![]() We're also having a similar sort of transformation in the weight loss world where it's sort of changing its clothes and putting on a fedora and those glasses with a nose and mustache attached. If body positivity was exploding our understandings of beauty, that would look really different, we would have more people who were visibly disfigured or disabled, we would have more people who are my size or larger, like very fat people, we would have more folks with like skin issues or acne being pictured. Much of the body positivity movement is focused on very slightly moving the goalposts, very slightly widening the target of who we consider an acceptable body. It doesn't require folks to reflect on their own behaviors. What do you make of the cultural shifts like the body positivity movement and efforts to combat fatphobia?ĪG: I would say that as a fat person, the primary effect that I notice with body positivity is a false sense of security amongst people who are not fat that they're doing the right thing because they tell people to love their bodies. That feels much more interesting and fruitful to me than like getting into a fight with somebody about whether or not it's okay for them to be on a low carb diet. It feels much more important to me that if we're having a conversation about working out, we have a conversation about the ways in which bodybuilding culture and working out has been used to drive, like, organized white supremacy. ![]() And what we're trying to change is like these people with power, who are like, in measurable ways, harming people.ĪG: It is extremely ineffective to try and get a bunch of individual people to change their individual behavior and expect societal change to result solely from that. And it's like, she's in college, she's experimenting with ideologies, but this becomes then, like, 55 YouTube video essays “fat activists don't want you to go to the gym.” Other than like, I think individuals should be kind to others, I really have no individual prescriptions for anybody. Some random person on a talk show-I think she was, like, 19-said it's fat phobic to do CrossFit or something like that. As soon as you start talking about this stuff publicly, what you get is somebody will say, “well, what about the fat activists who think it's fat-phobic to go to the gym?” This actually happened a couple of weeks ago. I think that most of the messages that people have gotten about this issue have been so misrepresented to them. MH: So much of this is about who has power in a situation. Over Zoom from their respective homes in Portland and Berlin, Gordon and Hobbes talked to GQ about falling for fad diets, why health myths spread and the limits of the body positivity movement. The idea is to encourage us to question these dizzying institutional narratives that we’ve absorbed as fact, and then, says Gordon, “do whatever you wanna do, man.” In other words, mocking someone for trying the Master Cleanse isn’t the point. Ultimately, when it comes to our health, logic and science are no match for myth and narrative. But by rigorously fact-checking quackery, they reveal that wellness is a cultural construct often exploited by profit-driven grifters and upheld by well-meaning, health-conscious consumers. (It turns out, for example, that celery juice is not a cure-all elixir, but simply a glass of water.)īut there’s no moralistic finger-wagging here Hobbes and Gordon don’t care if you’re vegan or whether you do CrossFit. Gordon, who writes under the moniker Your Fat Friend, is referring to the revelatory moments that tend to punctuate episodes of Maintenance Phase, the podcast she co-hosts with the journalist Michael Hobbes, formerly of You’re Wrong About, where they methodically dismantle health myths churned out by the “wellness-industrial complex.” Sometimes these moments are sensational-an Australian wellness influencer named Belle Gibson faking cancer-but more often the duo is bringing overstated wellness claims back to earth. ![]() “It's so fun to get your mind blown,” says the author and activist Aubrey Gordon over Zoom.
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