What new research tells us about anti-fatness in media narratives: Q&A with NAAFA’s Tigress Osborn
by: Saneeha Mirza
posted on Monday, February 27, 2023
Over the last few years, changes in social media and content creation have led to a push to rethink which bodies we see as beautiful and healthy. The growth of self-created media platforms has allowed new publishers to thrive where they would otherwise have been shut out from traditional news outlets. Concepts like fat stigma, weight bias, and fat justice are gaining visibility, but is mainstream media catching up accordingly?
New research from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) and BMSG’s Head of Research, Pamela Meija, examined a year of media coverage around weight stigma and fat justice. Their findings indicate that there were astonishingly few articles covering fat justice, compared to thousands of articles focusing on weight loss and harmful framing surrounding fat people. This matters because media is a powerful tool to shape the way that policymakers and the general public think about weight, health, and fat people; in light of the current news narratives about fatness, it’s not surprising that so few states have protections in place against weight-based discrimination, or that being dismissed or shamed is a common experience for fat people simply seeking medical attention.
BMSG sat down with NAAFA Board Chair and activist Tigress Osborn to discuss NAAFA and BMSG’s research findings. Tigress illuminated the various intersections that need to be acknowledged when discussing anti-fatness, discussed how the financial interests of pharmaceutical companies have influenced recent headlines regarding higher weight children, and shed light on how the recent release of Academy Award nominations for The Whale are reflective of the way that society and media view fat people. In her 14 years with NAAFA, Tigress has provided guidance for journalists who hope to improve their coverage of fat people and fat justice.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q&A
In the time that you’ve been involved with NAAFA, how do you think fat acceptance has changed? Do you feel like there has been progress? Or do you think it’s been regressive?
It’s a really complicated answer because things are simultaneously better and worse. There’s a lot more fat visibility in the media, and more of that is self-created media in the form of blogs and social media, which means that fat people are in control of their own narrative. So that contributes to a wider variety of depictions of fat people in the media as a whole. … Part of what we’ve done with the research we’ve [conducted with BMSG] is measure the landscape. The outrageous difference in sheer volume of coverage of fat people, when we’re talking about weight loss or health versus when we’re talking about literally anything else about fat people, it’s a huge difference. And that’s still what it looks like in the mainstream media. And so what that means is that public opinion and government policies are still very much shaped by the major areas of media in which fat people are underrepresented or misrepresented at best and completely invisible or actively erased at worst.
Public opinion and government policies are still very much shaped by the major areas of media in which fat people are underrepresented or misrepresented at best and completely invisible or actively erased at worst.
In the research that NAAFA recently released with BMSG, did any of those findings surprise you?
I expected there to be really disparate coverage, but I didn’t expect it to be that dramatically different. I am used to seeing a little bit better, a little bit more coverage of fat people because I’m looking at alternative media, especially self-created media. But it’s important for us to remember that policymakers don’t turn to your favorite fat girl’s blog, they turn to CNN, right? They turn to Newsweek; they turn to The New York Times.
And I just think that really underscores the way that the news sources that are considered reputable could be doing better. The stories are out there, the sources are out there. The information is out there. So really the only explanation for why we are not doing better is we don’t care enough to be doing better.
The stories are out there, the sources are out there. The information is out there. So really the only explanation for why we are not doing better is we don’t care enough to be doing better.
When the media do cover weight, what type of conversation is currently being fostered?
The mainstream media narrative is overly invested in talking about health, and almost always from the perspective of how fat is unhealthy with no acknowledgment of the research that shows that fat is healthy. Part of what’s challenging about that conversation is the general public thinks that’s organic. It’s actually a conversation that is very driven by weight loss interests and their funding, right? The fat rights movement is one of the most underfunded social justice [causes] in this country and globally. … The more there is media coverage of the idea that fat is a medical problem that should be solved, the more both the media and the general public believe that narrative, and so the more they want to see that kind of coverage. And so it’s like a snowball effect.
What role does public health play in driving this narrative?
National health organizations built the idea of an obesity epidemic on statistics that were then later reanalyzed and shown not to actually be what they were presented as, but that horse is out of the barn in the media. Also, in 2013, when the American Medical Association designated obesity as a disease, that got all kinds of attention. There wasn’t a lot of media attention about the fact that they did that against the advice of their own internal committee. One of the things that troubles me most about medical media coverage about fat people is that there’s not enough questioning of the interests of the people who do the research that is most quoted. We also know that the increased medicalization of fat leads to problems with fat people and access to medical and health care.
When we think about expert sources, we often think of a doctor or a researcher. If you were to advise journalists out there, who would you tell them to interview or seek out as expert sources?
