Episode 149: How Fatness Became a Cheap Joke and Proxy for Moral Deficiency in Pop Culture

[Music] This is Citations Needed with Nemeshirazi and Adam Johnson. Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the Media, Power, PR and the history of Bullshit I Am Nemeshirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. You can follow the show on Twitter at CitationsPod, Facebook, Citations Needed and become a supporter of our work through patreon.com/CytationsNeededPodcast. All your help through patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded and run no commercials. And as always you can rate and subscribe to us on Apple Podcast and please if you can support us on patreon. And there you'll find a little mini episodes for patrons that we do every now and then little news briefs as well as AMAs, newsletter and other content that we offer there. So if you can please support us there. We very very much appreciate it and it helps make the show sustainable and the episodes themselves free to everybody. A character played by an actor in a fat suit shovels food in his face unable to restrain himself in a fit of rage. Another falls too lazy and out of shape to even get up without the aid of others. And yet another loses weight and avenges the anti fat bullying she face growing up finally earning respect as a thin person. All of these described tropes we've seen Nadnazium in film television, literature or other forms of art and pop culture, they're a manifestation of a deep cultural hostility towards fat people. One that perpetuates a centuries long stigma that both reduces them to their size and their eating habits with little curiosity about the other facets of their lives and equates their bodies with the sins of sloth, greed and gluttony. The results, degradation, dehumanization and a constant unrelenting message that fatness is a moral failure. Whether in 19th century side shows and cartoons presenting fat people as the object of humiliation and scorn, sitcoms and movies of the 90s using fat suits for a cheap laugh or dramedies of the present day that continue to miss the mark. The characterization of fat people as sin incarnate has hardly changed. Thanks to a virulent and complex nexus of racism, classism and misogyny. On today's episode we'll explore how mass media perpetuates anti fatness in western especially American culture, looking at the ways in which imperial conquest and capitalist development laid the foundation for hostility towards fat people. The way even supposed in light and liberals used the thin patina of public health to mask routine anti fat bullying and the methods Hollywood and other sources of cultural production use to present fat characters as punch line and nuisances who can only be either cookie best friends or morally dubious bad guys. Later on the show we'll be joined by Amy Erdman Farrell. James Hope called well Memorial Chair of Liberal Arts and Professor of American Studies in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College. Currently she's a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and author of the books Yours in Sisterhood, Miz Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism and Fat Shame, stigma and the fat body in American culture. There are lots of scientists who were studying bodies as evidence for a kind of scale of civilization which bodies were more evolved than other bodies. And really as part of that articulating a science of race and that there was an already understood hierarchy among those scientists that white people were superior to people of color I would say in general. Africans were at the bottom of the scale but then there were indigenous peoples, Asian peoples who there was some debate among these kind of school of thinkers, philosophers, scientists about where everyone should be placed. This is a disclaimer at the beginning we're going to be using the terms then and fat, not as value-laden terms, we're not meant to say one is good or one is bad. These are just the terms that for the most part, activists in these spaces have adopted. They're non-normative and there are obviously in many ways an attempt to reclaim the language so we are going to be using the term fat and thin. Please do not describe moral value to us and describe moral use fat and thin. But just FYI those will be the terms that we do use. And as an extra content warning this episode will feature a number of clips from pop culture that are derogatory, disturbing and dehumanizing. To begin though, the historical context for the association of fatness with immorality is multifactorial and extensive but undoubtedly traceable to the development of Western Empire and a cultural reaction to the spoils of imperial conquest. The background we'll provide right now is far from exhaustive of course but offers at least a foundational explanation for the stigmatizing portrayals we continue to see in pop culture. So let's start a couple hundred years ago in the 18th century. The attachment of stigma to fat bodies is one of the most fundamental elements of the cultivation of whiteness and race science. Well into the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade in European colonization, late 18th century European race scientists like Georges Cuvier, Julian Joseph Virey and Georges Louis Leclerc linked characteristics like gluttony, stupidity and idleness to Africans. They attributed this idleness to a warm climate. In her book Fearing the Black Body, the Rachel origins of fat phobia, sociologist Sabrina Strings writes that quote, "Virey was a voracious reader of bio theories and he would make his own claims about black skin, gluttony and weight. Black people he claimed were mindless self-gratifying automotons who were, here's a quote within a quote, "given up to the pleasures of the table, those great eaters, intemperate epicures who seem to live only to eat have a stupid look, always digesting they become incapable of thinking." In this way they were distinct from whites. He elaborated quote again, "in our white species the farhead is projecting and the mouth retreating as if it were rather designed to think than to eat. In the negro species the farhead is retreating and the mouth projecting as if he were made to eat rather than to think." Kuvier meanwhile was responsible for turning Sarah Bartman, a southern African woman exhibited throughout Europe in freak shows as the uncivilized and apparent "hot and tot Venus" because of her race, size and shape, into what Strings called quote an internationally recognized totem of racial and sexual savagery. Her excess fat was used as one sign of her primitivity. This occurred roughly at the same time that the consumption of sugar and coffee in England, commodities produced by enslaved people in European colonies were increasingly characterized and perceived as markers of decadence. Strings would go on to state that during the 18th century quote, "as gluttony and fatness were becoming associated with African women and scientific racial literature, the values of delicacy, discipline and slimmer physiques were becoming associated with English women by arbiters of taste and the privators of morality, far from being a coincidence the fear of being un-cultivated and thus like racial and national others lay at the heart of these developments." By the 19th century fat people had become psychostaples performing under stage names that either reference their body size, such as "I'm a wadler" or "infantilizing titles." And fatness was used as a cautionary tale in children's literature, one example from the mid-19th centuries as the story "The Little Jacob" from the book "Cheerful Stories and Funny Pictures for Good Little Folks" by German author Hoffmann Heinrich in which a boy named Jacob eats so much that he breaks into ending with the lines quote, "I'll say this much to boys and girls if they be thick or thin that be the story true or false, sure gluttony is a sin." And so this was all the rage back in the day and this of course began to merge with sort of Victorian influence. Multiple scholars have pointed to the Victorian value system as another influence on contemporary notions of fatness building on the moral panics around consumption in the imperial core by the end of the 19th century. Some people, particularly women, had come to be associated in the West with self-discipline moral purity and upper class status. Fat people then again, particularly women. We can just probably add particularly women to every one of these, but for the purposes of clarity we'll keep repeating it. And in parallel it was associated with promiscuity, the idea being is that if one was willing to indulge all their appetites for food they would do the same for sex. So fatness became a proxy for promiscuity and immorality with respect to sex as well. Author Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written on the relationship between fat and class in this era, the Victorian era, according to Brumberg, a thin physique improved one's chances for upward social mobility. This is from her book Fasting Girls, The History of Anorexia Nervosa. Quote, "Women with social aspirations adopted the rule of slenderness and its related dicta about parsimonious appetite and delicate food. By the turn of the 20th century, elite society already preferred its women thin and frail, as a symbol of their social distance from the working classes." Now what we haven't touched on and which I'll just mention briefly is that before all of this hundreds and hundreds of years before all this dating back to ancient Greece and then up through medieval times and the Renaissance, body shape was considered very differently. I mean, think about ancient Greek sculptures of Aphrodite or even the Renaissance paintings of Titian. Body image was completely different there and so you can really