Book Review: What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat by Aubrey Gordon

Media Representations of Fat People Are Reductive and Structure How Straight-Sized People Think About Fat People

Across several chapters, Gordon exposes how the mass media typically represent fat people using extraordinarily reductive and well-worn tropes. These tropes revolve around viewing fat people as bodies without personhood, simplified caricatures that are “more symbol than human” (p. 137). Examples from news reports about fatness are offered where fat people are presented as “headless fatties,” shot from the neck down, and presumably without consent (p. 119). For Gordon, such depictions position fat folk not as whole people, just bodies, “reduced and dehumanised as symbols of cultural fear” (p. 119). Through a series of comedy movies and prime time TV shows, Gordon demonstrates how fat characters are reduced to “punchlines and punchbags” (p. 128), with their fat bodies viewed as disgusting and funny. Particularly troubling examples include hit movies where thin actors wear fat suits to portray fat characters who are food-obsessed, physically repulsive, and socially dense. Gordon deplores these representations as unquestionably cruel and absent of any real fat people.

Gordon also attends to how the mass media misrepresent fat people as categorically undesirable. At the same time, she relays her own and other fat women's accounts of being frequent targets of sexual harassment. In one gut-churning story, Gordon tells of how friends congratulated her on being the subject of a man's rape fantasy. Depressingly, in a culture where the fat attraction is inconceivable, this story reveals the twisted logic that rape can be seen as a sign of hope for fat women.

Taken together, Gordon concludes that these crude and troubling media representations encourage antifat attitudes, create a social template for thin people's understanding of fat people, and provide limited social scripts for fat people to enact.

Antifatness and Fat Shaming Are Commonplace in Everyday Life and Harmful for Fat People

Gordon critically analyses a number of health campaigns that support the war on obesity. Here, fat people are viewed as enemy combatants who need to be shamed and ridiculed to motivate them to lose weight. Gordon also reviews research that documents how healthcare providers increasingly demonstrate implicit and explicit bias against fat patients. In worst-case scenarios, serious illnesses are misdiagnosed due to incorrect assumptions that fat people's health concerns must be due to their weight.

Concern trolls who present themselves as sympathetic supporters of fat people also come in for critique. For Gordon, claims such as “I’m just trying to help” or “I’m being cruel to be kind” enable thin people to disguise their bullying and disregard fat people's feelings, needs, and experiences under a veil of good intention. Yet Gordon cites a range of research that demonstrates how weight stigma and fat shaming have harmful psychological effects on fat people and lead to weight gain and worse health outcomes. Such issues, however, are seemingly ignored in cultural discourse, and Gordon laments that weight loss continues to be positioned as the primary solution for experiences of bullying and stigma.

Simplistic Constructions of Health Blame the Individual for Their Failings

In several chapters, we encounter examples of health conceived in a simplistic manner, as a size-based approach where health is conflated with being thin. Gordon argues this misplaced association is, in large part, based upon the dubious logic of the body mass index (BMI). Widely taken for granted in the U.S. as an objective and universal tool for measuring “healthy weight,” Gordon debunks these assumptions by offering a fascinating historical analysis. She uncovers the BMI's peculiar origins as a tool for identifying the shared characteristics of 19th-century Belgians. And she identifies how its shifting and increasingly restrictive thresholds of health constitute more of the population as “overweight.” Ultimately, this critique shows that prominent definitions of health are reliant on a crude mechanism with poor applicability to diverse populations.

Gordon also analyses a recent U.S. government-led initiative in which major food companies actively reformulated their foods under the guise of making them “healthier.” But such changes are viewed as mere token gestures, with foods reduced by only a few calories. Crucially, according to Gordon, what this and other initiatives miss is a sustained critique of the proliferation of cheaply produced foods with little nutritional value, and the growing reliance on such foods due to economic hardship.

