Episode 16: Kate Manne on Anti-Fatness

That gives rise to a sense of, like, oh, this fat person must be doing something wrong.

They're unhealthy.

They're unvirtuous.

Whereas, no, this person is actually just existing in their body.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are joined by the brilliant, the illustrious, the gift to American intellectual life, Kate Mann, who is a moral philosopher from Cornell.

And she is most recently the author of Unshrinking, How to Face Fat Phobia.

Kate is the author of Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny, which did this kind of insane thing, or at least a very rare thing, which it is a book of academic philosophy that became a mainstream hit.

I use this book a lot.

I think a lot lot of people use this book a lot to delucidate the meaning of misogyny in the wake of Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss to Donald Trump.

And I find myself continually going back to Down Girl to explore

Kate's really systematic approach to how misogyny functions and its disciplining role in women's lives and in our public life.

And now she's turned her same critical eye with unshrinking to the phenomenon of anti-fatness, which I think normally gets understood as a manifestation of misogyny.

But Kate makes a really compelling case in this book for understanding anti-fatness as a broader phenomenon that affects our politics on its own terms.

Kate, thank you so much for being with us.

Thanks so much for having me.

It's great to connect again, Moira, and great to meet you, Adrian.

It's really lovely to meet you.

And in discussing the episode beforehand, you already mentioned that the book feels like a tougher sell than Down Girl, for instance.

And this is something that I think the book kind of anticipates.

And I thought maybe we could start by talking about that part of it.

In your intro, you talk about three myths about fatphobia.

And the third, I think, struck me as the most surprising in some way, which is that fatphobia is not ancillary.

It's not...

second to, it's not less than, it's actually integral to all these other forms of bias and of domination.

You dash off this sort of point where you're like, you know, there are plenty of left-leaning folks who would want to correct themselves the moment they make a racist or a homophobic point, but who will indulge in fat phobia, you know, kind of reflexively and unreflectedly and will, in fact, defend that when they're called out on it.

And I'll say that that landed.

That definitely is, that that squares with my observations.

I thought maybe you could say a little bit about that, that third point.

That to me was the one that sort of jumped out.

We're like, okay, now we're cooking.

This is why this, maybe even more so than Down Girl,

needed to be written.

Can you say a little bit more about it?

Yeah, I'd love to.

Thank you.

I mean, that really goes to the heart of what I think we're often up against with this issue, which is

there is a kind of complacency about fat phobia on the left and even amongst very progressive people, people of my political genre, broadly speaking, there is this sense that it doesn't really matter.

And we see this in certain statistics.

You know, one of the really striking studies that I looked at when writing this book showed that fat phobia was really the only form of implicit bias that they studied.

And they didn't study every form of bias, but these Harvard researchers studied race, skin tone, disability, sexuality, age, and weight bias was the only one that was increasing when it came to implicit bias.

And it was also the form of explicit bias that was decreasing the most slowly.

And I want to be really careful here because

there is no thing ever, unfortunately, as a last acceptable prejudice, if only.

But what I do think is, yeah, there is this sense of complacency and also complicity among especially left-wing people about fat phobia, which really doesn't make sense when you think about the way that not only is fat phobia something systemic and structural, as I argue in the book, but I think it also intersects with every other major system of oppression.

So I think wonderful work by Sabrina Strings and Deshaun Harrison has shown that fatness is something which has had an association with blackness and that fat phobia in fact has its origins in anti-black racism.

There's also a potent intersection that I've been very interested in given my background of misogyny and fat phobia.

So the way that girls and women being asked to shrink ourselves continually is a powerful weapon in oppressing girls and women and making us small, meek, quiet, pliable.

And there's also a really powerful intersection, just to name one other, between fatphobia and transphobia, where trans folks' bodies are policed.

And one of the huge forms of gatekeeping to which trans folks are subject to is being denied access to life-saving, gender-affirming care on the basis of BMI.

So yeah, I think we really need to take fatphobia seriously, both in and of itself, but also because you really can't address these other forms of oppression that people claim to care about without also addressing fat phobia.

I'm grateful that you touched on Sabrina Springer, whose work I think really gets a lot of grateful recognition in your book.

I was struck by that passage because, you know, there's a moment that I had as, you know, an American high schooler, right, where I was taken on a tour of an art museum and, you know, we're exposed to these like Raphaelite nudes that look different than the sort of

ideals of female beauty were being, I was being presented in the 2000s in like a Calvin Klein ad, right?

And you know, this

museum docent explains that the ideal of beauty was

different at that time.

And it's just like thunderclap.

It's like, oh my God, desire.

What if desire is historically contingent?

Oh my God.

What if it's shaped by these social factors?

And I think you do a really elegant history of how

historical conditions created fat phobia through the sort of a necessity of creating like a moral justification for anti-blackness, right?

Could you like walk our listeners through that really quick?

Because I think it's so useful.

Yeah, I'd love to.

I think it's really interesting to look at how recent fat phobia is.

I mean, look, there are dribs and drabs of fat phobia.

And by the way, I use the terms fat phobia and anti-fatness interchangeably, just for any listeners wondering about the terminology here.

But yeah, there are dribs and drabs of fat phobia throughout human history, but oftentimes the relationship to the fat body was really quite positive, at least ambivalent, but often pretty positive.

Fatness was often seen, unsurprisingly, as a sign of wealth and luxury and abundance, especially in food environments where calories were kind of in scarce supply.

It was a sign you had enough money to make your body larger.

And that really changed very, very recently compared to something like misogyny, which, as you both know, misogyny is kind of as old as agriculture.

And so it's very hard to kind of figure out where it came from.

And that contrasts with fat phobia, where Sabrina Strings, this brilliant UCLA sociologist, has shown that it was in the mid-18th century that this association between fatness and blackness began to be drawn by these white racist, garbage pseudoscientists who were coming up with a pretext essentially from distinguishing white bodies from the black bodies who were being enslaved so brutally and in ever-burgeoning numbers in the transatlantic slave trade.

And so

once the association between fatness and blackness was drawn, which by the way wasn't based on any empirical data or even observation, this was armchair garbage science by people who had never been to the relevant parts of Africa.

But once that association was drawn, fatness came to be derogated shortly thereafter and associated with things like being primitive, quote unquote, or being depraved and being basically deserving of the horrifically racist fate that black bodies were being subjected to under white colonialism.