then trace this change as we've just laid out to colonization and then up through the Victorian era into the 20th century. Our guest, Amy Erdman-Ferrell, author of the book Fat, James Stigma and the Fat Body and American Culture argues that the perception of fatness as a cultural problem dovetailed with the introduction of the industrialized urban settings, complete with white collar office employment and the accompanying rise of the white middle class, whereas fatness had previously been the domain of the wealthy, Fowl wrote quote, "more people experience efficient wealth or performed work that was either sedatory or less physically taxing than farm work so so the body is literally big. began to change, able to put on and keep weight. She continued, quote, "Even factory work dangerous as it was often requires less energy expenditure than farm work as employees were required to stand in one place all day." In addition to a more sedatory lifestyle, food production began to change by the end of the 19th century. Mass production of foods on farms, factory processed foods and better transportation systems meant that people had better access to more, though of course not necessarily healthier, food. The conflation of fat people in a lack of moral virtue, namely a proclivity for excess and recklessness, had become calcified. Newspapers and magazines in the late 19th century and into the 20th century were rife with cartoons, mocking apparently middle-class white fat people for daring to think they could enjoy the same luxuries as with the wealthy. For instance, a 1908 life magazine cartoon shows the back of a fat woman walking to a train carrying luggage. The guard perceiving that she can't fit it to the door, yells to his co-workers, "Lively there now, both gates." One from 1918 shows a fat man and a woman on a ship returning from a trip overseas, the caption reads, "Yes indeed, travel does broaden one." Was that the dinner bell? To quote our guest, "Farrell again." These people, the cartoons appeared to say, "Did not know how to enjoy these new privileges without overdoing it." Unlike the older, wealthier classes, these newvo rich seem to be incapable of demonstrating their strength and control necessary to experience these new liberties responsibly. The general idea being is that there's this constant sense of puritan morality and denial and withdrawing of oneself from indulgences. Yeah. And like the whole like given inch take a mile thing of not being able to again restrain yourself that moderation is not going to be the way that things proceed. That there's a greed and a gluttony that accompanies this and how does that manifest, especially in our stratified class system, right in like some people are fat and some people are not. And those that are fat are worse and those that are not are better. Now given this history, anti-fat vitriol, even when aimed at white people, particularly women, which we're going to keep saying, is rooted in anti-blackness. As Sabrina String's has stated, quote, "If fatness is related to blackness, and if there was an entire movement in the United States where white people were trying doggedly to prove that they were white and not black, then it's very important for white women not to be fat." So there's a way in which fat phobia being an index of anti-blackness very directly harms white women in contemporary America, end quote. Similarly, as Amy Farrell has written, quote, "Fatness was a motif used to identify inferior bodies, those of immigrants, former slaves, and women. And it became a tell-tale sign of a superior person falling from grace. In today's terms, fat, if it had a color, would be black. And if it had a national origin, would be a legal immigrant, non-US, and non-Western," end quote. Now, notably an early 20th century vaudeville performer named Sophie Tucker described by multiple authors and scholars as a, quote, unquote, "large woman," offers an early example of how entertainment has exploited the racist origins of anti-fatness. According to author Busy Jackson, quote, "as she," meaning Sophie Tucker, "told it, she was persuaded to perform in blackface by vaudeville managers in New York, who apparently felt that because she was a large woman, the audience would warm to her more easily if she took on the "mami" role, so familiar with the minstrel C tradition. So this is also, of course, a way of the groundwork for fatness in the 20th and 21st centuries, specifically in pop culture. This history of characterizing fatness is a signifier of morality and general worth, closes into the kind of shame-based finger pointing depictions of fat people in both fiction and how even non-fiction context and contemporary film TV and other avenues of pop culture. Being or getting fat is presented in multiple, multiple pop culture products, specifically film and television as the ultimate nightmare, a proxy for having no value, having no reason to live, and no hope, or no potential. Here are just a handful of common depictions. It is presented first and foremost as a comedy plotline for people who have no restraint or are given up the will to live. And one thing to be clear to all these examples, that fatness is presented as per-save funny, that if someone is skinny and gets fat, that this is inherently really, really, really fucking hilarious. Fat people are per-save funny. Their existence is funny, right? And so the first example from a 2009 episode of How I Met Your Mother, the character Barney gains weight while he's in an unfulfilling relationship and the fatness becomes a sort of inciting incident for him to acknowledge that he's not happy in the relationship. In this scene, we're going to listen to he's devouring beef ribs, which while thin, he thought we're disgusting, but now he really, really loves them. Right? What reason does he have to be happy anymore? So he's just going to indulge and indulge and so we get this. Have you noticed how beef ribs used to always be disgusting? And then recently they found a way to make them really delicious instead. Okay, Barney, I'm going to go ahead and ask you this, head on. Are you happy with Robin? Are you kidding? How could I not be happy with Robin? It's Robin. Heads we have sex, tails, we order a whole pizza and just lay here moaning. Let the coin decide. Which was pizza again? Tails. It was tails. Sex. Am I right? Thank God that's mostly over. I'm so hungry. This is also a plot line. It's Frazier. I know you Frazier heads out there like me. I remember when Daphne gained 60 pounds in the gag. Of course the actress herself, which we'll see you again later, she was pregnant and so oftentimes for an actor it's pregnant they'll work in a gag where they just gain weight for some reason. They're like, oh, we know how to deal with this because the character can't just like either naturally gain weight or be pregnant. So therefore we have to make an excuse for what you're seeing on screen. If the actor is going to keep working, which obviously they should keep working, the writers have to figure out how to explain away what you're seeing because it is so different than what you have seen before and there's no natural explanation. So therefore they have to turn it into a gag where someone gets fat and they have to comment on it. Yeah. So throughout the few episodes where she is quote unquote fat, she's pregnant. Pretty much every joke targeting her isn't that funny isn't fat people funny. She has one gag where she falls down and three different people have to pick her up. So just the same actress Tisha Campbell on the Damon Wands show my wife and kids. The woman places wife was also in real life pregnant and they also worked in the script that she got really fat and this is played for yaks several episodes but in particular went episode from 2002 which we'll listen to here. Oh my god I missed you so much. I missed you too and there's so much to miss. What do you mean? You just fell off the room. What smells so good? That would be me. No I smell gravy. Well I made some chicken dumplings for the kids before I sent them out to the movies. So all alone. Oh baby how romantic. You got any biscuits left. So the running joke and pretty much every joke with the episode is that how inherently horrible it is to get fat and the worst thing in the world is to be fat. But then there's obviously the you know about face. There's the redemption part which is how can we get this character thin again? God forbid she remains this way. So there's this part of the episode where she has this dream that her entire family is fat and this is what shocks her out of her own weight gain and motivates her to get thin again. But this is the dream of the entire fat family and of course we should mention for all of these when there are fat characters except when they're like actually pregnant actors people wear fat suits which was huge in the 90s in the early 2000s. There's wearing fat suits and so you have that here with Damon Wands and Tisha Campbell and everyone else in the family really wearing these fat suits for laughs. Oh, those stairs are killing me. I thought I was going to fight for them to get. We need to get afraid of her. Don't tell Katie that I got hungry and I ate a goldfish on the way there. Oh baby no not again. I'll get hungry. I can next time we just get her a puppy. I think it's time to wake the kids my goal. Oh I'll do it here. You can't make that big. I love the dude here. Oh what's it? I'll call this the "pokalon". He's holding a fan to the plate of bacon to get the smell through it. So anyway I think you get the picture. The joke is that they're really disgusting and fat and that's funny by definition. Buckle up we have about 45 more minutes of exactly that. So in 2008 Disney's Pixar released the movie "Wally" which depicted a dystopian 20 nights in in which corporations had ravaged