Relationscapes
Turning the Tables on Fatphobia (with Kate Manne)
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps
Introduction – 0:00
BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, the podcast where we map the stories and ideas that shape our identities and connect us with each other. I'm journalist Blair Hodges and our guide in this episode is philosopher Kate Manne.
KATE MANNE: I felt so angry in that moment, he had watched a healthy fat person shrink themself in a way that had he asked just a few questions and had I answered honestly, he would've seen that I was doing some tremendously unhealthy and disordered and problematic, but there was none of that care, that concern, that oversight. And I just thought, you know what? Screw this. Like, this is not how I wanna live my life, it's not the example I wanna set for my young daughter, this is not okay. And that was really a catalyst for the book.
BLAIR HODGES: Kate Manne was used to working hard and seeing results, earning her PhD, publishing a smash-hit book on misogyny, but there was one area of her life where she felt like a total failure no matter what she did: her weight. She tried everything. Things finally came to a head during a doctor visit when she nearly passed out because she was literally starving, she hadn't eaten in days, and her doctor complimented her size but didn't seem to notice what dire shape she was really in.
So, she started digging deeply into fatness. Along the way she began to discover that a lot of the beliefs we have about fatness--like why it occurs and how to get rid of it—were extremely flawed. Kate Manne joins us right now to talk about the book that grew out of her personal anguish. It's called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia.
Something Weighing On Kate's Mind – 02:15
BLAIR HODGES: Kate Manne, welcome to Relationscapes.
KATE MANNE: Thanks for having me, Blair.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure, I'm really excited you're here. I know when one of your previous books came out, you had a hard time doing publicity for it, especially on TV, because you worried people would be critical of your weight. Which is horrible. So the publicity thing hasn't been so easy for you.
KATE MANNE: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I think the audio medium has always been my friend, but certainly I really found myself shrinking from the limelight after my first book came out. And it was an unexpectedly nice position to be in for an academic. I am now much more a public-facing philosopher, is what I'm often called.
But at that time, I was someone who was really working within the standard confines of academia, but did want to reach a wider audience if I possibly could, with my first book, which was about misogyny. And I just had the good luck of it coming out a week that people happened to be interested in misogyny for once, which was—
It was the week the MeToo movement was publicized by celebrities like Alyssa Milano, after having been led by Tarana Burke, of course, for over a decade. And so everyone was talking about misogyny. And my book became much bigger than I had any right to expect. And I found myself invited to appear in all sorts of in-person and on-camera interviews, where I was really worried about doing any of that because I was at the time much fatter than I am now.
I now identify as a small fat person, using the parallel of fat activism. I was then, I would say, somewhere between a mid and large fat person. And the idea that my body, my fat body, would be seen as just a really obvious point of vulnerability and that it would be used to take me down, to question my authority, and to jeer at me meant that I was very reluctant to take advantage of what were really big opportunities to put my message out there and put myself out there.
BLAIR HODGES: And it's ironic because, I mean, the book was about misogyny. And oftentimes fatphobia that's internalized, like you described, can also be connected to gender and how people assume different bodies should look according to gender. Like, I guess there's often more social pressures on women.
KATE MANNE: Yeah. And in a way, I think that is why I became so invested in the subject matter. I'm someone who was really influenced by fat activism in my own private thought, for I've been influenced in this political issue by fat activists for a long time.
However, it didn't really affect the way I conducted my research for, I would say, at least 15 years after that initial influence. So I had cut my teeth on authors like Kate Harding and Leslie Kinzel and Marion Kirby, all these classics in the movement in the early 2000s, when I was encountering the—what is known as the "Fatosphere." So fat bloggers, fat fashion influences, people who were thinking about body positivity well before it was a hashtag. Well before there really were hashtags in any meaningful sense.
And yet, for my own part, I really came to think about these issues, like, fresh, when I thought about misogyny as fundamentally intersecting with fatphobia. Because my first two books—as I mentioned, my first book, but also my second book Entitled—they were about misogyny. And I felt like I had really not addressed misogyny in anything like a full way, even notwithstanding the fact that, look, you can never cover everything. There was this aspect of my own experience, the way that misogyny weaponizes fatphobia, that I had just not touched because it was too personal, it was too raw.
But I wanted to circle back to that for exactly that reason. Because, yeah, misogyny both crucially utilizes and I think requires fatphobia.
Kate's Extreme Measures Lead to a Breaking Point – 06:35
BLAIR HODGES: And this got to the point for you where your physical health became an issue. One of the most stunning moments for me in the book was a memory that you're relating, because you get quite personal in the book. And this is when you're in a doctor's office and you're almost passing out. Take us to that moment. It seemed pretty extreme.
KATE MANNE: Yeah. I mean, I am one of these people whose bodily experience is often doubted, because I was a fat person who was very healthy. And oftentimes when I was either trying to lose weight through dieting or dieting and exercise, I would think to myself, what is this really about? Because my blood pressure is great.
At that stage in my life, I was very fit, because when you have quite a lot of mass, then making yourself exercise that mass requires quite a lot of fitness to move. Mass also moves mass. So I was, again, one of these kind of active, healthy fat people who felt a pressure to shrink myself largely for aesthetic and kind of inchoate reasons that were no less intense for being not very well articulated.
And I got to the point where I couldn't continue to lose weight—or really lose weight whatsoever—through dieting in a so-called healthy way. I got to the point where I had been on so many diets that my metabolism had kind of slowed to a crawl. So I had been on various diets and low-carb eating plans and all of this for nearly a year, and nothing.
BLAIR HODGES: You're thinking about food constantly—ironically, thinking about food constantly.
KATE MANNE: And I just thought, you know what? I'm so sick of this. I'm just gonna stop eating. It just seems easier. It just seems easier to not have any food and just let my body survive off its own fat for a while and see how that goes. And it didn’t go great. It really was terrible for my health, and I think it still affects me to this day health-wise.
But yeah, I lost a lot of weight through just starving myself, and it culminated in going to the doctor for routine medical care. And I hadn’t eaten for seven days. I mean, really, I hadn’t consumed anything caloric of any kind. Not soup, not broth, not juice, not anything. And I just felt the world start to go fuzzy, black-brown at the edges.