So yeah, what I think strings show so powerfully is that it wasn't that fatness was derogated and then association with blackness.

It actually went the other way.

Fatness was quite positive until we had this association drawn between fatness and blackness, and then fatness came to be derogated shortly thereafter.

And then that kind of created a very new aesthetic for especially white American Protestant women throughout the 19th century and then into the 20th, where it became a sign of being kind of refined of mind, of being physically dainty and frail and vulnerable.

And it was really tied to a kind of misogynistic beauty beauty ideal that has remained in place throughout the 20th century with, again, minor variations.

We see that there are some eras where slightly curvier bodies are in fashion, but really it's an enduringly thin body throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that has been celebrated with, again, minor variations in fat distribution.

Right, which is always an index of extreme amounts of work, right?

It's never the voluptuous body as such.

It's always like very select places.

And you have a beautiful part of the book where you talk about the redistribution of fat through surgery, which like goes in different directions at different times.

Right.

And it's like, you know, and it's, it's a sign of supposed to be a proxy for effort, for accommodation.

It's really a form of pliancy.

Yeah, it's kind of a holy kind of voluptuousness that we see in someone like Rubens.

That's exactly right.

I mean, sucking out someone's buckle fat, which is basically your cheek pads.

For those listeners who don't know, it's now a trendy surgery.

And, you know, taking out that fat in the face and having recently, the trend has reversed, but for some time, the BBL was quite a popular surgery where fat would be inserted into the buttocks in a way that was reflective of a kind of new norm or at least style of fat distribution.

But yeah, it really is about showing yourself to be willing to be compliant with these kinds of fat distribution trends, regardless of the natural size and shape of your body, which is tremendously variant, in ways that, yeah, show that you're willing to spend the coin of your capitalist dollar in order to make your body conform to these pernicious and very mercurial norms.

But that's the other part of it too.

I think these trends in increasing thinness also have a lot to do with the fact that in a calorie abundant social environment, it's increasingly expensive to be thin.

So part of what we see in terms of the fat phobia increasing in the 19th and 20th century is also just as you get more calories widely available in society, it's no longer a sign of wealth and elitism and just sheer abundance and luxury to have a fatter body.

Instead, it's a sign of actually low socioeconomic status.

And elites, especially white elites, are increasingly wanting to spend their money to show signs signs of social prestige by doing the things that increasingly need to be done to get a very thin body, like the expensive peloton bike, the overpriced salad delivery kit service, and increasingly too, weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wee Govi are also a sign of this social status and this ability to invest in your thin physique.

So yeah, that's been part of the changing norms of beauty as well.

What is easiest to do, namely oftentimes for many people to gain weight, tends to be the thing thought of as less than, whereas what's harder to do, namely to make ourselves very lean, especially for those of us who aren't genetically predisposed towards that, that's thought of as better.

So I call it the harder-better fallacy.

That which is harder is seen as more worthy, despite the fact that that's really fallacious.

It doesn't follow.

Yeah.

I really like, there's a moment in the book where you point out that, you know, one thing that clearly gets routed through anti-fat anti-fat bias is, I think you make the point that, like, if you look at Victorians looking at the poor, right, like we would be shocked at the level of disgust they were able to muster.

But then you point out that like the level of disgust people routinely muster and are supposedly mustering for a good cause, for some bizarre good cause today.

It's the same thing.

We're just we found a way to route it through bodies and not to say we're horrified at immiseration.

It's like we're horrified allegedly at their lack of health or their poor health outcomes, et cetera, et cetera, which are empirically not given.

But it is a place where we sort of where class becomes spectacular and where it gets written on the body in ways that like we normally associate with Victorian England, basically.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

I mean, fatness is a powerful proxy and marker for certain kinds of marginalized racial and class statuses.

And so the way Paul Campos put it in his fantastic book, The Obesity Myth, is kind of, I think, very telling and revealing and just true, which is for a thin white elite,

many people at least wouldn't feel comfortable jeering at a Mexican-American woman going into Walmart as such, but they feel totally fine showing contempt and derision and even jeering at her body and calling her quote-unquote morbidly obese.

And the pretext for that is, oh, we're so worried about her health.

But really, it's about an excuse to indulge in in a kind of classism and racism that is veiled in the more acceptable garb of fat phobia.

And oftentimes, like, there are stereotypes about this that are incredibly powerful, again, even among liberals and progressives, that according to this common narrative, poverty and obesity, quote unquote, because it's a word I don't love, are in lockstep.

And it's just not true.

It's actually not true that the fattest people in America are the poorest ones ones or that there's a reliable relationship between getting richer and getting thinner.

It's true for some demographics, but not most.

So for example, amongst men, the fattest group of American men are in the middle income bracket and the thinnest group is actually the poorest men.

with a similar amount of so-called obesity prevalence.

Again, it's a stigmatizing word I don't use.

I use in scare quotes when I'm reporting scientific and epidemiological studies.

But yeah, the richest men have a similar quote-unquote obesity level.

And for women, it's a different picture, but the only group of women who reliably and statistically significantly get thinner as they get richer is white women.

So for other groups of women, and this is especially, we just don't see any patterns among black women for obesity prevalence being higher in lower socioeconomic groups.

So yeah, there is this trope on the left that fatness is bad because it's associated with or caused by poverty.

And of course, poverty is indeed a scourge in this country, among many others.

But it's firstly a kind of guilt by association.

And secondly, and more importantly, it's just not really true.

It's much more a marker of low socioeconomic status than actually a simple reflection.

of someone's socioeconomic status in America today.

I think it's also interesting that you bring up this

like tricky correlation and causation

issue with class and weight, because one of the things I learned from your book that made me alarmed and enraged, one of several, was that there is such a dramatic income gap between women who are fat and thin.

Well, exactly.

So the question is, and I think, to be clear, this goes both ways, but are white women fatter because they're poorer or are they poorer because they're fatter?

And I think that the latter possibility is at least part of the story, plausibly, because what we find is amongst millennial women and this is true across racial demographics so I should add that as a caveat but amongst millennial women between very fat women and very thin women there is a $40,000 annual average wage gap and so as a woman is in the category of people who are very fat her income her earning power will be markedly affected for the worse.

And so there's certainly a possibility, and some fat study scholars have argued this: that part of what we're seeing here isn't getting fatter because poorer, but rather poorer because fatter, and just not having that same earning power, especially as a woman.

