Maintenance Phase - Anti-Fat Bias

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

To celebrate the release of her new book, Aubrey takes Mike on a tour through the statistics and debates surrounding weight bias. Anyone interested in body positivity, airline seats, 'skinny shaming' or the sugar content of melons is legally obligated to join us.Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPal Get Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreGet Aubrey's book in the U.S.:Powell's BooksBookshop.orgBeacon PressBuy from your local bookstore on IndieboundGet Aubrey's book outside the U.S.Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Uh, would you want to start us off? I feel like you're better at these than I am. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha My name's Aubrey Gordon. No tagline? Nothing? Okay, okay, okay. Okay, okay. Okay. All right, we'll take it again. How about welcome to maintenance phase. We're just a podcast standing in front of a listener,

asking them to love us. And reconsider their bias against fat people. You ruined it. That's worse. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post. I am Aubrey Gordon, I am a columnist for Self Magazine, a newly minted author, and a pro at Ruining Tag Life. But it's the middle one that we're talking today, this is a very special episode because Aubrey has a new book out and you

should go click on order this now on your internet. Yeah, so we're going to talk about weight bias today and stigma against fat people, which is basically what Aubrey's book is about. Aubrey's book is basically a sort of primer on all of the ways that fat bias affects fat people. And it is called what we don't talk about when we talk about fat. That's my book. I wrote it. It's very good.

Thanks, bud. Appreciate it. My brain is broken from having a podcast for two years. So I like went through it and copy-pasted paragraphs. And I've got a bunch of like statistics that I pulled out. But if you're a normal person, you can also just read it normally. Yeah, totally. It is a quick little read that will get you through a bunch of information.

Yes, but before we dive into the book, we should have a little sort of like house meeting. Yes, house meeting. So basically, this is our sixth episode. We recorded all of our episodes without releasing any of them. So basically, over the last three months, we recorded all of our episodes without releasing any of them. So basically over the last three months, we recorded all of those episodes, but because we weren't releasing them, we had no idea what the reaction was gonna be. We had no idea if we were gonna do more than six.

And since we started releasing them, it seems like some number of Americans enjoy our podcast, and have been listening to it and downloading it, and tweeting things at us. And it has been really gratifying and really wonderful. And so we wanted to thank everybody. Thank you all so much for listening. Thank you all so much for spreading the word.

And we have to do some catching up. Yes. And also we're also we're buttering you up before we tell you that we're fucking off for a while. We're taking a break. We don't know how long it will be as short as possible. We want to get recording again, but we sort of thought of these first episodes as sort of like season one. We're coming up with some sort of schedule,

some way to make this a more regular thing. So we're gonna take some period of time off, and then we're gonna come back with a more regular release schedule. So we're here to thank you and to warn you. Yes, that's right. And Mike and I are already researching our next episode. So we're here to thank you and to warn you. Yes, that's right. And Mike and I are already researching our next episodes.

We're already working on booking some fun guests potentially. So we're moving forward. We're full steam ahead and we just need to be honest with ourselves and take a little couple of weeks. Yes. So this episode is sort of our season finale. And essentially, the Paul Simon line, she comes back to tell me she's gone.

This is us coming back to tell you. We're not going to see you for a while. Yeah. Is it bad to know my own bit? Yeah, I got you. Yeah. This so now that we've disappointed you, we also want to inform you about fatphobia and weight bias or whatever we end up calling this episode

Listen, we want it now that we've disappointed you. We want to disappoint you in new and exciting ways Only this time about the world. So Aubrey tell us about I mean you basically Set out to write a book Exploring the parameters of weight bias in America. Yeah, that was a lot of it. And also, I just felt like, look, our conversations about fatness and fat people get stalled out in a couple of ways. One is that we all get really focused on talking about fat people without talking to fat people. So all of our conversations about these quote unquote obesity epidemic and the quote unquote war on obesity, all of that stuff is overwhelmingly thin people functionally

sort of pointing the finger at fat people, right? And telling us that we are a disease that we are responsible for health care costs. It's there's a lot of scapegoating. There's a lot of stuff that gets called into question when fat people enter the conversation, when fat people enter the chat. Yeah. And I wanted to write a book that was about both my own personal experiences with anti-fatness, but also the ways in which those are not just individual blips on the radar. Those are the results of policy choices that we have made of cultural shifts that have been pre-intentional over time of profit-driven decisions of all kinds of things. So I wanted to sort of like do a little mapping of like, how did we get here?

Your fat friend might not be telling you about all of their experiences with anti-fatness, but I think 74% of fat people have experienced even just other people making negative assumptions about that based on their size. 10% of fat people have been physically attacked because of their size, right? This is not a minor issue,

and this isn't something that you should pity an individual when they come up against it. These are systemic things that we need to address as systemic things. I mean, one of the numbers I pulled out of your book was that 68% of American women were above a size 14 dress. Yes, correct.

And yet, it seems like, well, okay, these are people with actual experiences of this. So we should actually be talking to those people as opposed to talking to everyone else and saying here's how to prevent yourself from becoming like the majority of Americans. It's super structurally odd and it has become such a prevalent way of thinking

and talking about fat people that there are fat people who also do this, right? Our whole logic of anti-fat bias is predicated on the idea that it's okay to treat fat people this way because we choose to be fat and we choose to sort of shirk our responsibility to be thin. And what we actually know just based on like a whole lot of studies, about a whole lot of people. And frankly, what many of us know from our personal experiences is that people really like to talk about weight loss,

being a really simple thing that anybody can do. And it actually really isn't. It isn't. We just don't know how to make fat people thin in the long term. You know what my overwhelming impression reading the book was? Tell me. I don't know.

