When the Cornell philosopher Kate Manne was invited to the UK in 2017 to promote her bestselling first book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, she declined because she felt “too fat to be a feminist in public”. She doesn’t feel this way any longer, and in Unshrinking turns her analytical attention to fatphobia. The best evidence suggests that being fat isn’t a health risk – in fact, being medically “overweight” is protective, having “mild obesity” doesn’t increase morbidity, and being more than mildly obese is no worse for you than being underweight – and yet both doctors and the public are reluctant to accept this.
Manne argues that equating fatness with unhealthiness is a “smokescreen”, one that barely conceals the contempt with which fat people are treated. She writes in harrowing detail of her own experiences of discrimination and the cycle of shockingly disordered eating. Manne sees fatphobia as a structural problem, but her response is more individualistic. She is striving for “body reflexivity”, which “prescribes a radical evaluation of whom we exist in the world for, as bodies: ourselves, and no one else”. Claiming total ownership of one’s own body ought not to feel radical, but perhaps it is.
By Sophie McBain
Allen Lane, 320pp, £20. Buy the book
Content from our partners