Whereas we do see some income gaps for fat and thin men, but it tends to kick in at much higher weights, and it's also not as reliable a correlation.

For women, there just really are these huge effects, like gaining even 25 pounds as a woman, has been shown to have a causal effect on her earning power to the tune of about $15,000 annually.

So, yeah,

this is really stuff that should affect how we think about race and class, but in a complicated way, not the kind of classic hand-wringing over all these poor, fat, racialized groups who are fat because of this, you know, inability to access fresh food or what have you, the actual picture is more complex and is a lot more implicating of white elites in perpetuating noxious stereotypes that are racist, classist, and fat phobic in a way that they're walking hand in hand and very much in lockstep a lot of the time.

I can tell you that in your chapter on the discipline of philosophy, where you've spent your career, I saw a lot of parallels, just anecdote totally to my own career working in media, where you look at women on an org chart, and the further you go up the org chart, the thinner the women get.

And there is sort of a moral logic at play that those women's discipline and self-deprivation and supposed seriousness that they bring to disciplining their bodies and depriving their bodies is a similar ethos to what they bring to their work.

And I wanted to tease out this moral logic from you a little bit more.

We touched on it earlier with your like harder, better fallacy, But I think there's something

at play that almost valorizes not just difficulty, but really suffering and sort of masochistic endeavors, particularly by women and sort of the logic of a diet culture.

Yeah, I think that's really well put, Myra.

And I think being in these spaces, I have just long felt so anomalous as a woman in philosophy and as a fat woman.

And I should say, like, I speak now from a place place of relative privilege.

Like, I identify now as a small fat woman.

And for those listeners who don't know, there is a kind of spectrum of fatness that fat activists have long recognized from small fat, mid-fat, and large fat to recognize relative degrees of privilege.

So, yeah, one way of putting this is: even as someone who now identifies as a small fat person, my body is markedly anomalous in the incredibly white male and I would say thin and non-disabled spaces that I occupy in the discipline of philosophy, which is very much a microcosm of an intellectual elite, for lack of a better term, that has so many gatekeeping and noxious tendencies that I think are really pernicious.

And I do think a lot of it is connected with this idea that we're really in tight control of our body size.

and the equally pernicious idea that exercising control over what you eat in a fine-grained and tightly rigorous kind of way, that that is somehow a sign of how well disciplined you are as a worker and also, yeah, as a thinker.

There was a woman who, a friend of mine who told me when I was writing this book and allowed me to include this anecdote that her PhD advisor once asked her or said rhetorically of her, if she can't discipline what she she eats, how can she discipline how she thinks?

And that's a really common way of thinking about it.

It's obviously kind of false and obnoxious when you put it clearly.

And yet our implicit expectations about the bodies we'll find in spaces like this, yeah, they persist.

And I think it's worth maybe just being clear too here about

the huge limitations in actually controlling body size that we know people are subject to.

I mean, study after study after study shows the same thing.

Really, every study that is longitudinal and goes for four to five years shows that people who diet and exercise can lose a moderate amount of weight in the short term, maybe 10 to 15% of their starting weight if they're very quote-unquote successful.

But the weight comes back really inexorably for the vast majority of people.

And so

for between one-third and two-thirds of people who do subject themselves to these diets, they'll end up heavier than they started, probably because of overshooting their kind of natural set point weight, which I think, you know, reading between the lines has various determinants, but genetics is a big part of it.

So, you know, another striking finding based on identical twin studies is that upwards of 70% of the variation in body mass we find across the human population is due to genetics, making the heritability of weight just a little bit less than height.

Height is about, you know, 79%.

So it's a bit higher, but not that much.

And it just points to this, yeah, really persistent myth

that

we can and should control our body size, in virtue of which I think we're being unjust to certain people in really deep ways, but we're also missing out on a lot of fat talent.

I mean, I think of some of the writers who I most admire and regard as some of the most luminary minds in just working in cultural criticism and sociology and journalism today.

And there are many of those people are fat women where if these norms had worked even more successfully, we wouldn't hear from these voices.

And so many other fat women's voices are simply not being heard because, yeah, we are being kept out of these spaces spaces and these professions in ways that are such a waste as well as so unjust.

I love that you bring up the marginalization of fat voices from these sort of like institutional avenues that lift up different ways of thinking.

Because something that I really was intrigued about by your book is that you said you came to fat activism, not through your work as an academic philosopher, but like sort of in this personal interest that you discovered these communities on the internet from.

And this is something that

you brought into an academic setting.

Like Adrian and I were doing this podcast on

conservative understandings of sex and gender, where there's a lot of panic on the right about like ideas from the academy supposedly corrupting the youth and filtering down into these internet spaces.

But what you've identified and done is this sort of like backwards path where you took something that was in these like, you know, non-professional vernacular communities of just people trying to articulate their own experiences with similarly situated folks and brought it into like the seriousness of philosophical work.

Do you have any thoughts on that, on that trajectory?

Yeah, I mean, I wondered too, partly if some of these really brilliant thinkers maybe haven't been given the institutional recognition that is so sorely deserved.

I mean, because I...

Exactly as you said, Maura, I cut my teeth after having been a chubby girl in high school and really mercilessly teased on that basis.

I discovered somehow, I can't even remember how I stumbled upon it, communities like Fat Shinista and Kate Harding's Shapely Prose website, and there were bloggers like Leslie Kinzel and Marianne Kirby and Kate herself.

They were and are such brilliant thinkers, but I'm not convinced they have been given the full institutional recognition that they are so owed.

And, you know, we see

some increasing recognition within areas like fat studies of how important this school of thought is, but we still don't see the kind of recognized, you know, certainly fat studies departments are incredibly thin on the ground and it's a very, very niche kind of interest still.

I still feel as a philosopher that when I describe to colleagues who are fully on board with my projects about misogyny that I'm now thinking about fat phobia and the intersection of fat phobia and misogyny, they look at me strangely like i've taken a funny turn whereas for me it feels like such a natural transition because this is something which is such a powerful weapon of misogyny among other things in keeping women's energy and time and money bound up in a futile ultimately a project that for most people for most bodies is doomed to fail and so it's just a great way of keeping us from you know staging a revolution.

But yeah, I think there is certainly a sense of this as

work that doesn't demand the kind of prestige or recognition that would really place it into the mainstream.

And maybe part of that too, just to talk about one other piece of it, is that it is hard to get that political momentum.