I felt conflicted because I know you, and I know that you're a pretty private person generally. And yet, the book is full of these like really rough anecdotes about the way that people have treated you. And like, it just made me think of the way that these forms of discrimination work. The owner's responsibility is up to you to put yourself out there enough to get people to see your experiences as legitimate. Yeah, totally. I mean, like, it's really tricky, right? I especially feel like as someone who's been an organizer around other communities that I call home, right? An organizer for queer rights, women and reproductive health and organizer for like lots and lots of things, right?

It's really shitty because I feel like I have seen the ways in which there's this economy of trauma that gets people to pay attention and reconsider. And it sucks that I feel like they need to see someone whose experience is different from their own. They need to see them sort of like vivisected in order to buy into the idea that what they personally are saying or doing is harming this other person. It's actually like not enough currently for fat people to just say,

hey, this hurts me and I wish you would stop, right? There are like too many people who just won't take our word for it or will say, well, then you just should have lost weight, or you shouldn't have gained in the first place, or whatever, right, that it's extremely unforgiving, and that the only way that I have found to sort of write that is through both sort of like data and research, but again, I know as an organizer that data and research isn't what changes people's mind. It helps! But that's just not how our brains are wired. Our brains are wired to pay attention to changes people's mind. It helps. But that's just not how our brains are wired. Our brains are wired to pay attention to other people's stories. These are the stories that I've got. But that just means you have to tell your own stories over and over again.

Yeah, totally. Bad things that happen to you. Yeah, absolutely. And like many, many, many communities have had to do that for a long time. Absolutely. Yeah. Putting this trauma front and center. And making it more central to your life than it is in a way, even though of course this is central to people's lives, because you're trying to get attention to this one aspect of your personality, you sort of have to highlight the degree to which that has been this massive factor in your life.

Yeah, totally. It just made me feel like bummed out. They're like, oh, I'm just gonna do a book tour now. I'm just gonna have to get asked the same question. Well, if you're getting me real jails for the, oh, I'm just gonna do a book tour now. I just can't have to get it as the same as Jimmy Quest. Well, you're getting me real jazzy for the book tour. I'm sorry. I'm literally doing this to you. Wow.

No, I mean, like, it's really interesting to me, right? Because I think you're right that it sort of all gets collapsed into. You're gonna be the fat lady who's gonna go talk about fat stuff. And I think it's really interesting and context of my own life. Like the way that this is operated is I didn't really talk to people about being fat until like, hmm, last five or 10 years. Oh, so it's pent up. You have like 33 years of back. I have a lot of geniuses of stuff. You know, I have sort of all these years and years of experience, but I haven't really talked about it into the last five or 10 years.

And in terms of the way that anti-fatness shows up in my life, the 95% of the time I'm just out living my life being a big mucket. And the way that anti-fatness shows up is as an interruption to an otherwise normal existence, right? That I'm going about sort of trying to get a cup of coffee or get to work and somebody tells me they don't want to see me in a sleeveless shirt, right? Or somebody threatens to kick me off a plane or on and on and on. Not only am I and other fat people confronted with very overt, very proud anti-fat bias. We are also confronted by the many bystanders who choose not to address it. Yeah. There is research about that exact effect, which is thin women believe that anti-fatness

is motivating to fat people because it is motivating to thin people to stay thin. So not only are the people not conditioned to interrupt, they are conditioned to perpetuate it, right? Harvard has these implicit bias tests, which millions and millions and millions of people have taken. And what they found was that anti-fat bias was significantly on the rise and by the end of that time period, they found that about 80% of us have bias against fat people and in favor of thin people. I think it's also like an important sort of orientation to the conversation to say,

Antifa bias isn't something you decide to do and you decide to pick up. It is something that is sort of part and parcel of growing up in a society that has declared a war on obesity That makes one of fat people kind of every chance it gets, right? I mean, this is a good way to get us into the content of the book because as I mentioned my brain is broken and I Pulled a bunch of like categories out of the book for us to talk about because there's a lot of themes that you return to in the book and there's a lot of really good data and really great passages in

the book. So I think the first thing we should do is just establish that discrimination against fat people exists, right? Because I don't think like to us that is really obvious and to fat people in general, that's pretty obvious, but that's not necessarily obvious or like an accepted form of discrimination that is really recognized by society at large. Yeah, I mean, like fat people earn substantially less money than thin people. Fat people are regularly fired or denied jobs altogether

because we're not the image of the company, right? In my sort of last five years of writing about this, I haven't heard from anyone who has disputed that fat people are discriminated against. Yeah. I have only heard from people who dispute whether or not it is deserved. I mean, that's another thing I pulled out of your book. You mentioned that there's a study in 2006 that finds 59 types of obesity. There are all these different reasons why people end up fat. Like people have polycystic ovarian syndrome or people have medications that they take.