And I knew I was gonna pass out. And I said this to my doctor, who had congratulated me on my pretty massive weight loss at that point. And he just said, oh, okay, well, look, we’re nearly done here anyway. And he gives me a little wave and leaves the room, leaving me to my own devices.
And I managed to come to, but I felt so angry in that moment. He had watched a healthy fat person shrink themselves in a way that, had he asked just a few questions and had I answered honestly, he would have seen that I was doing something tremendously unhealthy and disordered and problematic. But there was none of that care, that concern, that oversight.
And I just thought, you know what? Screw this. This is not how I want to live my life. It's not the example I want to set for my young daughter. This is not okay. I need to sort my head out regarding my body. And that was really a catalyst for the book.
Defining Fatphobia – 10:01
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So it seems like such a thing for an academic to do—just dive into the research on it. Right? And that's what you did. And when you're going to write a book about fatphobia, coming to it as a philosopher, one thing I know philosophers love to do is define stuff. So let's start there with your definition of fatphobia—what you arrived at for this book.
KATE MANNE: Yeah, so, great question. I define it as the unjust downranking of people in larger bodies. And like most people in the fat activist space, I also use the word “fat bodies” in a purely neutral way—as a neutral description of larger bodies. And it's meant to be a way of reclaiming that word and not regarding it as shameful to be in a larger body.
But some people might prefer to say “larger” or “bigger” bodies, and that’s also fine if you're not comfortable with the term fat. And what I do with that definition is look at what I call four strands of fatphobia, where I say that this downranking of fatter bodies comprises our aesthetic and sexual value, our moral value, our intellectual value, and also our health status.
So I think unpicking those strands is also this classic move of an analytic philosopher—to take what's often tangled together and try to separate out those elements and look at the thinking that informs all those strands of fatphobia.
BLAIR HODGES: And the book is especially helpful because you directly confront some myths. The idea that fatphobia is individual—you’re saying, no, it’s actually structural. This happens not just on an individual level, but in the way society is set up and the messages we receive collectively, and that there are structural things that need to be addressed.
That’s one myth. Another one is that a lot of people who are fatphobic don’t feel that it’s intrinsically wrong or aren’t doubtful about it, maybe in the same way that, say, sometimes racism might be today. For example, if you called someone a racist, they might say, no, I’m not, because that’s a terrible thing and I’m not a terrible person. If you called someone fatphobic, they might say, that’s not a thing. What are you talking about? Being fat’s wrong—so they might actually feel morally good.
And then the other one is that it’s seen as less important than other prejudices—sexism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism. And you’re striving here to point out that it can intersect with all of those things. So it’s not a contest of oppression. It’s just another way that society can pick people apart. And when it combines with some of those other “isms,” it really takes on an outsized role in people’s lives.
KATE MANNE: Yeah, that’s a really nice unpacking of those myths. So the definition of fatphobia is meant to do something that is a feature of a lot of my work, which is thinking about oppression from the point of view of the target or victim rather than the point of view of the perpetrator—not because perpetrators aren’t interesting and important to think about, but partly because there sometimes aren’t individual perpetrators, for the very reasons you gave.
Sometimes this is about going into a doctor’s office, and maybe everyone—hopefully, this might be actually quite rare—but just imagine, let’s say everyone is actually well disposed and has a good attitude towards you, despite being a larger person. However, there isn’t an examination table suitable for your body. The scales don’t hold you adequately. The needle chairs for your arm—exactly. Even the waiting room chairs are inadequate. This has actually been changing a little bit in recent years, at least in some areas of the country, I’m happy to say. But the very structures of material accommodations that are there—or not—create a fatphobic environment. You’re going into a space that is hostile to navigate, even if people are perfectly nice.
And that being said, people are often not perfectly nice. Because this form of oppression that I, again, as you say, think of as structural and systemic is partly perpetuated by individuals who often think that, look, I just care about the health of fat people, and I just care about the obesity epidemic, and I just care about blah, blah, blah—whatever it is.
And we can get into all of that complexity, and there are some valid questions to be answered about the relationship between weight and health. It’s a complex matter, and I don’t think it reduces entirely to prejudice to have that natural curiosity, given the nature of the discourse at least. However, often there are people for whom the idea that they just care about the health of larger people is window dressing, papering over actually feeling really disgusted toward and having a really prejudiced attitude toward larger people.
And that is reflected in the fact that most forms of—at least the biases this particular set of researchers were looking at, so race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and age—all of those forms of implicit bias, according to Harvard researchers, are declining. Anti-fat implicit bias is the only form of implicit bias, again of those studied, that seems to be on the rise.
And it’s also the form of explicit bias decreasing the most slowly. And this doesn’t mean that, as some people have put it, fatphobia is the last acceptable form of prejudice. If only there were some last acceptable form of prejudice—because there are always other acceptable forms of prejudice, as anyone who is trans or queer or who exists in a disabled body is unfortunately going to be able to testify to, given the reality of bigotry.
However, there is something about the way fatphobia, I would say, kind of goes under the radar in progressive, well-meaning circles that I think is a bit distinctive. And finally, too, it also intersects with every other major form of oppression. So it isn’t the oppression Olympics. It’s actually a compounding—racism and fatphobia work together to really oppress Black folks in larger bodies in ways that are more than the sum of their parts.
So we kind of need to address fatphobia in order to address, I think, any other major form of prejudice—including transphobia, misogyny, racism, classism, and more.
Different Fat Categories – 16:35
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, that sets us up perfectly. And we’re going to circle back to a lot of the points that you laid out as an overview. But I also want to point out I learned a lot from this book just about the discourse—about how people are talking about stuff. Because I’m not paying much attention on Instagram or other places to conversations about fatphobia or fat justice or anything like this.
And so to even find out that there was this taxonomy you mentioned a little bit earlier was news to me—that there’s “small fat,” “mid fat,” “large fat,” “superfat,” “infinifat.” That there are even these sorts of gradations. Is that something that’s more common for people in fat communities to know about than folks who aren’t in those circles?
KATE MANNE: I think totally. Although there's a caveat to this, which is a lot of fat people aren't in fat communities, unfortunately. One of the interesting things I think a lot about when it comes to fatphobia is that it's not an issue that is particularly niche in one sense. About two-thirds, or maybe even up to three-quarters of Americans are arguably somewhat fat, depending on how you do the classification.