Earth and towards the end of the film, we see an endless series of mindless fat human sitting in hover recliners watching screens and eating junk food on a recreational spaceship after they fled their uninhabitable planet. So this was typical of a current around, specifically very popular in that time, to have after SuperSizeMe, after the Michael Pollan kind of healthy eating lifestyle stuff, where the conservatives would bash fat people because they're weak and moral. And then liberals had this kind of very thin and patina of this very thin pretext to be assholes to fed people under the guise of being concerned about public health. And so a joke or a sort of cultural punchline unit all the time is that fatness was a sign of a lazy Americans. This was sort of the, this was around the time of the height of political commentary was people showing up to the rally to restore sanity and fat suits on scooters, you know, with Walmart bumper stickers. This was the cool thing you could do, like, oh, I go to go to Walmart and you're fat. And it's like, this was seen as a kind of cultural leadism that was acceptable because it was viewed as a moral failing. It's not like you were born homosexual or gay or a woman where you could discriminate against people. - Right. - For that reason. And this is sort of similar to how, you know, we did the episode a long time ago, about four years ago on new atheism and how you sort of take these seemingly secular and kind of non-imperialist or non-racist critiques of religion abstractly and you use that as a way of basically being an imperialist, like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, you sort of come up with a new way of packaging, sort of pat white savior imperialist tropes about the Middle East. - It's like saying tough on crime or we're on drugs when you actually are trying to do something else. - Yes. And just the same, it's like this sort of war on obesity. Again, I think around the margins as well in tension as it may be, really just kind of, and especially in pop culture became a way of just being an asshole to fat people. Because that's just a fun thing we all have been doing for centuries, for various cultural reasons. And Wally really kind of, in movies like Idiocracy, this as well, it's sort of, it was a way for liberals to be assholes, assholes bullies because they could always say, oh well actually this is sort of a moral choice and I'm very concerned with health. And if we create an environment where we're mean to people who are quote unquote fat, that the result won't be depression in needing disorders and other problems, it'll be somehow they like get in shape. - Right. Now at the same time, movies like the ones you're talking about, especially like Wally, have a lot going for them, right? Like they're correct in placing the blame for, let's say the destruction of the planet on private enterprise for late, late, late stage capitalism for mass consumerism overall for the destruction of not only society but the environment. But as you're saying Adam, it also then uses as the visual representation of this over indulgence of humans in a capitalist society into like how do we depict that? Like fat people, fat characters, the avatars of degradation of the planet and humans in general, it's a lazy, really kind of individualist critique that in a review at the time Slate magazine actually took the bait on describing the hovercraft zooming around characters in Wally on the spaceship the axiom as quote, obese infantile consumers who spend their days immobile and hovering lounge chairs staring at ads on computer screens. In other words, Americans end quote. Now Slate also, we should not publish a rebuttal to this review that criticized its inherent anti-fatness just to be a little fair. - And in movies like "Shallow Howe" which was supposed to be a commentary on how someone wasn't shallow but the solution wasn't for them to not be shallow is for the other person to get skinny. - Who is for Gwen and the palcho to be in a fat suit? - Pretty much every joke in that movie is wouldn't be funny if we took like a skinny, pretty actress and made her fat but deep down inside she's good but also the only reason that only way that reveals itself is if she gets skinny. The Nutty Professor was basically just a series of fat jokes. I mean, we don't need to go into them but basically every gag isn't it funny when fat people do things. One trope we wanted to sort of talk about was what we call the relapse. Many films depict a formerly fat person and now think character as relapsing and potentially turning into their old selves which has perceived this sort of inherently bad or problematic. Particularly when a traumatic episode triggers them it's sort of akin to drug use. Food becomes a drug. It's all above all, I'm very important that we prevent this from happening. The 2001 film America's Sweet Hearts with Julie Roberts who is America's sweet heart. Her character Kiki has recently lost a significant amount of weight in the film and in one scene she begins devouring food to cope with and especially stressful time at work which she refers to as falling off the wagon. The other voice you'll hear in this clip is Billy Crystal. - Good morning. So here's the buffet. What's going on? - Nothing. I'm great. - Just great. Oh, now I'm kind of this more better. - What advice when you hit full America? - Stop. - You know the expression of falling off the wagon leaf? - This is what it looks like. - Yeah, but you got 20 and 30 pounds of food to break your full. - What the hell happened? - Bad morning. - Proceeded by 33 bad years. - Does this have something to do with the Quinn? - Mm. - Of course not. - Right, so of course this reinforces the application that this person, this individual, has failed, right? Is a failure, has succumbed to an urge to eat, to give it all up, to stop caring about what they look like, how they feel, what they consume, when they should have, instead resisted it in some sort of noble act of modern day temperance, food temperance. This reinforces the individualistic current that runs through anti-fatness in general. The message that one must, where have we heard this before, pull themselves up by their bootstraps in order to overcome fatness as a disorder, as a moral failing, and discover, instead, the virtue of being thin. This echoes another tentative anti-fatness, which is this, that body size is controllable, unlike, say, other factors of physical appearance, or identity like race or disability, and thus, any increase in your weight in your body size, a change in your visual appearance in that way, is inexcusable, and therefore, not only should be mocked, but should be relentlessly combated, and that's when you get this strain in our pop culture of weight loss shows. The reality show, the biggest loser, a series that ran for 17 seasons on NBC, and later at the USA Network, constantly linked fatness with more of failure explicitly, asserting that people classified as overweight or obese had no discipline. They felt terrible all the time. They deserve shame, humiliation, and by implication abuse. They exaggerated their trauma, needed to muster their own willpower in order to help them lose weight, and to quote-unquote, help themselves. We could probably do an entire episode on this show. It's horrible in about a bunch of different ways, up to and including their glib pun for a title, but let's watch a clip from Season 8 here to give you a sense of what we're talking about. For "Do Not Stop," we are on Season 8 right now. We're having contestants that are bigger than we've ever had before, because that's what's going on in America right now. Go, go, go, go, go! My life's been more. What we're hoping to achieve this season is tell America that, yeah, you know what, a tragedy in your family may have occurred. But how can you take these tragedies and turn them into opportunities, giving people a second chance at life? Amanda was on national television in front of millions of people, wanting this spot. You've got this spot, Amanda. All these people watching you, what you've gone through, what you are going to be going through every single day. There are heroes in this room. That's what you think about. Heroes. Welcome to the biggest loser, Shay. Who do you think him right now? You think it was the f***ing. Am I done? Aren't you, Shay? Six, five, Danny. Let go! Shay gets the f***ing up! I knew. I knew coming into this, I would be screamed at, I would be yelled at. So, yeah, we have this idea that they're kind of constantly failing when you yell that. There's this kind of bootcampism that pervades diet culture and this kind of makeover culture. That there's something fundamentally wrong with everyone. We're not only going to scratch your age, but we're going to give you the Kalamine lotion. We're going to tell you that you're a f*** up and you're fat and you're a piece of shit and you're ugly. Nobody likes you. And also, by the way, by these products that play during the commercial, and they'll make you happy. A similar trope that's very popular is what we call the reformed fatty. These are stories revolve around formally fat characters who become thin and thus better versions of themselves. They're usually told using a thin actor wearing a fat suit to the necessary exclusion of actual fat actors. Of course, numerous sitcoms have aired, quote, unquote, "what if" episodes presenting alternative timelines in which a character audiences know as thin, they become fat, or if their backstory involves their being fat at a prior time in the show. There was an episode of Big Bang Theory that did this. It explores the character's life. If they haven't met the show's main character, Sheldon, the two characters, Leonard and Raj, would apparently have become fat versions of themselves in this hypothetical