Manipulate🕹, Moonsplain🌙, Murder-Bears🧸

Back when I had a podcast, one of my early guests was a self-styled “fat activist.” I don’t want to call her out by name here, because I consider her a dear friend, though I do think she is, and was, wrong about many things.

We had a long conversation about how she was fat 1 from a very young age, how she was always attempting diets and failing, how nothing seemed to help her lose weight—until finally she had an epiphany: the “purpose” of her body wasn’t to be “skinny,” or “attractive,” or “fit”; it was for living in, enjoying, and serving the people around her.

I could affirm all this, of course, but then she started hammering me with factual claims that I instinctively knew were wrong: that diets “don’t work,” that BMI is racist and meaningless, that “health at every size” is possible, there are no “bad foods,” that some bodies are just “naturally fat.” A lot of it just didn’t make basic intuitive sense (you’re telling me that there’s no downside at all to putting twice as much stress on your knees every single time you take a step?), but I wasn’t really equipped to argue with her at that moment—and, being that I myself was obese at the time, I was temperamentally inclined to at least nod along.

But I’ve been thinking about the conversation in the years since, and I think I’ve finally landed on an analogy that makes the point I wish I’d made at the time 2 : consider how conservatives and libertarians talk about climate change.

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