Simplistic Constructions of Dieting Are Misleading and Ineffective

With weight loss positioned as the only solution to fat-stigma, and thinness conflated with health, Gordon charts how dieting is held up as the deceptively simple, quick-fix path to salvation. Critiquing such simplistic notions, Gordon raises concern that diet pills and dietary supplements are marketed as miracle drugs supported by unscrupulous claims, whilst evidence suggests they are rarely effective. She also reflects on her own and other women's engagement with Weight Watchers, a dieting system through which women are inducted into an endless war with their body to beat it into submission. A central assumption of diet culture is that being fat is a choice and weight loss can be achieved through individual discipline, responsibility, and exercise. Yet countering this popular logic, Gordon presents research showing that dieting and exercise rarely work for long-term weight loss. And after 20 years of dieting, the author concludes she will never be thin.

The Body Positivity Movement Needs to Move Beyond Viewing Antifatness as an Internal Psychological Struggle

Gordon notes that the Body Positivity movement has profoundly impacted U.S. culture, challenging the thin ideal and widening the circle of acceptable bodies. That said, she is critical of the caveats and restrictions embedded within body positivity. These include not being obese and responding to body shaming by loving your body. For Gordon, such perspectives are not fully inclusive and repackage social and cultural discrimination against fat people as a personal struggle with self-confidence and body image.

Society Needs to Treat Fat People With Respect

Finally, Gordon calls for society to treat fat people with respect. To realise this goal, Gordon offers a series of recommendations to engage in public conversations that challenge people to acknowledge and unlearn their own biases about fatness and fat people; to recognise that fat people have complex lives and are more than their bodies; to understand that diversity in size and shape is part of the natural variance of human bodies; to embrace more complex understandings of health; and to engage in meaningful and sustained action to support fat justice.

The main arguments proffered in this text will undoubtedly resonate with feminist researchers working in the fields of critical social psychology, critical health psychology, and fat studies. For example, there are established research literatures that critique media representations of fat people (Kyrölä, 2021), consider the harms of fat shaming (Farrell, 2011), challenge simplistic constructions of health and dieting (Lyons & Chamberlain, 2006), question the individualist tendencies of the Body Positivity movement (Gill & Elias, 2014), and call for activist work to improve the health and social lives of fat people experiencing discrimination (Cooper, 2021). For me, the unique contribution of What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is how these familiar arguments are conveyed with such personal vulnerability, gut-wrenching despair, and real-life grounding.

Critically reflecting on the text, it purposefully sets out to offer a powerful and impassioned challenge to societal norms that discriminate, marginalise, and oppress fat people. Whilst this is undoubtedly a noble political goal, I thought some arguments in the text were too extreme, and at times I was unconvinced by the amount of evidence provided to support the claims. For example, the text offers an insightful challenge to taken-for-granted assumptions about the success of dieting and exercise for weight loss. However, it concludes with claims such as “there is no data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss” (p. 54) and “contrary to popular opinion, neither diet nor exercise leads to long-term weight loss for the vast majority of us” (p. 83). I find these extreme case formulations unconvincing because personal experience tells me maintaining weight loss is challenging but can be done. And from a quick Google Scholar search, I found research evidence detailing successful examples and strategies for maintaining weight loss through diet and exercise (Kwasnicka et al., 2019; Reyes et al., 2012).

At times, some arguments in the text could also be more convincing by taking a balanced approach that thoroughly engages with counterarguments. As such, the text argues that people should stop assuming being fat is inevitably unhealthy or that all fat people have health problems. This is an extremely important argument. However, the text pays little attention to arguments, evidence, or examples when being fat does lead to health problems or health risks. Taking these counterviews into account would offer a more balanced and, in my view, more persuasive argument.

Despite these critical reflections, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a thoroughly engaging book that offers an exacting critique of taken-for-granted prejudices against fat people in the U.S. The job now is to explore the extent to which Gordon's arguments for fat justice and the experiences of fat people in the U.S. apply to other countries and cultures.