scenario, in the scene they're gorging themselves at a dinner table in the conversation, or strictly about the food they're going to eat. Dinner! Come in! Hang on. Why would I be fat? You'd have no girlfriend to see you naked. You'd try to fill the void with food, and I'm an enabler who wants deep-fried a pancake. Why can't you be fat too? What do you want to do for dessert? I think there's too half a cake from breakfast. So now they're both fat. Get it? It's hilarious. So one of the most famous examples of this, I believe, in TV sitcom history is the show Friends. In numerous episodes, the backstory of Monica, played by Courtney Cox, later Courtney Cox, our cat, as you can tell, I think that's the show. The backstory of Monica is that she is now hot. However, she used to be fat and used to be very fat and it is per se the funniest fucking thing in the world. - Right, which is funny just because she used to be fat. And every single time you see Fat Monica, which is literally what she is referred to in the show, itself Courtney Cox is wearing a fat suit and the entire gag is that she's fat. In one particular episode, it does one of these, what if tropes explores the character's interactions if certain parts of their lives had not gone the way that the plot of the sitcom goes but had remained the same as when they first started, right? So they'd stayed in old relationships, never changed careers, et cetera. The character Monica, who again, fat before the time period during the show is set, is still fat. She didn't get thin. She's depicted as obsessed with food, has never had a meaningful romantic relationship and is constantly commenting on her own weight as well. So part of the episode shows her dancing by herself with a donut in her hand and of course, therefore she is the object of mockery purely because of her size. This fat Monica gag is seen throughout the run of the series of course in many different flashbacks. - Where's Monica? Over here, dad. - Wait, how do you zoom out? There she is. (audience laughing) - Come girl, eight Monica. (audience laughing) - Shut up, the camera adds 10 pounds. - Huh, so how many cameras are actually on you? (audience laughing) - Oh, you look so great. - Oh my God, beautiful. - Oh, what? - Shoot, I think I got mayonnaise on you. - Oh, that's okay, just the shoulder's not my juice. (audience laughing) - Smile. - Oh, dad, turn it off. - It is off. - No, it is not, what's with the red light? - It's the offline. - The character has of course, illicit many critical pieces, especially with friends being somehow more popular now than it was 20 years ago, got him getting old. It went such a piece or entertainment weekly from 2019. Clarkecia Kent wrote quote, "Could the show have treated Monica better? Sure, but that would have deprived it of the reliable laughs at the expense of a fictional fact character doing normal things like eating dancing or simply living." Fat Monica worked in horrendously offensive sense in an era where slim fast was popping, extremely thin models like Kate Moss, where it girls and heroin chic was the prevailing fashion trend, pop culture fed a hysteria over being or becoming fact. And Fat Monica allowed people to take those anxieties about that and this project them onto the character and laugh at them. And become to laughing because whatever happened, they would never be as fat, sloppy or socially enough as Fat Monica. And of course, I guess she's not a real person, she's a thin person in a fat suit, so I guess that makes it okay too, right? Another trope is the weight loss revenge story and a sensibly well-intentioned trope, the characters who are formally fat and have since lost weight and become quote unquote hot, seek revenge on those who have bullied them for their old body sizes. It's insidious because it would seem to convey that pain people experience when they're scorned by their way, but then implies that the only way they can find justice is by then becoming thin. This actually happened on friends. Chandler derides the aforementioned Fat Monica for her size and then later we see that she becomes thin and hot. And then they, hey, get married, so. He's regretful over it. Then there was a revenge plot in the 2018 canceled Netflix show called Insatiable, which is their premise. It girl is a rass and debased for her size. She loses 70 pounds after an accident, requiring her jaw to be wired shut. And then her hot quote unquote hot version seeks revenge on the offenders. Creator Lauren Gusus told the Hollywood reporter that she based the series and part on her own experiences and used the radical weight loss for Ryan's character to comment on the trope of thin equating popularity. But like friends, the show garnered criticism for its equation of thinness with virtue and legitimacy. My name is Patty. High school was a nightmare. Fatty Patty's huge. While my classmates were out losing their virginity, I was at home stuffing another hole. It smells like bacon. (laughing) - On me. - On a roll. - Every day I wondered how much more of this can I take. Then it hit me. Now what? - Where's Patty? - Right here. - Woo! Patty's hot! - Having my jaw wired shut lost me more than just my summer vacation. - Oh, this is like every great high school movie I've ever made. - Now I could be the former fatty who turned into a brain. - Or an athlete. Or a princess. No, I'd rather have revenge. (upbeat music) - Are you insane? - I don't know. - Patty has had a control. (upbeat music) - Bowls! - I wanna punch her in her bitch face. - So yeah, this falls into this paradox with her sort of acknowledging that people are mean to fat people, but the solution is to instead of accepting them or some sort of broader growth or any kind of character catharsis, they just get thin as a sort of plot device. Well, which obviously we see here is like a jaw wired shut. So it's this idea that she was even forced to do it because she just otherwise wouldn't have been able to stop eating food, to stop gorging herself. She was forced to and therefore got thin and somehow stayed thin, which is also kind of an anomaly in reality. - The show was canceled due to backlash from activists. I think there was, it didn't sort of hit the right note. It was going for, it didn't seem to be generous, I guess the creator, Lauren Gusus, I guess they were supposed to be some kind of metacommentary, but really it just sort of reinforced all the kind of tire tropes, especially this idea of like, again, the only way fat person could sort of get revenge on their bullies is to not be fat anymore, which is sort of the thing that perpetuates the problem. I didn't see the show to be fair. It's possible that it was more nuanced than that. I might measure probably was, but near 2018, we sort of still have this basic framework. And just to sort of establish the stakes a little bit, you know, I guess that's one of the things we like to do in this show is that countless studies do show widespread hatred towards fat people. And what we're kind of arguing is that public culture both reflects this and also reinforces it and that this actually does have a negative effect on both people's psyche and as individuals, but also broader sociological and health effects. - Yeah, so for instance, a 2001 study, 20 years ago, from the National Library of Medicine, found that 28% of teachers said that becoming obese is the worst thing that can happen to a person. 24% nearly a quarter of nurses said that they are, quote unquote, repulsed by people classified as obese and controlling for income and grades, parents provide less college support for their overweight children than for their thin children. Now again, that study is 20 years old, but this stigma remains a 2016 survey, so just five years ago, conducted at the University of Chicago found that three quarters of participants said obesity resulted from a lack of willpower. This is despite the fact that as even the New York Times will acknowledge researchers say obesity is caused by interactions between environment and genetics, and a study conducted by the University of Chicago published two years later in 2018, 34% of respondents reported that they or someone they knew had directly experienced fat shame within the last year. There's a wealth of personal accounts, of course, and to a lesser extent reporting about anti-fatteness in the medical field itself, wherein people who are medically classified as overweight or obese have had major health conditions unrelated to weight ignored, because doctors just assumed that their weight was the cause of their problem. - And of course, the body mass index, which was the prevailing metric for years, was reformed about six, seven years ago because it was completely nonsense. I mean, the rock and Michael Jordan or obese, the sort of assumption that if you fall into a certain category of weight in body mass index, that's immoral proxy, is very prevalent in our culture. One of the ways I think it does, that makes it stick. And again, there's been pushback in the last 10 years or so, and that's great in many ways, but one of the reasons it has such longevity and it sticks around is because it does have this idea, and you see this with a lot of like health and fitness and crossfit culture, which can get pretty fasci pretty quick, and a lot of self-help culture in particular, as we discussed on the news brief about the New York Times, dump your fat friends, op-ed that was then later changed. It has this veneer of like, no, I'm genuinely concerned with these people's health. - Right. - And if you use this big S science, whether it's a racing native culture, whether it's justifying evasions in the Middle East, whether it's justifying being a fucking prick to fat people, if you have this kind of veneer of science, then you're not being a body-shaming asshole, you're not being someone who's just being a bully. