Was Fat Is a Feminist Issue Liberating? Or Weight-Loss Propaganda?

The history of how women have endeavored to change, and usually shrink, the shape of our bodies is littered with artifacts so horrible they are often humorous: the massive, vibrating Magic Couch that promised 1950s husbands weight loss for their wives as a perfect holiday gift; the mail-order tapeworms that packaged parasites as a beauty product; the 1970s head-to-toe sauna sleeve meant to “melt” fat away; and the closets full of ThighMasters, Ab Rollers, and Butt Blasters that have since falsely promised to fix whatever “problem area” the era’s beauty standards dubbed in most urgent need of improvement or eradication.

The unabashed fixation on losing weight that drives demand for one such gimmick after another is what makes this assemblage so absurd, but the fact that this single-minded focus on slimming has survived for decades—through the fights for suffrage, reproductive rights, equal pay, and yes, even the body-positivity movement—feels like a gut punch to this twenty-first-century reader. Is aspiring to take up less space, and investing intensely to achieve it, actually inextricable from modern American womanhood?

When I first read Susie Orbach’s Fat Is a Feminist Issue as a graduate student in the early 2000s, I certainly didn’t think so. The book was published in 1978, the year I was born, and this confidence made me hate the bestseller that was called “shatteringly powerful” in offering the impossible—an “anti-diet guide to permanent weight loss”—in a characteristic review. Orbach’s title felt excitingly au courant, but her core argument struck me as only OK: that women are not fat due to their inherent weakness but rather because of a patriarchal society that makes food and their figures one of the few domains women (mostly) control. Compulsive overeating and its attendant weight gain make sense in this context as something other than a moral failure, whether as an act of resistance against dominant beauty and domestic expectations or as an equally desperate attempt to create a bodily armor to contend with the expanded demands of womanhood. On the one hand, fat could provide a literal defense against sexual violence; Orbach described the thickness of one woman’s thighs as creating a wall around her vagina. For others, the protection was more symbolic, as “the physical model of the shy, retiring flower, demurely smiling beneath lowered eyelashes, is too frail and insubstantial to accomplish the daily tasks of living that are their responsibility,” she explained in a decade in which more women filed for divorce and pursued advanced degrees than ever before. Her bottom line was to remind women that “at the point of giving up the fat you are not then throwing out all of yourself because you are more than the fat.” Weight loss as liberation.

The troubling part, in my eyes, was Orbach’s underlying assumption: that fatness is obviously bad, and an obstacle all psychologically healthy women should want to overcome. As Orbach explained, and appeared to accept as a rule of nature: “Fat women can’t win.” Framing girth as psychosocial pathology rather than personal failure might have been transgressive back in the 1970s—British Cosmopolitan called her argument a “controversial” new approach to a familiar “vicious cycle”—but to my early-aughts eyes, it just felt more like weight-loss propaganda sneakily trussed up as feminist liberation. How else could one interpret conclusions such as, “They feel safer using their mouths to feed themselves than using them and being assertive”? Or the confident assertion that only when a woman “risks going without food for a couple of hours until [she] experiences some hunger sensations” will she unlock self-knowledge and understand the nourishment she actually craves”? Perhaps most troubling to me was that Orbach, a prestigious feminist psychoanalyst, did not seem to be aware of, or even interested in grappling with, this tension. Fat Is a Feminist Issue, or “Fifi,” as Orbach now affectionately shortens the title, felt like a damning artifact of a less enlightened era when even eminent feminists couldn’t see past their own fat hatred, or even felt the need to mask it.

My unease, and even outrage, made sense at the height of the love-your-body/lifestyle-not-diet mood of the early-2000s wellness movement. Fat Is a Feminist Issue made no pretenses of loving or even accepting fat bodies as they are, but encouraged women to understand their size as the somatic manifestation of a social pathology. And feminist empowerment meant embracing this causal link and summoning the self-possession to shed the pounds that mostly symbolized subordination to patriarchy, or at least a self-destructive form of resistance to it.