tonight we're thrilled to host

kate manne and kara alaimo for a discussion. their latest books on shrinking how to face fatphobia and over the influence by social media is toxic for women and girls and how we can take it back. kaye is an associate professor of philosophy at cornell university, where she's been teaching since 2013. before that she was a junior fellow at the society of fellows, mann did her graduate work in philosophy at mit and is the author of two previous books down girl and entitled cara, the associate professor of communication fairly dickinson

university. she's been writing for cnn opinion the social impact of social media and issues affecting women and girls since 2016. she's also former communicator in the obama administration and united nations. so without further ado, please join me in welcoming kate and cara to the stage. hi, everyone. hi. great to see everyone so we're very excited to have this conversation. and if we're looking at our phones, it's not we're on social media. we just have a little for for our conversation planned out. so i'll begin and we're going to go back and forth because. we have a lot to talk about by

asking in honor of her book coming out just yesterday or tuesday at this point about the first chapter of the book, which is girl meets instagram. so you say that social media profoundly affects how girls look at themselves. and i'd like you to tell us about the advice you have for parents in terms of handling use of social media. so one of the things i learned researching this book is that for girls on social media, it can go either way. one of the stories that i tell in this book is a viviane who's this woman who says that she got her eating disorder on instagram as a teenager. but i also talk about girls who use social media as a lifeline. people who find their communities when they're minorities in their physical community. people who get involved in really important social justice

movements online. and so my advice for parents is help your kids get this right scroll with your kids. help your kids filter through content and teach your kids about very real dangers that they face online predators, extortionists and you know. let your kids know that no matter what happens online, you are there to help them. yeah, that's so important, because i really do think that a lot of kids are really afraid of parents taking their phones and. so will not go to parents. they encounter trouble and and instead will be worried about parents taking away what feels like a really important source of freedom, social life. and so having this sense that it is a delicate balance of teaching especially girls these dangers.

but making them afraid or ashamed, they run into problems if. they run into predatory behavior that was a very important message i took from your book. yeah, i interviewed a attorney in brooklyn who takes on cases of cyber exploitation action, and she talked about, you know, sex torsion, which is when a girl establishes an emotional relationship with someone meets online and, he convinces her to share a racy image. and when she does so, she gets a text saying. venmo me $25,000 in the next hour or i will these images all over social media and the very worst situation she can be in is when she's afraid to go to a parent or trusted adult and ask for help. because when that happens, often situation gets worse and worse. she might be sending more and more racy images or getting into just a really awful situation. and so i know as a parent, it's

really easy in the heat of the to issue the threats that you know will make your see what you're asking. but one big message i have to parents in this book is just never tell your kids you're going to take their away permanently because if that's the case, may be afraid to come to you when they're in a situation this. yeah. can you remind of the statistic you mentioned that i think it was a quarter or a third of girls have had some kind of encounter with an adult of a sexual online, which really disturbed me. and even as someone who misogyny was surprising to me, it's that high is that i it. yeah, i think it's something like a third of girls will have some kind of an encounter like this, a male online. and so, you know, i've been talking to a lot of parents on this book tour and i think there's always this sense think but it won't be my child because thought enters my head right.

but my child will know better. but my child won't be exposed to -- because she's a girl. my child would never sext. and i think it's really important to be in touch with youth culture, because when interviewed teenagers for this book, teenagers who i was put in touch with by their parents, you know, they would tell me things that blow my mind because i didn't grow in this era. but are just so normal to them. like they don't quite get why it's such big deal to share nude images. and so i think we have to look at the statistics and look at fact that a lot of these behaviors are normalized. and you know the one big one for me is teaching daughters never to share nude images online. we know that when a nude image of a woman or girl is posted online, it puts her at greater risk of sexual assault, greater risk of depression, at greater risk of suicide.