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're actually concerned. - Yeah, you can, I'm concerned for the human rights in the Middle East, I'm concerned with observing the universe. That's why we need to bulldoze every menachio and Hawaii. I'm concerned with the health of these, when you use the sort of veneer of science, you can really just reinforce these bourgeois and hurtful and harmful. And again, we could share with you dozens of anecdotes of how these things reinforce and hurt people. And it's sort of okay because no, you genuinely really want them to like, not have a lower A1C or have, you know, not have heart problems. - I'm really concerned about your cholesterol, but allows me to also be class assistant racist and misogynistic. - Yeah, or do you just like to make fun of fat people because we've been doing that for hundreds of years? I mean, that probably is the more likely culprit, right? - For more on this, we're now gonna be joined by Amy Erdman Farrell. James Hope called one Memorial Chair of Liberal Arts and Professor of American Studies in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College. And currently a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She's the author of the book's Yours in Cisterhood, Ms. Magazine in the Promise of Popular. feminism, as well as fat shame, stigma, and the fat body in American culture. Amy will join us in just a moment. Stay with us. We are joined now by Amy Erdman Farrell. Amy, thank you so much for joining us today on "Sytations Needed." It's excellent to be here. So I want to begin the discussion by talking about a theme of your book. And one, I think that's a sort of key question a lot of listeners sort of, I think, are grappling with, which is the conflation of moral scolding with the so-called health concerns and the evocation of a ladder as a sort of pretext to engage in the former. You write, quote, "It is easy for us to assume today that the cultural stigma associated with fatness emerged simply as a result of our recognition of its apparent health dangers. What is clear from the historical documents, however, is that the connotation of fatness and the fat person, lazy gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly, and lacking in willpower, proceeded and was then intertwined with the explicit concern about health issues. I want to sort of talk about the sort of, it's a fascinating relationship. And one, I think a lot of listeners sort of want to understand better. Can we begin by kind of broadly laying out how this dynamic historically has worked, how recent decades, how this concern for health, again, while I think maybe earnest in some circles, has become a bit of a patina to do what is basically just classic bad shaving. Yeah, yeah, pure discrimination. Yeah, I think it's important to know the history of this a little bit at least, which is that really through the 19th century, for the most part, doctors were really concerned about wasting diseases, meaning ones like a sign of a thin body was something that would have been of concern for health reasons, things like tuberculosis, malnutrition, et cetera. And actually the father of dieting, William Banting, he was writing in the 1860s, he was a really wealthy man, a casket maker. He made a lot of money making caskets. And he was also very fat and he got really concerned about that. And he went to all his doctors who told him just to quit worrying about it, that he was, he was wealthy, he was happy, you know, just quit worrying about it. And he wouldn't hear it. And he wrote the first diet book in the early 1860s. And that became an international bestseller. And it was really one of the diets we see today too, was like eating a lot of protein and not eating very many sugars, not drinking very much either. I mean, not just alcohol, like not even water. And then people became constipated and they had to have an elaxative. So that was his plan. He made a ton more money on it. But I think what's really important there is to know like this started with someone being concerned about what they look like, not about their health. And I think that has really continued since then that often we will hear people saying, "I'm going on a diet, it's really from my health." When we know it has nothing to do with their health, it might have something to do with how they feel, like how they feel about themselves. But it has nothing to do really with their health. The scientific studies, especially coming out from the CDC, have all indicated that actually for most people, the correlates the best with health is actually that weight in the overweight category. And that ill health really shows up on the really high end of the skills. Like you're very, very, very fat according to BMI, which is problematic, or you're very thin according to BMI. Do you know that the best health is correlated with that overweight? So really, when people say healthy, I just hear you're concerned about something culturally. It has nothing to do with your health. Yeah, it's amazing. Sometimes you look at the BMI and it's shocking how low it is for what's supposed to be normal weight. I mean, I remember, I mean, it's just, you know, again, it's six feet. I think it's like 184 pounds and you're considered, or if you're 185 pounds are considered, I quote, unquote, overweight, which for anyone of six feet tall, especially if you have a certain frame, it's very sort of a remarkable claim. And of course, we discussed at the top of the show the problems with BMI as well. But yeah, because I think that's, it's sort of like the concern trolling about crime. It's sort of a pretext for race. It's like, there's these things we sort of fake like we care about. And like you said, it reality, the health aspect of it. Again, I think for some people, health is an issue, diabetes, whatever. I don't doubt that. But culturally or sort of broadly speaking, the impetus for these things and what drives these industries that you argue is really just about meeting these kind of aesthetic and arbitrary aesthetic standards that are cultures kind of decided were important. Yeah. And even I would just jump in there like about the diabetes to, there's a lot of pretty standard, I think, well supported evidence about exercise and how people eat and how that's linked to things, especially things that are like diabetes or other kinds of things. And health problems, that's different than fat. So because someone could actually have up their exercise, their movement getting up there, you know, like how well they're eating and still be fat. And I use the word fat purposefully to sort of take it away from the presumption that we're really talking about something neutral when really, you know, overweight and obesity are these medicalized terms. Yeah, can you comment on that? Because I know that a lot of people maybe find that jarring and I know a lot of activists use the word fat. Can you sort of talk about why that is? Are already prescriptive or already making it out to be a pathology. So to say obese that really comes from, you know, from a medical term that is already presumed that you are sick or overweight, it's sort of like over who's weight. I think there's a, was a movement among activists to reclaim the term fat, just like we reclaim the term queer black even. So terms that had been used pejoratively to say, we're, you know, don't throw that back at me. I'm just going to claim that term myself. And then also to try to make it more neutral so that we could use that term in the same way that we would say someone has brown hair or their hair has dyed blue or whatever it is that it would just be a descriptor of someone. Having said that, you know, it's still very much can be used as a derogatory term. So I wouldn't just, you know, I think it depends on how people identify themselves as well. But for myself and my work and I'm not idiosyncratic there, I mean, for people who do work in fat studies, we use the word fat explicitly to mark ourselves is not within the medical paradigm. Right. Yeah, I think that's such an important thing to bring up. And, you know, this idea of how language is both used and weaponized is, you know, something we actually talked a lot about on this show. Starting on some of those kind of historical foundations that you were talking about about our cultural kind of discussed about discrimination against hatred really of fat people, namely fat women, you've written a lot about the racist origins of fat shaming. Can you expand on this a bit? How have the two modes of discrimination, racism and anti-fatness merged and also kind of compounded one another built on each other? Yeah. It's a really good question. I mean, obviously, I think it's a good question. That's what I study on. But I'm going to take respect to the 19th century again. So even as I said, like, you know, William Banting, the father of dieting, he was concerned about this culturally. His doctors weren't concerned about his health. At that same time, there were lots of scientists who were studying bodies as evidence for a kind of scale of civilization, which bodies were more evolved than other bodies. And really, as part of that, articulating a science of race. And that there was an already understood hierarchy among those scientists that white people were superior to people of color, I would say, in general. Africans were at the bottom of the scale, but then there were indigenous peoples, Asian peoples who there was some debate among these kind of school of thinkers, philosophers, scientists about where everyone should be placed. The body was something that was really studied for those signs. So you might be familiar with the term "frenology," which is really about the skull. But I'm going to talk about physiognomy more generally of really studying the body