Virginia Sole-Smith on Ageism, Fat Phobia and 'the Stigma of Mom'
By Leslie Price
It's hard to overstate the impact Virginia Sole-Smith's writing has had on how we think and talk about our bodies and weight. She's behind the extremely popular newsletter and podcast Burnt Toast, and has also published two books: Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. We spoke with her about fatphobia, ageism, and letting go of dieting.
In your interview with registered dietician Debra Benfield, you brought up the stigma of mom, which is how we code middle-aged women as “mom,” whether they have kids or not. The “mom” haircut or the “mom” jeans; it’s used as a pejorative to convey uncoolness. And it doesn’t matter what you do as a woman. You're just going to be the mom.
We are all going to end up there, whether you have kids or not. We all migrate through aging to a place of being the mom. It's also inextricably linked with anti-fatness. Not to just be a one-trick pony and go there.
Go there!
When we talk about mom in a negative way, we're talking specifically about a woman whose body is no longer thin and young. We both want women to be mothers so badly in this country that we are taking away our rights to do anything else and we want women to look like they’ve never given birth or gone through any of the physical changes.
Many women choose to push back against that by continuing to pursue thinness at any cost. Thinness itself is a form of social capital and privilege, but it also ties you to youth privilege, sex appeal, etcetera.
We're aging and our bodies are changing. But we resist it because of where social capital and power lies for women. Since we're little kids, we are taught that our power lies in our appearance and in our ability to attract and hold the male gaze. I'm a fat mom. I'm white, and I still have loads of privilege, but there are times when I'm aware of a layer of invisibility assigned to me in social settings in the world. I no longer have the young, thin body.
It's both erasing and sort of liberating. There's a safety to that invisibility. But I am aware that I need to insert myself in order to be seen and recognized as valuable. For anyone with other intersectional identities, that's going to be a larger issue.
There's been a lot of conversation around body positivity or neutrality, but not as much about being comfortable or happy with our age or aging. There are still so many prejudices, but this one is very persistent.
I spend a lot of time in fat-activism circles, and there's really nuanced discourse linking fat activism and disability rights activism, for example. There will be casual references to the okay boomer [meme] or calling someone old or saying, I feel so old. When someone says I feel so fat, I can be quick to say, “That is not a feeling.” There's nothing wrong with being fat. Let's reclaim that term. I wrote a whole book about it. There's a clear conversation happening about fat being used in that way, but when we say, I feel so old, it's like, yeah, man. Yeah, that's elder millennial stuff. That's Gen X, that's Boomer. You're old. You're what we are all fearing.
The number one question I get asked from my readers is: How do I talk to my Boomer mom about being anti-fat? My mom is so diet-y and it drives me nuts. And that is very real. That's often what people are chafing against. It is not even the fear of aging, but it's that this older generation holds values that you are challenging and that's good. We need that progress. I look forward to how Gen Z gets challenged in the future, but we can have that conversation without making fun of a whole generation of people and reducing them to their age. And with respect for aging, which is a huge gift.
What would you say to women starting to grapple with the fact that diets don’t work? Because it was always this dangled thing, the fact that you could change.
It's hard to see the cage from the inside, and it's terrifying to think about what's on the other side of the cage. And with dieting, if you give up on that belief of, I will finally get thin, if you are okay with the fact that that won't happen, what's on the other side of all of this are some very liberated, free, happy women who are wearing our comfy pants and doing great, but you don't see that. You don't see those women, you don't see me.
When you've been told your whole life that being fat is the worst way to have a body, to suddenly say, well, I'm going to stop doing this thing that doesn't work, but one outcome of this is that I'm going to be fat,” it’s super scary… All I can say is, it's great over here. Water's fine, come on over. But we all have a different breaking point where we suddenly realize the unknown is actually less scary than the thing we're in.
A lot of us in our forties are like, fuck that. If you spent your teenage years dieting and fighting the way your body was trying to grow, that didn't serve you. If you spent your postpartum period trying to lose the baby weight, that didn't serve you. It didn't make you bond with your baby more. It didn't make that period of your life less stressful or anxiety-provoking. So are we really going to get back on this merry-go-round? Bodies change. That is the narrative we need to normalize. We need to have that conversation with our kids and understand that is the throughline of having a human body. It is always changing. And now we're coming up to this period where there's going to be a whole bunch of new changes.
Am I excited about all of my chin hairs? I am not, I admit. I cannot embrace them, but I can have a lot of grace over my resistance to them. I'm not participating in anything to do with wrinkle removal, but also I'm fat, and fat faces don't get as many wrinkles as kind of a perk.
I appreciate that because it's very gentle. I think that everyone is dealing with their own stuff and we're all doing the best we can. It's good to be aware of the choices.
My decision to keep participating in hair culture is a whole thing. I decided that maintaining that beauty standard is something I can afford and do with minimal negative impacts to me. It gives me a little more access to youth privilege, which is beneficial when you work in a profession where you have to be on camera sometimes. But I've opted out of dieting. That one came too high of a cost for me. But also, I can opt out of that because I have education and financial privilege. When I go into a doctor's office, I am white. I don't experience the same biases that a different fat person experiences in a medical setting. I still experience some, but I can advocate for myself and navigate that.
I've been able to build a career that supports my family and doesn't require me to keep pursuing thinness. So I'm not going to judge the fact that many fat folks have to make a different choice and keep pursuing thinness because I understand that's the cost of being a human in a lot of places. We live in a fucked up culture. [So I ask,] how can I keep showing up for fat people? How can I keep challenging ageism? How can I keep doing some degree of work to hopefully move the culture in a different direction?
Your book Fat Talk is so useful for people who are trying to navigate tricky topics around bodies. Now that it has been out in the world for nearly a year, what has surprised you about the feedback you’ve received?
I get the most amazing, moving messages. I hear from people who don't have kids, who say, “This was so helpful for me, reparenting myself around these issues.” Which is what a lot of us need to do. If we do have kids in our lives, we need to do that work on ourselves to help our kids. But I've heard from parents who were able to go into their kids' schools and challenge the way anti-fat bias shows up there, whether it's required weigh-ins and gym class or crazy calorie-counting logs in health class or a school performance of a play that had fat jokes. I hear from pediatricians a lot, which I love because pediatricians are unfortunately often a very traumatic experience of anti-fat bias for kids. I’m hearing from pediatricians who are like, “Yeah, I don't want to do that.”
I'm not surprised to hear from therapists who say, “This is a great book for me to hand to clients.” But [I love] when parents tell me about a conversation they had with their kid and a tough moment that it helped them steer through. Not to say we have to get this exactly right. We get so many opportunities, we can fuck it up and keep trying. But for the parents who say, “I used to try to be a sugar-free house, I used to make fat jokes, and I'm trying to move in this different direction, and you helped me talk to my kid about something that was hard.” That's amazing.
Around both feminism and fat activism, we're in a really hard moment. We've obviously got everything happening with the right to choose, and then also Ozempic and all of that. And so I do feel very much like we're in this fight for our lives a little bit, and the stakes are high. I am excited to be there doing the work and hoping that whatever I'm writing about next helps people navigate and continue to come back to their sense of body autonomy.