Some people are just fat their entire lives. I still remember, you know that photo of the fatest twins, like the two dudes on the motorcycle that we've all seen a million times. Sure. I remember a documentary about them as a kid that talked about how they had been fat. Like they were fat basically from birth

and their parents were always worried about it and their parents sent them off to some fat camp where it was like exercise constantly fucking kayaking all day, eating salads, like the most hardcore regimen for weight loss that you can imagine and they both gained five pounds. Yeah, some people's bodies just hold onto weight and that's just the dice that got rolled.

Yeah, and that doesn't mean that there are not fat people who do choose to be fat, right? Like there are fat people who are like, I just like being fat. That's fine. Yeah. But that myth of everyone is choosing it and I don't have to respect their humanity because I believe it's a choice. It feels like an echo of what happens in conversations echo about a choice. It feels like an echo of what happens in conversations echo about queer people. It feels like an echo of what happens in conversations about trans people. We are sort of in a really unfortunate and really upsetting way once you sort of step out side of it. You can kind of see the ways in which we are looking for opportunities to stop treating people like people. Do you also wear the same age?

So we both grew up in the time when there was this endless, tedious debate about whether gay people had chosen the lifestyle. I remember sexual preference, right? Remember like lifestyle choice and this total bullshit that went around. And I think it is the same thing with fat people that like A, a lot of the data indicates

that it's not a choice, but b, who fucking cares? That doesn't actually matter. Like it was always such bullshit that entire debate for gay people because it's like, well yeah, maybe I did choose like maybe I literally filled out a form. I would like to be gay. I applied. I got approved. Now I'm gay. Fuck you. It's still an okay choice, even if it's a choice. That's right, and also, like, if you take away sort of sequester the idea of, like, is it or is it not a choice? And you look at your own actions in sort of a vacuum, they start to look pretty gross.

I think that's the other thing, right? That you're sort of like, well, I shouldn't have to respect it because it's your choice or whatever. The conversation that led to that point is like, hey, why did you beat me up? Why? Why did you deny me health care? Right.

There are all these things that are like unquestionably every person should be able to walk down the street with a sense of safety. And many of us don't have that sense of safety, including fat people. Yeah, absolutely. Before we even get to the question of, like, is it a choice or not,

there are already all of these sort of, like, violations of just, like, basic decency. Yeah. Thin people are conditioned not to treat fat people like people. And fat people are conditioned to understand that thin people won't believe us, won't trust us, and won't change their actions.

So we also learn not to bring this stuff up. Totally. One of the things that really struck me from the book is that there's these experiences that are just like people being absolute warlocks, and then every single one of those stories is followed by you telling a friend, like, hey, this terrible warlock ass thing happened to me, and your friend being like, did it though? Like, wasn't that person trying to help? Like, some sort of gas lady follow-up conversation

that doesn't recognize just like, hey, that sucks, that person sucks. Yeah, totally. So I think the one that folks really tends to make people's hair sort of stand on end is this story of being at my local neighborhood grocery store, doing micro free shopping and being in the produce section and putting a melon in my cart, turning around to get something else and seeing a stranger

reaching into my cart and taking it out and putting it back. And that stranger explained to me that it has too much sugar for me. A melon. A melon. Maybe a fucking break. It's a fruit. Also, melons are like generally like lower in sugar than other fruit. They're not even correct.

They're not even correct, right? Like an apple actually has more sugar and higher carbohydrates. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I will say don't try to fucking out food science fat people. I can't be done. I know this from my mom. Like fat people and like habitual dieters know so much more about food science fat people. I can't be done. I know this from my mom, like fat people and like habitual

dieters know so much more about science than skinny people. It's so noticeable. And also where I would say just anecdotally in my own personal life, I know way more fat people with eating disorders than thin people. Yeah, yeah. You think disorders don't come from nowhere? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

But that was like absolutely a person who I remember distinctly sort of like imagining that this person has like a my body, my choice bumper sticker on her tour. It is a in this house, we believe house. Yeah. In our America. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's the sort of thing. like I would then take back to friends and family and they would say, Oh, she was just trying to help you. Right. My theory about this is that they can see themselves doing something like that. So they feel more aligned with the person doing the thing that feels to me like a violation. And they want to defend themselves and their own logic, which is like totally understandable and totally human.

And also the effect of that on fat people is absolutely gaslight. Right. You're prioritizing the intentions of the person who did the mean thing over the effect of the mean thing. Totally. Well, and I will say this isn't just a matter of defending individuals, right?

This also comes up in conversations about institutions. You know, I've been a community organizer for the last like 10 or 15 years, right? Even amongst those folks, including like union organizers, right? I will never forget a conversation I had with a friend at the time who was a union organizer and I told him about a passenger asking to be receded when I was on a plane. And he immediately went to, well, but the airlines have to protect their bottom line. I was like, you're a union organizer. That's fascinating.

There is this thing that happens where folks, even very thoughtful, very intentional, very justice-minded folks, their brains will just drop back into defending the status quo when it comes to people. Physical accommodations was another theme that I pulled out of your book. Yeah. You know, the airplane thing is the one that always comes up. But also, I mean, a lot of the people that I interviewed for my article would say that, you know, I can't go to restaurants where there's boots. And yeah, I get the sense from fat people that that's one of the hardest things to

talk with thin people about. Totally. So I went to high school here in Portland every week that we had assemblies. I would sit in the theater and I would sort of hug my arms to myself as closely as I could so that I wouldn't sort of encroach on anyone else's space. I would always sit in the aisle, I do that to this day so that I can sort of like tilt myself out into the aisle and away from the next person so that they won't complain. And I will reliably leave with bruises. I will come home, change my clothes that night, put on pajamas, and see change my clothes that night, put on pajamas, and see giant, deep purple bruising on my thighs. And I think that this is a thing, right,

that like thin people don't have to think about. And then it is a very noticeable omission that we are living in a country where again, most people's BMI's put them in the overweight or obese categories. And yet still, the designs that we are making for physical spaces are sort of centered around a minority of people. Yeah.

