Should people be embarrassed, not to gain weight, but to lose it? Such is the question discussed in a recent New York Times article about what happens when “body-positive” influencers start shedding pounds. Focusing on formerly plus-size model Dronme Davis, the Times reveals that weight loss can induce antipathy toward such influencers from their fans. “Right now, body-positive influencers who have decided to be open about losing weight have also had to navigate a community that is often disappointed and angry,” the Times observes.
The samples of fan anger are bewildering. “It made me feel like she was being dishonest with her community,” one fan of Davis said. “I don’t want to say it was owed to us, but it was such a drastic change.” Another weight-losing model was called “ableist and self-hating.” Still another was accused of presenting thinness as identical to health and creating material that could “justify fatphobia.”
If you’re unfamiliar with “fatphobia,” just think of it as the body-positivity movement’s attempt to invoke the leftist logic of intersectionality and identity politics in behalf of this particular characteristic. Fatphobia would have us believe that society discriminates against overweight people in the same way it does against other disadvantaged groups. It finds academic justification in the world of “fat studies,” which resembles other modern navel-gazing disciplines. The Journal of Fat Studies contains such titles as “Fat as a neoliberal epidemic: Analyzing fat bodies through the lens of political epidemiology”; “Fat politics as a constituent of intersecting intimacies”; and “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A study of pedagogical approaches aimed at challenging obesity discourse in post-secondary education.”
What makes this argument even more baffling is the obesity crisis America is experiencing. CDC data rated more than 20 percent of adults in every U.S. state and territory as obese in September 2022, and about the same number of Americans 19 and under in 2017–20. And as with many injurious modern trends, Covid made it all worse. It’s strange to argue that a society getting fatter is structurally biased against the “plus-sized.” (For more on the ideology behind this crisis, as well as the extent of the crisis, see my Quillette article from last July.)
It may be that this crisis is best confronted in community. But at some level, it will require a rediscovery and reassertion of such old-fashioned concepts as individual agency and personal responsibility. And it will definitely demand the destruction of a curious — and, one hopes, not widespread — kind of stigma that sees weight loss as a source of shame or embarrassment. Fortunately, the Times leaves us with a sign that this necessary destruction is beginning: The same fan of Davis who criticized her for being “dishonest” has herself begun to work out and shed pounds. “I guess weight is just as much of a trend as anything else,” she said. We should hope so.