Episode 185: I chat with Virgie about plus size fashion, fatphobia and beauty ideals, changes in book publishing, and how fat acceptance is making its way into the media
Virgie Tovar is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat, and in 2018 she was named one of the 50 most influential feminists by Bitch Magazine. She holds a Master’s degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. Tovar is the founder of Babecamp, a 4-week online course and annual retreat designed to help people who are ready to break up with diet culture, and she started the hashtag #LoseHateNotWeight. Tovar is a contributor for Forbes where she covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work.
Her new book, The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color, comes out May 2020 from New Harbinger Publications. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, and Al Jazeera. She lives in San Francisco.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 185 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/185.
Seven Health is currently taking on new clients. There are a handful of reasons that clients commonly come and see us. Number one would be hypothalamic amenorrhea, which is the fancy name for not getting a period. This is often a result of undereating and over-exercising for what your body needs, irrespective of your actual weight. It’s almost always coupled with body dissatisfaction and fear of gaining weight.
Disordered eating and eating disorders, we work with clients all along the disordered eating and eating disorder spectrum. Sometimes clients wouldn’t think of using the term “disordered eating” to describe themselves, but they see that they’re overly restrictive with their eating, they fear certain foods – bread or carbs or fats or processed foods – they feel compelled to exercise excessively, and/or they find themselves binging and feeling out of control around food.
We work with clients who want to move on from dieting. These clients have had years or decades of dieting and are realizing it’s a failed endeavor, but they’re struggling to figure out how to do food without dieting. What should they eat? How do they listen to their body? What will become of their weight? They’re confused and overwhelmed.
The final area is body dissatisfaction and negative body image. Many of our clients experience feelings of body shame and hatred, and they find themselves fixated on weight, determined to be a particular size, and frustrated by what they see in the mirror. They even may avoid social events or opt out of photographs or put off appointments as a result of negative body thoughts.
In all of these areas, we are able to help. We do so through a mix of understanding physiology and psychology – understanding how to support the physical body and how it works, but also being compassionate and uncovering the whys behind clients’ behavior so we can figure out how to change this.
If any of these are areas you want help with, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include that in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. As I record this intro, I am finally back in the UK. I was away for pretty much all of January in Thailand and in Australia, and I’m still adjusting to being back at work, and the weather and the time zone. We had a lovely time away, and it was awesome to get some winter sunshine. It was strange to be out in Australia and see all the intense weather conditions. While there were no fires directly in Sydney, where we were, the whole of the city was in a constant fog of smoke. It really is just devastating.
Part of the impetus for the trip was my sister’s wedding. She was getting married down in Tasmania. I’m just so glad that we were able to make it out there, and it was such a fun day. They were both so happy and had such an incredible time. It was kind of touch-and-go whether we would be able to make it, as my son Ramsay managed to get chicken pox while we were away, and it meant that we had to change our travel plans, but we were finally given the go-ahead by the doctor and told we were now able to fly a couple of days before the wedding. So we were able to make it out there. Life is never simple, but it managed to work out in the end.
That’s enough of a life update for now. I know I need to do one of those episodes in longer form, but I’ll just get on with the actual episode for today. Today on the show, I’m welcoming back Virgie Tovar.
Virgie is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat, and in 2018 she was named one of the 50 Most Influential Feminists by Bitch Magazine. She holds a Master’s degree in sexuality studies with a focus on the intersection of body, race, size, and gender. Virgie is the founder of Babecamp, a 4-week online course and annual retreat designed to help people who are ready to break up with diet culture. She started the hashtag #losehatenotweight.
She is a contributor for Forbes, where she covers the plus size market and how to end weight discrimination at work. Her new book, The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color, comes out in May 2020 from New Harbinger Publications. Virgie has been featured as well by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, and Aljazeera.
Virgie was previously on the podcast for Episode 22, which was released over 4 years ago. I have subsequently read her book, You Have the Right to Remain Fat, and really enjoyed it. It’s not a long book; more of a short manifesto. But she brings out many great points, and I thought it would make for a really good conversation. Also, a lot has changed in the fat acceptance movement and that space in the last 4 years, and I wanted to get Virgie’s take on this.
As part of this conversation, we chat about plus size fashion, changes in the book publishing landscape and how fat acceptance is making its way into the media. We talk about fatphobia and beauty ideals. We go through the Strong4Life marketing campaign and why it was so problematic. We talk about sexism and the Me Too movement. I love hearing Virgie talk, so a lot of this conversation is me just giving her jumping-off points and then getting to listen to her wisdom.
With this intro out of the way, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Virgie Tovar.
Hey, Virgie. I’m really excited to have you back on the show. Welcome.
Virgie Tovar: Thank you.
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Chris Sandel: This is your second appearance on the show. Your first appearance was back in December 2015, nearly 4 years ago. Give us a little bit of an update. What has been happening in your life for the last 4 years?
Virgie Tovar: Oh my goodness, so much. I couldn’t believe it had been 4 years. I wrote a new book called You Have the Right to Remain Fat. That felt like a really big thing that happened in the last 4 years. I’ve just been continuing to dedicate my life to understanding diet culture and fatphobia and trying to help people, equip them with tools and understanding of what we’re dealing with. I think I’ve gone deeper down the rabbit hole in terms of the implications of it, what it means for individuals, what it means for us as a society.
And I’ve launched a few things. Last summer I just did this thing called Camp Thunder Thighs, where I took a group of people out into the pseudo-wilderness of California and did a lot of amazing work on all the stuff that I care about, like helping people learn what fatphobia is, helping them heal from it, and just having a lot of fun and jiggling on the beach and stuff like that. So I don’t know, yeah, just keep chugging along and feeling really excited about it.
Chris Sandel: I think when you came on the first time, you’d done Babecamp maybe a couple of times. I can’t remember if at that stage it was just online, or if you’d already started to do the bits where you were taking people away.
Virgie Tovar: Yeah, I’m still doing Babecamp online. Camp Thunder Thighs was the third retreat that I’ve done. I did one in Jamaica, I did one in San Francisco, and then the most recent one was in Sausalito in the Marin Headlands. It was amazing.
I was offered this opportunity to be a contributor for Forbes Women, and I’ve been writing about the plus size market and plus size consumers and what’s going on in that space from a business perspective, which has been really interesting.
I don’t know, I’ve had a lot of opportunities in the last 4 years to really see things transform a lot in my world, as a fat woman who’s really interested in everything related to that identity. It’s been incredible watching the proliferation of business, the proliferation of things like watching Lizzo become this superstar. I think there’s been a lot of fat news, if you will, since I spoke to you last, and I think that trend is only going to continue.
Chris Sandel: How many of the brands or the people in this space do you feel are getting it right and are there because they genuinely believe in that, and how many people does it feel like it’s just cynical, trying to make a buck?
Virgie Tovar: Well, it’s interesting. It’s a good question and it’s a complex question. On the one hand, we cannot rely upon business and capitalism to be the solution we’re looking for when we’re talking about justice. We need to have that understanding as human beings. [laughs]
I think what ends up happening is people – we’re trained culturally, as individuals, to look to capitalism for all solutions, whether they have to do with a consumer problem or a very large social problem. We often turn to businesses to do the work that we actually as individuals need to do, and as collective individuals need to do, and can do. But we feel very disempowered because we’ve been taught to see justice as through a capitalist lens.
In that way, we don’t understand sometimes, or it’s difficult for us to understand the timeline of justice. Capitalism’s timeline is very short. You have a problem, you go click on something, you have the solution. With justice, the timeline is much longer, and it can often feel like you have a sense of failure or a sense of a very overwhelmingly daunting task that there’s no way you can chip away at.