And yet a lot of fat people walking around in larger bodies, or likely to be told by their doctor to lose weight, are not willing to identify as fat and be in fat community, because fatness is seen, falsely, as very malleable. The idea is, just lose weight, and the thin person within is ready to emerge. It's not the real me.
BLAIR HODGES: The thought, I could lose this if I tried.
KATE MANNE: Yeah. So the idea of being a certain level of fat is actually very important, because I sometimes identify as small fat. But I also think that some people don't even categorize me as fat in my present incarnation. And I’ve been fat almost all of my adult life, so this is an actual dilemma for me to self-describe accurately. I might even say borderline fat is a potentially useful term to demarcate someone who's considered fat in some contexts but not in others—like fat in New York City, but not necessarily in upstate New York.
BLAIR HODGES: It's like liminal fatness. It depends on where you're at.
KATE MANNE: It does a little bit. However, whatever the right way of classifying myself, it's super important that someone who is a small fat person has access to so much more—in terms of public spaces, clothing, the ability to travel, and adequate medical care—versus someone who is mid-fat, let alone large fat, let alone super fat.
Or at the very upper echelons, in infinifat, which is a term coined by Ash Nishuk, who has her podcast and blog The Fat Lip—I really recommend it to folks. It’s a very thoughtful analysis of what it is to be a person who is, in most ways, healthy and happy and just living her life, but in a very fat body that is marginalized on account of that degree of fatness, often reduced to a kind of trope, a figure of fun, or even, for many fat folks, a worst-case scenario.
And in a way, there’s just no comparing my experience—even as a previously mid-fat person—to someone who is really stigmatized as soon as they leave their house.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, not just by what people think, but even the built environment too.
KATE MANNE: Exactly. Exactly.
BLAIR HODGES: That’s Kate Manne, philosopher and author of Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia.
The Racist and Misogynist History of Fatphobia – 20:22
BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite parts of the book is when you dig into the history to show that the standards we have today and the ideas we have about body size aren’t static. They’re not something built into human nature that we’ve carried with us all throughout time. They’re historically created.
And so, in taking us through how today’s ideal body standards were created, you really open up the possibilities. It’s a nice way to shake us from our position of just thinking that these are value-neutral judgments instead of things that humans have created. So give us some examples throughout history of different beliefs about bodies.
KATE MANNE: So unlike many forms of prejudice—for example, misogyny, which is about as old as agriculture—I take it to be just a feature of patriarchy. Patriarchy itself is super old, super entrenched. Fatphobia, in at least its very intense form, is really a recent historical invention. The brilliant sociologist Sabrina Strings, who I know you’ve talked to in other contexts, has this work that really influenced me in this chapter, showing that it wasn’t until the mid-18th century that fatness fell into disrepute.
And the reason for that, she has discovered, is that fatness was previously seen as a sign of wealth, luxury, and abundance. Especially for white women, it was a sign of beauty, having enough, and plenty. Whereas when the transatlantic slave trade really ramped up in the mid-18th century, racist white colonizers needed a way to differentiate Black bodies from white bodies and justify the brutal and burgeoning enslavement of Black bodies in numbers that hadn’t been seen before.
And the way they did that was to create myths from the armchair that Black bodies were fatter than white bodies, especially Black women’s bodies. This wasn’t based on science as we understand it—it was based on pseudoscience. Often the theorizing was from men who had never been to the relevant parts of Africa.
But the idea was that the Black female body was large and thus could be justifiably enslaved in this brutal and, of course, disgustingly racist way. And that practice was already, on the face of it, so bad as to call out for justification. Fatphobia served that role.
Meaning, to be very clear about the order of events here: it wasn’t that fatness was disreputable and then associated with Blackness. It went the other way—Blackness was associated with fatness, and then fatness became a bad thing. And that led to the eventual creation of the image of white femininity, especially American Protestant femininity, as needing to be very slender, thin, and frail in order to make a contrast between white women and Black women.
So, yeah, it’s a really fascinating book—Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia—and I recommend it to all listeners. I think it gives a really plausible story as to why fatphobia became so powerful and entrenched so quickly and dramatically.
Impacts on Men and Gender Nonconforming People Too – 23:53
BLAIR HODGES: And it shows how it became hierarchical, that even today fatphobia tends to hit women and trans folks differently than it hits men. Now, it's also important to point out that it's difficult for men, too. For example, I know some men—it’s less likely for a man to find a support group about being a fat guy. There are probably fewer social media influencers. There's not as much fat fashion for men. Guys aren't really having the same kinds of conversations.
What's funny is how it connects into misogyny, too. Like, I think of “man boobs,” for example—calling a big guy's chest “man boobs” is a very negative thing. We're associating him with a woman. This is a way to denigrate a man, again rooted in ideas of misogyny.
KATE MANNE: Yeah. Fatness is feminized. And so that means I think fatphobia is worse for women—maybe partly because of that, but mostly because women's appearance is capital, it's prestige. It’s the coin of privilege for many women, being in conformity to aesthetic standards that are hard to meet. And that means thinness in today’s day and age.
But the flip side is that because fatness is feminized and seen as a feminine property, men who have more flesh on their bones tend not to be subject to some of the worst forms of employment discrimination. They're not necessarily subject to the same degree of taunting. But the taunting that does exist, and the accessibility barriers that do exist, they don’t necessarily have a ton of ways of pushing back against.
The resources socially to address the fatphobia that, let’s say, cis straight men face—setting aside certain complexities that are importantly intersectional—just aren’t fully developed. There isn’t the same intensity of fatphobia to begin with, but precisely because of that there isn’t the really strong pushback of an anti-fatphobic kind.
There are bits and pieces that I think are really good in this connection. For example, the fantastic podcast series Weight For It by Ronald Young Jr. that I really recommend to folks who are interested in this intersection of especially Black masculinity.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I haven’t heard of this. Sounds good.
KATE MANNE: Anti-fatness. Yeah. He’s someone who identifies as a fat Black man who explores ways in which—I think he would probably agree that in a way fatphobia is worse for women, all else being equal—but it can be very painful for men too, precisely because their resources haven’t yet been fully developed. We don’t have huge communities of influencers saying it’s cool to be a man who has a chest with more undulations and rolls. We don’t have that kind of discussion, community, and discourse.