for signs of civilized status or of what they call degeneracy. So degeneracy could be a sign that you weren't as evolved as you purported to be. So they actually were looking for, like, how could we tell that someone was going to become a criminal? How could we tell that someone was going to become a prostitute, for instance, just by looking at their bodies? Lots of scientists focusing a lot of time establishing why white people were superior. And probably the most famous of that is George Cuvier, who studied Sarah Bartman, who was the African woman from what is now South Africa. Stolen, this woman was displayed, like, put on this kind of parade display within England and then France. But it wasn't just like a side show. Scientists were interested as well. So after she died, Cuvier did an autopsy on her body. He decided, and if I were, like, looking at you, I would be making a face. He decided that she actually was human. That was his big discovery that she wasn't what was called the missing link between animals and human beings. But he had lots of evidence of how she was, in fact, inferior. So that included her sexual organs, the size of her brain, the shape of her legs. But it also included her fat. And that was when I went back and studied those documents actually just following this trail of the way that these thinkers talked about fatness as being uncivilized. It just led me down to lots of scholars were studying this work by George Cuvier and Sarah Bartman and how he was establishing these kind of science of race, Udo science. But no one had really talked about this fatness as a sign. And that is something that just really took hold so that by the end of the video, I'm going In the end of the 19th century, we have people like Cesar Lambrosa, who's a criminologist. He has quote unquote evidence that fatness on women is a sign that they're going to become a prostitute, especially fat thighs, which is especially ironic, right? Considering that most women have fat thighs. I mean, that's where fat accumulates on lots of female bodies. So it almost is like every female is at risk of this deviant behavior. And there are other scholars who have really picked up on this, like, especially Sabrina Strings work, of really looking at the way that by the 19th century, an anti-fat discourse was used to discipline white people, and especially to discipline white women, at the same time that it was used as this kind of evidence of the inferiority of black people. And that was so firmly established and just seemed some almost normal that, you know, I feel like we need to know that history because once you know that history, you'll see it everywhere. You know, it's sort of like that it went undercover, but it's in full flight as soon as you notice it. Yeah, it's always amazing how European pseudoscience always seemed to justify colonialism and misogyny and patriarchy shockingly so. Yeah, it did. And you know, I would say it was European, but it was Euro-American because all those people were translated if they were writing in like, like, Lombarossa and Italian. He became wildly famous in terms of sociology here. Yeah, I mean, this was very much in these were prevalent ideas, and especially among, like, eugenics thinkers as well in the United States. So on the topic of eugenics, we talked about this a few months ago. We actually touched on a briefly topic to show. There was an infamous New York Times, I guess, op-ed for "Want of a Better Termer," or column that was published a few months ago, where the author effectively argued that if you're around people who are unhealthy or overweight, you're going to be more likely to be overweight. If you're around people who are depressed or are likely to be depressed, it was one of these kind of popsikology kind of rise and grinds sort of capitalists like how to be a winter kind of thing. So the term is called "Friending Up" I think in the popsikology world. So you put some higher kind of get, like, dirty by these people? Yes. So there was a huge outrage. I ended out that part and the author apologized, but it's definitely central to a whole segment of kind of self-help books, this idea that dumped the fatties and saddies. And of course, the whole thing's based on a paradox because by definition, not everyone can friend up, by definition 50% of people have to friend down, but setting that aside. And what we talked about with this is a sort of maybe soft eugenics, but it is a eugenic concept, right? That you sort of weed out the undesirables. So a lot of these vestiges, like you mentioned, are sort of still around. I don't know if you followed that particular example, but can you comment briefly on this quasi eugenics element to modern? Because again, I think while it's not as explicit, some of this sort of logic still lives with us, there's a whole pop self-help industry around, like basically saying, don't surround yourself with fatties. Yeah. I mean, I was actually going to say I don't even think there's the soft eugenics. I mean, there's also the hard eugenics of this as well, which is that it's much more difficult for fatties people to qualify to adopt children with the, I think, the thinking there, supposedly the thinking is that they're unhealthy, but I think it's really that they will create bad and bad environment for their children and create bad children or really difficult for fatties people to qualify for fertility treatments. And there's a lot of, that's not my research, but there's a lot of scholars out there saying that's really dubious on a dubious basis that they're not qualifying for treatments. Well, that would be textbook eugenics right there, right? Yeah, well, that's really, that's just like straight up eugenics that we don't want. And even fatt children being taken away from homes in this idea that the parents have failed them. So like their scholars like that. That's a sign of negligence. Yeah, exactly. Which I would say is connected to this eugenics. I think that what you're talking about too though is just, it really speaks to the kind of discrimination that people face when they're fat. And we know that like how much more difficult it is for fat people to actually, you know, get dates or, you know, sort of the kind of status issues there. And so I think that that's just speaks directly to what you were talking about. I mean, that's really typical, you know? So I think there was something, there was a popular diet book a while before that was like, even you shouldn't look at a fat person on a bus or something because it might be, you know, whatever infect you that that fatness might infect you. So I think you're going to see it all over the place or like there was a big documentary in 2012. I don't know if you saw it called weight of the nation, which was really focused on how fat was killing the nation. It was going to smack us into oblivion. It was like some language that they used like that that we were going to, meaning the United States. Well, weight of the nation is a play from birth of the nation. So the film that is strictly about black people taking over the United States after reconstruction and the need for the KKK to control black people. I mean, I couldn't believe when they used that title. Yeah, literally the rebirth of the KKK in 1915. Yeah, that was the, yeah, yeah, exactly. So for them to use weight of the nation, these are filmmakers. They would know that, you know, they're not like that's your reference. So yeah, so I think you're spot on there. And I think we can look for sort of the soft eugenics as you put it, but also just the really explicit eugenics too. One aspect to your critical of, which is similar to which place off what you just talked about is this kind of moral panic around the 1990s, the so-called obesity epidemic, which I think there was a, there was a federal law requiring television producers to do the crop down images of people's guts with their faces cropped out that we have thousands of these stories, which you argue are sensationalists and oftentimes cloud judgment around kind of sober discussions about health concerns. Because we do have dietary trends that exist in the so-called developed world. And then it becomes a full blown moral panic and has a corollary anti-fat bias. Again, there's always this sort of thin veneer of kind of health concerns, but really ultimately it just kind of boils down to like, you know, let's, here's this bad thing you don't want to be in. Here's these bad people, you don't want to be around. I want to sort of talk about the problems with the framing of an epidemic you write about. And most, I think most importantly of all, like sort of what are the forces that drive this narrative? Is it just inherited cultural contagions or is there maybe more kind of material or kind of capitalist interest in reinforcing this framework? Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, my own work is really about the historic ideology and how it's alive today. And I think we have to always be following that because that's these deep-seated ideas about who is an acceptable person. And I think those ideas of degeneracy, they really lurk in us even if you don't have never heard that term. Having said that to follow the money, it's about money and ideology going together because in like today, we have, I think the last time I looked, we have like a $78 billion US diet industry. It's almost $200 billion, I think worldwide. And we know like, for instance, I don't know if you follow the story of Catherine Flagel from the CDC. So in 2005, she published one of the first studies on fat. If you followed all this, if you remember in the '90s, there was this stat that got thrown out around a lot, which is that fat causes 300,000 deaths a year. And so she sort of took that up. She had no like sort of bone to pick in terms of the fat studies world or anything. She just was assigned to say is that true? Let's actually look at that again. And her first study showed that it was nothing like that at all. Like the number just went down dramatically. And that actually she started to find those numbers that actually people in that overweight categories seem to correlate. We don't know causation, right? But correlate with the better health outcomes. So she gets really attacked for that. And the CDC gets really attacked for that. So she's like, well, fine, let me just go find every study that's in the body. It's been done on weight and health. So she does one of those gold standard studies where she finds like 50 studies that have been done in every language, you know, and really trying to put all those findings together. And it supports the same thing that there seems to be like that really the worst health effects are on the on either end of this. So either if you're very thin or you're very fat. But this middle category of even obese is just kind of neutral. I don't know, I mean, it's just not that big a deal. And that overweight category is actually seems to have a startling better health effects for people. Well, she just came out, I don't know if you followed this. She just came out in June of this year with after she's retired with this whole sort of, I don't know, not expose, just sort of her recounting the kind of smear campaign that was against her by she really would argue by people in the diet industry who would get themselves in positions within these various task force, et cetera. But like a personal smear campaign against her, you know, and she at the end of this article, she's just a very kind of measured person. And she says, you know, I think we need to be willing to deal with inconvenient scientific findings. You know, she's not like swearing any all in or anything, but it's pretty amazing. You know, and that's really, I think that's about follow the money. Is the general idea from policymakers, again, assuming sort of the best faith possible? Obviously there's a lot of financial interest in making people feel miserable all the time. That's kind of one of the basics of marketing. Yeah, or the diet industry. I mean, it's like if you really started to really push these ideas that actually it's about just moving your body more eating while there's not a lot of money to be made - Yeah, it's the idea from like a sort of health policy maker standpoint that you sort of want to over-correct. Is there a sense that they'll create some kind of moral hazard where if we're like too nice to fat people or slightly fat people, is it where that they'll get like extra fat? What's the sort of? - Yeah, I think there's two things there. One is really a belief that if you push stigma on people even though we know that's not true, like there's no evidence for that. If you really push stigma, people will change their behavior. I also think like you really need to be following who's on those task forces. Do you know what I mean? That these aren't necessarily people who are neutral. I would have said Catherine Flagos is just a completely neutral science employee. But a lot of these people are not. They're working basically for these industries and their diet food industries, the weight loss industries, like the I mean weight loss surgery industries, the pharmaceutical industries, there's a lot of money, it's never ending. People can't lose weight and keep it off. It's not a moral failing. We just know that people's bodies put the weight back on. And so it's never, and it's just an extraordinary amount of money to be made in the weight loss industry. - Let's talk about another industry where weight plays a really, really important role, the entertainment industry. As we've been talking about on this episode a lot, fat characters and fatness in general as a plot device is ubiquitous really in pop culture and TV film typically used, obviously as either punchline, something that's inherently funny, or certainly as we've been discussing a moral proxy for weakness, for negligence, for gluttony. Now countless sitcoms, especially have gags where a character either becomes fat or used to be fat and it's presented as per say hilarious and evidence of all the things we've been discussing. Now don't wanna be to mock us here, but like when we talk about the human stakes of this, how does this constant stream of comedic characters of overt mockery, what does this do to, I think, our society at large and certainly to people who view themselves as being fat or are told that they are fat and are constantly seeing that reflected back to them in pop culture. - Yeah, I'm really glad you're asking this question because I don't think it's like us being too, "Oh, we can't take a joke or something." I think this is really about a culture that has said that it is fine to treat fat people as inferior and is not quite human. And so it actually completely legitimates extensive discrimination, which we know actually starts by the time kids are little. It's like the most likely reason a kid will be bullied on the playground is because they're fat and it goes through everything. So it goes through your whole educational system, getting dates and partners, getting clothes, getting a job that's especially a front-facing job, housing, what we're just talking about, your medical care. Do you know, like, so all of those things, it's like it just compounds itself. And I think it legitimates the bad treatment of fat people and for fat people themselves. It's like always being seen as at the best a humorous sidekick. So I think there are other voices out there now, but I think it's really serious. Do you know, and it's not something that's just, and even the use of like fat suits to tell a story too, it's always like, if we're gonna take that character seriously, it has to be an actual thin person inside. Like that suit. It can't actually just be the fat person having a real full story. You know, Irving Goffman, the sociologist, always talked about stigma makes you treated as a lesser human being and it decreases your life chances. And I think we really see that with the treatment of fat people. And so when it's mockery on the kind of like funny, on comedies and sitcoms, to then like the news channels that show fat people what their face is off as if they're not real human beings too, I think it's kind of just a spectrum there. So it's serious, I think it's really serious. - Yeah, 'cause one of the things you wanna do with this thing, you wanna sort of establish the stakes. I think it's easy to talk about, it's easy for people to mock like groups as an abstraction. And one of the things we try to do with the show sort of expand the bubble of empathy a little bit. Because like you said, there are material consequences to this. It's not like discrimination doesn't have economic impacts, like you said, whether it's adopting children or getting fired, like there are consequences to this. Do you hear a lot of people say, "Oh, Irving's too PC, can't take a joke." And it's like, well, okay, maybe, but like, imagine if you are of that group and your identity or sort of how you're identified rather, is constantly just per se funny. Like it's just look at this fat, like Daphne and Frazier gets fat, that's per se funny. Like I'm not trying to cancel Frazier necessarily, but like, you know, that over time that would sort of begin to erode on one psyche, I would think it has to, right? I mean, again, it's not even as if it's like funny, pursuant something else, it's just seen as inherently a joke. It's just inherently a joke, sort of that spectacle. And then it often is used as that kind of proxy for the moral failing. So if you have the person, so in things that aren't even humor, just any kind of story where when the person has some kind of downpour, they almost always become fat. And then when they are redeemed somehow, they become thin. It doesn't really matter what the redone, it's sort of like it almost becomes actually just becoming thin then becomes the redemption. You know, so it's like no wonder then, we can't think straight about health even. I mean, there's an issue too, even about whether certainly we can't say that people can be discriminated against because they're unhealthy. But we can't even think straight about health, like to be thinking, actually it might just be that people, if they up there, like just movement, a little bit more might be healthier, but their body weight might not change at all. But people will quit exercising because they're like, oh, I didn't lose any weight. And I thought, well, actually it doesn't probably matter that you didn't lose any weight. In terms of some of those health effects, I'm not a physician, I'm not trying, I'm just saying if you actually read the studies, it'll show you that, but the headlines and that the ways that it gets reported in media doesn't show that. - So you wrote your book 10 years ago, got forbid we ever ended on a positive note, but I guess I'm sort of curious, both positive and negative. Do you feel like the general kind of so-called psych-eister conversation and pop culture conversation has shifted? Do you think the norms have changed at all in the last 10 years? Or is it a bit of a lateral pass in your perspective? - I feel like it's both. I just looked up really quickly before we talked, just what in my book I wrote that we had a $60 billion weight loss industry, and I know it's like 78 billion now. I don't think that's just inflation. We had like 158,000 weight loss surgeries in 2011, each year in the United States, and now we're up to 256,000 weight loss surgeries. That to me is horrible, especially because that is the biggest growth market there are young people. So people like 15, 16, 17 years old, who will have had this debilitating surgery early on in