their most beautiful, most powerful, and most like themselves at their fattest.17 Feeders seek feedees, partners who consent to being fed for the purposes of gaining weight.18 Some people simply prefer how they look when they’re fatter. For a wide range of reasons, there are fat people who choose to be fat.
Scientifically, most of us cannot appreciably change our body size or shape. Whether a diet, a cleanse, a “weight-loss journey,” or a lifestyle change, the many methods we use to lose weight simply don’t lead to significant, sustained weight loss for the vast majority of people. In 2007, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) made a splash with the release of a meta study that analyzed thirty-one longitudinal studies. “We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weight loss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete regain was found in the majority. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people.”19 Ninety-five percent of those who attempt to lose weight through dieting gain that weight back—and often more—within just a few years.20 Indeed, those same UCLA researchers plainly noted that among the greatest predictors of future weight gain were recent attempts to lose weight.21 The data is clear: diets simply don’t work.
The other mainstay of weight-loss attempts, of course, is exercise. The old truism of dieting is that it’s as simple as calories in, calories out—so if a person limits their caloric intake and increases calorie-burning activities, they’ll have to lose weight. But despite being beneficial for cardiac health, circulation, mental health, and other areas of personal health, exercise has long been known to be ineffective as a weight-loss method.22 It simply doesn’t burn enough calories to lead to significant weight loss, and many types of physical activity lead to an increase in muscle mass—which won’t lower the number on the scale. And on top of that, many of us eat more after working out, offsetting the few calories we just burned.23
While many of us know people who have undergone major weight loss through diet or exercise, those anecdotal cases are an extreme statistical minority, making up less than 5 percent of all dieters. Contrary to popular opinion, neither diet nor exercise leads to long-term weight loss for the vast majority of us. That’s borne out by larger-scale data too. According to the American Journal of Public Health, women with BMIs categorized as obese have an extraordinarily slim chance of reaching their BMI-mandated “normal” weight. Just 0.8 percent of fat women become thin in their lifetime.24 The few that do will face a grueling uphill battle, since weight cycling and dieting may dramatically and permanently alter their metabolisms, making it harder to maintain weight loss.25 According to the CDC, despite a deluge of federal funding for the war on obesity, Americans are fatter now more than ever before.26 People who were thin are now fatter and people who were fat are fatter still. Our war on obesity has unquestionably failed—in large part because we don’t have nonsurgical, evidence-based weight-loss treatments that are proven to work for more than a short time.
On top of that, our understanding of the nature of fatness is becoming increasingly complex and nuanced. Many of us have a wildly oversimplified understanding of fatness. Obesity is culturally understood as one condition with two causes—eating too much and moving too little. When pressed to explain how we know what we know, most of us will come up with some variation on It’s just science. But the science of weight couldn’t be more different. As of 2016, researchers at OMNI have catalogued fifty-nine different types of obesity—each with their own causes, contributing factors, unknowns, and possible treatments.27 According to the head of the department of clinical biochemistry and medicine at Cambridge University, “investigators have found more than 25 genes with such powerful effects that if one is mutated, a person is pretty much guaranteed to become obese[.]”28
Despite so much overwhelming evidence, most of us are staggeringly incurious about the nature of such a complicated condition. We remain recalcitrant, holding onto our outdated, disproven, and destructive cultural beliefs about fatness and fat people. Besides, if we acknowledged that fatness might not be a personal failing, we might have to treat fat people differently, with less condescension and disdain. And if we couldn’t look down our noses at people fatter than us, how will we make ourselves feel better about our own bodies? Who would we pity, lament, mock, malign? And what would become of our lesser selves?
His first email seemed pointed, but innocent enough. He asked if I had tried to lose weight and why I didn’t just do that instead of writing about what it was like to board a plane as a fat person. I had set a rule for myself of responding to every reader email in good faith, and I followed it here. I told him that while I heard people openly complain about fat people on airplanes, I didn’t think they had reckoned with the impacts of their actions. The exchanges that followed were short, and increasingly terse.
