Unshrinking Out in Paperback

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I won’t lie. Releasing Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia in the height of the Ozempic craze last year was a huge uphill battle. The book was panned, and mocked, in the right-wing press in the UK. I had interviewers ask me whether the thesis of the book—that fat people are treated poorly, and that we need to change society to accommodate every body—was simply redundant, since Ozempic has now solved the problem of fat people. I was asked questions so stigmatizing and personal that I hesitate to reproduce them here. Suffice it to say that I walked out of one interview. Another, for a wildly popular podcast, never aired, as if the host had lost her brief interest in body liberation.

Now, just over a year later, I’m so proud of what this book has achieved. I’ve heard from reader after reader that it has felt validating and life-affirming; that the book challenged what they thought they knew about the relationship between weight and health; and that they found articulations within it of the gaslighting we’re all subject to, but especially as women, to the effect that our bodies as well as our minds are broken, disgusting, defective. I got to hug friends I’d previously only known online in person at bookstore events and speaking gigs. I made so many new, and deep, connections and found new bases within them for bodily solidarity. Oh yeah, and I got to shop for a fancy dress, when Unshrinking became a finalist for the National Book Award in non-fiction. I even got to have my first, and undoubtedly last, red carpet moment.

Unboxing the paperbacks! They’ll be out March 11, but of course you can—and, I hope, will— pre-order now.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the physical act of this book felt something like lifting my head out of shame and meeting others’ gaze, with the question, “You too?” After all, shame bows our head, lowers our eyes, and makes us want to recede from view. It’s no accident, I think, that shame is the central moral emotion marshalled by fatphobia. All the better to persuade us to shrink ourselves, sometimes even to the point of wanting to disappear entirely. Shame is hence a potent barrier to bodily solidarity and coalition-building.

We spend so much time, and energy, and money, and bandwidth we don’t have in the largely futile pursuit of trying to make ourselves smaller, and acceptable, and beautiful, in others’ eyes. If you tried to design a tool that enabled you to control women, you could hardly do much better: construct a linear hierarchy inversely proportional to body mass and insist every body be ranked somewhere within it. Point out, truly, that you can invest a great deal of—again—time, and energy, and money, and bandwidth in order to get thinner and thus up your place in this intra-feminine competition. Now make it the case that these gains in socio-economic status are typically only temporary, because the vast majority of dieters end up regaining the weight. So you’re aspiring to a higher place in the hierarchy and constantly slipping, or in danger of slipping, backwards. Finally, punish those who really slip, or never ascended, for their lowly place in the pecking order. Call them gross and lazy and stupid and unlovable for being fat. Everyone else can see this punishment play out publicly, and so will keep scrabbling for status.

How much does the advent of GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy change this picture? Only a little, and not necessarily in a good way. First, I want to acknowledge that this class of drugs is genuinely exciting for folks with type 2 diabetes, and possibly has medical benefits—such as cardiovascular ones—beyond that. That’s super-important, and something to be celebrated. But, taken for intentional weight loss, typically in much larger doses, we have to cast a critical eye on the populations taking them. Some 81% of people taking Wegovy are female (notwithstanding a maddening lack of pre-clinical or appropriately sex-disaggregated data on the impact of GLP-1s on the female body). Many of these women—and girls—are not in weight classes that place them, statistically, at greater risk of morbidity and increased mortality. (And even for those who are, we don’t yet know whether the correlation between being more than “moderately obese” and negative health outcomes is caused by the weight, or whether it is mere correlation, because these folks are often receiving such inadequate health care, among a whole host of other factors I unpack in Unshrinking.) A lot of the people taking GLP-1s are, to be frank, affluent and disproportionately white women who are already fairly thin. They are taking them not for the health benefits, at least deep down, but in order to gain a higher place in the aforementioned social hierarchy. They are often spending a lot of money—even money they don’t have—in order to buy a greater degree of thin privilege.

I don’t judge anyone who is doing this in taking Ozempic. Truly, I don’t. The antidote to body shaming is not medication shaming, surely. And I would bet money that, ten years ago, I would be doing precisely the same thing. Fatphobia is brutal, and social status can be genuinely important. Being fat has real and deleterious economic consequences. It can make dating, and marriage, seem out of reach for many women (even if that turns out to be partly illusory). Being fat can, as I show in Unshrinking, make it difficult or impossible to access everything from transportation to education to, above all, health care. Conversely, being thin has real benefits in all of these respects and more.

So my attitude to individuals taking Ozempic for weight loss is just this: I get it.

I get it but I am worried on a social level. And, while I have nothing but compassion and solidarity for the individuals embroiled in this scheme, my worries about what it will do to us as a collective are all the more pressing. More than ever before, you can try to gain social and economic status by means of Ozempic—even if it feels, truly, that you are just trying to survive and thrive in the world as we know it. That reinforces a social hierarchy that was beginning to break down a bit, thanks to the advent of the body liberation movement. It also skews the hierarchy towards greater and greater thinness: as I wrote here last week, thinness is not just fitting into a certain clothing size or a particular BMI class. It’s often a comparative notion, a matter of being thinner than your peers. That makes for a dangerous arms race of shrinking that we’re seeing play out in Hollywood in a stark way, where ever more fragile silhouettes are lining the red carpet.

What happens when someone invests in these drugs, only to lose much less weight than they were expecting? We know that people will lose between 10 and 20% of their starting weight, on average, but that almost 15% of patients will lose no weight whatsoever. Whatever the case, the math can’t be argued with: Ozempic will leave a lot of fat people still fat, and in need of body liberation now more than ever. Another obvious question: What happens when someone can no longer afford to take these drugs, due to the side effects, or costs, or both? And we know that 3 in 4 patients will discontinue them within two years for these reasons. Such people will, if clinical trials are indicative, regain much of the weight. Or else they will have to undertake Herculean efforts to keep it off. The socio-economic status derived from thinness has become more precarious—and expensive to achieve—than ever.

I don’t see us winning in this way, as women, at least in the long run. Individual competition—much as we tend to package it as running our own race—seldom benefits us collectively, or provides a basis for the political solidarity that is so desperately needed in this moment. The only way we win as a group is if the game goes away or at least becomes much less popular. Hence my deep belief that we need to get clearer about the game we are playing, in the hopes that some of us will stop playing it and take the path of body liberation.

It’s in that spirit that I am offering this special deal for my readers: buy a paperback copy of Unshrinking—for yourself, your family members and friends, your book club, or your library—over the next week and show me the receipt via a screenshot or photo by emailing me at kate.manne@gmail.com. I’ll gift you a year of More to Hate (in addition to your current subscription, if you have one). Multiple purchases will get multiple years, naturally. That’s an $80 value for just $20, plus the book itself. And hopefully that’s the last time I’ll sound like an infomercial.

Thanks, friends. Here’s to being unshrinking, together.