#unshrinking

[whilereadingandwalking]

This year I read a lot of great books…but five blew me away. My top five of the year are:

✨There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

✨Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne

✨The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

✨The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster

✨Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer

I was most surprised that four of five of my favorites were nonfiction! I don’t know if I was biased towards nonfiction this year or if that’s just what wowed me this year, but these really are the five books I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Honorable Mention list:

The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart

Road to Ruin by Hana Lee

Blueback by Tim Winton

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (2025)

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidya Hartman

Sailor Moon vol. 5 by Naoko Takeuchi tr. Alethea and Athena Nibley

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Maybe He Just Likes You by Barbara Dee

Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Jewel Box: Stories by E. Lily Yu

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future by Danielle Clode

Granada by Radwa Ashour

[maaarine]

Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia (Kate Manne, 2024)

"Many straight men have a potent sense of entitlement to “hot” wives and girlfriends too: to female sexual partners who rate highly according to the standards operative in their milieu.

To put it simply, such a man is not just interested in what he finds attractive; he also cares, or cares more, about how other men would rate his choice of partner, which is typically inversely proportional to her weight, among other factors.

Whether highly ranked or not, girls and women suffer greatly from this social arrangement—from the shitty men who reject us, to the shitty men who deem us worthy only until we age, sag, or gain weight. (…)

As well as the gross assumption that fat women will be “easy”—again, in being grateful for any male attention—the practice of hogging owes to the ambivalence exhibited by many straight men toward fat women.

They may well want us sexually, but they view our sexual worth as minimal or nonexistent, and are subsequently loath to take us seriously, let alone publicly acknowledge us, as partners.

As the writer Hanne Blank memorably puts it, “Whether someone finds you fuckable and whether someone thinks you’re sufficiently high-status to suit their self-image are two different things.”

As fat women, we may be a cheap, tasty snack, not a proper meal, then: the sexual equivalent of junk food.

They’ll throw away the wrapper and brush away the crumbs, sated but vaguely disgusted—with both us and themselves—when they are done with us."

[whilereadingandwalking]

Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne is an excellent book about fatphobia and all the ways it has us in a stranglehold. Manne pulls apart philosophical and moral arguments that being fat is intrinsically wrong or something that society has the right to condemn, all in an accessible, readable way. She proposes body reflexivity, an alternative to body positivity/neutrality that allows us to feel good and bad about our bodies at our own discretion without judgment.

Her philosophical arguments were powerful (and dare I say, healing). There are many arguments that there is something unhealthy and immoral about being fat, and that as such, society has a right if not a duty to help. She proves that this is not the case. A crucial part of her argument: there is no morally acceptable, safe, reliable way to get fat people thin. Because of this, society cannot demand change from fat people. She also argues that even if fat was bad for our health, society allows and accommodates plenty of mediated risks that people take despite it being bad for their health, from drinking to skydiving to motorcycles.

In addition, she shows that science has no definitive proof that being fat itself is bad for your health, showing that the causation links between weight and diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and much more are currently being debated. She shows that dieting and the weight cycling that comes with it, has been proven to be more unhealthy than simply being fat. She pulls apart related issues like what made our culture so disdainful of fatness, its intersections with rape culture, racism, and homophobia, and the horrid ways our culture discriminates against fat people, especially fat girls.

Unshrinking is a powerful and necessary book, and I recommend it to anyone who's felt uncomfortable about fatphobia but didn't know how to put it into words. It also gives helpful insights into how to raise children without them internalizing fatphobia, how to pull apart your own internalized fatphobia, and how to move forward.

Content warnings for discussions of suicidal ideation, fatphobia, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, sexual assault.

[maaarine]

Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia (Kate Manne, 2024)

"Perhaps the most vital complication, when it comes to the relationship between health and weight, is stigma.

People in larger bodies routinely face social stigma, as we saw in the opening chapter.

And there is now considerable evidence of the adverse health effects of being subject to these biases.

One study divided people classified as obese into two groups: those who demonstrated strong forms of internalized fatphobia—for example, the idea that they were lazy or unattractive because of their weight—and those who did not.

The “high internalized weight stigma” participants were some three times more likely to have metabolic syndrome—a cluster of risk factors including high blood pressure, high blood glucose, abnormal cholesterol levels, and a high waist circumference—compared with “low internalized weight stigma” participants of the same age, race, gender, and so on.

Members of the “high internalized weight bias” group were also six times more likely to have high triglycerides than their “low internalized weight bias” counterparts.

“There is a common misconception that stigma might help motivate individuals with obesity to lose weight and improve their health,” noted the lead researcher, Rebecca Pearl.

“We are finding it has quite the opposite effect.”

And, as the writer and health reporter Virginia Sole-Smith summarizes in connection with this emerging body of research, researchers have found that the stress of stigma increases inflammation and cortisol levels, both of which are associated with negative health outcomes. 

Moreover, as we’ve seen, weight stigma causes fat people to avoid seeking medical care, and results in our getting inadequate care when we do seek it out."

[read-books-by-women]

Unshrinking

For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wed

Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia by Kate Manne

For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not. Blending intimate stories with trenchant analysis, Manne shows why fatphobia matters, now more than ever. Over the last decades, bias has waned in every category except one: body size. Here she examines how anti-fatness operates – how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect and poor educational outcomes. It is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. Fatphobia is a social justice issue. In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of ‘body reflexivity’ - a radical re-evaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to simply love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size

[kammartinez]

Rebelling against fat-shaming society

Each of us wants to feel like the author of our public character. We want to succeed in looking and acting in certain ways, to realize the v

[kamreadsandrecs]

Rebelling against fat-shaming society

Each of us wants to feel like the author of our public character. We want to succeed in looking and acting in certain ways, to realize the v