Listen to this episode and get more information at theallusionist.org/fat1
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, rescue language from a burning building.
This is the first of two episodes talking about a word that has shaped the wiring of my brain since my brain began - and not in a great way - and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to unwire that, although this is some help.
Content note: this episode contains discussions of body size, body image, weight, fat, and anti-fatness.
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On with the show.
AUBREY GORDON: There was one day - my job was to bring in like a little sweet treat on people's birthdays, and there was one person who loved donuts the most. So I came in with two boxes of donuts for the office to pass around at our staff meeting to celebrate this person's birthday. And I walked into the office and one of my coworkers looked at me and said, "Oh, are those for you or to share?" And I was like, "This is like two baker's dozens. This is twenty-six donuts. Somewhere in this person's mind is just me tucking a napkin into my collar with a fork and knife and just going to town on twenty-six donuts! For like one meal."
HZ: And then being like, “Okay, what's for lunch? Gotta get beach body ready.”
AUBREY GORDON: Exactly! Exactly. Boy oh boy.
My name is Aubrey Gordon. I am the co-host of a podcast called Maintenance Phase, and I've written two books, most recently You Just need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People. And my pronouns are she, her and hers.
HZ: Maintenance Phase is Aubrey’s podcast with Michael Hobbes, where they debunk junk science behind health and wellness fads, and help us understand the perniciousness of diet culture and anti-fatness, which infiltrates and affects people of all sizes. There’s also a documentary about Aubrey, Your Fat Friend, premiering in June 2023, about Aubrey’s work to achieve a paradigm shift in the way that we view fatness.
AUBREY GORDON: There is this whole set of baggage that we are all culturally bringing to this word all the time. ‘Fat’ is one of those floating signifiers where people sort of pin it to different places; there's not a standard social definition of it. For me, when I think about looking for other fat people, there's sort of an internal goalpost that I'm trying to meet, and an external one as well. The external one for folks who feel like they need to pin something on like "This is a fat person" is: if you go into a department store and cannot reliably find your size, congratulations, welcome, you are a fat person. If you are consistently wearing plus sizes and struggling to find your size if, say, you forget to pack a pair of underwear or something for a trip and you don't know where you can get underwear in your size: hello, welcome. You are one of us.
I would say internally, and because it is a sort of socially blurry term, when I think of fat people who I share an experience with, I'm thinking of people who are defined by a shared sense of exclusion at this point. I hope that I am able to change this definition. But I'm thinking about folks who get on a plane and worry if they'll be allowed to keep their seat. I think about folks who go to the doctor's office and steel themselves for series of conversations about weight loss and have to strategize about how to get their symptoms addressed. I think about people who pay sometimes twice as much for the same garment that is one or two or three sizes smaller. When I think about who my fat people are, they are the people who folks would say, "I'm okay with being plus size, but not obese," the people who are socially defined as quote unquote "too fat”: I'm one of those people, right? Like, you drop me in any place, any time in human history, people will be like, "That's a fat lady." And I'd be like, "You're right! Check. I sure am."
HZ: But in some cultures they would've been like, “Cool, well done.”
AUBREY GORDON: Absolutely. But still: “That's a fat lady. Good job, fat lady. But that's a fat lady.” How about you? How would you say that you define the term fat for yourself?
HZ: Oh gosh, well, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to define the term ‘fat’ for myself because it was defined for me from the very start, as soon as I was aware I had a body I was made aware that it had failed, failed at being unfat, which was the most important thing about it, according whoever adjudicates these things - who is that? Everybody? Strangers on the street, loved ones in the home, every form of media, every garment shop. Fat wasn’t just a description of my body, which is, in fat parlance, ‘mid-fat’, meaning medical discrimination and street harrassment but I can still occasionally buy clothes in shops, not many but not none. Like my height, my circumference remains about the same, barring extreme interventions. Even a couple of years ago I couldn’t have just said all this to you, or self-described as fat, it’s thanks to the work of Aubrey and other writers and fat activists that I can use the word ‘fat’ just as a description of my physical form - because the word is so saturated with the culture of anti-fat bias, which some call ‘fatphobia’ but Aubrey and I do not.
AUBREY GORDON: I use anti-fatness or anti-fat bias, mostly because phobias are real things, and they are real psychological conditions, and folks who experience phobias don't need more stigma. And, to my mind, having a conversation about bias, especially given the state of conversations about implicit and explicit bias, invites more folks into understanding that as an organic part of our experience as humans in a society. And also quite a bit of people who are terrible to fat people are not afraid of us, and maybe should be a little bit more.
HZ: We will crush you!
AUBREY GORDON: That’s right, that’s right! Yeah, absolutely!
