Is Intentional Weight Loss Fatphobic?
And other body-related questions I don’t give a shit about
Oh, hello, there—
Sorry this is late. I was…busy.
I love writing about bodies—the gentle, slicing curve of a back roll, the chromatic variations in more secret tracts of skin, knees, burns, scars, stink, belly sliding over belly—but I absolutely loathe talking about them. Discursive bodies, identitarian bodies; they do jack shit for me. I have no beef with intersectional politics, not in the slightest, but there’s always been something reductive to me about corporeal hierarchy interlaced with rote perception, something fatalistic, even. Maybe it’s some latent trace of libertarianism or un-checked privilege peeking through, but I find the endless conversations about micro-aggressive minutiae, fatness, and taxonomy a bit futile, frankly. In my opinion, internet “Body Positivity” has made two or three distasteful people sort of famous, and that’s about it.
Take TikTok, for instance. TikTok’s short form structure and enormous teen user base means that neoliberal representation optics are considered de rigeur, and because the app’s endemic virality buoys in-group discussion to out-group space in seconds, dialogue about marginalized bodies is performed almost entirely for a hostile, skinny gaze. Instead of nuancing corporate rhetorical strategies, combating legislative inertia, or de-centering assimilation, online “fat activism” prefers to court whiteness and weight loss dollars en route to milquetoast take-homes about neutrality or self-love. To imply that fat liberatory praxis even happens on TikTok ignores the sheer amount of thoughtful creators who have been bullied off the platform for their embodied non-normativity—so much of the reason I bristle at fatness referenced as an “identity” or “community” rather than a stratified intensifier is because acceptability is so central to the way it’s perceived. Hourglass-shaped cis white women are not the only voices fat activism has to offer, after all.
And that’s the thing, right? When we individuate fatness, reduce it to a series of personal traumas, nothing gets done. Body fascists don’t care if fat people live longer than underweight people, they don’t care that the BMI is a eugenicist relic, they don’t care that beauty standards don’t reflect attraction, and they don’t care that anti-fatness kills real people in real time. They care about leveraging the affect of mid-aughts choice feminism as a corollary to bodysuit sales. They care about keeping fat folks in check.
Confidence is not a useful antidote to bias. You can’t girl-boss oppression away.
Back in 2012, Australian fashion blogger and artist Natalie Perkins penned a cri de coeur entitled “When Activism Gives Way to Advertising: How Fat Girl Blogging Ate Itself” in the now defunct (and disgraced) online rag xoJane. Links to the piece no longer work, but quotes still circulate in the annals of outlets like the Observer and Jezebel. Her hammer came down in the first paragraph. “We’re stuck in a bubble and fooling ourselves by thinking that the anti-fat world is learning anything from fatshion”, she wrote.
A year later, journalist Kelly Faircloth would refer to Perkin’s essay as an “excoriation” of the emergent plus-size influencer industry, which always seemed a bit unfair to me. In my memory, Natalie Perkins wasn’t polemicizing, exactly; she (and xoJane’s editorial team) registered her hurt in the cadence most legible to the Personal Essay Industrial Complex, which involved a lot of mic-drop declaratives and punchy, damning language. She sought out to name the killers of radical fat fashion and did just that, in print.
Perkins was active in the nascent Fatosphere, a community of femme-presenting fat folks, largely cis women, who posted their outfits and opinions on Livejournal, then Tumblr, in the early aughts and 2010s. Names like Keena Buttah, Lesley Kinzel, Tangledupinlace and Marianne Kirby immediately spring to mind. These girls thrifted, hand-made, hodgepodged, and custom-ordered the adornments necessary to celebrate their marginalized bodies in public cyberspace, no small feat for the edgelord era of Obama-era Twitter and Reddit politico communities. Few of them clocked in under a size 20. The clothes represented not just a commentary on access and oppression, but a gleeful fuck-you to a social hierarchy dedicated to keeping fat bodies hidden and humiliated. “Fatshion”, as they called it then, wasn’t about democratizing beauty, but interrogating the role of beauty as a prerequisite to a full, active life. It pushed back against prejudice, it balked at shame, it required active un-learning. Slogans that we now associate with Instagram ads for fucking Peleton— “fuck diet culture”, “all bodies are good bodies” — felt new, brash, paradigmatically dynamic. Before fast fashion companies like Pretty Little Thing, Boohoo and Abercrombie extended their size ranges, fat, stylish people had to build whisper networks, trade indie designer samples, and swap dress-making patterns in chat rooms and Anon boxes. In keeping with the zeitgeist, the personal was considered political by default. Identity hadn’t been fully commodified, yet, and it seemed like a body positive revolution was due to rise fully formed from the sea at any moment.
That never happened, of course.
Perkins named Gabi Gregg, the now legendary plus size designer, as an arbiter of fatshion’s radical demise, opining hers and other’s perceived fealty to explicitly capitalist ends. The plus size fashion community is small, and Gregg sounded off in the comments. Optics were bad. Representation was still the name of the internet game, after all, and Perkins’ readers found her tone cruel, her outlook divisive, and her intent envious at best. What was wrong with Gabi’s in-store advocacy, exactly? Was Perkins implying that fat women shouldn’t ask for a seat at the corporate table? Gregg insisted that her politics began and ended with inclusion, and the pushback to Perkins was instantaneous. She was blacklisted by the few companies interested in gifting items to fat girls and sidelined from an industry she had helped create. Her penchant for mental health transparency online didn’t help, either. The world kept turning, the polyester kept piling up, and the Fatosphere morphed into something far slicker than any of its founders could have imagined.
