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Book takes: As an academic with a PhD in feminist theory and practice, a former ballerina who finally fought off the bulimia “beast” in midlife, and the mother of a young-adult daughter who accuses her of “buying into diet culture” and “body-shaming” her, Sacha Jones is well placed to investigate the battle for women’s weight health in the modern West, especially with a less heard, often misrepresented, maternal perspective.
The Australian-New Zealander writes tragicomic memoir and stand-up comedy aimed at challenging sex stereotypes in a non-confrontational, clever and often comical way. She lives in Auckland with her husband, cat and (occasional) kid. Her favourite food is cake.
Here, Jones shares three things she hopes readers will learn from her book The Fatter Sex: A Battle Plan For Women’s Weight Health And Humour.
Programmed to be fat
The heart of the problem is a conflict rooted in culture and biology. Women and girls must live up to an unrealistically thin body-beautiful standard while being naturally programmed, with a slower metabolism and more fat-storing hormones, to carry 50% more body fat than men.
But unlike the “body-positivity” activists who have increasingly pushed back against this unrealistic beauty standard, claiming the standard is “entirely arbitrary” and the “diet culture” that supports it is unhealthy and “fat shaming”, my own experience, and various case studies, show that dieting reframed does not have to be unhealthy or shaming.
I argue that we can come to a more realistic and less wishful “battle plan” for women’s improved weight health and humour. We can do this by better understanding the combined natural and unnatural causes for women in the modern West being more likely than their brothers to suffer from low body-image confidence, and eating disorders and weight extremes that can develop from this lack of confidence.
By outlining at length the battle plan that helped me to beat bulimia and feel better than ever about my weight and diet, I put my social science education to good use analysing why this plan worked, and why I believe it could work for other women. It improves upon the established strategies of the classic “forbidden foods” diets on one hand and the anti-diet, “health at every size, intuitive eating” approach on the other.
Sweet and sour sisters
Central to this is a critical analysis of the bitter conflicts between various groups of Western women - in particular, mothers and daughters; fat and thin women; white women and women of colour - conflicts that complicate and aggravate all women’s battles for their weight health and humour.
Through examples showing how these conflicts manifest in the modern West, I make a compelling, feminist case for challenging this strategy in favour of building a more united front on the body battlefield with a better understanding of women’s largely shared body battle.
But to achieve this, I accept “thin white women” like me need to acknowledge our skin privilege and take steps to better understand the additional challenges faced by not-thin women of colour. Case studies include wāhine Māori and Pasifika women who experience much higher rates of obesity and related diseases, like diabetes, than Pākehā women. They also consider how such differences came about and what feminist strategies might help to reduce the perception and reality of “thin white” body privilege.
Salty realism and sweet idealism
In the end, I argue that with a mixture of salty realism and sweet idealism, women in the modern West can fight to win their individual body battles and the mutual battle for a feisty and supportive sisterhood between women of all walks and weights. This will involve a genuine desire to avoid the mutual shaming and blame-laying that too often undermines women’s co-operation on the body battlefield, as well as an improved understanding of the various obstacles to this co-operation.
The six “trim activist” athletes and dancers of various sizes and skins I feature for body battling inspiration - including Aotearoa’s Dame Valerie Adams - provide compelling evidence for the possibility of forging this more practical and mutually beneficial body battling.
The Fatter Sex: A Battle Plan For Women’s Weight Health And Humour by Sacha Jones (Umbilical Books, $45.00) is out now.