HZ: But, I think a lot of people are afraid of the word fat. They're afraid of saying it or having it said to themselves or being it.
1950s horror movie trailer:
VOICEOVER: Watch out!
MAN: Oh no! Oh no!
VOICEOVER: It’s coming for you!
MAN: It’s huge!
VOICEOVER: Yuk!
MAN: It’s getting bigger! It’s getting bigger!!
VOICEOVER: The Flab.
MAN: Help!!
VOICEOVER: Coming to engulf you all - at a cinema near you.
HZ: But it’s interesting that a lot of people are also afraid of calling us fat. Even though we visibly are, it's as plain as the fat on our bodies.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, that's right.
HZ: And the way that it presents itself, I know you've experienced this as well, is: if I self-describe as fat, or even one of the euphemisms, they'll be like, "Oh, you're not fat!" And I guess what they mean is, "You're not morally reprehensible like I think fat people are innately."
AUBREY GORDON: "You're not disgusting. I don't see you suffocating in a bag of McDonald's, therefore..."
HZ: "You're not sitting in a kiddie pool full of melted butter."
AUBREY GORDON: "You don't bathe in gravy every day. Good job."
HZ: Well…
AUBREY GORDON: You can't win 'em all.
HZ: Keeps me looking young.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, absolutely. I think the one that I get most often and the one that I hear used about other fat people most often is, "You’re not fat, you're beautiful."
HZ: Oh yes. The two are mutually exclusive.
AUBREY GORDON: It sort of proposes implicitly that there is a binary between the two. I mean, the way that I feel when people say the sort of like, "You're not fat, you're [blank]," is it feels to me like they are revealing a part of their psyche that they don't know that they're revealing, which is: “If I see someone as fat, I can only see them as fat, and when I only see them as fat, I have a profound number of prescribed assumptions that go along with that. I assume that they are a lesser intellectual force. I assume that their hygiene is bad. I assume that they're unattractive. I assume that no one wants to date them. I assume that they don't have anything meaningful to contribute. I assume that they don't know how to lose weight or what diets are, and they need me to tell them. I assume that they'll be grateful when I tell them how hideous they look and that they need to change the way that they look immediately.”
HZ: A lot of people don't realize they have that bias. Lots of people, people I consider good friends, will say in front of me - they'll be talking about, say a troll and they'll be like, "He's probably some fat sweaty guy who lives in his mother's basement." And I'm like, well, he could be someone of any size or sweat levels; and, house prices being what they are these days, rental crisis in so many places: it's not the same kind of shame to live in your parent's basement that may induce you to abuse people online.
AUBREY GORDON: Yes, absolutely. I mean, we had that modeled in the US by Donald Trump, said that about some of the intelligence leaks that happened here. He was like, "Oh, it wasn't us. It was probably some 400-pound guy in his mother's basement" or something like that. And at the time, I weighed 400 pounds and was like, oh, that's cool. So it's fully just open season on me, and like the dude version of me, it's absolutely horrendous.” And then the response from the left in the US was, "Well, Trump's one to talk: look at how fat he is!" And I was like, oh, great. So now we're just arguing over who's fat? We had an opportunity to take the high road in all of this. And instead we opted for things like for weeks there was a trending hashtag on Twitter in the United States about Mar-a-Lago, Trump's resort in in Florida. And the hashtag, mostly from folks on the left, was Mar-A-Lardass.
HZ: You can do all the terrible political things Trump has done, and all the terrible other things he's done, but his body is the worst of his crimes. Cool.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah. Where you're just like, oh! So no one cares. Even the people whose position is “We care!” don't care about fat people. It's a really bitter pill to swallow, to realize that there's just not any sort of natural allies to rely on in a struggle like this.
HZ: When ‘fat’ is used so much as an insult, it doesn’t show people how to use it in neutral way; so they end up using other terms to try to say what they’re trying not to say.
AUBREY GORDON: The word that always - well, the words that always bothered me considerably more than ‘fat’ are the many, many, many euphemisms that people who aren't fat come up with to supplant fat.
HZ: ‘Curvy’. My chins are.
AUBREY GORDON: Totally. I'm like, “I have one curve, guys! I'm just like an egg shape. Like what are we doing here? Not curvy!” Also like curvy is a body type and should be able to be a body type, and I don't have it. ‘Fluffy’, oh God…
HZ: ‘Fluffy’?!
AUBREY GORDON: Boy oh boy, it’s terrible. It's terrible. That's my dog. You're talking about my dog. He's very fluffy. I as a human being am not.
HZ: Well, it's a compliment for the dog.
AUBREY GORDON: Totally.
HZ: I was very interested when I looked up where the euphemism 'husky' originated from, because I thought that's such a weird one as well. Is it because we fatties, our bodies, there's so much more resonance of our voices? No, it was like a euphemism for plus size boys’ clothes.