Another resource that’s really great—this is complicated, because it’s a book called Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun L. Harrison. Da’Shaun is a nonbinary trans person, but in their recounting of their history, they were socialized as a Black boy. They have a really nuanced account of the way that for them fatness was feminizing and actually linked to certain kinds of childhood sexual abuse. It makes for really harrowing, confronting, and vital reading about the intersections between race, class, sexuality, being trans and/or nonbinary, and fatness.
It’s super nuanced and complex material that I think makes space for conversations we haven’t seen fully in the culture yet.
BLAIR HODGES: Those sound like really good resources. I’ll link those in the show notes.
Stereotypes About Weight and Health – 28:10
BLAIR HODGES: Let’s move to talk about health. You mentioned earlier that a lot of people might say they encourage people to lose weight, or they feel like they need to lose weight, because of their health. The idea is that being fat’s unhealthy, so losing weight must be healthy. And you say there’s actually a lot of research that challenges both of those beliefs.
KATE MANNE: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. What the research suggests about the relationship between weight and health at a very bird’s-eye view is that the relationship looks something like a U-shaped curve, where people who have a quote-unquote overweight BMI—and I use the BMI measurement advisedly because, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s racist garbage—
BLAIR HODGES: It's super racist.
KATE MANNE: Yes. Let’s use it as a reference point to locate what the U-shaped curve says at a population level. We can get into the limitations of BMI shortly, but the “overweight” folks are in the lowest-risk category from the perspective of mortality—which is already surprising to many people. Many just assume if you have an overweight BMI you should be thinner.
But that doesn’t look straightforwardly true from the perspective of mortality statistics, at least. People who are in the “normal weight” category have slightly higher mortality risks, and it’s comparable to people in the “moderately obese” category—those with a BMI between 30 and 35.
Now, if you get people who are either underweight on one hand, or very fat on the other—more than moderately obese, BMI above 35 or 40 depending on the study—then you do get elevated mortality risks. But as we see with people who are underweight, we immediately have to ask: is this correlation or causation? Because if someone is underweight, maybe other health issues are going on. Maybe there’s an underlying illness making them underweight and thus less healthy, less likely to live a long time.
Similarly, if someone is very fat, could that be a reflection not just of body size but of other factors—disease states, inadequate health care, the stress of stigma, the difficulty of exercising in public? Studies show the weight–health relationship is complicated, but it’s pretty clear that exercise is good for our health.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, moving your body.
KATE MANNE: Unfortunately for me, who likes to just sit still all day. But yeah, me too. Inconvenient news for me—but me too.
Point being, there’s a lot going on at the high-BMI categories that should make us hesitant to assume the weight itself is causing increased mortality. And here’s the kicker: even if it is—which is possible—it’s not clear what to do about it. Because most people who lose weight through diet and exercise, pharmaceuticals, or even to some extent weight-loss surgery, what happens? They lose weight and then regain it—and usually then some.
This isn’t based on one or two studies. This is based on huge meta-analyses of every longitudinal diet study to date. Studies over four or five years show that people who lose weight tend to end up heavier than they started. Between one-third and two-thirds of people who lose weight will end up heavier than they started.
BLAIR HODGES: I’m in that category.
KATE MANNE: Yeah, I mean I have been there many times before. Our bodies are very defensive against fat loss. And instead of calling it “weight regain,” we should probably call it “weight restoration.”
And the other thing I should say here is that the process of losing and regaining weight rapidly—what’s known as weight cycling—is linked to independently negative health outcomes, regardless of starting weight. So if you try to lose weight as a very fat person, it’s not clear that the weight was driving the risks in the first place. It’s not clear you can expect to lose weight and keep it off—that’s very unusual, if you look at the data.
And it’s not clear that if you lose and regain constantly, that won’t leave you in a worse position health-wise.
Is the Truth About the Difficulties of Weight Loss Discouraging – 33:05
BLAIR HODGES: Reading this part was hard for me, because I’d still like to lose some weight—in part because I want my clothes to fit like they did before. I like my clothes. I like to camp and I want to feel like I can move my body and not feel stuffed in.
As I’ve learned more about dieting and how ineffective it really is, I feel kind of discouraged. Did you feel discouraged by that research at all?
KATE MANNE: No, I felt really liberated by it. Because I’ve done this so much, and it so perfectly reflected my own experience, that I felt relieved.
I’m the kind of person who—this might sound hubristic, and I’ll touch wood as I say it—but typically if I set my mind to something, I can do it. There aren’t many things I’ve aimed at in my life that I haven’t figured out a way to do. And weight loss was really the one thing that, despite working harder at it than getting my PhD or getting the job I wanted or becoming the public-facing author I wanted, I could not do long-term.
I could do it short term initially. But then my body became so resistant that this research was like, oh wait—there’s actually something I’m hitting up against that has nothing to do with self-discipline or personal limitations. It’s actually just that the body is not designed, for many of us at least, to lose weight and keep it off.
I think it’s a bit controversial, but at least there’s some truth in the idea of us having a set point. And when we go under it, we tend to overshoot it. The body gets, in a way, anxious about fat loss and goes into survival mode—starvation mode.
But look, I understand the idea of feeling discouraged by this. For people who haven’t had the experience of constant and discouraging yo-yoing, they might still be in that place of, well, come on, surely if I just blah blah blah, then my body will blah blah blah. I get it. I have nothing but solidarity for people in that camp.
I would just say—it’s really common to cite clothing. It’s surprisingly common to say, I just want to fit into my old clothes, or feel better in clothes. And I heard this anecdote recently that I wanted to share in case it’s helpful.
Do you have children yourself?
BLAIR HODGES: I have two.
KATE MANNE: Okay. So have you ever had the experience—which I certainly have as a parent—of buying your kid some item of clothing that they either never wear, or they wear once and it’s too scratchy, or it never quite fits, or it’s just not the thing? And we, for the most part, don’t blame their bodies. We just think, ah, bummer, inconvenience—have to take it to the consignment store or give it away. It’s just life. Kids outgrow things. Some things never get enough wear. You bought this beautiful dress or shirt that never sees the light of day, stuck in a drawer.