Similarly, we’ve been taught to increasingly convey things that are important to us politically through wearing t-shirts, through a particular sloganism – again, very immediate. You buy a t-shirt, you type out a hashtag, and you feel like you’ve done something. And in some way you have. That’s the lowest level of buy-in, but it matters.
But again, when it comes to making legislative changes – for instance, in the United States, it is still totally legal to discriminate on the basis of weight in 49 out of 50 states. Certainly with the hashtags and the t-shirts and all of these things, they’re moving the culture in a direction, but it isn’t the same as arguing or fighting for legislative change. So it’s important to have that background when you’re thinking about the question that you asked me.
But to get more to the brass tacks of it, I actually am finding, number one, there’s a large number of young women who are increasingly in the plus size space, and they’re increasingly doing direct-to-consumer sales, which they can do through social media in a way that businesses weren’t able to do before. In the traditional business model, if you were a designer, you had to find a third party to sell your stuff because you didn’t have your own platform, so you were trying to sell to Nordstrom, trying to sell to Neiman Marcus or whatever. Then the consumer is on the other end of that pipeline, and there’s no communication between the producer and the consumer.
With direct-to-consumer sales, which social media, as I mentioned, facilitates, they can sell directly to consumers and they can talk to consumers. They can ask the people who are buying their product, “What is wrong with this product?” and they get an immediate response. So I do think, number one, that model – as the third party distribution model is going out of vogue and direct-to-consumer, boutique, smaller companies are becoming more of a norm, I think there’s tremendous potential, even on a basic solutions level, for people to be able to solve consumer problems.
What I’m also noticing from a vision/value standpoint is that a lot of people, these young women, are saying essentially, it is not a value proposition to offer extended sizing. It must be a de facto thing that’s part of every business model. They’re really seeing it as something that is not part of a mission statement; it’s part of a basic, fundamental function of a fashion company.
I think it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but I have a lot of hope.
Chris Sandel: Nice. The whole idea that the market will always find a solution I think is drastically wrong. I like the way you talk about the fact that by cutting out that middleman, you can have a person who is incredibly passionate about this, who has had that as their lived experience, and is like, “Hey, I want to create fashion that is going to meet up with people like me because I know how much I’m into fashion.” Being able to get in front of people the way that you just couldn’t even 5 years ago – or maybe 10 years ago, definitely not – I think that’s a great change.
You mentioned at the beginning about the fact that you’ve written a book called You Have the Right to Remain Fat. I want to use this as the basis for a lot of our conversation today, or at least as a starting point. We can see where the conversation goes from there. I know I made reference to the fact that I’ve done a previous podcast with you, and I do want people to go and check that out because it is a really great episode. I got a lot of good feedback from it.
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But just as a starting place, do you want to tell people who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that sort of thing, just so we have an understanding of who you are before you dive into everything else?
Virgie Tovar: My name is Virgie Tovar, and I’m an activist and an author. My background academically is in sexuality studies. I have a Master’s degree that is focused on the intersections of gender, race, and size and how body size and race potentially affect gender for women. That was my official entrée into this space and having a conversation about wellness and what health is and how fatphobia affects people.
From a personal perspective, I have always been fat. I was a fat baby, I was a fat kid, I became a fat adult. For a long time in my childhood, being fat was not a problem for me, for my family. I was aware of being bigger than other children, but I had no sense of shame or self-awareness around it. It was sort of this amazing, delightful fact. I had this very intuitive relationship to my body and to the world around me.
Then at around the age of five, I was introduced to fatphobia when I was introduced to school. The way that it was presented to me was that something was very wrong with my body, and all of the sense of wonder and delight and joy that I had went away. In fact, it was wrong of me to feel joy about my body, because there was something fundamentally wrong with it. I primarily received this education from boys, and it was packaged as “You would not make a fit girlfriend, and therefore I am allowed to torture you with impunity. It will stop when you become someone who has a thin body and who then becomes desirable.”
It’s really important for me to bring that up because I think, for a lot of girls and women, this is our introduction to our bodies, through boys abusing us. [laughs] And telling us that if we just acquiesce to their demands, we can be okay, and that ultimately dating them, the very people who abused us, would be the ultimate prize. In a lot of ways, that experience is so metaphorical of misogyny just in general in our culture.
I proceeded to spend about two decades attempting to do that very thing that these boys had told me I was supposed to do. I was all over the place on the spectrum of food restriction and disordered eating. I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, I think in part because I’m a fat person and because I’m a person of color, which fall outside of the diagnostics of disordered eating.
In my mid-twenties, I met a fat-positive partner and we dated, and I felt like he really began to help me change the way that I saw my relationship to myself and to food. Not long after that, I was in graduate school and began doing this research on fat people. This was around 2010. At that time, there were very few resources available, almost no books, a very small number of articles on fat studies. It’s kind of unbelievable to imagine that. That was not that long ago, less than a decade ago, and it was a radically different landscape. It was still quite controversial to be studying fat.
I tried to pitch a book about fat in 2009 and the publishers’ response was, “We really like this message, and we have no idea how to sell this book. We don’t know if the market is there.” [laughs] Again, it’s startling to imagine.
Anyways, I was finishing grad school. I decided to pitch another book, an anthology that was a collection of fat women’s stories – fat women who were refusing to diet – because these were the women I met as I was doing the research I was doing. Immediately after that, I was being invited to speak at universities. Really, it speaks to the need that was around this issue, the urgency, the fact that I was barely out of grad school. I got my first lecturing gig before I even finished my Master’s degree, and I think it really speaks to how desperately people wanted to talk about this issue.
After that, it flowed. I was doing university gigs, and then I was writing books and writing articles, and then it became clear that I wanted to work with women who were experiencing what I had experienced. This is where my online courses came in, and then I realized that I really wanted to work with them in person, and that’s where the retreats came in.
As I got deeper into it and I began to really understand the lay of the land of what we were really talking about with this issue, all these other things began to emerge from it, like writing for different outlets, collaborating with different brands.
But at the end of the day, I do consider myself primarily a public intellectual, a thinker who’s trying to utilize her academic background to help people all over the place, outside of the ivory tower, understand the complexity of what we’re doing when we are talking about dieting.
Chris Sandel: There’s a lot there that I want to go back to.
Virgie Tovar: Yes. [laughs] Long answer.
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Chris Sandel: That’s cool. One of the things when I was trying to put this together was like, what is your day job? Do you have an official job, or is it just the whole collection of things that you’ve talked about there?
Virgie Tovar: I quit my day job about a year ago. I was working at a queer literary arts nonprofit in San Francisco called Radar for many years. That work was really important to me. It just became really clear about a year ago that it was time to dedicate my waking hours completely to this. And it worked out really well. My day job is now what I just outlined for you.
Chris Sandel: You said about starting to do retreats and working with women. The thought of being a therapist or a counselor, has that ever crossed your mind? Or that’s not the work you want to be doing?
Virgie Tovar: I’ll admit, it has crossed my mind, but it hasn’t really stuck. I think at the end of the day, my heart is really – I’m a theorist, I’m an intellectual. That is the sacred thing for me. That’s what I wake up for in the morning. So I think for me, if I were to pursue licensure or further education, it would have to be in service to that passion.
Chris Sandel: The other part of it, working in public health or doing the policy side of things – is that something you would want to do? Or that’s just red tape and headache, and you don’t think people are going to be onboard with our message?
Virgie Tovar: It’s a good question. It’s so funny, because everything that I do feels really intuitive in my life and my job. I have wondered, what’s the resistance around going into that space? Because it’s a very powerful space to enter. I think you can really get a lot done. If I think about the life’s work, the work that I’ve done over the past decade, and if I had dedicated that to legislative change, I do wonder, would the impact have been bigger?