Part of what we're up against here is that for many fat people, they don't really want to identify as fat.

They don't really want to

think about

being in a larger body as something that is likely permanent, at least will endure for quite a long time, and that is the basis for shared solidarity and momentum and political activism.

We tend to have this illusion that there's a thin person waiting inside, waiting to emerge victorious after the next diet or Peloton bike scheme.

But that is largely illusory.

So I think part of what is going on here too is that although fat activism has been around and important for a long time, it's not quite as mainstream as it deserves to be in many ways.

I never sort of thought about the fact that how doubly ironic it is that you come from the discipline of philosophy, right, which already has trouble sometimes with the fact that we're embodied.

humans at all when we start working with our concepts.

And the and of course, the thin body is one that we can forget as a body.

A fat body is one that

will always impress us with its bodiliness, right?

Like as a lifelong inhabitant of a body that can't gain weight, no one's ever remarked on that.

I'm allowed to forget it at all times.

I sort of experience a weird mirror image of what millions of Americans experience, and no one's ever commented on it at all.

I'm allowed to forget this constantly.

I'm sure it's an inverse of those biological processes.

And unless I read a book like yours, it just doesn't enter my consciousness.

And of course, so much of our traditional disciplines are, right, they are, the word discipline is there for a reason.

It's about abstracting from the creaturely, from the, right?

And like everything

about the 18th century extraction of fatphobia that you sort of trace so beautifully is about the fact that those who cannot abstract from their body are somehow or less than or not are not quite attaining the the Socratic heights of whatever it is that that that philosophy or what what what thought ought to be doing.

It strikes me as extremely wonderful that you're coming specifically out of that discussion.

These are the questions that we need to be asking.

The other thing I wanted to briefly think about, just because it's, you know, this is a podcast about more saying conservative ideas.

Like, I'm not sure fatphobia is ultimately like that conservative in where it crops up, given that like, as you point out, like progressive people are perfectly capable of being absolutely monstrous about this.

So it's not sure that the left-wing space is that much better on this stuff necessarily.

But it seems like, you know, your book's kind of making the argument that in some way, fatphobia is where a very old idea went that we're no longer supposed to believe, but that clearly subtends a lot of our politics still.

Namely, the idea that the body you happen to be born with constitutes some kind of achievement, right?

If we do that with race, everyone's like, whoa, that's messed up.

Please don't say that.

But when we do this, when we talk about the size and the the shape of a body, suddenly this goes again.

It's like this really old idea that, like, your body constitutes an achievement.

It's something that, like, clearly still lives in our society everywhere.

People who think that something flows from the fact that they were born with Y chromosome, right?

Like,

but we can sort of see, we can see that for the noxious drivel that it is.

Same with you know, racial uh animas, but like here, it's sort of like still it can survive and even and be even sold as as somehow caring and nice and like just telling it how it is or funny or whatever.

Is that right?

Am I striking too broad an arc here, or is that is that what's going on?

No, I think there's really something to that, Adrian.

I think there is.

I mean, first of all, I was thinking about what you said about whether fat phobia is a conservative idea.

I just want to circle back to that because I must say that the left isn't great on this, but the right is

so awful and so vicious.

and it strikes me as really interesting that a lot of the worst media around this book has come from like really transphobic sources right which i have found interesting just because i thought there were sort of deep links between a trans liberation politics and a fat acceptance politics that i explored in the last part of the book like a sense that bodily autonomy is where it's at and you know this shouldn't be controversial but that the idea that we would try to police and patrol and constrain and control the body, like there is some deep allyship here between transphobic thought and fat phobic thought.

And, you know, I think now when I'm looking at the British tabloids, especially, I think there have been two Telegraph pieces on my book,

two or three, no, there were up to three daily mail stories, two Sunday Times or Times, and none of them positive, I should add.

All of these murder kind of rags

have things to say about the book that I find hilarious.

Like one of the Daily Mail stories was: Kate Mann believes that fat people deserve hospital beds and

to

have airplane seats and clothing.

Yes, I do believe those things.

She's going to be treated like human beings?

What's next?

I mean, clothing come off.

I guess that's your point.

Like, yeah, like, next, they'll have to treat trans people like human beings.

Like, where does this end, Kate?

Where does this end?

Seriously, like, it feels like a very similar and very allied strand in really horrifically noxious discourse that just bulks at the idea that a body might need special forms of support, care, accessibility, compassion, and just basic humanity.

And that, from my perspective, it is so manifestly unreasonable to not be like, yes, you know, people should be recognized as the gender that they are and respected in terms of their choice of name and pronoun and so on.

And similarly, the idea that we don't give people hospital beds that fit their bodies or clothing, that you know, that there's something wrong with people coming in a variety of shapes and sizes and needing to wear clothes.

Like, the alternative is fascism, right?

It's bodily fascism.

But so, yeah, I just wanted to drill into that a little bit because I I think I see a deep connection between fat pride and trans liberation movements that could all be kind of put under the umbrella term of body liberation, where of course there are different groups within that that need to be recognized and respected with, of course, big intersections.

But nevertheless, yeah, I see this pretty powerful link between

the kind of transphobia and the kind of fat phobia which we're up against.

against.

Well, that really brings something out for me, which might be kind of crazy and half-formed, but like it also says something about, right, that there is a mode of critiquing celebrities now on certain corners of the internet.

Have you seen this?

Where they're basically like, oh, this apparently cis woman celebrity is actually secretly trans?

Oh, yeah.

And it's like the same gaze that was like, oh, has she gained weight?

Right.

It's the exact same thing.

You're absolutely right.

They're like,

it's transferring the logic, barely bothering to update it.

Be like, eh, it worked for this.

So like,

why don't we just apply it to this?

Let's scrutinize, let's patrol, let's speculate on bodily states and vulnerabilities and identities that are just none of our business.

I mean,

it's so alien to sensibilities like ours, and yet it's so incredibly common.

So yeah, I just, I wanted to comment on that because, yeah, I think the left sucks on this, but I think the right is even worse.

And I mean, worse in terms of more noxious, more toxic, more ostensibly awful.

The left has a sort of more subtle thing of, oh, of course, we shouldn't fat shame anyone, but at the same time, fat people are just so unhealthy, which as I go through in the book is

you know, it's actually a much more delicate, nuanced, complex conversation on the relationship between fatness and health.

So the left loves to do concern trolling and complacency.