And it was so striking to me—the difference between that and how a lot of adults feel about their bodies. With adults, it’s I ought to fit back into this or I should be able to buy this size. That’s such an uncompassionate way of thinking about our bodies.
I get the inconvenience of having to think about our wardrobes differently—the expense, the lack of accessibility sometimes. But there’s something wise in the parental mindset that says: look, the cost of having a body is that it’s hard to clothe. And it can be a bummer when you buy the gorgeous Hanna Andersson dress that turns out to be too scratchy for the kiddo and it sits unworn. C’est la vie.
So that’s my unsolicited thought.
BLAIR HODGES: No, I appreciate it. I also wanted to say—you mentioned Maintenance Phase in the book, right?
KATE MANNE: Oh, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: That’s the Michael Hobbes podcast.
KATE MANNE: It’s a huge inspiration.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes. So if people want to hear more about dieting culture, Maintenance Phase is a great place to start. We’ll throw that out there so we can move to other issues.
Surgical Dangers – 37:45
BLAIR HODGES: Surgeries are really dangerous—you talk about a lot of adverse health outcomes of surgeries. Did you consider surgeries at any point?
KATE MANNE: Yeah, I did, for sure. I made the phone call. There are a ton of weight-loss surgery mills where I live in upstate New York—or around upstate New York. I live in Ithaca, which is Finger Lakes—controversial classification. But anyway, there’s plenty of weight-loss surgery.
BLAIR HODGES: I’m going to get so many emails now.
KATE MANNE: I know. Probably the main source of hate mail in my 2025 is “Ithaca is not upstate New York.” I know this is technically true, but it’s a gesture at the correct geography.
Anyway, yes, I considered it. I made the phone call, left a message. Then I thought about it. And I looked at the side effects—which I knew existed from friends and from my general knowledge. If you’re in fat activist communities, you hear about people receiving these surgeries and the side effects: not being able to eat and satisfy yourself without severe pain, faintness, lightheadedness.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, the dissatisfaction rate’s super high.
KATE MANNE: It’s so high. Compare that to something like gender-affirming care, which has incredibly high satisfaction rates and extremely low regret rates—under 1% in whatever study you look at, often well under 1%. Weight-loss surgery, by contrast, often has upwards of a 20% regret rate, sometimes as high as 40.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I’ve seen as high as 40. Yeah.
KATE MANNE: It’s shocking, and yet it’s not shocking, when you consider that we need food to live. And so you’re basically—again, this is said with huge love to anyone going down this road or considering it—we’re talking about potentially amputating up to 80% of the stomach. You need those nutrients.
One of the most alarming statistics about weight-loss surgery, even setting aside the considerable mortality rate, the pain, the nutritional deficiencies, the risks of life-threatening complications like bowel obstruction, is that the suicide rate is at least double—probably more like fourfold, maybe even higher—for people who have weight-loss surgery compared to a comparable population of large people who do not.
That means these are extremely risky surgeries from a mental health, suicide-prevention standpoint. And that really should be understood and talked about more often. We don’t really understand why that is. Maybe it’s that some people who have these surgeries don’t lose as much weight. We know not everyone loses as much weight as they want. Some don’t lose very much at all, although that’s comparatively unusual. Maybe people feel like they took a last resort and it’s not working.
Another possibility is nutritional deficiencies that might be linked to severe mental health outcomes. If you’re not getting certain nutrients, that can have marked psychosocial effects. Whatever the case—and this is an area where really good research is being done—we still don’t understand the full picture.
I really feel worried about people being pushed into weight-loss surgeries. We see this happening in cases like the Bellevue Hospital case, where The New York Times did a huge exposé about a year ago on a surgery mill in New York City. They were taking poor patients and getting Medicaid reimbursements for doing weight-loss surgeries on people who were not always very fat. In one case, a woman was pregnant and had to terminate the pregnancy because her body just wouldn’t be able to get adequate nutrients in the aftermath of the surgery.
There are people with severe complications because these surgeries appear to be rushed. And, yeah, there is just enormous profiteering on the basis of preying on people who are disproportionately poor, Black, and brown. The Medicaid reimbursements are making a tidy profit for this hospital in the city.
So again, this is said with nothing but support for individuals like me who once considered this. But there’s a lot to consider. The thought that stopped me was: actually, my body is a comfortable place to be, even if I’m not comfortable with how it’s perceived externally. My experience of my body is actually quite lovely. I didn’t have particular issues. I didn’t have pain. I slept well.
BLAIR HODGES: You didn’t have autoimmune disorders and chronic fatigue. You felt pretty good.
KATE MANNE: So I was like, why would I do this to my body?
Supplements and Drugs – 42:45
BLAIR HODGES: So no surgery for you. You’ve talked about the downsides to that. We’ve talked about dieting and how problematic that can be. Supplements and pills are another avenue people try. And you tried a lot of these. You say you tried all sorts, and most of them did pretty much nothing. Others can be really dangerous. There’s not good regulation. There aren’t studies showing most of these work—with the big exception being today. Ozempic is the thing everybody’s talking about. Does that change your view at all on the part you wrote about drugs?
KATE MANNE: I was someone who was very, very tempted by appetite suppressants, and it fed heavily into disordered eating—arguably an eating disorder, although I was never formally diagnosed.
BLAIR HODGES: I think almost passing out at the doctor probably—
KATE MANNE: Yeah, I probably would have qualified. I’m not sure if it was long enough… well, who knows. Yeah. I say this, it sounds pretty bad, huh? But I was really heavily abusing Adderall to try to suppress my appetite, and it fed into huge side effects of anxiety, anger, depression, and disrupted sleep.
And I get into this—it’s probably the most personal and vulnerable writing I’ve ever done—because it was something I was so ashamed of for a long time. I still am, really.
BLAIR HODGES: But I was so glad you wrote about it. You have skin in the game. You bring such a philosophical mindset, and it’s so thorough and informed, but it’s also so personal.
KATE MANNE: It’s so personal. I was someone who looked very successful and had bunches of empty bottles of Adderall in my desk drawer, just really trying to tamp down my appetite. That was my main motivation.