For me, it’s less of a sense of red tape and headache; it’s just like a, “Hmm, I’m just not drawn to that. I’m drawn to this.” And I’ll admit, I think for me, some of it has to do with I want to engage. I want to be in deep and intimate conversation with the people who are experiencing the impact, and I want to be in meaningful conversation with women. So I think there is a little bit of that.
Chris Sandel: And thinking that if you’re in that line of work, there’s a bit more of a detachment, and you’re sitting in meetings and dealing with the different level of it.
Virgie Tovar: Yeah. I think perhaps my experience in academia was that – I experience academia as a very hostile place. I think any place, when you’re talking about places that are bastions of structural power like the academy, like the legislature, you are looking at largely people and rules and whatnot that are not friendly to change. I think there is this idea to go back to academia. I think there’s this idea that academia is this place that’s a breeding ground for free thought. That is just not the case. That is simply not the case.
If you’re a superstar and you have proved your chops and you’re someone who is already famous and then academia pulls you in and brings you in, that’s one thing. Think about these incredible people who we identify as academics – I think of Angela Davis, for instance. She was a superstar before academia. That’s not fair to say; she was classically trained. But I think of someone like her, who I think absolutely is a leader in thought, and I think that she is someone who, without the incredible fame that she has, would not have been embraced by academia. I think she’s someone who would’ve had – as an archetype.
So I think in general, I think of these spaces as places where I have to play a certain political game that I am not very good at, number one, and that feels like it deeply, deeply eats away at my dignity and my sanity, frankly. I’m really impressed by people who can dissociate and say, “This is the outcome I want, and I will do whatever I have to do to play that game to get the outcome.” I’m not that way. I’m a high authenticity, high expression person. [laughs] It’s not a good fit.
00:27:45
Chris Sandel: You mentioned just as you were finishing up your Master’s, you were already being asked to talk. I’m just wondering, how has the reception to your talk changed from in the early days to where we are now? Because obviously, you said the landscape has changed a lot around where we are in terms of books and publishing and people’s thoughts around fat activism or the fat acceptance movement, etc. Have you noticed a shift in terms of the kinds of people or the kinds of questions or anything about the talks that you’re giving and the crowd’s response?
Virgie Tovar: Interestingly, I haven’t found that much of a difference. I think some of it has to do with the fact that most of the times when I’m doing a talk, they are elective talks. People can come or not. The people who were interested in coming to my talks 5 years ago are not that different from the people who are interested in electing to come to my talks now.
I think that in general, these are people who are deeply interested in justice. They’re deeply interested in cultural criticism and change. And again, a lot of them are women, they’re queer people and people of color. For me, these are the people who are the early adopters of anything. So that doesn’t surprise me.
I think the thing that has shifted a lot that’s been really interesting is the amount of corporate interest that has emerged. Some of it is quite meaningful. I think it’s people who are actually really interested in changing the corporate environment around this. Like, literally getting asked by major tech companies to come and speak about fatphobia. That’s pretty incredible to me. I think that shift feels much more pronounced than the folks who are coming to my talks.
Chris Sandel: What’s the reception, then, in those environments? Because obviously that’s not people who are self-selecting; that’s people who are having that, in a sense, foisted upon them because they work for a specific company. Do you get much pushback, or is there different questions because of that?
Virgie Tovar: To be fair, even within that space, they’re not necessarily diversity training. But for instance, one company approached me and they have a fat-positive employee interest group in the company. The company allots them space to have these employee interest groups of all different kinds, and there’s a fat one. That’s so extraordinary and wonderful. That makes me smile and makes me so happy. But yeah, there’s still this elective component to it.
I will say the differences are, in general, corporate environments are more conservative. The questions are often focused – they’re more tactical. They might not necessarily want to get deep into the weeds around the theory, though many people are interested in that. But they’re interested in, “How do we make this workplace a less hostile environment for fat people?” Or “How do we deal with conversations around food when we’re having a meeting and we can’t elect out of these nonstop food surveillance conversations?”
So I think in that way, more tactical. They might not necessarily be the spaces where we’re going to go into the deep historical intersections of colonialism, but I’m obviously happy to go there. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: You said trying to get a book published in 2009 obviously didn’t happen, and then things started to change. When does it feel like there was a shift in this being more that people were wanting to read about, or at least publishers were wanting to publish things about? Did you notice, was there some point where you’re like “things really feel like it’s changed now”?
Virgie Tovar: We’re in the middle of the ramp-up to that right now. For me, I remember pitching the anthology, which is called Hot and Heavy. I pitched that anthology and I sensed in my body that this issue was about to explode. Not long after that, and around that time, you really began to see fat show up in the news as a consistent news item. For me, you started with the ripple of social media, things going viral, there being viral fat news covered in major media outlets in the United States, like Good Morning America, for instance.
Then came magazines. Mainstream tabloid type magazines were covering fat shaming. They were covering fatphobia. They were talking about it on the covers of magazines. And then you see the publishing shift. Publishers started to get really interested in it. For me, this was also I think concomitant with the beginning of the rise in plus size fashion availability.
So yeah, right now – I’ve been watching. I’m in the publishing world, I’m an author, so I’m looking at books just from personal interest. I’ve noticed this incredible uptick in not only titles being acquired that are explicitly about being fat, but a huge uptick in books that are being acquired that have to do with food, that have “food” in the title, that have “body” in the title, or references to those things, which I see as part of a ripple effect of this.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I’m thinking more on the food end of the spectrum – it feels like this year, and probably last year as well, the amount of intuitive eating-esque books that have come out by younger authors has just been huge. And not where people are self-publishing, but where they’re actually getting publishing deals. So yeah, it definitely feels like at least publishers think this is something that people are wanting to read.
Virgie Tovar: Yes, absolutely.
00:34:50
Chris Sandel: Let’s talk more about your book. You talked briefly about one of the things that I wanted to mention, which is when you first remembered being called fat, and you made reference to this in the book, being called fat by a boy. The thing that you highlighted or that stood out for me, at least, was at the point at which he called you that, you really had no context for the word. It didn’t have the negative connotations that he was trying to impose upon you, or at least, that’s not how it felt to you. Is that a correct assumption?
Virgie Tovar: Yeah, absolutely. It was a word that was not in my world at that time. There was kind of this deep learning curve that happened very quickly around that age, around what that word meant and what it meant to be someone who was described in that way, especially as a girl.
Chris Sandel: Then you talk about the connection between diet culture and fatphobia and how those two things go together, and mention that many women don’t make this connection. Can you talk a little about that?
Virgie Tovar: I was literally just having a conversation about this over breakfast. [laughs] One of the things that is really interesting and problematic is that within the eating disorder space, various eating disorders are considered pathologies having to do with food. They do not make the connection between fatphobia, body image, and eating disorders.
I think for a lot of people, they engage in diet culture, they engage in dieting or food restriction or weight cycling, whatever you want to call it. They engage in it with either the earnest belief that it is self-improving – which, from the data I’ve seen, it’s not. [laughs] And for some people, people like me, I was of two minds. One, my thought was like, “Oh, if I lose weight, I’ll be attractive. I’ll get all the stuff. I’ll get all the prizes.” Likewise, the other side of the coin was “I will escape the abuse that I’m experiencing as a fat person.”
I think it’s really important to keep in mind that dieting would not make any sense if we didn’t live in a culture that was fatphobic. If we didn’t live in a culture that hated fat people and stigmatized weight gain, dieting would make absolutely no sense, because it’s an entirely anti-intuitive, I would argue anti-biological behavior. [laughs] It largely sends the body and the mind and the spirit into a tailspin.