But yeah, I just don't want to understate the sort of toxicity that I think fat people deal with on the right.

That does strike me as having a similar flavor to what trans folks are up against in these really, like, just incredibly awful and

debates that feel so objectifying towards bodies in ways that, yeah, just are incompatible with basic human decency.

A part of your book that I really loved was

your comparison at the end of like the fat and trans rights causes.

And I think you have evoked really beautifully the like the destructive power of like the disgust, right?

The disgusted gaze yeah level yeah at fat and trans people and that's definitely i think a um a uniting theme in you know of our podcast like conservative responses to these kinds of bodies but i also wanted to draw out the distinction you make between shame and pride right because the fact of the matter is that a big part of

the like sort of obstacle of a fat liberation politics.

And I think something, a moral question that you explore really beautifully in your book is the question of the self-directed disgust by the bad person and the sort of the moral questions that that arises.

You know, you were talking about how fat people don't necessarily identify as fat people or don't want to understand themselves as permanently fat people.

And something I kept coming back to while I read your book was this metaphor that Susan Sontag makes about illness as this like country that all of us visit at some point.

And, you know, fatness can sort of function a similar way.

Like, obviously, there are people who are always fat and there are people who are never fat and always thin.

But for the rest of us, there's this kind of like cycling or like sort of journey that brings us in and out of these categories.

Right.

And I think also something that is very

influential and like impressive part of a lot of women's experiences is noticing the difference in how they are received and treated by others based on how their body looks and what size it is.

Yeah.

And like witnessing the disgust of others.

So I wanted to ask about the sort of like maybe moral or psychological process wherein the disgust of others becomes an experience of shame.

Yeah.

And what

to do with that experience?

It's just, I got excited because it's such a good question because a lot of this,

I think, a lot of fat phobia is a disgust-based phenomenon.

And it's sort of an interesting one because something else I explore in the book is that there's often this myth that fat people are just not found sexually attractive.

And I think that's just not true.

So I want to be clear that I think fat bodies can be found very sexually desirable and that it's in fact a pretty common sexual interest.

So porn consumption suggests that fat women in particular are being searched for a lot.

It's one of the most common search terms in internet pornography search term history studies.

But what it suggests is that a certain kind of sexual desire for fat bodies shows women who are in fat bodies to be, if I may, fuckable but not lovable, and to be subject to a kind of veneer of disgust that is overlaid with that desire and has this interesting role in making certain women, especially not seen as quote unquote marriage material and having a low social status when it comes to dating and again marriage markets.

And that

very

prevalent white, ableist,

and yeah, often implicitly fat phobic male gaze has this role in making us feel disgusted by ourselves oftentimes.

The way that I look at these men treating women often is sleeping with these women or joking off to them in secret, but then not wanting to date, let alone have longer relationships with fat women openly.

And the analogy that I use there is sort of treating women like Korean fat bodies as satiating but vaguely disgusting, almost like the way some people interact with junk food, sort of viewing it as quite satisfying and even delicious, but then throwing away the wrapper, kind of vaguely disgusted and brushing away the crumbs when they're done with us.

And so this is the kind of

dominant gaze that becomes internalized very easily.

And the way that I think about shame is it has this second or third person character that gives rise to disgust towards the self very easily.

So disgust is in a way the internalized echo of the shaming gaze from a second or third party saying, you're shameful or she is shameful or should be ashamed of herself.

And so that disgust that many fat people feel towards their own bodies, I mean, that's internalized fat phobia of a kind that is enormously destructive and powerful.

And it has this other effect too, which I think really worries me when it comes to both transphobia and fat phobia.

Is when you do have a disgust-based form of bigotry, what happens is, and I think a lot of empirical evidence shows this, when people feel disgusted towards certain stimuli, they confuse that visceral or aesthetic disgust with moral disgust.

And so they come to feel like certain people are just doing something wrong and are morally beyond the pale because of the visceral disgust being easily confused with finding someone morally abhorrent.

And I think that explains a lot of the extreme moralism and policing that we find within both fat phobia and transphobia where people feel this like weird visceral and aesthetic disgust response that's already a bad thing to have people feeling, but that gives rise to a sense of like, oh, this fat person must be doing something wrong.

They're unhealthy.

They're unvirtuous.

They're out of control.

They're not disciplined.

And they're quote unquote glorifying obesity.

Whereas, no, this person is actually just existing in their bodies.

Right.

Yeah.

And similarly with someone who's trans, just being who they are.

This brings me to a comparison I made to Adrian before we started recording, which is something I keep thinking about is this, you know, in a lot of fat, like sort of fat activist discourses that will make the point that you made so eloquently earlier, which is that like it's actually kind of empirically impossible for somebody who is sort of default, whose default is to be fatter to become thinner, right?

So there's that like debunking of the myth of volition around fatness.

But then there's also like, and I think maybe you just answered this question, but there's also the idea of like, it's hard for me

to distinguish what a person would be doing morally wrong if they were choosing to be fat or choosing to, you know, say like

per the myth, like eat to excess or whatever it is.

And it reminds me a little of, you know, Adrian and I recorded one of our first episodes on the marriage equality movement, where there was a lot of, I think, like reasonable insistence by marriage equality activists that being gay was not a choice.

But it also almost, that our line of argument almost seeds the ground that it would be a bad thing to choose, right?

And so I think we see this a lot with fat activism.

There's a lot of explaining to people who have this moralizing disgust reaction that it's not a choice but fat phobia never has to justify why being fat is morally wrong totally it's just sort of taken as a given yeah that's so smart because i mean the argument has to have this really delicate even-if structure because

look fatness is very typically not something that's chosen because it's hard to be fat in a fat phobic world.

And people are actually working super hard to be thinner in ways that are just not feasible for most of us in the long term if we are genetically predisposed towards fatness.

However, and here is the even if part of it, even if fatness were a choice and people were choosing to eat more adventurously or copiously or comfortingly to you know live their lives in the way they want to and had a fatter body as a result of that that's a completely valid choice as far as I'm concerned.

It doesn't need to be subject to this, well, it's not a choice, so it's fine kind of discourse, which is problematic both in the case of being gay and in the case of being fat.

And one way that we see that it's not a problem is, look, again, you know, even if someone does choose to be fatter and it has something to do with their eating habits, and again, I think this is not the case for the majority of fat people, but for some, it probably is.