AUBREY GORDON: I did not know that that was the origin of husky, but it makes sense. I feel like the times that I heard husky most were as a kid. There was a brand in the US - it might still be around, I don't know - called Garanimals and it was fat kid clothes and it was like, you don't wanna be seen in the fat kid clothes, because then everybody knows you're a fat kid who's wearing the fat kid clothes. It's remarkable to me how much of our anti-fat stuff starts by targeting kids.
HZ: An example from the 1970s: Sears was marketing its fat kid clothes as ‘chubby-sized’. A print ad touts their “Fashionable chubby-sizes” - chubby isn’t a euphemism, is it better or worse than the euphemisms?
AUBREY GORDON: It's a really particularly unflattering view of humanity if we look at how we tend to treat fat kids, which is as some kind of social contagion or as someone who needs to experience stigma early so that they learn not to be fat or what have you.
HZ: If we keep at it, maybe we will find the right amount of shame and self-flagellation that makes fat people thin!
AUBREY GORDON: Part of the reason that I really bristle at a lot of those euphemisms is that they are often paired with unquestionably anti-fat behaviour. ‘Fluffy’ didn't used to be one of my least favourites until I was at a restaurant for a work lunch with a bunch of my colleagues and the person who sat us at our table, while I was sitting down in a particular chair, he came over and sort of grabbed my shoulders and lifted me back up and was like, "That's actually not a chair for fluffy people. And I love fluffy people, but it's just not gonna work," and then called someone over to get a different chair from a different table. And it was just this whole production in front of all of my colleagues at work, and I was like, this is a level of attention I am not desiring of. This is an approach that I don't care for. And after that, I started paying attention to who was most invested in using those euphemisms. And it was often people whose behavior was, at best, insensitive and at worst pretty overtly discriminatory. And I would much rather that people just get comfortable with a word that they think is sort of rude, and treat fat people like people.
HZ: What if they get too comfortable? They're like, “I'm comfortable with using it as a weapon, just not as a descriptor of a body that is fat.”
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, totally. Totally.
HZ: Some of the advice you gave in the book was to mirror language that fat people use about ourselves, but some words I don't want a non-fat person to use. Some of them are in-group words, like if I call myself a fatty, I don't want other people to call me a fatty.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah. Fair. That's reasonable. Again, I feel like this is all stuff that is solved by, like, show any interest in how the fat people in your life are responding. Show any sort of level of curiosity about what's affirming to folks and either have a conversation about it, use the language they use or they ask you to use. I think there is plenty more room for conversation about how to do that right, and step one is: actually manage to care how the language that you use impacts fat people. And that feels like the big hump to get over currently.
HZ: I think even if people are listening to this thinking, “Yeah, but you're fat, so you don't deserve my sympathy or acknowledgement of your humanity,” you should at least consider how the word fat, and the way you feel about it, impacts people of all sizes. It makes a lot of people feel terrible, even if they're not fat. Do it for the thin in your life too.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, be nice to fat people as a way of being nicer to thin people.
HZ: That's what we’re for! Did your colleagues - how did they respond when that restaurant staffer was like "<Honk! Honk!> Fluffy person coming through! <Honk! Honk!> Get the reinforcements?"
AUBREY GORDON: Honestly, I would have preferred that version.
HZ: Did they do anything?
AUBREY GORDON: Uh, no, they all just looked very uncomfortable and no one said anything or did anything, which is sort of like - listen. I've done this. I think other folks have probably done this too, where you sort of assume that the person who is the target of the behavior needs to lead the response without really thinking about how much that is asking of that person at a moment of public humiliation. That folks don't wanna like overstep or say more or different things than you would want to be said. But also the impact of that is you experience this very public kind of humiliation or being singled out, and functionally your experience of that is: no one stands up for me. I'm in this by myself. You know? That's a rough place to be.
HZ: I think that happens an awful lot of times: people don’t what to do in a moment of anything, and particularly one where it's tied up in so much complication in their own minds.
AUBREY GORDON: Absolutely.
HZ: And the best thing you can do is not acknowledge someone's fat because maybe then it will not exist.
AUBREY GORDON: Right, I think in just a commanding majority of experiences of public anti-fatness, absolutely no one says anything; people avoid eye contact with me; that I become sort of a non-person, because people are trying to manage their own discomfort rather than trying to tackle a social situation that's playing out right in front of them.
HZ: To be fair to people, it's hard to manage said discomfort when anti-fat culture has been stoking that discomfort throughout our lives. And when our vocabulary for fatness is awkward or cruel - or both.
AUBREY GORDON: The word that folks think is the most polite one is ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’.