The thing about dieting is, number one, we know statistically that dieting is an inefficacious behavior. I was just reading this a few months ago. It was this article that came out on Huffington Post, and I think the article was called “Everything you know about being fat is wrong” or something like that. It pointed out the really compelling statistic that there is a 0.8% chance of a woman who’s classified as “obese” to become a person who’s classified as “normal” weight.
So we know that. We know that in general, weight loss is only weight cycling. Ultimately, you lose and gain the same amount of weight, largely on an upward trajectory. We know that dieting is correlated with depression, anxiety, an increased likelihood of developing a full-blown eating disorder.
For me, when you really look at the data, the landscape is pointing to a very clear truth, a very obvious outcome or conclusion, which is that dieting is inefficacious. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t do the thing that it says it’s supposed to do.
So for me, as somebody who’s a thinker, a person who’s really interested in the implications of information, I’m like, all right, we know this doesn’t work. If you’ve ever dieted, you know it doesn’t work. And yet we’re doing it all the time. What I’ve found socially is that when you have a behavior that doesn’t have any basis in data as being effective, but people are still doing it in large numbers, it’s often because it serves a social purpose.
In this culture, dieting serves many social purposes. Number one, it normalizes the idea that every single person should try to look the same, so this idea of conformity. It normalizes the white male body, which is still considered the ideal and has long been considered the ideal. The white, young, able-bodied wealthy body has long been considered the ideal of health in our culture. And obviously beauty and success and all that stuff too.
I think for women, it serves the social purpose of keeping us in our place. Certainly, I point out in You Have the Right to Remain Fat that many people believe that thinness is what is being eroticized and romanticized, but in actuality what’s being eroticized is women’s willingness to be submissive to social expectations. That is what is actually being rewarded. Not the thinness itself, but what it represents.
I feel like I can say that with a good amount of confidence because there are other cultures in which women are expected to be very fat, and that is considered the height of marriageability and beauty. The men in those cultures are very physically attracted to larger bodies.
Ultimately, thinness or fatness in either of these cultures largely serve the same purpose, which is that women are expected to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve an arbitrary beauty standard in order to be considered worthy of marriage, which to me indicates we’re really talking about an issue of control here.
So that’s my initial thoughts on the question. [laughs]
00:42:05
Chris Sandel: You highlight something that I wanted to chat with you about as well. You talk about the difference that you’ve noticed between queer spaces versus more heterosexual spaces in terms of how women think about weight. Also, you’ve talked about this in terms of the difference between the liberation movement and more of the watered-down body positivity movement and the difference that you notice between those two. Can you talk a little about that? Because I think it does definitely connect into what you were just talking about there.
Virgie Tovar: Yeah. To position myself, I’m a straight person. I have long been really drawn to queer spaces and queer thought, and that’s always felt like home. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m fat and I’m also a person of color. I think these are demarcations of outsiderness. I think certainly queer culture is that kind of outsider space.
For me, I felt very drawn to what in queer spaces are just core ideological tenets. For instance, the idea of anti-assimilation, the idea that I do not want to be accepted into a culture that is deeply committed to so many problematic things. Certainly in the United States, when I’m like, “I want to be accepted by my culture,” I’m talking about a culture that imprisons a huge percentage of its population. I’m talking about a culture that has the death penalty. I’m talking about a culture that doesn’t feel like it needs to pay for people’s medical care. I’m talking about a culture where not everyone has access to clean water or housing.
I learned this from queer community in a lot of ways. What does it mean to ask for acceptance or assimilation from a culture that is so deeply entrenched in this horrible violence that’s ongoing? So it gave me the space to really begin to understand this concept of liberation, the idea that I can have a self-directed life that is not on the culture’s terms, that might not even be visible or legible to the culture.
That was the big principle that I learned in fat activism within queer spaces, which was we need to fight for the people who are the most vulnerable. We need to center them when we’re thinking about interventions and what we’re doing. We also need to continuously maintain not acceptance, but rather liberation and freedom as the ideal, as the goal.
What has happened with body positivity, which absolutely emerged from fat liberation – even though I think it’s about more than just weight; I think body positivity is about many things related to the body, but I do see it as derivative of fat liberation. The way that it’s become mainstreamed is through what I call the privatization of fat liberation.
Mainstream body positivity is really interested in self-love and how the individual can have the best relationship to themselves. This is very important and was always a part of fat liberation. However, I see the limit of it is that it stops there. There is not an engagement with the institutional component that really disallows higher weight people from accessing basic parts of society and life, like barred access to medical care, barred access to clothing, barred access to meaningful romantic engagement and even friendship, let alone workplace discrimination and things like that.
If you think of fatphobia as having three dimensions – the intrapersonal, the interpersonal, and the institutional – I do see body positivity as largely engaging with the intrapersonal and a bit the interpersonal, but has very little engagement, I’ve found, with the institutional component.
There’s the obvious fact that self-love, though important, is not a particularly useful tool for people who are being actively dehumanized and discriminated against in every component of life every day, which is the lived reality of higher weight people.
I think to speak to the difference between queer space and working within queer spaces and then working within more straight frameworks or straight spaces, I have noticed a really big difference. I think a lot of it has to do with the unspoken and very uncomfortable reality that straight men are a major, major part of maintaining the status quo. Straight men have a huge incentive to maintain the status quo because the status quo is meant to largely benefit them at the expense of others.
So when you or someone who essentially has a de facto, consistent engagement with straight men – if you’re a straight woman, you’re interacting with straight men. It’s sort of a given. You’re interacting with at least one, presuming that you’re not asexual, or a few, whoever you’re dating. As a straight woman, I can speak to this personally: there is something that happens when you are, on a psychological level or an intellectual level – I’m not sure exactly what level I would say it’s on, but there is a way in which we do – God, I’m trying to say it in a way that’s compassionate. [laughs]
There’s a way in which I do think that we hinder our own political process, our own liberation, because we know that if we go too far, we will not be attractive to straight men. I think what’s fantastic about queer space is that hindrance is not there. There is no concern about being attractive to straight men. [laughs] It’s a major difference in positionality to the world.
So I have found in general, when I’m working with queer clients, we’re on the same page around justice and around fat liberation, what fatphobia is, how it affects people, what kind of tools we can use. I’ve found that because the consideration of being appealing to straight men isn’t there, we can go a lot further.
In addition to that, when you think about the construction of desirability, desirability within queer space is enormous and beautifully massive. It is so expansive. Obviously, queer space is not free of some of the same problems that straight people deal with; however, in terms of the boundaries, the boundaries are much more expansive than they are within straight desirability. Straight desirability I would argue is about the size of a pinhead. [laughs]
In comparison, the queer world is a space of really actively often questioning who is desirable, why, what are the implications of only being attracted to one kind of person, and actively choosing not to be a part of that. That is simply not part of straight aesthetics. Like, what is straight community? There is no straight community. The whole world is straight. [laughs] I mean, that’s the de facto space.
I feel like I could go on and on about this, but I think I got to the answer of your question.
00:51:15
Chris Sandel: No, I’m wanting you to go on and on about this, because I think it’s a really good point, and it made up lots of different sections of your book. You told a really good story in the book about a friend at a party who was a PhD student who was thinking of dropping out because it was impacting on her desirability to men, or her perceived desirability to men. Can you talk a little about that?
Virgie Tovar: Yes, and I didn’t name the institution in the book, but I think I’m going to name it today, because I think it’s important to name it. She was getting her PhD at Yale. Obviously, extraordinarily prestigious institution and loved what she was doing in her program. I was at a dinner party; my best friend at the time had a dinner party. She was also at Yale, and they were colleagues. I really liked her. We had this nice party, and then everybody started to trickle out and it was just the three of us left.