I’m biased here because I do think that journalists should be asking NAAFA, right? We’ve been doing this for 53 years and [we’re] predominantly a group of volunteers. There are so many people who work in fat rights and fat advocacy who do that through a civil rights lens, [through] a genuine concern for fat people’s health without a profit investment. There are other fat liberation organizations. There are fat studies programs in universities across the country. There are scholars in other fields who do weight-neutral research in everything from dietetics to urban planning.
You could ask actual fat people. [But] there’s a thing that happens in journalism — this “both sidesism” — where if you tell a story of fat liberation or you tell a story of fat rights or you tell a story of fat people living their best lives, you have to do a “but scientists say this is dangerous” story. I’m in favor of fat-quality-of-life without weight loss.
Let’s talk about body positivity. Is it helpful? How does it intersect with and differ from fat justice?
On the one hand, the mainstreaming of body positivity made people a little bit more attentive to the concept of fat shaming. But what it has also done is decontextualize anti-fatness from the rest of this generic dialogue around bodies. So what I mean there is body positivity tends to focus on the personal: How do you feel about your body? Do you feel good about your body? Fat liberation historically has concentrated a lot more on the systemic. How does the world treat you? What are you prevented from [having] access to?
[Focusing too much on individuals] is serious because it affects people’s mental health. And if you think your body is trash, you are less likely to advocate for your rights as a person in that body. So if you can embrace body positivity, I am all for that. I just don’t want people to stop there; that’s an easier narrative because it’s a lot more fun to be like “stretch marks are cool” than [it is] to talk about employment discrimination or lack of medical access.
Body positivity tends to focus on the personal: How do you feel about your body? Do you feel good about your body? Fat liberation historically has concentrated a lot more on the systemic. How does the world treat you? What are you prevented from [having] access to?
Body positivity also sounds convenient for marketers. One day curves are in; the next they’re out.
[Body positivity] is a buzzword, and it’s a trend. We’ve constructed a media world in which we only trust messages of body positivity from people who are just barely outside of the norms, who are getting the economic opportunities to talk about it, who are getting the media opportunities to talk about it. But [body positivity] started with people in rebel bodies, right? People in historically disenfranchised bodies. It started with Black women … It started with queer folks, it started with disabled folks. It started with folks who were talking about scarification and amputees — all these people who were very outside of what we consider the norms.
[When people talk about embracing curves] they’re not talking about bumps and rolls. … Also if things like government policies are dependent on whether curves are in or out, I can’t expect equitable treatment in the culture. I need a chair that fits my big ass, whether curves are in or out. I need accommodations on public transit, I need to be able to get a surgery that’s gonna change my life, I need to be paid fairly at my job, and I need to be represented in the media, whether curves are in or out.
Let’s talk a bit about how weight stigma shows up in other areas, outside of news coverage, like entertainment. Brendan Fraser was recently nominated for an Academy Award, and the makeup team for the movie he starred in, The Whale, was also nominated. What message does that send?
Part of the problem is not The Whale itself; it is the overall landscape of representation of people in Hollywood, of fat people in Hollywood. If The Whale came out in a world where there was a robust representation of a multitude of kinds of fat characters and fat lives, it’d be a whole different discussion. But in a landscape where the historical representation of fat people has predominantly been as sidekicks, as butts of jokes, as all of these negative stereotypes, then having a fat tragedy movie is just reinforcing the greater cultural narrative that fat is always tragic first of all.
Second, this is in most ways not a story about being fat. It is a story about disability. It is a story about disordered eating. It is a story about depression. It is a story about the effects of homophobia on people’s relationships and lives. It’s a story about grief. The problem is, this is a story about trauma, but it is presented as a story that is traumatic because that trauma led to this man becoming incredibly large. The specific things that are shown in this movie about the experience of being that size should have nuance in their presentation and should be in works created by people who are actually that size.
When we talk about fat bias, what are some intersections that we should be acknowledging as well when we do that?
It’s almost universally intersectional. We always have to talk about race when we talk about anti-fatness because all of our construction of beauty ideals and health ideals are based in racist ideas about bodies. … Class is always part of the picture; anti-fat bias affects people economically, and economics affects people’s body size. The connections of fat and health are so often blatantly ableist that you have to talk about that. There are gender intersections, especially in terms of beauty standards, but also in terms of the economic impact of being fat. Fat has to do with politics; fat has to do with reproductive rights. Even if abortion access were fully restored, there would still be care clinics that don’t have tables that accommodate higher weights, you know?
Any closing thoughts?
If you are a journalist who does care about doing better, then you gotta push your industry more. And if you’re a reader who cares about that coverage, you gotta push the industry more. When you like something a journalist has done in terms of the coverage of fat people, you gotta let the publication know. You gotta let the journalists know.
Read the full report: https://naafa.org/mediastudy