Ten years later, what hasn’t changed about the plus-size influencer sector has crystallized into a series of empty tenets. All bodies are still good bodies, sure; so good, in fact, that you’re hard pressed to find any evidence of them over a size 3X. Fat girls CAN wear horizontal stripes; were you aware? The forcibly apolitical feel-good talking points of yesteryear have metamorphosed into an all-out disavowal of fatness itself; a size 18 is considered “mid-size” now, and “thick” influencers routinely talk about “lifestyle” in the dulcet tones of an anti-fat dog whistle. And why not? The pay is better, certainly, and visibility increases ten-fold when “inclusion” refuses a hard-line stance. Just try on the clothes, right?
Remi Bader, TikTok superstar, is an interesting test-case, here.
She’s funny, gorgeous, cis, upper middle class, and blisteringly frank about how ill-fitting fast fashion can be on bigger bodies. She never pretended to be a fat liberationist, and routinely discusses the way her COVID quarantine weight gain (she’s maybe a size 16) has affected her self-esteem. Her calculated relatability is profitable, too; Bader recently debuted her collaboration with Victoria’s Secret’s extended sizes roll-out (they’re making XXLs, apparently). The pushback to this announcement reminds me a lot of Natalie Perkins’ comments a decade ago; fat folks want the near-spiritual revelation of individual body positive attitudes to remain important, honest, un-tethered to the larger machinations of corporate enterprise, but, frankly, when the access point of “body positive” ingress never strays from the fashion sector, virtue-signal bone-throwing becomes an inevitability, if not all-out hazard of, well, doing business. Many fat people have spoken out against her alignment with a formerly fatphobic company, but, ultimately…all companies are fatphobic. Retailers aren’t our friends.
Bader is a big name precisely because she’s not oppressed. Instead, she represents a new kind of post-feminist avatar; an influencer who straddles the oratorial gap between aspirational marketing and the cult of “transparency”. I guarantee that Bader’s weight has never impacted her ability to get a job or seek medical treatment, but I bet it’s affected the way she navigates rarified 1% spaces, especially in terms of the marriage market. As in the case of many small-fat cis women, Bader’s point of identity difference doesn’t negate her privilege, it merely abstracts her from the trappings of Supreme Whiteness, which, to those who haven’t known many other struggles (again, in terms of public perception, not internal turmoil) feels an awful lot like oppression. Add in the dizzying clickbait pastiche of Manhattan “it girl” energy, and you’ve got a perfect cocktail for hocking velour sweatpants to women who don’t want to challenge the status quo—they want the status quo to stretch just wide enough to fit them. TikTok’s algorithm feeds on instinctual in-group attention metrics. We click on Remi precisely because she won’t change our minds.
I don’t care about Bader’s politics (I find her very charming), largely because I’m old and mean and have all but divested from the neoliberal chokehold of Big Body Positivity, but her brand is worth invoking in the context of the Fat Girl Online Feedback Loop. The Loop consists of a series of hypothetical questions designed to flex the political muscles of the person asking and drive engagement to their socials. “Is intentional weight loss fatphobic?” “Is ‘mid-size’ a useful term?” “Is it possible to get weight-loss surgery and still be body positive?” Cue the outrage, the stitches, the duets. The answers don’t matter because the premise relies on the idea that fatness, in all its multivarious iterations, has any relationship to monolithic solidarity. Fat groupthink cannot exist because the material ramifications of fat experience live along a delicate balance of intersecting axes. Caleb Luna, PhD candidate at Berkley and queer Latine artist, shared this insight on Twitter last month.
“A major problem with getting your fat politics from non-fat people is that they fundamentally miss the humanity of fat people. I see too many well-meaning non-fat people repeat seemingly fat positive sentiments still steeped in anti-fat logics…As queers, we saw the failures in the ‘born this way’ argument decades ago. It doesn’t need to not be our fault for it to be okay to exist. I choose queerness every day. I choose fatness every day. And those are both legitimate and desirable choices that improve my life”.
Mainstream dialogue on fatphobia never seems to account for racialized dehumanization, disability advocacy, or queer empowerment. Instead, it lives in the Feedback Loop of individual opinion, which serves no other purpose than the dilute the already foggy pool of high-profile fat justice work. There’s a reason the political dial hasn’t moved in ten years. It was never supposed to.
And look, I completely get the appeal. I’m a small-fat, white, cis woman with a cute wardrobe and favorable waist-to-hip ratio. When I started sharing (bad) outfit pictures on Tumblr in my early twenties, I instantly received modeling contract solicitations instead of, you know, death threats. Despite the fact that my weight had no real bearing on my day-to-day life, trauma from the early aughts media cycle made me feel like I was entitled to take up space on the Body Positive internet. I craved validation far more than I wanted to shift perception of plus-size people in the fashion industry, and my privilege protected me from the full affective reign of my choices therein. I could have easily become Remi Bader, and my bank account would have absolutely thanked me for it.
Fat trans mutuals of mine have had to turn off their comments or go on private for months after a full-body video garnered even modest views online. Dark-skinned femmes experience fatphobia so differently than me it feels disingenuous to group us together at all. While, yes, I have experienced the strange, peculiar pain of being cropped out of a thin friend’s Instagram picture, or omitted from a very specific kind of party invite, or romantically rejected by a man who still wants my body under cover of darkness, these aspects of my identity do not an axis of oppression make. This isn’t a flex; it’s just real life.
So, is intentional weight loss fatphobic? Who fucking cares. I echo Perkins’ sentiments from 2012. We’ve learned very little from clothes-centric body positivity online, and hypothetical who-dun-its aren’t getting us anywhere in the war against food insecurity, workplace discrimination, or white supremacy. The lexicon of social justice should grate against the needs of deregulated capital. Get that bag, absolutely, but consider its ethical implications first.
See you tomorrow for more writing bullshit!
-B