Review: Kate Manne: Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia, London: Allan Lane, 2024.
New York-based Australian philosopher Kate Manne became famous several years ago with Down Girl, an account of misogyny that employed the techniques of analytic philosophy to great effect. In her latest book she applies these techniques to the issue of fatphobia. Her argument is engagingly written, carefully argued and frankly polemical. It is also that rarest of things: a philosophy book that might actually do some good. Although I have reservations about some of her conclusions, she has changed my attitude to both my own body and the bodies of others.
Manne claims that fatphobia is a widespread form of bigotry, comparable to racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. Indeed, she argues, there can be no adequate understanding of these better-known forms of bigotry without an understanding of the ways in which they intersect with fatphobia. The problem of fatphobia is in part the problem of widespread, unfairly negative attitudes towards fat people, but Manne argues that it is also a structural issue. Even if everyone stopped being fatphobic tomorrow, the world would still need to change to accommodate and actively support fat bodies. In other words, fatphobia is not merely a form of bigotry; like racism, sexism and so on, it is also form of oppression. We have to not only recognise and reject our own fatphobia, but also remake the world to ‘fit’ fat bodies better. Fat acceptance is not enough; we need fat liberation.
Many people will find this call for fat liberation overblown; however, Manne’s descriptions of the many daily unnecessary inconveniences and humiliations that fat people endure from cradle to grave and even beyond—apparently fat people are not permitted to donate their bodies to medical science in the United States—make it clear that this is a real and growing problem. Manne argues convincingly that fat people are routinely unfairly stereotyped as stupid, incompetent, lazy and lacking in self-control. Her discussion of fatphobia in academia, and especially in her own discipline of philosophy, is compelling. She demolishes Peter Singer’s argument that fat people should have to pay more for airline travel. She also exposes the fatphobia inherent in various formulations of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous ‘Trolley Problem’. She even argues that the popularity of Ockham’s Razor in contemporary analytic metaphysics is evidence of fatphobia; initially I thought this was a bit of a stretch, but now I’m not so sure. Certainly the language in which many philosophers argue that we should avoid ‘bloated’ ontologies appears to presuppose an aesthetic preference for thinness.
Another reason for dismissing the rhetoric of ‘fat liberation’ is that fatness is bad for your health. Without quite denying this, Manne does succeed in problematising it in various ways. She accepts that extreme fatness, like extreme thinness, is bad for your health and that there is a well-established correlation between even moderate fatness and a variety of serious health conditions. She points out, however, that correlation is not causation; junk food and sugar are making many of us fatter and they are also making us less healthy, but it doesn’t follow—and if Manne is right, it is not in general true—that our fatness is a cause of our ill health. Manne argues plausibly that the view that moderate fatness is bad for our health is at least unproven, and probably false. Furthermore, she argues that the line between moderate and extreme fatness is not where most people, including most health professionals, think it is. She cites, for example, a study which found that people classified as ‘overweight’—though not ‘obese’—according to their Body Mass Index have a statistically significant lower mortality risk than people classified as ‘normal weight’. In short, Mann argues that being fat need not be unhealthy, and even when it is unhealthy, the health risks have been greatly exaggerated.
A third objection to Manne’s argument for fat liberation is that fatness, unlike the subjects of other liberation movements, is susceptible to individual control. You cannot choose your race, sex or sexual orientation, but surely you can choose whether you are fat. Manne responds to this objection by arguing that for most people it is virtually impossible to lose weight over the long term. Manne fiercely attacks the diet industry and diet culture, citing meta-analyses of a wide range of weight-loss diets, according to which they are ineffective at achieving long-term weight loss and often actually lead to eventual weight gain. Manne is not always as clear as she should be that the target of her attack is dieting that aims at weight loss, not dieting more generally; it would be unfortunate, and certainly contrary to her intentions, if anyone understood her to be dismissing prudential or ethical concerns about what we eat altogether. It would also be wrong to think that she is opposed to exercise. Regular exercise is certainly good for our health; however, it is almost entirely ineffective as a means of losing weight. Finally, Manne does not deny that some people have managed to successfully lose weight and keep it off by dieting, but she argues that they are exceptions to the rule. Most people cannot lose weight over the long term by any methods short of bariatric surgery or appetite-suppressing drugs, both of which are accompanied by serious long-term dangers. Manne concludes that ‘even for those who maintain, contrary to my own view, that there is some value in weight loss … There is currently no morally acceptable practice that serves reliably to make fat people thin’.
The final objection to her position that Manne considers is that fatness is unattractive. Her response to this objection is one of the less clear and convincing parts of the book. She rightly points out that beauty standards have varied a lot over time, and clearly thinks that they are largely social constructed rather than biologically determined. But socially constructed truths are still truths, and most of us want to be attractive in the socially constructed eyes of actual people. Manne argues at length that we have no moral obligation to avoid fatness, and I think that for the most part she is right. Nonetheless, it does seem to me that we have some moral obligation to be attractive to anyone with whom we are in a long-term sexual relationship. Even if, as Manne argues, we are unable to make ourselves thinner without going to unreasonable lengths, it is surely within our power not to ‘let ourselves go’.
Manne calls for a total divestment from beauty culture as well as diet culture. She hopes for a future in which ‘our current relentless beauty pageant has no more judges—and not a single entrant’ and exhorts the reader to ‘dress and look how you want not in the name of any kind of beauty but for the sake of being the most yourself that you can presently imagine’. I find this unconvincing. If per impossibile we were to cease making judgements about human beauty, or aspiring to be beautiful ourselves, we would be giving up something important—something which is the basis of much of our greatest art. Furthermore, I don’t see why the goals of fat liberation require us to make such a sacrifice. I agree that we should challenge current beauty standards, but surely what is needed is greater diversity in our understanding of the ways in which people can be beautiful, not that we stop making beauty judgements about people altogether.
Despite this caveat I find most of Manne’s argument convincing and am happy to embrace the cause of fat liberation. Nonetheless, I retain some qualms about Manne’s comparison between it and other liberation movements. Much of the evidence Manne presents is personal and anecdotal, and while that is not itself necessarily objectionable, it does mean that she focuses almost exclusively on Australia, where she grew up, and the United States, where she now works. Consequently, she tends to lose sight of the fact that fatphobia is largely a first world problem. Of course, first world problems are still real problems, but her rhetoric gets the better of her when she says that she longs ‘for a world in which nobody goes hungry for no good reason, including for the sake of weight loss’. This lumping together of people who go hungry because they don’t have access to enough food with people who go hungry because of social pressure to be thin borders on the absurd, if not the obscene. Almost a billion people around the world do not have access to enough food, and this would not be happening if it were not for widespread systematic racism. The inevitable result of comparing fatphobia with racism is that racism is trivialised, and the same holds true for Manne’s comparisons between fatphobia and other more pressing and global forms of oppression.
In conclusion, Manne has written an important book with two significant flaws. First, she treats our physical appearance as being nobody’s business but our own. This comes out in both her argument that we have no moral obligation to avoid fatness and her argument that we should stop making judgements about human beauty. For her, our appearance, to the extent that it is under our control, is a domain of self-expression where others have no place. I find this extreme individualism unconvincing. We don’t live for ourselves alone; others have rightful claims on us, and there seems to be no reason to think that the parts of our lives that we devote to managing our physical appearance should be any different. Second, when Manne compares the oppression of fat people with other, far worse forms of oppression she draws a long bow, and that bow finally snaps when she compares those who go hungry because of poverty with those who go hungry because of dieting.