I mean, one of the people I interviewed for my article who's kind of become a friend of mine, hello Emily, she told me that one of the biggest ally things that people can do for her is in a restaurant that one of her thin friends will go up to the Mator D and be like, sorry, we can't sit in that table that chair won't hold my friend. Yes. She's at the first time that one of her friends did that for her. She started crying because it's like that's such a huge thing to have a Thin person just recognize the basic humanity of like my that's that's not the right accommodation for my friend. Yes. I have friends who will just walk into a place and they'll just turn to me and go,

where do you want to sit? Yeah. It's very simple. It doesn't call any attention to itself and it makes all the difference in the world. We also have to talk about airlines. We sure do. You made this the first chapter of your book,

which I know you did deliberately because everything in the book is very deliberate. And this is, I mean, this is one of your main, this is one of your most viral articles too, and something that you tweet about all the time. Yeah, I think last I checked, just the original version without reprints, had been read by like two or three million people.

Oh, look at her. Wow. Wow. That's so pretty. You're so pretty. No, no, no. But yeah, I think because, listen, how many of us have heard someone just go, oh god It was on a plane and like I just don't I just don't want to have to sit next to this great big fat person

And they were spilling on to me and they were sweaty and Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh flying. I think what a lot of thin folks don't necessarily know is that pretty much every airline has something that they call their customer of size policy on Southwest Airlines, which is the best one. You can go get an extra seat and they will refund you at the end for free. I believe is the state of their policy. So you just pay for one seat, even if you use two. That's the best, best, best one we've got. Everything else is like, if a flight attendant determines that you don't look comfortable in your seat, they can escort you from the plane.

Even if there is not a second seat available, you can be charged for a second seat at the day of price. And also, it sounds like the anxiety comes from the lack of predictability. That's right. Because it sounds like a lot of airlines have these policies that like, yeah, we'll give you an extra seat or you know, buy two seats, it's no big deal.

And then you get to the flight and they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, we filled the seat next to you. Absolutely. I rarely sleep well for several days before flying. And there have been times when I have like had a prescription for like Xanax or clonipin and taken that before getting on a plane. Those are medications for

a panic disorder. That shouldn't happen when you're just trying to get on a plane. Yeah. Can you tell your terrible airline story? Am I a monster for Asmeter Tellet? No, it's fine. So I was flying from, this is from Long Beach to Portland and I got on the plane and took my seat. Guy sat down next to me who was a, who was sort of middle-aged white dude and he got sort of increasingly agitated and got up and went to talk to the flight attendant and then came back and sat down and got more agitated and then went back up and talked to the flight attendant again and the flight attendant came back and switched places for him but switched him to the row directly in front of me. You know, not a lot of distance. I will say when he got up to talk to the flight attendant, I absolutely, I couldn't hear his conversation for the most part, but I absolutely remember him

saying, paying customer and I was like, oh, shit. Yeah. This is not going my way. Yeah. This guy got up and changed seats. And he explained to me while he was changing seats, two things. One, he said, this is so you'll be more comfortable and you'll have more space. And the flight attendant was like, no, it's not. Which is great. She was like, no, no, there will be someone sitting here. You're not going to have more space. Like the flight is sold out. Yeah.

We then went through the whole flight. I absolutely remember quietly crying to myself because that is without question a humiliating thing to have happened. It's awful. During the flight, the flight attendant brought extra snacks to people in my row, but did not offer them to me, shitty. And as I was getting off the plane, the guy stopped me again, the guy who was sitting again, like 18 inches in front of me for the whole flight. So I'm on this whole flight and I'm like staring at the back of his head. At the end of the flight, he said,

you know, I just want you to know, I wouldn't do this with a pregnant person. Jesus Christ. He's trying to preserve his, like, I'm not a terrible person, this. So he said, I wouldn't do this to a pregnant woman and I also wouldn't do it to a person with a walker. And I just looked at him and I said,

I know that's what makes this terrible. Yeah, that makes it worse, fuck you. Yeah. And I left and I went to the bathroom and the airport and I cried for a while. It was really an awful thing to have happened. And that is like far from the worst stories and this to about this.

Oh my God, I know you have some in your book of like people being arrested, people fuck the lady who dies because she can't get on a flight to get medical care. Yeah, there's a weird thing in the rhetoric too, because I've also been on airplanes where I sit next to some big linebacker dude, with just huge broad shoulders, some guy who's like six foot six.

And I've been on flights where I've had to basically be leaning at a 45 degree angle away from the person in the middle seat, the entire flight, and you know what? It sucks. But also, it's not that person's fault. Right. For having a large body and really broad shoulders and being six foot six, there's nothing they can do about that, and there's especially nothing they can do about that on the particular Tuesday on which we are sitting next to each other on an airplane. Yeah, so this is a story that is not in the book, but is one of my faves. Ooh, besides deleted scenes.

