Aubrey Gordon > Quotes

“We need a world that insists upon safety and dignity for all of us—not because we are beautiful, healthy, blameless, exceptional, or beyond reproach, but because we are human beings.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“This cultural obsession with weight loss doesn’t just impact our physical and mental health; it also impacts our sense of self and, consequently, our relationships with others of different sizes.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“I’m just concerned for your health. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you, again and again, that you’re going to die. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you that no one will love you at your size. I’m concerned for your health, so I cannot treat you with basic respect.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“In The Obesity Myth, Paul Campos argues that as overt racism, sexism, and classism fell out of favor among white and wealthy Americans, anti-fat bias offered a stand-in: a dog whistle that allowed disdain and bigotry aimed at poor people and people of color to persist, uninterrupted and simply renamed.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Despite constant insistence that we lose weight for our health and track the simple arithmetic of calories in, calories out, there is no data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Often, we defend ourselves by insisting that concerns about our health are wrongheaded, rooted in faulty and broad assumptions. We rattle off our test results and hospital records, citing proudly that we’ve never had a heart attack, hypertension, or diabetes. We proudly recite our gym schedules and the contents of our refrigerators. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us. Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. We insist on our goodness by relying on our health. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“I guess if you hate it that much, you should just lose weight. But despite its ubiquity in conversations about fatness and fat people, that is the logic of abuse. You made me do this. I wouldn’t hurt you if you didn’t make me.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“All of us deserve peaceful relationships with our own bodies, regardless of whether or not others perceive us as happy or healthy.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Fat people are frequently spoken about or at, but we’re rarely heard. Instead, bodies and experiences like mine become caricatured and symbolic, either as a kind of effigy or as a pornography of suffering. Bodies and experiences like mine are rarely allowed to just be ours.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“I don’t really want to hear everything you’re doing to avoid looking like me.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Whether being fat is a choice for an individual or not, they do not deserve discrimination, harassment, or unkind treatment because of the size of their bodies. None of us should have to change our appearance in order to “earn” basic respect and dignity.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“In books, political cartoons, films, and TV shows, fat bodies make up the failings of America, capitalism, beauty standards, excess, and consumerism. Fat bodies represent at once the poorest of the poor and the pinnacle of unchecked power, consumption, and decay. Our bodies have borne the blame for so much. Whole artistic worlds are built on the premise that bodies like mine are monstrous, repulsive, and—worst of all—contagious. From individuals to institutions, academia to the evening news, fat people are made bogeymen. And that spills into daily experiences of abuse, driven by intentions both good and ill, but always with the same outcome: an intense shame for simply daring to exist in the bodies many of us have always had.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“While body positivity seems to be everywhere, it doesn’t appear to be changing our deeply held, deeply harmful beliefs about fatness and fat people.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness. We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“fat hate starts young, that its trauma can last a lifetime, and that early intervention will be essential to raising a generation of more compassionate people.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“This should not be the only book you read by a fat person about fatness and anti-fatness. Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more. Whether you’re new to thinking critically about anti-fatness or a longstanding fat activist, be sure to locate this book, accurately, as just one of many fat perspectives available to you. Writers who aren’t fat have made substantial contributions here too. Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is an indispensable history linking anti-Black racism to anti-fatness. J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics analyzes the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the United States’ so-called obesity epidemic. Each of these works offer vital analysis of the mechanics and history of anti-fatness. And each will deepen your thinking about anti-fatness and your clarity in countering anti-fatness.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Fat hasn’t become a bad word because fatness is somehow inherently undesirable but because of what we attach to it. We take “fat” to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy. But fatness itself is simply one aspect of our bodies—and a very small part of who each of us is. It deserves to be described as a simple fact, bearing little relevance to our worth or worthiness but a great deal of relevance to how we’re treated by individuals and institutions.”
― Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“If a marginalized identity or experience can be established to be a choice, then solving the problems that marginalized individuals face falls to those individuals themselves rather than a broader collective.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“When we reduce fat people to their bodies, to “before and after,” or to bellies and rolls, we come to think of fat people as bodies without personhood. Fat bodies become symbols of disembodied disgust.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Its rallying cry, love your body, presumes that our greatest challenges are internal, a poisoned kind of thought about our own bodies. It cannot adapt to those of us who love our bodies, but whose bodies are rejected by those around us, used as grounds for ejecting us from employment, healthcare, and other areas of life.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“But not remembering treating fat people badly isn’t necessarily a sign of having treated fat people well—it’s just as likely a sign of having so deeply normalized poor treatment of fat people that we don’t even remember when we’ve done it.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“A diet is a cure that doesn’t work for a disease that doesn’t exist.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“That is, what we think of as health risks associated with being fat may in fact be health risks of experiencing discrimination and internalizing stigma.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Despite growing evidence to the contrary, we all share a cultural belief that fat bodies are an individual failing that each of us can and must control. Despite a mountain of evidence linking physical and mental health to social discrimination, the conversation about fat and health stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the possible influence of stigma in determining fat people’s health.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“I choose to believe that fat people can be genuinely attractive, truly loved, actually lovable, sincerely wanted.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“We do not consider the many causes of weight loss. We don’t remember troubling weight loss is sometimes prompted by grief from a breakup, divorce, or death. We don’t think about weight loss caused by cancer or chemotherapy. We don’t consider that the person in front of us might be going through a medical crisis, their weight loss a sign of abrupt and troubling change rather than hard-fought victory. And we don’t consider that weight loss is sometimes linked to declining mental health or a new wave of disordered eating. In our eagerness to compliment what we assume is desired weight loss, many of us end up congratulating restrictive eating disorders, grief, and trauma in the process, revealing that we are in a constant state of surveillance, monitoring and assessing the bodies of those around us. We keep our disappointment and displeasure quiet, revealing our disapproval of fatness only in our celebration of thinness.”
― Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Just lose weight is deeply dismissive, incuriously judgmental. It assumes that fat people have neither considered nor attempted weight loss and, more than that, that thin experts need to teach us about the wrongness of our bodies and how to make them right.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People