“I felt too fat to be a feminist in public.” The startling admission appears in the opening paragraph of Kate Manne’s new book, . With that single frank and sobering sentence, Manne, an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell, captures the pervasiveness of anti-fat bias—and its stifling impact.
Manne had tapped into the zeitgeist of #MeToo with her 2017 book, and was frequently called upon by the press to comment on current events like Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. But in early 2019 she turned down the opportunity to go on an all- expenses-paid publicity tour of London to promote the paperback release because she felt too self-conscious about her weight. The experience made her uncomfortably aware that even she, an Ivy League academic with a PhD from MIT, had internalized our society’s anti-fat bias.
“The combination of being publicly feminist and fat is a way of violating patriarchal norms and expectations in this very fundamental way,” she says, making it difficult to speak out “in a body that is ripe to be belittled and mocked.” Manne grew up in Melbourne, Australia, where she recalls being called fat for the first time by a classmate in fifth grade PE class. She’d been fascinated by philosophy, which she describes as “thinking about thinking,” since the age of five, when a family friend who was a philosopher asked her why she was catching butterflies in a net and taking away their freedom.
So she studied the .
