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In the New York Times best seller, ‘The Body is Not an Apology’ (2018), Sonya Renee Taylor reminds the reader of the joy that babies take in discovering the different parts of their bodies and the enjoyment to be had in the wonder of how one's body functions, pointing to the fact that hating your body and being ashamed of it is something learnt, not something innate. Taylor's thesis of radical self-love is the need to unlearn the acquired self-hatred we accumulate for both our own and other people's bodies when they do not fit the accepted ‘norm’, with that accepted ‘norm’ being largely created by an industry that is reliant on creating body insecurity.
I too remember that prepuberty period of my life when I enjoyed being ‘big and strong’, as being one of the tallest and by chance one of the larger bodied in my class felt like strength. It was not until I became aware of the way my body was viewed and judged against the ‘accepted norm’ that it transitioned from being ‘big’ as a synonym for strength to ‘big’ meaning fat and the understanding that ‘being fat’ was not good. Growing up in the 90s the word ‘fat’ was far from being the powerfully reclaimed word it is now, it was a slur with the intended hurt and pain attached and designed to make women change their bodies to stop taking up too
much space. The 1990s reached the pinnacle of this need for women to be as small as possible, when ‘heroin chic’ became the key fashion movement.
It is exactly this diminishment and patriarchal control over women that the philosopher Kate Manne describes so carefully and precisely in ‘Down Girl’ (2019) and ‘Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women’ (2021). Manne describes misogyny as ‘the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women's subordination and to uphold male dominance’ . Having written an in-depth exploration of misogyny, it feels that a logical next step for Manne to extend her lens to challenging fatphobia in her remarkable book ‘Uns