We were talking frankly about dating, and all three of us were having challenges for various reasons. She started talking, and she’s this 6 foot tall, striking, smart, warm human – I look at her and see somebody who is extraordinarily appealing, and yet she was having a lot of difficulty dating because she found that she was too educated and she was too tall. She was also almost 30 at that time, and she was talking about considering dropping out of her PhD program because she couldn’t control her height, but she could control how educated she was.
I really think that story – and this is San Francisco, California, the 2010s. This is not some bygone era I’m talking about here. For me, when she said that, it was very hard to hear, but it was also not surprising to me, because I felt like I had dealt with some version of that my whole life.
I think when we’re talking about the lived reality of women, women are socialized to believe that we are not complete without men. I think another important part of that is we are not safe without men. And men teach us that. It’s important to remember that a lot of those beliefs – the beliefs that we have as women about our inferiority are a product of sexist trauma. They’re a product of us having been taught that we’re a different kind of person and that we’re an inferior kind of person.
I think a perfect example of this would be the idea that certainly still pervades in the U.S., which is that to be bested or to be beaten by a girl if you’re a man is humiliating, whether it’s physical or intellectual. This speaks to really, really strong, core ideological problems, and it’s important to recognize.
To return to diet culture, women engage in dieting behavior for a number of methods. Number one – oh God, I’m having a bunch of thoughts all at once. A lot of us have I guess like a decoy thought, and oftentimes there’s a really sinister truth that’s underneath it that we sometimes can’t access because we haven’t been taught to access it.
One decoy thought would be “I just want to be thinner so that I can date more easily.” That’s a really simple idea. When you go to the root system of that, you begin to see really disgusting, terrible, horrible truths about what that simple behavior or that simple thought really has at its core. The idea that you have to undertake massive amounts of effort and spend a bunch of resources – hours, time, emotional bandwidth, literal hours at the gym or hours figuring out what you can and cannot eat – but that is considered a totally appropriate amount of labor in order to be able to access a romantic dating pool. That’s really shitty, and we shouldn’t accept those terms.
Another maybe decoy thought would be – gosh, this whole idea that I was presenting that this person at the dinner party was experiencing, where it’s like, “I should sacrifice things that are deeply meaningful for me in order to be able to get married.” There’s a whole lot in that.
But this idea that we don’t deserve to do things that are meaningful to us, or that the more meaningful things that we have in our lives, the less marriageable we are. These are deeply problematic thoughts.
Anyway, I have so much I could say about this, but I’m going to leave it at that for now. [laughs]
00:57:10
Chris Sandel: I know you talk in the book a lot about inferiority and that kind of internalized inferiority and its connection with sexism. You mention that when you do talks, many women believe that sexism is a thing of the past. Obviously your book came out, I’m guessing, pre-Me Too movement, or just on the cusp. I’m just wondering, has that changed since then?
Virgie Tovar: I’m so glad you bring that up. I wrote this book before Trump was elected. It’s so interesting looking back at the book and just realizing, oh my God, he became the body of evidence that what I was saying was – I think for a long time after second-wave feminism, you began to hear from the average woman that sexism was a thing of the past, that we were post-sexism, that we’d made progress, we had all these laws, we had all these freedoms, and we no longer needed to keep harping about misogyny. You really begin to see the construction of the feminist who’s kind of a bitch and who’s difficult, who’s a stick-in-the-mud and all that stuff.
I think that continued on some level. I remember writing that section of the book about sexism – and yes, sexism is still real – and I remember feeling this deep compulsion to try and be as clear and precise as possible, to really convince the reader that this was real. And then Trump gets elected and I’m like, this thing that had been living there, perhaps – some people think it was living under the surface. I don’t. I think it was out in plain sight if you knew how to see it. He became, in my opinion, that body of evidence that, oh my God, all of these things that we thought were something of yesteryear are things that are being done by one of the most powerful people on the planet, and with impunity.
So absolutely, Me Too and conversations about the realities of how – those conversations happened after the book came out, and I’m so happy that they did. I don’t feel like at this point talking about the fact that sexism is an actual thing feels like such a hard sell, and that’s both sad and also really important. Because the truth is, yes, feminists have made extraordinary strides in getting women’s rights.
To give some context for people, I can speak about the U.S. context – women could not even get their own library card until 1974. You think about that in the grand scheme of things – for me, my mother was born before 1974. A lot of us were raised by women who were living in this reality. It absolutely has an impact on what we think is normal, what we’re willing to accept, and our ability to even see things as problematic.
Feminists always knew that sexism was a major problem that was very alive and well in our culture, and I think there are fewer people who believe that we are post-sexism at this point. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: When I was reviewing the book as part of putting the questions together, it was funny reading that section where you –
Virgie Tovar: I know, it’s funny to me. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: You were so specific in your language and all of that, and now, you just don’t need to do that. It is so in plain sight, as you talk about.
Virgie Tovar: Yeah, absolutely. I think that Me Too really got to the reality that women were still being exploited and harassed and abused. I do think that there’s a lot of things that are still not questioned, even in the midst of this really important cultural moment. I mention in the book internalized inferiority, what it really looks like, and these little tiny ways we live our lives as women.
To again point to fatphobia and diet culture, you think of something as simple as a compression garment, whether it’s a waist trainer or it’s panties that are supposed to be shaping or whatever, these things are not designed to create comfort. They’re designed to create a particular look. The fact that we’re willing to wear these things that make us actively uncomfortable intentionally, day after day, without much questioning is a real indication of our – that’s a really meaningful thing. What does it say that you are totally fine with being a little bit uncomfortable all the time in order to create a particular look, or in order to prevent your body from jiggling because it might be upsetting to other people or something like that?
I do encourage people to really excavate the little things that are part of their lives that cause them discomfort all the time – for women, that’s a very long list – and really think about that. What does it mean that we’re willing to accept these terms?
01:03:25
Chris Sandel: I know a lot of the focus is around you have the right to remain fat, but as you talk about, all women are subjugated. Thin women get dehumanized, just as fat women do, but it just looks different.
Virgie Tovar: Absolutely. I think it really is that – what I’ve found more and more as I’ve done this work is that it’s always important to see everything as a two-sided coin, to always see the shadow side and to always look for the bright side. For things that are hard, always look for what is the value for the person who’s experiencing it? Because it’s not just pure terrible. And then likewise, for people who are benefitting from any number of privileges, it’s important to interrogate the shadow side. At what cost is this occurring? At what cost are you having this?
When it comes to this issue, I think there is this idea that thin women get away scot-free when it comes to diet culture, and that just simply isn’t the case. The negative impact of diet culture occurs on a spectrum. The same with fatphobia. The higher weight you are, the more you are experiencing the acute impact of fatphobia, so I don’t want to take away from that, but this concept that thin women don’t have any skin in the game is false.
I use the example of the private/public binary in the book. Statistically, there’s evidence that fat women have sex at the same frequency, have the same number of partners on average, as their thin counterparts; they just tend to have fewer relationships. So what we’re really talking about here is not a matter of desire or desirability; it’s a matter of what bodies we are supposed to be seen publicly with, and which bodies we are not supposed to be seen publicly with.
I think when you’re going back to the straight context of men-women interactions, men certainly have been taught to see marriage and romantic partnership as something that is a social status thing. Essentially, there’s a high incentive to be in romantic proximity to people who are impressive to your fellow men, your man friends and your man coworkers and whatnot. This of course is a product of misogyny.
The opposite side a lot of times – I know from personal experience, having been someone who has engaged a lot with these kinds of status-seeking men, they’re often privately having sex with fat people. They’re having sex with trans people. They’re having sex with gay men. This is one of those things that I would say is historically something that we’ve seen throughout certainly the last 50 years in our culture, but way beyond that.