So, when I board a flight, I always, always, always try to be like one of the first people in line because whenever I have the chance I request a window seat so that I can just sort of like pack myself in, I don't drink any water beforehand. So I won't have to get up and go to the bathroom during the flight, which then people get often get very angry about. I own a seat belt extender for the flights, and I like to be able to get that out and use it before anybody gets there because people will make remarks and that will prompt people to make complaints to the staff, which is the first step to be getting kicked off a flight,

right? So I got enough light at one point. It's one of those little sort of like regional jets where there are just two seats on either side of the aisle. People start boarding the plane and the people who start boarding the plane are all wearing matching track suits and they are from a college basketball team. Oh, no. And I was like, this is like all of

my high school nightmares. I'm on a plane full of jocks. Like, I hate this. No, thank you. And this dude who's easily over six three, sits down next to me and sort of stoops to sit down next to me and gets in a seat. I am just like put in your headphones. Don now next to me and sort of stoop to sit down next to me and get to

an seat. I am just like put in your headphones. Don't talk to me. I won't talk to you. Like just I just want this to be over. I want us to both settle into our quiet flights and not have to worry about it. And instead of doing that, he leaned over to me and he went, this plane is a really built for either one of us, is it? And I was like, imagine that! Like imagine if that was our sort of outlook, right? Yeah. If people were just like, Hey, man, you know who's comfortable in airline seats? No human being.

So this kind of brings us to the next theme from your book that I wanted to talk about, because one thing that you mentioned in quite a few of the chapters is the intersectionality of all of this. Yeah, just one example of this, fat trans people are often told that they have to lose weight before they get gender confirmation surgery,

which is one of those things that has nothing to do with the actual procedure. It's just sort of what is done in the medical system. And so that actually blocks their access to confirmation surgery. That's right. Should we just talk about that aspect for a second? Because anti-fat bias, of course,

is going to be different for everyone depending on all these other characteristics that they have. Like, there's no such thing as like vanilla anti-fat bias. That's exactly right. Anti-fat bias kind of turns up the volume on existing systems of oppression, right? I think another example

is Eric Garner who is one of the- I was just going to mention this. Yeah. Did you know about this? I could not fucking believe it. No. So this is like a videotaped murder of an unarmed black man, and the defense put forth by the attorney for the police union and for this officer was that the officer couldn't have murdered him because basically he was going to die anyway because he was fat. The thing, the quote that I cannot get over, this is a direct quote which is

in your book. This is from the lawyer of the officer who choked him to death. He died from being morbidly obese. He was a ticking time bomb that resisted arrest. If he was put in a bear hug, it would have been the same outcome. Are you fucking kidding me? Right. When you are making it acceptable and natural for someone to die at someone else's hands, like I don't know a greater measure of dehumanization than that. They know on some level, no one's coming to defend fat people. That's how you get away with that argument. It's often sort of the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of folks' ability or willingness to empathize

with someone. Right. Can I read another passage? Sure go. Because you have some very interesting stuff in the book about sexual assault. And the way that there's this thing that sort of fat, especially fat women, it's like they deserve to be assaulted.

And then the fatness is like a reason that they're lying about being assaulted because like, well, who would want to rape her? Basically, like, this is a quote that people have said. So this is from your book. In 2017, 21-year-old Quantasia sharped in filed suit against Usher for failing to share his herpes diagnosis with her before she says they slept together. Quantasia was just one of

three people to suit singer, but she was the only one who appeared at a press conference. And she was a fat black woman. The online response was swift and ruthless. And then you quote one of the tweets which received over 6,000 likes, I refuse to believe usher fucked this. Yeah. So I said to throw a lot of tweets. Oh, that was dark. That sounds bad.

We have now been through me too. We now have sort of more of a vocabulary for sort of thinking and talking about sexual assault and more of sort of a social script for how to handle it. And that social script, because we are talking here about a fat black woman, that social script got thrown out the window, right? And people from just all sides were referring to her as it and that. There were jokes about, is diabetes communicable? Did she give that to him?

So with Eric Carner, we've got excusing the murder of a fat black man, and with Quantasia Sharpton and sort of the public response to that, we've got excusing the sexual assaults of a fat black woman. Right, I mean, there are interesting gender dynamics here because as you mentioned, weight starts to affect women's earnings much earlier than men's. Absolutely. So the data is like a little bit all over the place on those sort of like how much do thin women earn more than fat women? But across the board, thin women earn more than fat women,

right? The sort of low end is that thin women earn, I think it's like $1,300 more than fat women and the high end is that they earn 20 or $25,000 more each year for similar jobs. Yeah. Fat people are fired for gaining weight. We are fired because we are assumed to be physically unable to complete tasks that need to happen, even sometimes when we demonstrate that we can. It's not just a matter of pay equity, it's also a matter of straight up, like employment and access to jobs, right? Yeah, which brings us to the next theme

that I wanted to talk about, which you don't actually mention specifically in your book, but I have been wanting to talk about this ever since we started doing this show. Should we discuss skinny shaming? Yes, yes, yes, let's do it. I have a lot of strong thoughts about this. We have talked about this like offline, but I know you, I know,

I generally know your thoughts on this, but yeah, one of the first things that comes up as soon as a fat person starts to talk about the discrimination that they've experienced, like there is always a skinny person who pops out of a trash can to be like, what about skinny shaming? What about the people who, when I talk about my body, they say, oh, you should eat a sandwich. What about that, huh? So Aubrey, what about skinny shaming? Ooh. Okay, aren't there any symptoms?

