“They find our bodies repulsive.” On episode 96 of Overthink, Ellie and David bring on Dr. Kate Manne, philosopher and author of Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. She explains the moral failures and biomedical perils of our fatphobic culture and its misleading imperative to diet. This look at the politics of fat, fatness, and fatphobia in the philosophical canon and beyond to reveal rich links to questions of accessibility, justice, and intimacy. Should we trust the BMI (Body Mass Index) as...
Before getting into today's episode, we just want to mention that we will be discussing dieting and disordered eating.
Welcome to Overthink, the podcast where two philosophy professors connect big ideas with everyday life.
I'm your co host, Dr.
David Pena Guzman.
And I'm Dr.
Ellie Anderson.
David,
one thing I was really struck by is a Harvard study
in 2019 showing that fatphobia is the only form of implicit bias they studied that has gotten worse
since 2007.
These researchers who started studying implicit bias back in 2007 investigated race,
skin tone, sexual orientation, age, disability, and body weight.
And they found that the implicit bias around body weight is the only one that's gotten worse
since they started their study.
In fact, the majority of people still harbored explicit anti fat biases at the end of the study in 2016.
So not only has this implicit bias towards fat people gotten worse since 2007,
for a majority of the study participants, it's not just implicit, it's actually explicit.
Yeah,
so much for all those fantasies that we liberals like to entertain about the inevitability of social progress with time,
right?