People take risks with their bodies all the time in order to live the lives that they want to.

And we do not see the kind of moralism that we see with regard to fat people when it comes to people who do much more dangerous things like Grand Prix racing and mountain climbing and skydiving and deep sea, whatever.

I mean, we're trying to lose tons of weight, which turns out to be extremely dangerous.

Yeah, seriously.

I mean, people who are going on, you know, very extreme diets are even taking the kind of heavy-duty amphetamines that I have very much gone in for.

I mean, that's a genuinely dangerous choice, both in terms of the physical health effects, in in terms of the mental health effects.

Yeah, but you just don't get this kind of moralism about presumptively thin, fit, non-disabled people doing what they want to do with their bodies.

I mean, there we have the appropriate attitude that within a certain range, when we're not hurting other people and when we're not doing things that are egregiously imprudent, that we could very easily do something more prudent, like wearing a motorcycle helmet or wearing a seatbelt are good examples of like very, very minor things that we can do to safeguard our own health for the sake of society when it it falls outside those narrow parameters we regard people's bodies generally as up to them to do what they want with except when we fall into these ways of regarding bodies that are incredibly bigoted so yeah i think there is just a really good argument to be made that fatness usually isn't a choice, but even if it was, like, what is with the level of moralism that we see?

And it's an immense double standard and a wrong-headed one.

I mean, it's, it's it's also noticeable, right, that like people will then sort of draw in these, like, frankly, fantastical seeming estimates of how much it costs everyone, right?

Like, to have so much of that is garbage.

It's costing us this much money or whatever.

And it's like, wait, what's your solution here?

What do you think is a way to moralize an issue that's clearly not really readily moralized?

So many of those cost estimates are garbage because what they do is they just assume that either all or a large percentage of the health costs of people who are in the overweight or obese categories of the BMI are due to weight.

And that's just straightforwardly not true.

I mean

first of all

between,

you know, two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans fit that category, depending on the statistics that you look at.

So, of course, a large percentage of healthcare costs that we have will be attached to fat bodies because the majority majority of Americans are in that category.

But also,

the idea of assuming without argument that someone's health problems or what they need medical support for is because they're fat, just because they're in a fat body, is horribly fallacious, especially since we know based on major epidemiological work by Catherine Flagel and others at the CDC that the relationship between weight and health looks like a U-shaped curve, with people who are in the quote-unquote overweight category actually having the lowest all-cause mortality, statistically speaking.

And people who are even in the quote-unquote moderately obese category with a BMI between 30 and 35 have similar mortality statistics to those who are quote unquote average weight, which is in fact a lower weight than the average American studies.

I was going to say, right?

Because those people are also known as the average.

So, yeah, which they're not.

Average people have the most average costs.

It would make perfect sense, right?

Yeah.

So it's just like a lot of this fear-mongering and the excellent podcast maintenance phase called the zombie statistics really just, they don't pan out.

And look, even if they did, people cost what they cost medically and we deserve adequate healthcare.

And the idea that, you know, the ever-rising medical costs of the healthcare system are the fault of fat people rather than due to horrific medical inflation and a system that is not actually geared towards helping most people in an adequate or integrated way.

Anyway,

you can see where all of this is going.

But yeah, a lot of those statistics are both fear-mongering and really inaccurate and stigmatizing in other ways.

I too am a fan of maintenance phase, and I think I can't read these kinds of statistics anymore without freaking out because I'm like,

what's your solution here?

If three-quarters of Americans weren't around,

it would be be cheaper.

Imagine if we made that argument about age, right?

Like

we're entering soil and green territory.

It's really weird.

Like we wouldn't allow ourselves that thought experiment because it's like fucking.

It's straight up a modest proposal stuff, right?

It's like, why do we not simply eat the Irish children?

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

I mean, and there it's not even...

like there's no actual modest proposal type plan to do this because no society, no town, no city, no jurisdiction to my knowledge has actually succeeded in reversing its so-called obesity epidemic.

Like this is actually something we don't know how to do at a population level, which is unsurprising because we don't know how to do it at an individual level in the long term.

So making populations thinner on average is just not something that has been successfully done at any scale.

I mean, it would be headline like major news if it had been done.

So yeah, what is the plan?

And the plan seems to be to actually continue to do the thing which is responsible for people with a certain BMI above 35 or 40.

You know, a lot of the correlations with health problems there shouldn't be assumed to be causation because the correlation with having greater mortality could be partly due to weight stigma, could be due to having terribly inadequate medical care, could be due to the fact that the doctors are dismissing these people and saying just go lose weight instead of seeing the true cause of someone's symptoms and giving them the kind of advice that they would give to a thin patient who had that kind of issue or complaint or concern.

So, yeah, it's just, it's such a mess.

And to regard fat people as the problem and our bodies as the failure, rather than reflecting that the healthcare system is

really radically failing fat people who do constitute the majority of Americans, it just shows how incredibly fat phobic the discourse is around this topic.

topic.

And I think it's an interesting moment too where we can see

why this trends conservative in its logic, right?

Because it diagnoses societal problem, but as you say, it's never an attempt to offer a societal answer.

I mean, I guess sometimes people yell about food deserts, but that's pretty much it.

Other than that, it's basically individual solutions, right?

Have you tried eating differently or less, right?

Like, here's a diet that worked for me.

You should try it, right?

Like, it's perfect.

Like, it's the same way that like, we're supposed to marry our way out of poverty.

It's the same way we're supposed to, you know, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

It's this completely phantasmatic construction of politics where large populations are supposed to be changed by, like, I don't know, stick-to-iveness and just grit or something like that.

Yeah, totally.

And I mean, it's frustrating too, because even some of these tropes about food deserts are somewhat mythical.

I mean, as you both know, like people who are poor face enormous food injustice and inequity, but are often going to supermarkets as much, but are just having to travel very long distances to access food.

And then our son has also making different choices, somewhat different choices on average, when they get there for a variety of reasons, including expense, including what is appropriate for a particular family who might need more convenient food,

including culturally appropriate food choices and all sorts of factors.

But instead of having a sort of nuanced, complicated picture of this, the

supposed solutions to this problem tend to be along the line of, well, you know, just put farmers' markets in so-called food deserts.

And I mean, I am completely in favor of having access to fresh food and health equity of every kind.

But the interesting thing about these measures is that they could be done without regard to people's body size and shape.