Aubrey, the people with abs? Yes, there's no question that thin people have at worst in this world than fat people. No. Starting table stakes. Let's just lay that out to begin from job. So, listen, no one should be shamed for the size or shape of their body.

Yes. Or for what a can or can't do, or for how it looks, or for anything. Yes. Be nice to people. And there's something that happens, though, where I'm like, I don't actually hear thin people talking about skinny shaming in the absence of fat people talking about their experiences with the attack of hi bias. So that's one, right? There's not an independent conversation about skinny shaming that exists without a conversation about that shape. It's the all lives matter of weight bias, right? 100%. And it is, I think, a discomfort reaction,

right? I'm not being discussed here. And I don't know what to do in a conversation where I'm not being discussed and where I can't be an aggrieved party, right? So that's the one thing too is that this is a pretty intense derailing tactic that flattens anti-fat bias, right? Like we're talking about, when we talk about anti-fat bias, we're not just talking about individual people being mean to you. We are talking about institutional policies. We are talking about millions of dollars being spent on a war on obesity. So to say skinny shaming is bad, when a fat person is talking about employment discrimination or about airline policies,

is like a complete red hairing, right? Like it is completely designed, sort of derail and to flatten all of anti-fat bias into the idea that an individual person is being mean to an individual fat person. This actually reminds me of another passage from your book. So what you say is the concrete external harms of anti-fatness are often re-framed and reinterpreted as insecurity by thinner people, especially women. After all, thinner women simply aren't subjected to the same levels of societal prejudice, harassment, bullying, and overt discrimination as fatter people.

As such, feeling insecure is among the worst things many thinner women can imagine. So many interpret fat people's story of explicit, interpersonal, or institutional anti-fatown-as-as-in-security. I mean, you talk about in the book of describing these experiences of, yeah, overt differential treatment. And people will be like, I've had days where I didn't feel very pretty either. That's right. So for taking sort of the classic setup of skinny shaming, which is like, fat person talks about some kind of usually institutional anti-fat bias, then person pops up and says, skinny shaming isn't any better. Leave me alone, stop telling me to eat a burger. The implicit sort of follow up to that is so shut up.

So stop talking. If there's like one thing that I can hammer home about this book, it is that it is not a book about confidence or self-love. It is about what lies beyond our own individual mindsets and what are the sort of like social and institutional realities that create those mindsets, right? Right. You can talk to fat people all day long about needing to love ourselves and have higher self-esteem, but like

ultimately like the thing that will make that possible for many fat people is for us to create a world in which it is possible for fat people to have self-esteem. Well, this is the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. And we're gonna eventually do an episode on this. Body positivity. Like, why isn't body positivity the way to look at this? Yeah, so I'll back us up even one step from that, if that's okay. There is sort of like a great deal of contention

in body positive and then fat activist spaces about sort of like, what are the origins of body positivity to our point spaces about sort of like, what are the origins of body positivity? To our point earlier about sort of like the ways in which thin people project on to fat people, this is a big one, right? Thin people will sort of say, body positivity is for everyone to feel good about all of their bodies except fat people, unless you're obese, unless you're using mobility device, unless unless, unless, right?

They are sort of all these caveats that have come with the mainstreaming of body positivity. And I think like the reason for me that body positivity is not the way to look at it is two things. One, again, it sort of reduces things to a problem of mindset. Thing two is that as body positivity has become mainstreamed more and more and more,

there is now the sense of ownership that thin women have over body positive spaces, that they are actually the arbiters of who Canon cannot feel body positive, right? So like many, many, many harassing comments or very judgmental comments that you will see on like pictures of Lizzo, for example, on like Instagram or social media or whatever, are like, listen, I'm as body positive for the next, as the next guy, but this is just unhealthy and we shouldn't celebrate it. So they're using it as a shield. It becomes the thing they put before the butt.

Yes. I'm as body positive as the next guy, but not for any bodies that I don't already like to look at personally, right? So like most of the times that I step into spaces that consider themselves body positive, what I am met with is anti-fat bias that has been repackaged as empowerment. Yeah. You have been in these spaces much longer than me and much deeper in these spaces, so tell me if I'm totally off base with this. But I've always also been of two minds about the body positivity thing. Because to me, it's always associated with those fucking dove ads.

The only thing that a capitalistic solution can do is change your feelings about something. It can't actually change fat women make $22,000 less per year than non-fat women. It can't actually do anything about that, right? But it's also felt to me like kind of a gateway drug. There's a lot of people who have found this body positivity stuff. And, you know, they've seen the dove ads. They've seen people with different bodies

start to show up in like Calvin Klein ads. And it's made them a little sort of fat curious. And it seems like that's opening a door. Yeah. You're liking the fact that you're seeing different bodies represented in media. Well, did you know that people who are even larger than that have trouble getting medical care?

Yeah. That could also just me being like, let's work within the system. I don't know, I could be full of shit. Yeah, I mean, I think there are as many feelings about this as there are fat people who are engaged in these spaces, right? Like, I know and have seen a number of people enter into body positive spaces and use that as a logic

that reinforces their anti-fat bias, no question. And I have also seen people who have stepped into those spaces been called out really hard by fat people and then been like, oh, wait a minute, what am I doing here? Right? If you are a thin person who feels validated by body positivity, that's awesome! Great! And keep the door open so that other people can get into those spaces as well. Don't use this as an excuse or a reason to become sort of a gatekeeper or an arbetter.

