Is Fat Still a Feminist Issue?

Examining Lindy West's 'Shrill' alongside Susie Orbach's seminal text

Photo by Good Faces on Unsplash

I recently watched the Hulu series Shrill (available on BBC iPlayer) starring Aidy Bryant as a plus-size woman who is sick of being nice about the way people treat her.  Aidy in the part of Annie begins to follow her own desires and to dress in a way that she wants, encouraged along by her British-Nigerian housemate Fran, who is also plus-size but refreshingly confident about her looks and her sexual appetite as a lesbian woman.  

What is also good about the series is that it doesn’t teeter around the edge of Annie as being perfect, either.  She makes mistakes in her new-found confidence and she is sometimes selfish, making bad choices, as we all do.  None of the characters are perfect and all are believable.

Annie begins writing about some of the outrageous treatment she receives, often at the hands of complete strangers, for The Daily Thorn to the dismay of her health obsessed boss.  One particularly memorable scene sees Annie attending a women’s conference where she is offered ‘leg makeup’ to cover up the ugliness of her legs.  Then there is the personal trainer who tells her that there is an attractive person inside her, she just needs to lose the fat, and the more disturbing scene where Annie’s visit to the gynaecologist results in her being offered a leaflet on gastric bands. 

Speaking in 2018, on the fortieth anniversary of her widely acclaimed book Fat is a Feminist Issue, Susie Orbach claimed that issues around women’s bodies, in her opinion, have gotten worse in recent years.  Her reasons for this appear to lie with the public acceptance around fat as being a disease requiring medicalisation, rather than a lifestyle or individual choice. 

Echoing the scene in Shrill with Annie’s gynaecologist, Orbach cites a 2018 report claiming that one in three women refuse to attend for smear tests due to shame around their own bodies.  This is further intensified through pregnancy, with expectant and new mothers exhibiting considerable anxiety around their body shape, according to midwives.  A disturbing trend affecting the bonding process with their new born.  

Orbach states that when she originally wrote the book, it was distributed through women’s magazines and aimed mainly at working-class mothers.  Speaking about women’s lived experience, it referenced how preoccupied we were with women eating as a source of comfort, often when they felt depleted and empty due to their roles in fulfilling the needs of their families.

Part of the current worsening of fat as a feminist issue, Orbach suggests, is due to the normalisation of the porn industry amongst teenagers and the fashion industries portrayals of teen girls.  Orbach also worries about the development of so-called ‘non-foods’ made to replicate previous staples of children’s lunch boxes such as potato chips.  This, she suggests, allows for ideas to become absorbed that real food is somehow quasi-dangerous.

Clearly, For Orbach, the body remains a political project, limiting women. I would also suggest that, as I discussed last week in my Frida Kahlo post, the proliferation of reality shows on mainstream TV glorifying a certain ‘type’ of woman is unhelpful, particularly for the younger generation of women, as the rise in plastic surgery treatments for teenage girls would testify.

Photo by Jennifer Enujiugha on Pexels

In a great piece in Ms Magazine back in 2019, Sara Simon suggests that not only is fat a feminist issue, but it is also a queer issue, a racialised issue, and an issue of class, stating that this is because ‘fatness’ is inseparable from all other intersections of identity.

She points out that we rarely hear conversations about fat liberation, instead, preferring to focus on body positivity and thus erasing the revolutionary power of the long-standing feminist movement to fight fatphobia. She suggests that there is a connection between fat acceptance and second-wave feminism, and that since queer organisation emerged at around the same time, fatphobia impacts people from every other identity group: you can be fat and black, fat and heterosexual, fat and trans, and so on. 

Her suggestions around fat and identity make a lot of sense: in a culture where beauty and thinness is celebrated, it is easy to struggle with acceptance of your own identity when it doesn’t fit the accepted stereotypes portrayed in the mainstream media.

The Shrill series is based on comedian Lindy West’s essay collection Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman which delivers both a humorous and ironic punch at the predicaments she finds herself in as a fat woman who refuses to be silenced.  West provocatively examines, through her memoir-style essays, how she went from being silent and invisible to speaking out – and speaking up.

Photo by RF ._. studio on Pexels

After watching a bunch of (admittedly enjoyable) series featuring slim, mostly white, mostly straight, fashionably dressed young women deal with everyday issues around work, relationships, and gender politics, it made me realise that we need to see a wider variety of women’s stories like this in all areas of the media.