HZ: Oh, lovely.
AUBREY GORDON: Delightful.
HZ: Love to be called obese.
AUBREY GORDON: The trick about those terms is ‘overweight’, very explicitly in plain English, implies that there is a right weight for everyone to be, and you are over that weight and you need to get back down. This is based on a very 19th century idea of standardizing human bodies being a top priority. The other one is ‘obese’, which folks say, “It's a medical term, so it can't be insulting.” So first of all, plenty of slurs were medical terms, like a great many of our slurs for developmentally disabled people come straight out of medicine.
HZ: Medicine is not neutral. How do people not know that?
AUBREY GORDON: No! It's really wild. And I think it's worth knowing that ‘obese’, as a term, etymologically just comes straight from the Latin for ‘eating oneself fat’ or ‘having eaten oneself fat’. And we used it long before it was used medically, in the same way that we use it now, which is "I'm okay with people being fat, but not obese," which is not a medical designation that's a social line that people are drawing of: “These are the bodies that I think are now unacceptable. Fat might be okay, but obese, absolutely not.”
HZ: In the late 1990s, lots of people became obese overnight, when an organisation calling itself the International Obesity Task Force recommended that the World Health Organisation expand its definition of obese to include people whose weight was not hitherto considered obese - even though researchers recommended the opposite, that the range of healthy weights should actually be bigger. Despite that, the WHO went with the task force rather than the researchers. Who’s in the task force, you cry? Why, it was primarily directors of weight loss clinics, and the bulk of the funding came from manufacturers of weight loss drugs - who now had a much bigger market to sell them to. A solution manufactured a problem.
HZ: In Old English, they translated obese as ‘oferfæt’, which for some reason I kind of prefer.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah. I would love to be called ‘overfat’.
HZ: Because again, it's that suit that we put over ourselves.
AUBREY GORDON: Listen, I have been targeted by any number of trolls, from any number of anti-fat message boards and 4chans and whatevers from around the internet. And there are things that they come up with that they think are insults and I think just sound kind of bitchin and great. My favourite was being called repeatedly being called a ‘ham planet’.
HZ: Oh, take us to there!
AUBREY GORDON: A whole planet of ham. Sign me up!
HZ: ‘Ham planet’. That's majestic.
AUBREY GORDON: ‘Land whale’ is another one where I'm like, that just sounds great.
HZ: Yeah. Whales are great. Also, if whales weren't fat, they would be dead.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah. Correct. Correct. And then where would you get your perfume from?
HZ: Surprisingly though, a few of the less flattering-seeming euphemisms have pretty nice etymologies. Stocky, for example, was a strong and sturdily-growing plant.
HZ: I looked up ‘portly’, which meant stately and dignified, and of noble appearance and bearing.
AUBREY GORDON: I love this. OK.
HZ: And then ‘stout’, which I've never really heard used in a complimentary way, but it meant proud, valiant, and strong.
AUBREY GORDON: These are both great!
HZ: I wouldn't mind being those things.
AUBREY GORDON: This is great.
HZ: Yeah. I'm gonna reclaim stout.
AUBREY GORDON: Stout is great. Are you a tall person or a short person? I'm a tall person.
HZ: Short. I'm like five foot three.
AUBREY GORDON: Oh, god bless.
HZ: So short and stout like the rhyme.
AUBREY GORDON: Totally go for stout, if that is an affirming one for you, thumbs up. I will absolutely go for portly.
HZ: Treat yourself.
AUBREY GORDON: Just a portly lil ham planet over here.
We’ll hear more from Aubrey Gordon in the next episode, but I’m also interested to hear from you: how do you feel about the word ‘fat’? Are there any euphemisms or synonyms you particularly enjoy or bristle at? If you want to share any of that in the next episode, get in touch via voice message or writing at theallusionist.org/contact.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
figurant, noun: a supernumerary actor who has little or nothing to say.
Try using ‘figurant’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The original music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com, hire him for your film trailers and other compositional work. The cast of The Flab was Felix Trench of Wooden Overcoats podcast and acting and writing - find his work at felixtrench.com. And you heard from Aubrey Gordon, who cohosts the podcast Maintenance Phase, and writes - her new book is You Just need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People - and the documentary about her, Your Fat Friend, premieres in June 2023 at Tribeca Festival and Sheffield Docfest. Find Aubrey at AubreyGordon.net and maintenancephase.com.
Our ad partner is Multitude. If you have a product or thing about which you’d like me to talk, sponsor the show: contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads.
Seek out @allusionistshow on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And you can hear or read every episode, find links to more information about the topics and people therein, donate to the show and become a member of the Allusioverse, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and browse a lexicon of every word covered in the podcast, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