BLAIR HODGES: So do you think, like, Ozempic can—
KATE MANNE: I do. think one good thing about Ozempic is it doesn’t have obvious psychiatric side effects. That is a good thing. And I do think there are some people for whom Ozempic may be a form of harm reduction. Like if the options are: starve yourself, take a more speedy drug, or take the option of weight-loss surgery—look, probably Ozempic for many folks is less harmful than those avenues. But still better, I think, would be developing a degree of trenchant body-liberated politics that would see you feeling okay with who you are, given the fact that bodily diversity is a natural and beautiful thing.
BLAIR HODGES: We should also pinpoint the privilege element of it, too. Obviously Ozempic as a treatment is out of reach for most people.
KATE MANNE: I mean, it’s not cheap. That segues perfectly into one of the concerns here. In a different universe, Ozempic might be a form of pretty grim harm reduction, because it still has all sorts of side effects. Those can be serious for some people—ileus, bowel obstruction, gastroparesis. For others, it will just be unpleasant: not being able to enjoy food without feeling nauseous and bloated, having all sorts of issues.
But the people accessing Ozempic, Wegovy, semaglutides, tirzepatides and similar drugs are predominantly rich white women. That points to the ways in which the people who are actually able to pay for increased thinness in the world as it is are not necessarily a representative sample.
BLAIR HODGES: Of fat folks or bearing the brunt of fatphobia.
KATE MANNE: Bearing the brunt of fatphobia, yeah. There’s a vast mismatch between who’s taking the drug and who is most affected by fatphobia—and possibly, for people who are very large, by fatness itself in some cases. That’s part of it. But there’s also the issue that we’ve overestimated the effects of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy in ways that are irresponsible.
People are treating these drugs as if they change the picture hugely, but they don’t. By the math, these drugs will take about 10% of people’s starting weight off on average, in a very optimistic scenario.
BLAIR HODGES: So I’m like 180. That would be like 18 pounds.
KATE MANNE: Exactly. It’s still going to leave people who are 300 pounds still fat, even very fat. It’s a greater loss than you’d expect with diet and exercise, but maybe double—not orders of magnitude different. And as soon as you go off the drug, most people have a huge ramping up of appetite and their weight tends to rebound.
Since 80% of people go off the drugs in a year—because of the side effects as well as cost—I just want to question how much the picture is really changing, based on the basic math of it all.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, let’s tie a bow on it right there. We’ve talked about dieting, surgeries, drugs, and things like that. We’re talking with Kate Manne, author of Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. She’s an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT. Her previous books include Down Girl, an excellent book on misogyny, and Entitled, which talks about the same subject.
The Bodily Imperative as a Better Moral Compass – 48:47
BLAIR HODGES: All right, Kate, let’s talk about ethics. A lot of people believe, and you hinted at this earlier, that being thin is actually a moral imperative. It’s morally right to be thinner: you’re less intrusive, maybe you eat less, maybe you take up less space, maybe you’re less disgusting to people. Based on aesthetic preferences, you are offering something different. You have a problem with that kind of moral imperative. You introduce the bodily imperative. Tell us about what you are arguing here.
KATE MANNE: In an earlier chapter of the book, I look at this idea that there’s a moral obligation not to be fat. I argue that there aren’t terribly good moral arguments behind this supposed imperative. Probably the best version of the argument is that fat people place a burden on the healthcare system.
But given that the relationship between weight and health is so complex, that’s not altogether clear. Moreover, on average—because very fat people skew the data—fat people do die a little earlier than thin people. So it turns out there’s a version of the smoker’s paradox in the offing, where it looks like fat people aren’t really costing the healthcare system more, because we die a little bit sooner. Maybe three or four years sooner, on average, again because of the way the data pans out.
And we don’t require healthcare postmortem. So even if we have greater healthcare costs during our lifetimes, that doesn’t mean we require more dollars spent on our healthcare. It just means that, yeah, the math needs to be done about this.
Finally, the last part of the argument I should mention is that depicting human beings as just a burden to an anthropomorphized healthcare system is a tendentious way to think about things. Thinking of people as having bodily needs that are actually valid is what I would much prefer to do, as we manage to do when it comes to thin, presumptively non-disabled fit people who run all sorts of health risks—like scuba diving, mountain climbing, and Grand Prix racing.
BLAIR HODGES: Driving a car.
KATE MANNE: Driving a car without moralism. So we don’t moralize about most people if they’re in bodies that we approve of. Pointing to the fact that this is actually not a great argument, or based on rational argumentation, it’s based on bigotry. That is meant to cut through the argument that there’s a moral obligation to not be fat, which, by the way, is likely moot from the beginning because of an odd “implies can” principle.
Philosophically, if it’s not the case that you can feasibly do something, then it’s not the case that you ought to do it. And given the limitations of the technologies and practices we have to make us thin, that means there’s probably not a moral obligation to do the near impossible and make ourselves permanently thin—because, newsflash, we don’t actually know how to do that for fat folks at this point in human history anyway.
So that’s the argument: no moral obligation to not be fat.
At the end of the book, I try to say maybe this goes the other way. Maybe there’s actually some kind of obligation—arguably a moral obligation, a duty to ourselves—to meet our own bodily needs and to respond to things I long ignored in myself as someone who was eating or not eating in a very disordered way. Maybe it’s incumbent on us to respond to the bodily imperative of hunger and meet our needs when they arise.
That way of thinking flips the argument on its head and says, hey, maybe you should be looking after yourself precisely by eating when you’re hungry and nourishing your body in the ways that it needs. Not everyone would call that a moral imperative, but I’m tempted to, as someone who thinks of bodily imperatives as actually kind of core to ethics.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you compare it to pain—like it’s a moral imperative to alleviate pain and fight suffering—and place hunger in that same category.
KATE MANNE: If we care so much about the hunger of distant, needy others in ethics—which we do, at least in theory, if not always in practice—then why are we so unworried about self-imposed hunger that is, if anything, celebrated and lionized by diet culture?
Now, I’m not saying that imposed hunger is on the same level as unchosen hunger. I do think politically, unchosen hunger is the worst. However, hunger that is in some sense chosen and self-inflicted is still really…
BLAIR HODGES: Bad on a practical level. But it can also be on an emotional and psychological level too, as your book describes. And again, in ways that are very real. You describe your own struggles with it in really personal ways.