HIM: |
Why do you want sympathy for being a fat tub of shit? Eat less . . . exercise . . . self-control. It’s easy. |
ME: |
I didn’t ask for sympathy. I just wrote about what I did to prepare for a flight. I also wrote that I lost 60 pounds. What’s your goal in writing to me? What outcome were you hoping for? |
HIM: |
Don’t have a goal . . . So on twitter I see you post about “abuse” . . . you’re a fat tub of shit and should be embarrassed. Work in yourself and then you won’t be a lard ass any more. |
He closed his email with three smiling shit emojis.
I blocked his email address. In the coming days, he created five additional email addresses, sending me missives each day from a new account. Obesity as a human right? Absolutely not, slob!!! Graphic gifs of hippos shitting. Lists of terrible, tired fat jokes cut-and-pasted from websites. Don’t you want to see your kids grow up? Or do you hate them so much you’d eat yourself to death? Or maybe they want you to die too? Each morning, I looked for emails sent from new, anonymous accounts, eventually blocking them without opening them. And the next day, the cycle would begin again.
Eventually, he grew tired of sending emails and began sending comments through Twitter, through anonymous question-asking apps, through any contact method he could find.
The comments were endless and ruthless. To him, my body was an undeniable choice, evidenced in so many of his missives. Work in yourself and you won’t be a lard ass anymore. Eat less . . . exercise . . . self-control. It’s easy. You will always be ugly and fat. Unless you change the fat part. The fact that I was urging others to treat fat people with respect and to look critically at their own harmful behaviors felt, to this stranger, like a shirking of my own responsibility to get and stay thin. Because fatness was, in his mind, a willful choice anchored in gluttony and sloth, requests to respect fat people’s dignity felt not just premature, but delusional. To him, I had fallen off the deep end, into a kind of fat madness.
I reminded myself of what I knew, that these were his judgments and not mine, but each time the reminders worked a little less. As the comments flooded in (dozens each day), they wore at me like water on a rock. I could feel myself eroding. After weeks of unending harassment, they began to cut through me, some sharp, irreducible pain. A fresh wound every day. I needed to know who he was, needed to see his face. I needed to know if he planned to make good on the constant threats, and if he could. It took less than five minutes to find him. His first message came from his personal account, linked to a public Facebook profile.
I had expected some sign, though I don’t know what—a sinister grin? Proud bigotry against all manner of people? Posts mirroring the vitriol he’d sent to me? But I found none. There were no alt-right memes, no Pepe the Frogs, no swastikas.
He was forty, lived in Kansas City, was a father of three. In his profile picture, he wore a tattered baseball cap and smiled widely at the camera. For a moment, I felt his eyes meet mine. Surrounding him were the faces of what appeared to be his three young daughters, all elementary school age or younger.
I sat back, disheartened and deflated. He wasn’t some snarling beast, some anti-everyone activist. He looked like men in my neighborhood, people on my street, a friend of a friend. These weren’t the beliefs of some vocal, cruel minority—he was the voice of the majority. People like him—people with steady jobs, people with kind smiles, people with sweet young children—were all around me. As I stared at his face, so guileless and quietly monstrous, I was terrified.
Then my eyes settled on his daughters. Their faces were sweet and soft, lit up by their trio of bright and broad smiles, each mimicking the next. I ached for what invariably lay ahead of them. What would happen to them in adolescence, when their bodies were sure to grow? What would become of them if one became fatter than their father wanted? How would his rage curdle and what sickness would that cause in his children? Had they already seen the monstrosity in their father, or was that a grief yet to come? Would he speak to his daughters the way he had spoken to me? Or would he insist that their bodies were a choice and that he was just concerned for their health?
However anti-fatness shows up, even in ways that seem benign, each paves the way for the next, laying a foundation that makes more overtly anti-fat behavior possible. Laughing at fat jokes lets the people around us know that they’re okay to tell. Telling fat jokes makes more room for disregarding fat people’s humanity. Disregarding our humanity opens the door to treating us callously, parroting hurtful stereotypes back to us under the guise of concern for our health. This callous treatment makes way for overt discrimination, harassment, violence, and death threats, each softening the ground for the next. Whether the wolf (ban this, you fat fuck) or sheep’s clothing (I’m just concerned for your health), the story ends the same way. The wolf bares its teeth, then devours its prey. However anti-fatness presents itself, it will swallow me whole.