Anyway, I talk about the ways in which thin women are dehumanized through the process of treating them like trophies, like objects that are meant to largely sate the ego of the kind of men who are insisting upon that standard. Likewise, on the opposite end, fat women get dehumanized because we are pushed into these private interactions. But I would argue dehumanization is happening to both people; it just looks different.
I think it’s important to be really honest about that, because certainly when I think about when women are entering a deep, important relationship, like marriage or a long-term relationship, they’re bringing trust. They’re bringing vulnerability into that interaction, and I don’t think that they’re being met in kind.
I don’t know. Again, many, many thoughts. I’m going to leave it there. [laughs]
01:08:15
Chris Sandel: Sure. I wonder how it fits in now with the increased expectations on men in terms of how men are now meant to look and how many more of them are getting into dieting and having to have their body live up to some standard that the vast majority of people aren’t going to even get close to. How does that fit into your thoughts around this?
Virgie Tovar: Absolutely, I do think that of course there’s evidence that shows that men have increasing rates of body dissatisfaction. Those statistics pale in comparison to where women are at, but I think that the rise is indicating this way in which there was a time where, when the market primarily, and perhaps even somewhat exclusively, went after women around bodies – and those boundaries aren’t there anymore. It’s like a free-for-all at this point. [laughs]
So I really do think men are beginning to – not even just beginning to, are experiencing body pressure in a way that historically men have not. Men have experienced pressure around ability to perform financially or what kind of car they had or what kind of suit they had or what kind of cigars they were smoking or whatever, and women, it was largely the domain of the body. I do see a shift in that, for sure.
I think what has always consistently – and I talk about this in the book, too – one of the things that’s important to consider is that a lot of times when men are experiencing fatphobia, there is a layer of sexism that is part of it. It’s this terror of men being soft or womanlike that is in many ways at the heart of the body pressure that men experience to be strong and hard and fit and not fat and all that stuff.
When I was doing reviews of memes and articles that were related to fat men, a lot of them were really preoccupied with things like the development of a larger chest if you’re fat, or the concern that fat men have more estrogen than thin men, or the concern that if you become fat, your penis will become less visible. These all point to what I would argue is this terror of men being womanlike.
So absolutely, I think it’s important to think about the pressures that men experience around their bodies, and it’s also important to remember that a big slice of that pie is about sexism.
01:11:20
Chris Sandel: One of the things you really highlight in the book – and you went through I think three of the four ads – there was the Strong4Life ad campaign, and I know that had both boys and girls in it as part of that campaign, and it was just horrible on so many levels. Do you want to just talk a little bit about it? Was it back in 2012 that that occurred?
Virgie Tovar: Oh gosh, I can’t even remember. That sounds about right. There were these ads that were all over Georgia. It was the state of Georgia where those ads were happening, at bus stops and whatnot. They were about the “childhood obesity epidemic.” I put quotes around these things because they’re deeply offensive, pathologizing language. I don’t think it’s okay to use that kind of language.
Anyway, they were all images of children, boys and girls of different races. All the images were black and white, and then emblazoned across their images was I believe the word “WARNING.” Was it “warning,” Chris? Is that what it was?
Chris Sandel: I can’t remember that part. I can just remember some of the slogans that they had below them.
Virgie Tovar: They had some kind of exclamatory – in red, something like “WARNING” across the image.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, it felt slightly like a mugshot.
Virgie Tovar: Yeah, like a mugshot. For sure, it was definitely very arresting. Then underneath, there were various slogans that were supposed to be about the image. One of the images is of a young black girl who is a chubby person, and it says, “To you my fat might be funny, but to me it’s” – I need to look this up. Hold on.
Chris Sandel: It’s like, “to me it means death” or something pretty morbid.
Virgie Tovar: Yeah. I looked it up. They’re all black and white, and then across their bodies, usually across all these children’s stomachs, is the word, in red and all caps, “WARNING.” Then, for instance, things like “My fat may be funny to you, but it’s killing me.” There is one that says “Chubby kids may not outlive their parents.” “Fat kids become fat adults.” “Big bones didn’t make me this way. Big meals did.”
There’s a couple that I really focus on. There’s one where there’s a little girl – and by the way, they’re all grimacing and frowning. Not one of them is smiling. It’s just this really horrible portrayal of fat children. There’s a few I focus on in the book, but I’m going to talk about two of them with you, Chris.
There’s one with a little girl, and she’s got her arms crossed over her chest. Her slogan is “WARNING: It’s hard to be a little girl if you’re not.” I analyzed this ad as interestingly talking about both size and gender, as someone who’s interested in how body size affects how people experience their gender.
For me, to say “it’s hard to be a little girl if you’re not” is both an indictment or a critique of the fact that she is not a small girl, but it’s calling into question whether she’s even a girl at all. If you grew up fat, you know this struggle.
I grew up fat, and I always was not sure that I was actually really a girl because I never was treated the way that I saw my thin counterparts be treated. I was not treated the way that thin girls on TV and in movies were. I was not treated like a dainty, delicate flower. I was treated quite roughly, by boys in particular. Then when I was around my friends, who were thinner girls, often, they would always ask me to play the boy role whenever we were playing house or whenever we were reenacting books that we read.
So to me, this Strong4Life ad spoke to this weird duality of this person, this little girl, is being pathologized because she’s not “the right size.” And her gender is I think inadvertently being called into question.
The second one that I want to focus on is another one with a little boy, and on his ad it says “WARNING: Fat prevention begins at home and the buffet line.” For me, first of all, this is a really clear call to mothers, I would argue. We know statistically that mothers are still the disproportionate caregivers, the disproportionate people who are taking care of the meals for their children. At least in the United States, that’s the reality. So it kind of becomes a coded indictment, a coded reference, a coded call to mothers.
And then specifically, the reference to the buffet line, the buffet is a class reference. In general, it is working class people who go to buffets. I think about San Francisco, where I live, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a buffet in San Francisco. San Francisco I think is the lowest average weight in the United States. The zip codes in San Francisco are the lowest weight in the United States or something like that.
Anyway, I live in an upper middle class, affluent city, and one of the values of the upper middle class/affluent is of restraint. A buffet is the antithesis of the concept of restraint. When you think about it from a working class perspective – and I grew up working class. I went to buffets all the time. Buffets are genius, in the sense that they’re the most food that you can get for the lowest dollar, and you can take food home if you bring a plate or you bring some Tupperware or whatever. Which my family did.
So it makes complete sense. Logically, a buffet is a fantastic idea. It is only when we overlay it with this hierarchical class understanding of what is acceptable and what behavior is déclassé or not acceptable, it’s only then that the buffet is cast in a different light.
But specifically, to return to this ad, it’s a reference to working class people and the idea that working class people do not know how to feed their children. This is a very old concept. There’s long been this belief that poor people are less moral and their poverty is evidence of that, and that if they were trying harder, they wouldn’t be where they are, and if they were trying harder, they wouldn’t be fat. There’s a lot of really, really horrible presumptions made about poor people, and a lot of surveillance that poor people experience.
I really felt like this ad spoke to that, but without calling it out overtly. The ad didn’t say “Dear working class moms, you are terrible at being a mother. Please stop.” I think it was very cleverly worded, and perhaps even unconsciously worded, in a way that specifically called out a class behavior.
This is what I’ve noticed when we’re talking about fatness, especially in medical and health contexts. There’s often a lot of coded language, but it all goes back to the history of surveilling and pathologizing people of color and poor people and mothers. So I feel like this ad campaign really spoke volumes to a lot of the nuance of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about this issue.