KATE MANNE: It’s a kind of self-torture, right?
BLAIR HODGES: It’s exactly what it seemed. Your descriptions made it sound exactly like that. And I remember when I was losing weight, I was pretty miserable. I was irritable. I was doing the calorie thing—like, how many calories are we going to be eating? And I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like who I was during that time. Other people might be more successful or have different experiences, but mine, definitely, was difficult.
Body Positivity, Neutrality, and Reflexivity – 54:34
BLAIR HODGES: But you don’t just stop with pointing out problems with dieting, surgery, or other things. You also want to make a positive case that bodily diversity is actually a good thing. And your positive case seemed different from a lot of the things I’ve seen on Instagram, like body-positivity influencers, and body-neutrality movements.
How do you differ from typical body-positivity movement stuff?
KATE MANNE: Yeah, it’s a great question. I want to be clear that I’m supportive of anyone who finds body positivity useful. I don’t begrudge anyone that. And I want to say, if it works for you, that’s terrific. For me, it felt like yet another standard against which I was failing: this idea that we should be relentlessly positive, especially about our own bodies.
That is just a tough ask for someone who’s been embodied as a woman in a fat body in a fatphobic world. I felt like it was redolent, in a way, of toxic positivity, which is like, you must be positive or else, and you’re not allowed to feel anything that even smacks of negativity.
And then, of course, I started thinking about whether body neutrality is a better option—which is the idea we should be purely neutral about our own bodies. But I find that a very hard state to get into. Neutrality is hard about anything. We’re actually psychologically not prone to neutrality about many things.
If you ask people to approach various kinds of scales, ranking things, they often tend to avoid the neutral option because we lean in one direction or another—and certainly for a subject matter as fraught as our own bodies, that was the case for me. I began to think, why do we need positivity or neutrality as a response to negativity? Wouldn’t it be more powerful to throw out the scales of judgment altogether, to suspend judgment rather than going to positive or neutral judgment as a corrective to negativity?
So that idea of throwing out the scales of assessment became my mantra: My body is for me, your body is for you, and so on for everyone. That’s an idea I call body reflexivity. And it became, to me, a more healing option than neutrality or positivity.
BLAIR HODGES: I liked it because it didn’t feel as controlling as some of the other messaging I’ve seen. You’re not trying to control how I feel about my body.
KATE MANNE: That’s right. It feels like you’re actually allowed to have variable and shifting ways of thinking about yourself and conceiving yourself. But the hope is that in thinking of your body as not for others’ consumption, not for comparison, not for ranking, not for correction, we have an attitude toward our bodies that’s actually more like the attitude we have toward the bodies of very young children. Imagine having body positivity about, like, 2-year-olds. That would be so weird. We don’t need it.
We just see a bunch of little kids running around, and it’s… Yeah, I hope that, at least to the extent we’re thinking about these young people in the right ways, we’re just thinking their bodies are for them. What a nice scene: a bunch of kiddos running around enjoying their bodies.
BLAIR HODGES: And don’t we want them to, like, love who they are? And why couldn’t we want that for ourselves?
KATE MANNE: Yeah. There’s only really one group of people whose bodies we’re relentlessly judgmental about, and that’s girls and women. Often, we’re quite good at being less judgmental and more appreciative—in a way that’s not laced with ranking or punishment—of the bodies of, I think, young kids, to some extent men (at least straight men), and also some non-human animals we keep as pets.
Imagine body positivity about dogs. What a silly idea. There’s a reason the Twitter—or now X—account werate dogs is a parody site. They don’t need ranking. They’re all fabulous already. They all get more than a 10 out of 10. It’s like 13 out of 10 for this corgi, 14 out of 10 for this border collie. It doesn’t matter. Dogs are great.
But it’s also not about giving a kind of thumbs up or neutral judgment. Judgment is just not apropos. Really, it is. We can be appreciative without tacitly ranking and assessing.
The Fat Liberation Project is Diverse and Collective – 59:53
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, I like putting your book in conversation with body positivity and body neutrality stuff because it reminds people that your book has grown out of an entire anti-fat liberation project. It’s multifaceted. You can be situated within many different conversations about fatness, many different social attempts to reframe fatness or approach it differently.
There are better approaches and some worse ones. There are good things you can take from a lot of different approaches. I see your book fitting in there.
I did have one question about the “my body is for me,” body reflexivity thing that I was getting stuck on. It's something I've thought a lot about since all the Covid stuff: How do we prevent ourselves from slipping into an isolated, individualistic view of the body?
Which is to say, if I say my body’s for me, does that also mean I really don’t have to care about anyone else’s health—like public health measures? How would you answer that problem?
KATE MANNE: Yeah, totally. I mean, look, to say that my body is for me is really a way of resisting a certain kind of gaze. That is what Marilyn Fry calls "the arrogant eye." In feminist philosophy, the idea is that you see a body, like an animal, and it looks like something to be assessed, something to be inserted into pornography, or if it fails to be attracted to you, it’s a problem.
Or in the case of a non-human animal, it’s meat, or it’s all for consumption.
BLAIR HODGES: I’m going to cuddle with that or I’m going to eat that.
KATE MANNE: That’s right. It’s, you know, a kind of version of—put it delicately—kiss, marry, kill. That’s the arrogant eye. And my body is for me—body reflexivity—is a rejection of the arrogant eye.
But it’s totally compatible with saying, of course, my body can have effects on others. I should wear a mask because I’m contagious. I should be cautious about going into a crowded restaurant right now because Covid is on the rise. I need to be vaccinated because we are in community with each other, as bodies as well as minds. And that, I think, is crucial.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, that’s great. I mean, it just shows the shortcomings of slogans, right?
KATE MANNE: Yeah. There’s a reason why I only have one mantra as a philosopher. And, as you’ve just pointed out, even that could easily be misappropriated. I can see it being weaponized against me by my 5-year-old already. You know how kids will say my body, my choice about bathing, and you’re like, no.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, no vegetables.
KATE MANNE: Yeah. Of course, we are not going to dunk you in water against your will. But this isn’t something we can just regard as optional. It’s always a delicate dance.