Right, like don't use this as an excuse to move the goal posts of a beauty standard or a health standard that most of us can't reach anyway. Use this as an opportunity to just obliterate those boundaries and genuinely make it a space for actually everyone. And the way that you do that is by checking bias as it shows up in that space. Right. I mean, this is, to me, what feels like the political organizing challenge of our era, that like, it's very difficult to reach out to people on the right.

So the gains that you're going to make as like a further left person are going to be from pretty normy Left-wing people Absolutely, and that's like my whole world, right? So I totally hear you on this front and completely agreed, right? There's got to be a starting point and there's got to be like ways to sort of move folks up the ladder of their own Understanding of this topic and their own commitment to it, right? in understanding of this topic and their own commitment to it, right? In organizing world, if you are out knocking on stranger's doors or calling them on the phone and trying to

get them to vote in favor of a ballot measure that you think is important, for example, there's a one to five scale that you use for every person that you talk to, most canvases, I should say, not all of them, where a one on that scale is someone who is all the way with you. They would probably volunteer if you ask them, they're like on board all the way. Let's go. Two is someone who's sort of leaning towards support. Three is someone who's undecided and four and five are sort of mirrors of ones and twos, right? Five are the people who are dead set against you. They're probably actively organized against you. And pretty much every campaign

that I have ever worked on and every sort of organizing effort that I've been part of, we skip the fours and fives. I don't think I'm going to get Gillian Michaels on board. Right, but what I'm doing. So thinking instead about like, okay, how do we get folks in the door? And then how do we deepen their understanding,

deepen their commitment and talking to them about, like how to actually not just feel different, but do different things. Right. This is also sort of the purpose of this podcast, right? Yeah, radicalize the normies. This is, we finally found a tagline. That's it, that's it.

To me, the most challenging part of this is that logically, academically, I know that the most gettable people on this issue are the people who are like kind of into body positivity, right? Like, that's their sort of entry point. The problem is, those people are really fucking annoying. The people I'm interacting with are the kind of people who are sort of semi sort of body positivity. They see the dovads.

They're like good for her, but then they also post memes about Donald Trump being an obese turtle. Yeah, that's right. And so challenge is to like not just flame those people. Yeah, I mean, almost every time I get a new batch of followers on like Instagram or Twitter or whatever, I will do a little clicking through to be like, who are these people? How are they describing themselves? Every time there is a good chunk of people who I click through to their Instagram bios or their

Twitter bios and they have CW and GW. What is that mean? Current weight and gold weight. So the people who are actively engaged in weight loss efforts and are for whatever reason, curious to hear from someone who's like, that doesn't work. Right, right.

I think there are a number of fat people. I certainly know fat people online who are like, that's an instant block. I don't want it in my life. I don't want to hear from you. I don't want to do it. Which is like, that's a fair boundary to set. Yeah, fair enough.

For me, it definitely, I have a very strong reaction to it. There's no question just sort of like emotionally. It makes me feel real bad for like a while. And also, as an organizer, I think that's exactly who I want and need to be talking to is the person who's like, how many times have I done this? I feel like this time I might be able to do it. But also, I don't know. Maybe there are other ways of thinking about this, right? Like that actually feels like very promising and fruitful territory. That's like a four leaning to a three, right?

If we're talking organizer scale. The thing that matters most to me is that they are cognizant of how they are treating fat people and that they are not just defaulting to, I don't mean to hurt anyone, so I'm not hurting anyone. I mean, as I think I've mentioned on the show before, I really have no interest in making people choose

anything differently individually. Like if somebody wants to lose 20 pounds by Christmas, it just isn't what I want to spend my time on trying to talk them out of that. You know, I've done so much work on homelessness. What people always ask me whenever I talk about like all the homeless people I've met and all the sort of policy stuff on homelessness I've done is they always ask me like, well, you know, should I give money to homeless people or not? And some people do and some people don't and I don't care. Like if you're should I give money to homeless people or not? And some people do, and some people don't, and I don't care. Like, if you're not comfortable giving

cash to homeless people, fine. If you are also fine, what I'm interested in is you voting for city council candidates that will tax rich people and build housing for the homeless. To me, it's like, if you want to keep all the personal weight stuff, and like, you want to believe that you are part of the two to five percent of people who do keep weight off forever, then like, okay, I probably can't affect that belief of yours, but also I can get you hopefully to think differently about the fat people around you

and behave differently and vote differently. 100%. I don't care how you personally eat. Because I hope that you don't care about how I personally eat. Yeah, because it's no one's business how anyone else eats. Yeah, I will say I definitely notice that people who are actively engaged in weight loss absolutely treat fat people differently and often worse. That is true, dude. Former fat people are so fucking mean to fat people and it drives me nuts. It's so noticeable.

And people who are in the process who are seeing some weight loss, we like to think that we are losing weight for our health and for all these other reasons. And that may be true. And that may be part of the reason, but ultimately the strongest reinforcement that we get is social reinforcement. So part of what happens is when people start to lose weight, they start distancing themselves from people who are their old size, or they start lecturing those people

on like, I used to be like you, and you need to do this thing, right? I think we all like to think that we are more thoughtful and more actively sort of directing our own actions than we actually are. Like our brains are not that sophisticated. We are thoughtful. Tag. And also like I am the first go to for anyone I know who's trying to lose weight.