01:20:45
Chris Sandel: When I got to that section of the book – I don’t live in Georgia; I have no idea how I’d seen the ads, but I remembered seeing them. I looked them up, and I really did like the commentary that you added to it. And it just felt so classist with all of them, especially the styling and everything. I know before we jumped on this call, we were having a bit of conversation and you said you’d written an article or you’re delving into the idea of social determinants of health. Is that something you want to speak about in connection to this?
Virgie Tovar: Yeah. Actually, I want to talk about one other thing and then maybe the social determinants of health.
When I was looking at one of the things that’s really wrong and deeply harmful about fatphobia, especially when we’re talking about children, it’s that fatphobia has this phenomenon known as adultification. It projects onto a child this belief that they have adult-like qualities. Examples of that would be a more advanced understanding of adult themes, including sexuality or morality or any number of things. It presumes that a child is incapable of feeling the same amount of pain as a child should be.
Let me back up and say that again, because I think I messed that up. It is over-assigning this resiliency to a child when it’s not appropriate. As a fat kid, I experienced this, and I see this ad campaign as promoting this. I think that if the children in this ad campaign had been thin, the copywriter or whoever wrote the slogans on them would’ve thought twice. Like, perhaps it’s inappropriate to put this kind of language literally overlaid on the body of a child.
But I do think that because the children in these ads are fat, there’s this idea that they don’t deserve that kind of consideration, that they are outside of an innocence that we typically assign to children. When you think about the ways in which our attitudes about fat are highly connected to attitudes about morality, like this idea that fat people are already always immoral and slovenly and lazy and all these biblically attached words – fat children already always are considered outside of that innocence because of how we think about that.
This is deeply harmful to people, to humans, and certainly to children.
01:23:55
To speak to the social determinants of health, I just started dipping my toe into this recently and was really compelled to find – if we think about our health as a pie, and we think about all the things that make up the pie, for a lot of people I really believe that we are taught, and people believe, that the biggest slice of that pie is personal behavior, individual behavior. Like we can totally turn the ship around on our health, 180 degrees, if we just work hard enough or something like this.
It was really interesting to delve into literature from the Centers for Disease Control and from the World Health Organization, who examine health in an ecological model and have found, in general, that social determinants of health are actually the bigger part of the pie. I was really compelled to find what these social determinants of health are.
It went to things like income level, educational opportunities, occupation and workplace safety, whether or not you experience gender inequity or racial segregation, whether or not you experience food insecurity, whether or not you have nutritious food available to you, whether or not you have access to housing and utility services. It includes early childhood experiences, which none of us can control. It includes social support, how many people around you are treating you with respect and dignity and actually trying to help you thrive.
It has to do with crime rates, exposure to violence. Whether or not you have access to clean drinking water and clean air, and things like recreational opportunities. Are there parks all over your neighborhood? Do you have access to those things? Are you living in a place where if you walked for 10 minutes, all you’re going to see is rows of houses and no trees? Those kinds of things.
And these things are largely things that we do not have control over. Certainly there’s a minority of people who class jump – start in one class, end up in another, a higher social class. But for a lot of us, we don’t go very far from where we grew up in terms of socioeconomics.
So in fact, when you zoom out, you realize that it’s these things that are a much bigger part of the picture of health, that have huge impacts in whether or not we have the health outcomes that we’re expected to have. I think it really does begin to help us understand that this single idea of what a healthy person is is deeply problematic.
I want to end by saying – and this is something that I’ve learned from colleagues, and you actually just mentioned it before we jumped on the call – we need to create a reality in which people can be the author of their own lives, and that absolutely includes people’s right and ability to decide whether or not they have the desire, the inclination, or even the bandwidth or resources to pursue this notion of health. In a lot of ways, when we grant people this authorship, we grant them dignity, and dignity, in my opinion, is a fundamental building block of healing.
What happens with ad campaigns like these and our general, very condescending attitude about health is that it continuously targets the same people. It lifts up the same people and it drags down the same people, over and over and over again. It lauds and uplifts wealthy white people who are able-bodied and young, and it consistently pathologizes people of color and poor people.
What really needs to happen is when we’re talking about recuperation, we really need to create more opportunities for people who have been consistently pathologized and marginalized to have full humanity. I would argue that authorship is a big step in that direction.
Chris Sandel: I completely agree. One of the things in the past I’ve done is a whole episode on longevity, and it was brought about because I think for the third year in a row, the U.S. had life expectancy rate come down, and in the UK we had that for the last two years. I was looking at, why is that occurring?
In the UK, the biggest thing was austerity and how much there had been cuts to so much funding, where the people who really depend on that and are living hand-to-mouth and don’t have the socioeconomics to deal with things when those kind of services get cut are just left in the lurch. You look at the boroughs in the UK that are the most affluent, they have the people who live the longest. You look at the places that have the least amount of affluence and they’re the people who die the youngest.
It’s not that the people in the affluent areas just care more, or the people in the lower socioeconomic places care less. It’s purely because of the opportunities they have, how they’ve been raised, what is around them, all of those things. It’s not a moral thing; it just makes sense that this happens.
And the same thing within the U.S. It was the exact same way. The thing that has most tipped why the U.S. is having this decline is the opioid epidemic. You’re having so many young people who are dying, and because you’re dying at a younger age, you pull down the average. So it’s that and then socioeconomics.
So I’m completely in agreeance with you, because if you have people who have all of the means who are then setting the bar of what it means to be healthy – even people with means struggle to live up to that place. But it means that people who then are trying to work multiple jobs, who have no savings, who have all of these things that are stacked against them, that has a huge impact on health, and then they’re suffering, and then it’s talked about as “oh, you’re such a drain on the NHS or you’re such a drain on the hospitals,” etc. It’s like, you’re really missing where this is all coming from.
Virgie Tovar: And I think that it ignores the real historical reality that the idea of health or who has the best body is a moving target that relies heavily upon not having the body of poor people. [laughs] This is the thing. It’s not some kind of vacuum, consistent thing. We have seen throughout history that in moments where the poorest people’s bodies are very slender, the beauty ideal becomes larger. The health ideal becomes a larger body. Then when we see moments of food abundance, now we’re seeing that the ideal body is a slender body.
So we have to have context through these things. It’s really important to remember that it is not that we have a constant notion of health. It is that we have a system that is heavily reliant upon hierarchy, and that is flexible whenever it maintains whatever the hierarchy’s needs are. And in this case, whatever the poorest person’s body is, that is going to be the body that is reviled and considered unhealthy. It’s kind of an inductive process in that way, do you know what I mean?
01:32:20
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It was interesting as well – in your book, you talk about the whole idea of bootstrapping and how big that is as the American ideal, and that’s definitely been exported out. I especially think in the last 10 years or so, the whole intake of everyone becoming an entrepreneur and that kind of thing, we just have this idea of “if you want something badly enough, you just have to do it, and if you put in the effort, you’re going to get there.”
Again, that may be true if you have the means to be able to attempt to do that. But for the vast majority of people, that’s just not a reality.
Virgie Tovar: Yeah, absolutely. I think the expectation of bootstrapping – obviously it’s deeply dehumanizing. Even the people who are “winning” – in the book, I use the example of my grandfather. He was like Bootstrapper #1, this immigrant – his whole story that he was so proud of, and understandably, was that he went from being a person who immigrated from Mexico and was a janitor who couldn’t speak English very well to the head chemist at this major factory.
For him, he held that standard for everybody. I think he wasn’t able to really see the impact of the pursuit of that and what it did to him, and the way that it created – first of all, I think he was someone who dealt with depression, and he was certainly someone who dealt with a lot of anger that he took out on the people he loved the most, like my family. He was a really wonderful human being and a very warm human being, but he was someone who held himself to this really ridiculously high standard, and we all had to pay the price for it.