Still, this nearly naked contempt doesn’t appear from nowhere. Concern and choice aren’t cultural constants because they hurt fat people—they’re ubiquitous because they benefit people whose bodies are socially accepted: Thin people and some smaller fat people. White or light-skinned fat people. Fat women with hourglass figures and fat men with barrel chests and broad shoulders. Smaller fat people who look white, look able-bodied, and who perform their gender “correctly.” Fat people who aren’t that fat.
Anti-fatness isn’t about saving fat people, expressing concern for our health, or even about hurting us. Hurting us is a byproduct of reinforcing the egos of the privileged thin. Fat people are specters of some haunting future in which thin people become fat, and like any supernatural foe, we must be vanquished. Thinner people conquer fatness by distancing themselves from fatter people—through street harassment, food policing, and voicing constant judgment so that those around them know that they’re not that fat, not that bad, not that slovenly, not that careless. Fat people are props, set pieces to prove thin people’s virtue by contrast. Even the most benevolent thin people simply tolerate bodies like ours. In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Wendy Brown describes tolerance as “a discourse of power.”29
Despite its pacific demeanor, tolerance is an internally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness, and conciliation with discomfort, judgment, and aversion. Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist. It involves managing the presence of the undesirable, the tasteless, the faulty—even the revolting, repugnant or vile. [. . .] As compensation, tolerance anoints the bearer with virtue, with standing for a principled act of permitting one’s principles to be affronted; it provides a gracious way of allowing one’s tastes to be violated. It offers a robe of modest superiority in exchange for yielding.30
In this way, thinness becomes a system of supremacy—a way of organizing the world around us and once again casting ourselves in a graceful light. At every turn, thin people are defined by their virtue: the restraint and vigilance to stay thin, the tenacity and dedication to monitor their bodies at every moment, the goodness to spread the gospel of thinness to wretched fatter people, and the restraint to stop short of death threats.
Everything about hating me reinforces what thin people need to hear about themselves. They don’t want to hurt me; they want to stop hurting themselves. They don’t want to hurt me, but they do.
Concern and choice are seductive. Concern tells thinner people that they are doing me a favor by ignoring my feelings, experiences, boundaries, and needs. Choice tells you that any harshness, judgment, and withholding is warranted—after all, I brought my body on myself, which means I asked to become a scapegoat. Concern is built on the foundation of choice. If a fat person has brought their own ill-fated body on themselves, if she has chosen fatness, then her boundaries simply don’t matter—including asking those around her to withhold their concern. No matter how much a fat person protests, no matter how cogent her arguments or how urgent her pleas, her requests are always belied by choice and overridden by concern. Accordingly, these two insidious forces reliably render thinner people the expert on fat people’s bodies, experiences, and needs. The duetting siren songs of concern and choice lure thinner people into a casual kind of abuse, a ready carelessness and heartlessness reserved for the worst of the worst, and the simple sight of my body proves that I’m deserving of their toughest tough love and all the concern they’ve got.
But whatever the explanation, whatever the caveats that follow such intense and constant judgment, pressure, rejection, and discrimination, a simple fact remains: the way that thinner people treat fatter people is abuse. Choice whispers to thinner people that they wouldn’t hurt me if I didn’t make them. It tells them they’re doing me a favor—more than that, that they’d be doing a disservice if they didn’t express deep contempt for bodies like mine. Like so much abuse, its cruelty disguises itself as something not only benign, but beneficial.
But the truth is that concern and choice are cover for a convenient and tempting set of stories that establish a hierarchy of people by establishing a hierarchy of bodies. They are judge and jury so that every thin person may play executioner for any fat person. But by every measure, choice is false and unfounded, and concern isn’t helping. If thin people are just concerned with our health, they can tackle the bias that is hurting fat people much more than our bodies themselves.