And they just want to talk about how great their diet is and how great they feel and how awesome it is to lose weight. I am the first person that they go to and that is may not be explicitly intentional, right? It might not be a, just decision that they are making, but it's also not an accident. I don't know where I've read it or when, but I remember reading this thing where a writer tried a juice cleanse, one of these cayenne pepper, something, some things, juice cleanse is one thing I will always remember from this article is she said in, you know, the first second day when there's all this kind of stuff in your system and it suppresses your appetite and you basically have an eaten for a day and a half or whatever, she said the first thing

that happened was she got really condescending. Yeah. And she would look at people at work who were eating and be like, look at these pigs. And of course, after 24 more hours, she gets too hungry and it doesn't, we're like, no one can maintain that, obviously, right? But it's like, even before the weight loss, she got this superiority complex. Absolutely. And like, again, like,

the first reinforcement that we get for weight loss is near universal affirmation from almost everyone we know. So you're not being drawn to weight loss because of your health or because of whatever, like again, maybe also that, whatever, but like we have to be real, but like what is drawing us into weight loss

is the affirmation, the support, and frankly the privilege that comes with other people seeing you lose weight or even just hearing you talk about. Yeah, right. It's like getting a new haircut. Yeah, it's like getting a new haircut. If you thought that getting a new haircut

made you morally superior to people who have longer hair than you. Do people not think that after they get a haircut? I'm like, oh, I look so sleepy. I'm a better person than you now. I do think we have to be able to separate out these conversations between like, what do you need to do to sort of protect your own piece of mind and then also be able to have

concurrent conversations about like, what's the strategy to change those conditions and be able to respect that those two things are different things that sometimes align and sometimes don't. Right. Right. I think there's a conversation to have about a strategy around divesting from diet companies, right? Oh yeah. I think there's a strategy to talk about about like moving capital out of the diet industry and sort of taking our money away from that. So like decide to lose weight if you want to.

Don't buy a fucking keto meal kit. Don't go to weight watchers and pay them monthly. I think that's a conversation to have and we could talk about when and whether that's strategic. That's a different thing, right? Dude, I was at the story yesterday and I was trying to buy soup and they were all out of the kind of soup that I like and the only thing that was left on the shelf was the weird keto soups. Oh no. And it was seven bucks. It was literally like a cup and a half of soup. It was like the size of a fucking like little juice box

that you would get after a soccer game when you were a kid. Campbell's soup isn't gonna keep you in ketosis. I didn't even know what these things mean. So, okay, but we should end. Yes. Not talking shit about keto. I mean also talking shit about keto, but with your policy prescriptions, because you have a very good final chapter of the book, where just to spoil it for everybody, these are

Aubrey's policy prescriptions, like where we need to go from here. So one, end legal widespread practice of weight discrimination, realize the promise of health care for fat people, three, increase access to public spaces, four, end-and-difat violence, five, end-to-the-approval of weight loss drugs with dangerous side effects. Yeah, this is all harm reduction. Yes. This is not liberation for everyone all the time to feel great about their bodies and be respected in them in every way at every moment. This is Let's like actually just address some of the most glaring disparities as a starting point, right? Like hey, maybe you should have to pay us the same amount. Hey, maybe doctors shouldn't actually be able to set weight limits on the patients that they will agree to see.

I don't think that's a radical statement. Yeah, you're not shooting the moon here, Aubrey, which is a last chapter of your book. Don't worry, you're not getting out over your skis. None of this is like the fat people should rule over thin people. Now, really, it's like, it's none of that. It's just straight up, like, baseline things that I think a lot of people who aren't fat or haven't been fat think are already the way the world works. Yeah. So what do you what do you want to what do you

want to end with? What should we say what should we say at the end? I would keep your eyes on the prize which is like how are you not how are you changing your mindset? Not how are you relating to your own diets? But keeping your eyes on how am I materially showing up for fat people who are getting Short end of the stick show up. That's the sum total. If you learned one thing today and you're like, that was interesting I didn't know about that. I didn't think about standing up to that guy who yells at that fat lady. I'm going to do that now or I work in a doctor's office. I'm going to talk to our other staffers about how we change our policy, right, to make it clear that fat people are welcome here. Or I'm going to block some personal trainers on Instagram. You know what? Get those pecs out of here. We have not spoiled that

much of the book. We actually, there's a lot of the book that we didn't cover because we don't want to spoil future episodes. So the book has a chapter on BMI. It has a bunch of stuff about weight watchers. Like, there is great stuff in the book and you should buy the book. So don't feel like you've gotten everything you're going to get out of it just because you listen to this episode. You're still legally obligated by Aubrey's. And it's actually an obligation. It's a contractual thing. I'm sorry if you've made it this far. So we will see you in an indeterminate number of weeks as we go off and record more episodes. Thanks for making this such a fun season one. Absolutely. We're so excited to come back with so much more. Keep sending us your diet jokes. Keep sending us your, give us this day our daily

13 pieces of bread jokes. Yes. Keep sending us your episodes us this day our daily 13 pieces of bread jokes. Yes. Keep sending us your episodes suggestions. We have a gigantic list and are happy to grow it. Yes. And we're going to go get to work and record a bunch more episodes for you guys. And we'll see you soon. Bye. Thank you.