So I think even for the people who are succeeding, who are hitting that standard, there’s a lot of hidden costs.
I think the other thing about bootstrapping is that we’re really taught that it can be the solution to all social problems. This is deeply problematic. We need to be able to look to our leaders as a country, our legislature, our states people, and be able to have some expectation that they are going to take care of us, that there’s reasonable expectation of access to things like clean water and medical care that is good and these kinds of things.
I really think, to return to my own example and my family’s example, absolutely for me, dieting and weight cycling and restricting was very much about this idea that I could on some level end the abuse of others if I could just submit, if I could just conform, and that I should do everything in my power to acquiesce and submit to these quite abusive demands.
When you think about it, the way that this – I now realize as an adult – I did not know this at the time, but a lot of what I was doing was attempting to assimilate to not just a thin body, but in the pursuit of the “ideal,” I was also attempting to pursue the white body. Which I simply was never going to have. I’m not a white person, so I cannot have a white body.
I do think that there are these extra taxes that people of color and certainly women and queer people, all of us who are in some way or another outside of the norm, we are paying this extra psychic and emotional tax because a lot of times, we’re not just trying to change these small things about ourselves. We’re often trying to change fundamentally who we are in ways that we simply cannot.
I really tie that assimilation and bootstrapping drive that’s implicit within diet culture to the pursuit of essentially the reiteration of racism and sexism and things like that.
01:37:10
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I’m conscious of time, so the final thing I wanted to ask – and maybe we already touched on it a little bit with the Me Too part and the sexism part – but what’s changed for you since writing the book? Are there any things that have shifted for better or for worse, whether it be small things or big things?
Virgie Tovar: Personally, this book really represented getting into the weeds around some of the bigger cultural themes that I see connected so deeply and clearly to diet culture.
Since writing the book, I’ve gotten more deeply interested in hunger and the ways that diet culture creates this consistent low grade, if not acute, hunger, and what that does to humans. Why do we live in a culture in which women are encouraged to be hungry all the time? That’s really terrifying.
So I’ve started to really dive into that and really begin to see how women in particular relate to food as metaphorical, as the canary in the coal mine. What does it mean that I live in a culture where 48 million people are dieting every year? And probably even more, because many people who are on diets don’t identify what they’re doing as dieting.
I think certainly since the book has been written, there’s definitely been an even bigger schism between fat liberation and mainstream body positivity. One of the consistent things that really has troubled me and that I’ve seen only get more visibility and more traction is this constant question of whether or not body positivity and weight loss are compatible. It’s really frustrating to me to see that this is still a point of conversation, that it’s still getting consideration.
For me, the answer is they’re absolutely not compatible. Essentially any movement towards justice around body size is going to have to ultimately deal with eradicating fatphobia. And as I mentioned earlier, dieting is a behavior that does not make sense without fatphobia. Literally, dieting both is a product of fatphobia and it re-inscribes fatphobia. So if we want a movement to end discrimination against fat people, we’re going to have to stop pretending that that isn’t the truth.
As the conversation has gotten more mainstream, I suppose it makes sense that people who perhaps have never thought that critically about this conversation are now entering this. Again, there’s the two sides of the coin. On the one hand, body positivity and this conversation around weight and fat activism, all those things have gotten a lot more traction, which is really positive overall, I would argue.
The problem is that as something gains traction and it becomes more and more popular, there are social incentives for people to be aligned with it. And sometimes if all the cool kids are body positive and you’re maybe not quite ready to be on the same page, but you still want to be in the cool kid crowd, you might find yourself arguing for – instead of doing the internal work of interrogating, “Where are the areas that I’m still working through internalized oppression, internalized fatphobia?” or any number of things, the impulse might be, “I want access to this thing, and I should not be pushed out of this thing. I am going to argue my case again and again and again, no matter what anybody says, in an attempt to earn or push my way into membership.”
There’s a lot of complexity in this, but I do see, again, people who were maybe not part of this conversation 10 years ago when the conversation was – we were all on the same page; 10 years ago, fat activists were pretty much all on the same page. But again, as market forces come in and they create this cool factor around this issue and being in alignment with it, it does create a social reality where a whole population of people who otherwise may not be onboard with the actual political tenets of a thing want to be on the right side of history without maybe doing some of the intellectual work that needs to be done.
So I see that as a major change. I think for me, in terms of this book really did launch, as I was mentioning, an interest in food and hunger, and I am about to launch a podcast in February called Rebel Eaters Club. It’s about our relationship to food and really engaging with the high order social/historical things that are happening when we talk about interacting with our plate, with what we’re eating.
01:43:40
I want to give one quick story because I think it’s so powerful to speak to that metaphorical nature of food and how when we’re talking about diet culture, we’re talking about everything. We’re talking about the history of our country. We’re talking about all the little tiny, tiny things that have become socially normative and maintain structures of power and all that stuff. That all is happening every time we eat.
The example that I want to give is the first person I interviewed for the podcast tells a story about – I remember approaching her and asking her if she wanted to be part of it, and we started to have this conversation about what it means, why I wanted to do it. We were walking, and she stopped and said, “You know, if you were going to interview me, I would want to talk about my relationship to bagels.” I was like, “Okay, tell me more.”
She ends up telling this incredible story throughout the episode. She grew up in a Jewish home, in a community where there weren’t a lot of Jewish people. She used to wake up every morning as a little girl and her first favorite thing to do was to eat bagels. And when she would go to bed at night, she would get so excited that she was going to be able to wake up and have this experience.
Then she’s introduced to fatphobia, and she begins to have this relationship to bagels that very hate-focused, that’s very fear-focused, anxiety, like bagels are the worst thing that she could have because they’re bread and all the stuff that’s on them and all this stuff. She has this realization throughout the interview, as she’s telling her life story, that this hatred of the bagel was connected to her own internalized anti-Semitism, and it was connected to the complicated feelings she had about her mother’s fat Jewish body.
Then she turns a corner during her pregnancy around her relationship to bagels, and it becomes the starting point of her own healing to her own Jewishness.
It literally gives me chills telling that story and thinking about it, because I think that that is all of our story. Food is connected to fundamentally who we are as human beings. It is a way that we connect to culture. It is a way that we connect to the earth. It is a way that we connect to each other. And yet in the West, we live in an environment in which our relationship to food is largely characterized by terror. What is that about?
Anyway, the podcast goes into that. And I do see You Have the Right to Remain Fat as the direct predecessor of that interest in that conversation for me.
Chris Sandel: Wow. Virgie, I always love hearing you talk, so I’m very excited to hear that you’ve got a podcast coming out. That’s great.
Virgie Tovar: [laughs] Thank you.
Chris Sandel: Where do you want to be pointing people to find out more about you, if they want to be doing that? Social media, website, that kind of thing?
Virgie Tovar: I’m most active on Instagram, @virgietovar. I also have a website, www.virgietovar.com. You can sign up for my email list through the website.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put that stuff in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show again. I always love having these conversations with you, Virgie.
Virgie Tovar: Thank you. Same.
Chris Sandel: I hope you enjoyed this episode. So much of what Virgie and I covered as part of this are things I work on and talk about with clients – fears about putting on weight, body image, taking up space in the world, unrealistic beauty ideals, identity and worries about how someone’s being perceived.
These are things that so many of my clients struggle with, and if that’s the same for you, I would love to be able to help. As I mentioned at the top of the show, Seven Health is taking on clients. If you want to find out more about working together and apply for a free initial chat, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/help.
That is it for today’s show. I look forward to catching you on a future episode soon.
Thanks for listening to Real Health Radio. If you are interested in more details, you can find them at the Seven Health website. That’s www.seven-health.com.
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