They could be done as direct health interventions because every community in every circumstance deserves food access that is equitable and ready to hand in ways that are not the case in America today by any stretch of the imagination.

But yeah, having access to fresh food and leisure spaces and the time and ability to rest and get adequate, you know, stress management and all of these things would be so great for our health.

And we don't really know what they would do to our body size and shape at a population level.

But the good news is we don't need to know any of that in order to do the things that would be healthier for many, many Americans living in ways that really demand forms of justice that would be very easy to implement without any kind of this discourse about fatness that is so toxic and stigmatizing.

Wait, Kate, are you going to tell us that weight is neither a proxy for morality nor health?

It's a very imprecise proxy for health, and it's, yeah, has absolutely nothing to do with morality.

I mean, the funny thing, and I kind of joke about this in the book, but the idea that fat people's will is not sufficiently strong.

I mean, I can tell you that as a lifelong dieter who, you know, I only gave it up in the last five years or so, my will is iron.

I mean, a life of dieting will make fat people's will iron in terms of sticking to diets.

So even if we did care about willpower as a measure of moral moral character, honestly, fat people are often in a good position to tell you

how to do the stick-to-itiveness thing that is so bankrupt and such a such a bad ideal.

I once heard a fat activist, and I'm not, her name is escaping me right now, which is very embarrassing, but she said something to the effect of, it's like, well, your worst nightmare is to look like me,

which implies not only like the willpower that a lot of people have to cultivate when they're chronic dieters, but but also kind of psychic strength to endure

stigma when, you know, anti-fatness is sort of purged from the

sort of approach to living in the world that a fat person has to endure.

They have to take on this willingness to act counter to a societal value and to have a sense of personal esteem that is divorced from this, you know, like moral hierarchy of bodies that is imposed upon them everywhere.

And that's, that's a kind of like profound moral strength, right?

And sort of insight, too.

Like, I talk about this in the intellect chapter, and we touched on this before, but the idea that fat people should be excluded from the academy or from journalism or writing or cultural criticism, like what a waste because we're the ones oftentimes who are in a really good position to be really smart about the vulnerability and intransigence and

just frustrating material nature of the human body and the fact that we bend, we sag, we break, and we die ultimately.

And all of that is frightening.

But for someone who has had to give up the illusion relatively early that their body is under their tight and conscious control, we'll actually have some insights into that that can be quite valuable for especially a discipline like philosophy that, as you said, Adrian is sort of prides itself on being disembodied in ways that actually lead to us being kind of thoughtless and insensitive and ironically,

not smart about these conditions of human nature that we need to be cognizant of.

Two questions about that.

So, first, when I read these statistics about, just because this is kind of a theme of this podcast, about the supposed costs of fatness, right?

The numbers are so large that you would think, why don't we just experiment with giving each American only

38-hour work week and just like cap it at that and see if that does anything?

That would probably still be cheaper than the supposed costs that these fantastical estimates.

But somehow that it's crickets, right?

It's like, oh, no, no, no, not like that.

We'll yell harder.

We'll yell at them.

It's like, because I mean, like, if it were really true, it would be, you know, that would be actually a winning proposition.

So, like, yeah, let's all work 30 hours and see what that does.

Maybe, like, yeah, watch the price of these much touted and much, I think, overhyped weight loss drugs not come down or be regulated and watch insurance companies not cover them.

Because when push act actually comes to shove, again, this is a thin pretext for getting to do what people want to do, which is, as you say, yell at and jeer at fat bodies rather than actually

offer some of the supposed solutions to what, in my view, is often a bodily non-problem.

But if people were really so concerned, there are things that could be done, could be offered, could be tried, that oftentimes, yeah, it's the idea that this would actually be implemented is a pipe dream.

Yeah.

And so then the other other question I wanted to ask, so this is something that comes through in your book a couple of times.

But so you write, for instance, that, you know, that weight sort of becomes not just an assessment, but a quote commentary on my character, right?

You talk about this kind of weight loss as a kind of reprieve, it seemed to you like a reprieve from a fate both dire and predestined.

And like the religious language to me was always very striking.

And I did think about this.

A lot of the modes by which we read bodies in terms of

in terms of morality, of course, are religious.

And like, you know, sort of the new Protestantism comes up a couple of times in the book.

I also thought of Saint Augustine.

Is it St.

Augustine who talks about the monster being the monstrous body being coming from monstrare to show?

It's basically God sending a sign.

I'm wondering, like, is there like, I feel like you tell a thoroughly modern story of this, and I am fully convinced by that.

But is there also like an old kind of religiosity that sort of finds its way into that discourse?

It just seems like we're just, sometimes we seem downright archaic when we talk about this.

Yeah.

I think there is an older story there, but it's mostly, as you touched on, about gluttony and not fatness as such.

Right.

So I think a lot of this actually comes from the ancient Greeks, and both Plato and Aristotle were so against gluttony.

Interestingly, I mean, while they thought of gluttony as a profound lack of virtue and in a way, one of the greatest threats to philosophical thinking amongst intellectual threats to what they valued and prized the most highly.

So they were very against gluttony as a vice, but they weren't really concerned with the fat omega body as such because they did actually have the insight that people could be gluttonous but not fat and fat but not gluttonous.

And so it's, yeah, I think there are earlier strands in this very much leeched into early Christian teachings on the vice of gluttony.

And it certainly has a long history of being frowned upon but there was actually an earlier wisdom that this that gluttony was one thing and fatness was another um that has been kind of stripped away so yeah it's interesting i mean I am also, you know, one line on this that I don't like is well, fatness is fine, but gluttony really is a problem.

And I think, in fact, there is contemporary evidence that while moderation and temperance are good for many things, like I would nap all all the time given the opportunity and I have to restrain myself, but food restraint is actually something that makes our brains go a little bit haywire.

So, most people who restrict and watch what they eat and are try to practice temperance or moderation actually don't do very well.

There is a big body of studies that go under the name of the milkshake studies that show that if someone is trying to restrain what they eat and they're not necessarily dieting but they're practicing supposed moderation, If you give them a big fatty sweet sugary milkshake they will then go on if given the opportunity to eat more ice cream than a non-dieter or a non-abstemious eater because they have a kind of screw-it mindset.

So someone should feel fuller after this very big and large and satiating milkshake, but instead they actually eat more because they have this sort of, I think, somewhat desperate, yeah, like sense of, well, now I can eat what I've been restraining myself from eating, so I may as well, because screw it, the diets or the obstemiating is out the window, so I can just do this now.