But the ways that our bodies don’t have to be seen as consumable items, I think, is the way to hone in on what’s important about the idea—and also what isn’t important about the idea, or what is not meant to be in there at all. Which is this individualism or this almost libertarian strand that I want no part in.
Survival of the Fitness – 01:03:09
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, me too. Oh, don’t get me started on libertarianism. [laughter]
Okay, so in the end, you say that beauty standards and beauty culture continue to be a problem. You would prefer a world where a beauty contest mentality could go away. That doesn’t mean we can’t cultivate appreciation and awareness of others, but it does mean that we decrease comparison and superiority ranking hierarchies.
I did wonder if there’s something maybe evolutionarily rooted in human psychology that makes us want to rank stuff. And I don’t expect you to have a solution to that. But that’s the only other question mark I have after reading the book: is there something deeper down in our brains that just wants to rank stuff?
It could even be sex drive. Obviously, for asexual people, this might not be the thing, but like, people looking at bodies and wondering if they want to be with that body or if their body feels drawn to a body. That’s the only other kind of question mark I had.
KATE MANNE: I mean, it’s possible. But whenever these kinds of evolutionary explanations come up: a, we won’t be able to know; and b, even if we did know that people are drawn to this, we’re rational, reflective creatures who can resist these sorts of processes and tendencies.
And I say, given that we have the power to reject some of the impulses that could have their roots in this—or could not—why not channel some of the better dispositions that inform how we look at the bodies of… yeah, like a bunch of young kids running around. We just think, cool, happy little kids, and we hope their bodies are working for them to allow them to do what they want to do, including kids with disabilities.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, exactly. What can they do in their bodies?
KATE MANNE: Yeah. We could channel that, rather than regarding bodies through a lens that is consumption-based and that has almost a pornographic element of “is this something I want to X, Y, and Z with?” I just think that way of thinking isn’t compulsory.
BLAIR HODGES: I think this intersects with trans conversations too, by the way.
KATE MANNE: Absolutely.
BLAIR HODGES: A lot of social unsettledness or prejudice against trans folks kind of gets into these exact same conversations. I do want to say, reading the book, it made me feel discouraged about losing weight, but it made me feel much more encouraged about just moving my body.
KATE MANNE: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this is clear from the science, and people—again, if they listen to Maintenance Phase—will catch onto this. It’s actually much more important for me to try to move. And however that looks—if you’re a wheelchair user, to get out and go along in your chair, or if walking, standing sometimes instead of sitting—very little things can make a difference. But movement is much more important for our health, the studies are pretty clear on that, than our actual size. And I was happy to read that.
KATE MANNE: Yeah, completely. It’s fitness, not fatness. And I think there’s just been a good study that came out kind of bearing this out, which was reported as news, when in fact it’s consistent with a large body of epidemiological data. As I say, it’s kind of inconvenient news for me because I like being still and sedentary.
But yeah, it’s very clear that if you can find a form of movement that works for your body, given its limitations, potential disabilities, impairments, or illnesses, and if you can find a form that’s ideally joyful for you, then that is a really good way to pursue health, completely regardless of how that affects your weight.
And it very well might not. Exercise does not tend to affect people’s weight in terms of population averages because we tend to get hungrier when we exercise and make up that caloric deficit. But a life of joyful movement and intuitive eating is, I think, a good takeaway in the practical column from this book, even though most of it is leveled as a more abstract philosophical intervention.
But that’s how I would like people to think about the practical upshot.
BLAIR HODGES: But we really do, I think, have to address the underlying stories. So your book matters. It’s not a practical “how-to” guide. We need those, those are good, terrific. But we also need to think about why we’re thinking things and what we’re thinking. The book does a great job of that. It’s called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Mann.
Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:07:38
BLAIR HODGES: Kate, we always like to close with a segment called "Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises." This is an opportunity for you to speak to anything you would change about the book now that it’s out—like, maybe you didn’t extend a discussion enough or thought of a new point—or you can talk about challenges. What was the hardest part about doing this book? Or something that surprised you in researching it? Something new you learned that made you think, “Wow, this actually kind of changes the game a little bit”? You can speak to any of those.
KATE MANNE: Yeah. I wish I had talked more about the relationship between fatness and poverty because it felt too in-the-weeds at the time. But I’ve realized since then that it would be helpful for a lot of liberals and progressives to understand that there isn’t this tight relationship between fatness and poverty in the United States, as is often assumed.
So there’s only one group of people who reliably gets fatter when they get poorer, and that’s white women. There is no relationship between fatness and poverty for Black women, and very little relationship for Latinx women. For men, there is a relationship, but it’s surprising: the middle bracket of American men, income-wise, are the fattest, with the poorest third of men and the richest third of men being the thinnest.
Hmm. So that’s worth knowing.
BLAIR HODGES: That’s so funny. I mean, there was just a New York Times The Daily podcast today talking about processed foods, and I think income inequality came up during that too. So [laughs]
KATE MANNE: And yeah, if only we knew. It’s really a complex picture demographically.
BLAIR HODGES: That’s the biggest thing people need to know. This stuff is complex. The book does a great job simplifying it and giving us a great overview of so many different issues. I learned so much from this book, Kate, and thanks so much for taking time to talk to us. Your book’s terrific—highly recommend it.
KATE MANNE: Thank you so much, Blair. It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for just a great conversation.
Outro – 01:09:35
BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes. What a thrill to talk to Kate Mann. She's someone I've looked up to and learned from for a long time now and again. I just strongly recommend her books Down Girl, Entitled and Unshrinking. She also has a really good Substack. It's called "More to Hate," like instead of More to Love.
I also hope you'll take a moment if you're enjoying the podcast, to rate and review it. You can do that in Apple Podcasts. I got some reviews last month. It's really good to see these coming. Here's one from micah80ann. They said, "This is such a great podcast. I wish more people knew about it. Blair's a thoughtful and generous interviewer and selects such interesting authors and topics. This podcast is in my must-listen rotation."
Micah80ann, thanks for that review. That means a lot and I would love to hear from more people reviewing the show. You can also rate it in Spotify. It's just a rating system there. They don't do reviews. So you can give me some stars in Spotify. I would really appreciate that.
Mates of State provides our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm your host Blair Hodges, a journalist in Salt Lake City, and I'll see you next time.