their lives, who knows, that's only gonna hurt their ability to withstand aging. Do you know? Having said that, like the field of fat studies has just blossomed. Some of the people who I'm working on an anti-bigotry project with a woman by the name of Joy Cox, who wrote "Fac girls and black bodies." I mean, there's this new international handbook of fat studies by edited by Kat Pazé. Like there's just such great stuff out there right now, and I know that when I talk to people, they have language for things now. You know, they will bring up fat shaming or they will talk about themselves as, "I am fat, I can't find clothes that's unacceptable." It doesn't mean everyone will do that, you know, but I do think there's a big cultural shift too though, where people, there's a language to talk with the very fact that you contacted me to talk about this, that you're having an episode about this. That is different than 10 years ago. Like 10 years ago, people were getting pretty beaten up. I don't mean literally, although there were like, I did get death threats and stuff from actually daring to say fat people deserved to be treated decently. But I think that was seen as really daring and edgy then. And now I think that there's enough voices out there that it's like, it's still maybe not mainstream, but there's a space for it. And that's great. I mean, that's really changed. - That's amazing. So before we let you go, Amy, can you tell us a little bit about what you are currently working on? We know that you are working on a book about the history of the Girl Scouts. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? - Yeah, sure. Well, two things I'm actually working on an edited collection on Fat In Gender. So that should be coming out in the next couple of years. So I'm working with like 25 amazing scholars, writers, activists on that. And then at Radcliffe, I am working on a book that I've been working on for a while, doing research on for a while. On the history of the Girl Scouts, I was a Girl Scout. Girl Scouts was tremendously wonderful to me, especially as a bullied fat kid. Girl Scouts was a place of refuge for me. But for me, it's important for us to take a kind of clear-headed look at the Girl Scouts relationship to race and racism in the same way that we're looking at every institution. So I'm really thinking about what have been the Girl Scouts histories of discrimination and how have they worked with American Indian groups, somewhat the gender-based. Japanese American incarceration centers during World War II, thinking about policies of discrimination both over and more implicit. But weaving all that with my own story of being a girl's child. - So you're just ruining everything. You're gonna go after Apple Pie next. - Yeah, I know. - You communist. - Yeah, well actually, girls called for a coup instead of being communist too. So I'll talk about that. - That's right. - That's true. They were the more liberal version of the Boy Scouts, I guess, because then the Mormon church owned the Boy Scouts. - We're very much more liberal than the Boy Scouts and in fact, Girl Scouts up to the early 1960s, I think like the late 1960s, continued to bring lawsuits against the Girl Scouts for using the term scout because it insulated boys. - Ah, yes. - And so they wanted them to use the word Girl Guides. And Girl Scouts in the United States were like, "No, we're too young." - No, I can't trademark scout. - Yeah, I feel like that's my job is just to ruin everything. - That's what we do too. - Oh, that's good. That's also our job. So we can talk about the Girl Scouts and Raytheon as well. - That's true. - The apartment with Raytheon, yeah, that was fun. - But I think that's a great place to leave it. This has been such a great conversation. Of course we've been talking to Amy Erdman-Farrell, James Hope, Caldwell Memorial Chair of Liberal Arts and Professor of American Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College. Currently also a fellow at the Harvard grad cliff institute. She is the author of the books Yours in Sisterhood, Ms. Magazine, the promise of popular feminism as well as Fat Shame, stigma and the fat body in American culture. Amy, thank you so much again for joining us today on "Satations Needed." - Absolutely, it's been wonderful to be here. (upbeat music) - There's a lot of really good history in Amy's book, Fat Shame. I think when you learn about the history of these things, you realize that these are part of patterns and that what changes, that the currents don't change, the kind of excuses and the justifications change. The quasi-ugenics of this kind of discourse or the way it kind of veers in the quasi-ugenics. I don't think all of this public discussions of quote unquote obesity or inherently eugenic in nature, but I do think that as a general rule, when they start to veer into hyper-moralism and moral panics and base their premises on shame and the idea that radical body transformation is sort of the only way forward, I do think it does become very eugenics-y. Eugenics-y. And I think that's really where you start to say, well, you start to see these connections and these patterns. And some of the things we do a lot on the show is that these things have historical currents and that the basic premise has not really changed a lot, what's changed is the pretextual reason for why we have these norms. And I think a book does a really good job showing the connective tissue 'cause I think sometimes people think, "Oh, well, that was sort of back then, it's not anymore." And look, it's not as bad, but obviously. Not everything is still the '90s where everyone's just a fucking asshole. Yeah, things are better in many ways, but like some of the fundamental basic premises are still there and they're there in other parts of pop culture. So you sort of, even if it's less maybe a Netflix series ever so slightly, 10 minutes in the self-help CrossFit workout world, I mean, it's nothing but that. So it still has a huge amount of purchase. This is not a solved problem, even though some modest progress has been made. Well, right, I mean, then you can see it, something we didn't mention 'cause I mean, didn't need to go through literally everything, but I mean, there's all those shows, my 400 pound life, my 500 pound life, my 600 pound life, my 1200 pound life. I mean, is that really any different than what we talked about when PT Barnum would have fat people on stage to be mocked? I mean, is that any different? It's not, it's the exact same thing 120 years later. Yes, and it also has the guys, again, the patinas we were saying earlier in the show of being about public health or being about this moment in American history, right? Yeah, so it gives that a real sanctimonious figure. Yeah, exactly, and it's, you know, you're supposed to feel bad, you're, it's not supposed to be overtly mocking, but it is this oggling, it is this side show presented actually as the centerpiece of shows, of these kind of self-help boot camp type shows. We're gonna improve your life, we're gonna get you off the couch. Now, granted, there are those extreme examples, and then there are these less extreme examples that still present themselves as extreme because of what we are told to believe should be the ideal body image, you know, on shows like the biggest loser, contestants are also told by producers to gain as much weight before they start filming so that their weight loss can be even like more dramatic on screen. I mean, that's the thing, it's all about this kind of moral arc. And the most offensive thing you can do, and the thing that offends these people more than anyone is someone to say, look, I'm fat, I'm happy being fat, it's who I am. I have my own forms of health and exercise, and I try to prevent certain diseases or whatever, but like for yourself, it's not your fucking business. And second off, just because I don't meet a certain aesthetic standard does not mean I'm healthy. You cannot judge someone's health purely by how you look at them, and that is just like meltdown, people get fucking mad when you say that, or when people say when activists, or whoever, just normal people say that. And I think that's, 'cause once you say that, you sort of remove, once you remove that stigma, you remove the power of these bourgeois institutions to dictate what is and what is acceptable. - They're like, wait, you're not like a fat villain or like a jolly fat friend? What the hell am I supposed to do with you? - Exactly, and you don't fit into it. You can't be fit into this moral category that can be used as an instrument of power, and that is not something people really like. And again, we can talk about these kind of broad health discussions, but when they're used as an excuse to be a sanctimonious asshole, and make people feel like shit, and hold them to impossible standards, then we have a problem. And that's for the most part how these things play out. You cannot separate the social and historical currents from the so-called science. I mean, you just, you can't. I mean, you have to be very careful. Again, lots of people are doing this much better now. I'm not saying we're the only people that ever say this. I know this is definitely not the first people to make this point, but those two things are so inexperienced, you cannot just deflate them again as much as you want to. - Yeah. Well, that will do it for this episode of "Satations" needed. Thank you, everyone, for listening. You can follow the show on Twitter at CitationsPod Facebook. Citations needed becoming a supporter of our work through patreon.com/CytationsNeededPodcast. Our support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100%. Listen or fund it in, as always, an extra special shout out. Goes to our critic level supporters on Patreon. 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