So it's part of a large literature suggesting that, yeah, this frowning upon gluttony from the armchair of a Plato or Aristotle.

is actually not borne out by the modern wisdom we have about people doing better when they're not restricting access to food.

Of course, this is dependent on a lot of privilege, a lot of access that many people lack.

But when people do have the means and the privilege to have ready access to food, people tend to get less food-obsessed and less fixated and less likely to binge and engage in harmful behaviors if they're allowing themselves really to eat in ways that are not restricted.

But then that's because gluttony is linked to other pleasures that people are even far more even more anxious to control, right?

Like such as sexual pleasure, right?

Like that.

Totally.

It was very linked, especially for Aristotle to the idea of indulging in both sexual and food-based appetites that, yeah, there was, you know, a real anxiety about that Christianity especially only ratcheted up.

I think this idea of the appetite fulfilled

And to whom that reflects poorly and to whom it can reflect quite well.

You're talking about, you know, the classical confluence of like gluttony with lustfulness and the desire to control them.

And that has come in for sort of like a reconsideration in some, you know, like sex positivity politics, but also in some like conservative visions of masculinity, right?

Like I'm thinking right now about Helen Rosner's, I think, excellent essay on Mario Battalion

from the Me Too era and how Mario Batali's, you know, ethos of like indulgent, gratifying sensuality that he cultivated around his restaurants and food extended to this kind of like incurious consumption of women as like another sort of thing he could imbibe, you know, or intake, which is, would be fine if they were not people, you know.

Yeah.

But that, that's a model, that kind of like almost Falstaffian largeness of body and defiant indulgence and like life of pleasure.

That's not really something that women get to do, right?

At least not they don't get to do it and also be sort of praised for it and seen as virtuous in their like cultivation of a sensuality, right?

So, like, I think this like comes back to your very useful point that like fatness gets mitigated and refracted through these other kinds of hierarchies.

I think you convincingly argue that it is a sort of oppressive framework on its own, but it's also something that gets used against people for whom there is already sort of a

like incentive to punish.

Yeah, I love that.

It's a really nice point about the kind of Batali

partaking of people like one might partake of food in a way that isn't problematic, but when it comes to other human bodies, that is a very different proposition.

And I think part of what is at issue here is for girls and women, one way to think about it is girls and women are meant to be human givers, not human beings.

So, you know, this is what I argued in my first book, Down Girl, and it really has implications for the fact that we're meant to be givers of pleasure and we're meant to feed people, we're meant to cook for them, and we're meant to really be kind of cultivators of community and connection and all of these things that are associated with the family dinner table.

I mean, women and in general and mothers specifically are overtasked with food preparation and having the family meals go off smoothly and all of this.

And yet partaking ourselves is seen as antithetical to our roles.

We're meant to be the givers of this kind of food pleasure and not the partakers of it in ways that, yeah, really, I mean, it points to this kind of deep ambivalence we have about women in relation to food, which is in some ways our lives are extremely tied normatively to all of this, but we're not really meant to be able to enjoy it ourselves in ways that feel almost cruel to me.

And I mean, like, one other way of putting the point would be that in some way, the body that rests in itself and that says, I will do what I enjoy and I do not need to suffer.

It's not a shock that women are the ones who are told, well, your natural lot is to suffer.

You're opting out of that through your fatness, right?

I mean, like, it's, it's like the idea that the constant dieting, it's also just, it's torture, it's torment.

It's a way to naturalize and to plausibilize a definition of femininity as justified suffering, basically.

Yeah, completely.

And we're meant to give and give and give in terms of not just food and connection and pleasure, but also we're meant to give visual satisfaction.

And one of the biggest ways to do that as a woman is to give enormous amounts of energy and time and money and bandwidth in service of making your body small and as conforming as possible to pernicious aesthetic ideals, where that is to give visual, aesthetic, sexual, and sometimes reproductive labor in ways that are endorsed rather than taking anything from the world.

Aaron Powell, well, I mean, the pursuit of thinness sort of collapses a lot of these

moral demands of femininity that you're talking about, right?

It's about making yourself desirable, and simultaneously, it's about denying yourself pleasure and nourishment it's about making yourself desirable at the expense of your flourishing it occurs to me that one of the you know common symptoms of eating disorders which are you know predominantly though of course by no means exclusively pathologies exhibited in women is to actually create elaborate meals for other people yes in which the you know suffering disordered eater does not partake right it is almost this like cannibalistic ritual like you know yeah i'm like eat of eat of my body because I'm not eating anything.

Yeah, I mean, that that really has eerie echoes of Ansel Keys's Minnesota starvation experiment, where he did it to men.

But this is men in the 1960s who were put on a low-calorie or low-ish calorie, 1600 calories a day.

They ended up licking recipe books and fantasizing about their next meal, and often got very into cooking and really fixated on food in ways that are incredibly common for people who are constantly subjecting themselves to what you both said exactly right.

It is a kind of tormented, sometimes even torturous relationship with constantly denying yourself these very basic appetites, hunger that demand satisfaction.

Our bodies being so geared to get not just adequate calories and nutrition, but also we're so geared to seek tasty, delicious foods.

This is a big part of our very basic drives.

And to be constantly in denial of that is to live in ways that are so energy-sapping, so depleting.

And yeah, I really think involve genuine suffering in ways that nonetheless, many people just regard as either virtuous or neutral rather than an independent moral ill, which it seems to me diet culture so clearly imposes on us these pseudo-obligations that our grave moral ills, they're causing suffering for no overarching purpose.

When you you look at even if you did care about the goal of weight loss, that I really don't, or the goal of a population being thinner, which again, I'm dubious about, dieting doesn't get people there.

Nothing does with any humaneness and reliability.

So again, it's keeping people on this perpetual treadmill of effort in order to keep them small, disciplined, meek, quiet, and low in energy.

Just as you said, Moira.

Right.

Well, thank you so much, Kate.

This is an amazing conversation and an amazing book.

And I I hope everyone goes out and reads it.

If the Murdoch press says it's bad, we obviously

say no more.

Rupert, this is all the endorsement I need.

I'm so glad we got to talk to you.

Thank you so much.

Such a joy to talk to you, Moira and Adrienne.

What a great conversation.

In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lau.

Our producer is Megan Kalfis.