it makes it harder for her to get a job. it makes it harder for her to date. and so, you know, she might think, oh but this is my boyfriend. but what happens, that image is hacked or i disagree with the term revenge --, but what happens? things go bad in that relationship. he posts it later. there's all sorts of possibilities. but this is a big conversation to have. yeah and we talking in the green room i hope you don't me sharing this about just the prevalence of threat to girls and women online and. so it's tempting sometimes in view of these alarming statistics and suddenly i've been told many times as a woman who writes as a feminist in public to just delete my apps, that's a really common piece of advice. but you argue, i think, powerfully in this book. it's not the answer. could get into why just the advice that. yeah. should go offline and that women

should not be on social media why. that's actually not a good piece of advice. it makes me really angry when people say well if social media is so toxic just stop using it. i actually in whole a whole lot better about this for the l.a. times this week. and the reason, of course, is, one, social networks are places where we can empower ourselves right. so i was speaking at nyu earlier today and a lot of women were saying, but i'm with social media and i just don't using it anymore. fine. that's a great decision, if that makes sense. in the context of your right now. but when you're looking for your next job, you might need to go online. and so we know social media is a place where women can empower ourselves, where we can raise our professional profiles, where we can get involved in really important causes, but the second reason why that doesn't work, because i think what's happening on social media is making offline world so much more dangerous for women. this is the subject of my cnn

opinion piece that's running tomorrow for international women's day. and so we can't these problems without fixing what's happening online. yeah. and kate, i want to talk about your book. so before i ask you my first question, can you just tell everyone what fatphobia is and what you write about drinking? yeah, absolutely so i think of fatphobia as the unjust down ranking of larger bodies. and i use the term fat in a matter of fact way, not as pejorative term, not as a one, but as a merely neutral little bodily description, much like short or tall or thin for that matter. so in my mouth, fat is not a bad word, and i identify myself as a small fat person, which is a way that fat activists distinguish between various degrees of privilege in the fat spectrum. so someone like me is a small fat person. there are mid fat, large fat and sometimes called infinite fat

people who are very, very fat. and yeah, we can just acknowledge this in a matter of fact way, but fat says that the larger you are more or less especially for girls and women, the worse you that you are less intellectually brilliant, that you are less, that you are less less virtuous, and that you have a weaker will. and it also down ranks people's sexual and esthetic value in really powerful ways that intersect with misogyny. so i also think that fat consists partly in oversimplified myths about the relationship, fatness and health, which there is a relationship, but it's complicated it's nuanced and it's not as simple as a fatter person doomed to die of fatness. that is a massive overexaggeration of delicate statistics that show that being in the, quote unquote, overweight category, the bmi

charts, which, by the way, are garbage. but for what it's worth, the bmi charts, the overweight category has the lowest all cause mortality, statistically speaking. so that's often surprising to people that some amount of fat is rather protective of the body and that although there are between being either underweight or fat and having certain health, we don't know that that is partly because there is so much weight stigma larger bodies there is such inadequate health care and there is also the stress on the body of being put diets and going up and down in weight. so that's known as weight cycle thing, which research shows has all these independent health harms. so basically, yeah, i argue that there are a of bad ideas about larger bodied folks that are doing us all a disservice. and of course i'm always thinking about social. so i have to ask you, you write

in your book about you consumed health at every size content which is very posit content on social media, but that it wasn't enough to overcome the challenges that you faced. and so i wondered if you could talk about why that was, what all of us could do to create and amplify more positive content about body on our social networks. yeah, it's such a great question because i really cut my teeth in this space on early 2000. content from brilliant fat activist authors like kate harding and marianne kirby and leslie kinzel. authors who were arguing powerfully. being fat is not bad, it's just a way. some bodies happen to be. and i was instantly by that. politically, i found it incredibly compelling liberate amazing and i kept for 25 years and i think that even though it

seems contradictory is a familiar story to many people who are simultaneously absorbing positive messages in these online spaces and really negative messages that mean we're kind of caught in this ambivalent relationship of, really wanting perhaps to embrace the way our bodies are and break up with diet culture and really come to grips with our internalized fatphobia, especially as a larger and i've been much larger than i currently am in my life. that is an area, you know, i really needed to wrestle with what felt like a kind of judgment of my own body that was shameless, especially when i was in a a larger fat body. but the that we're also absorbing these images of thin bodies being lionized, idealized and valorized at the same time means ambivalence persists for many of us. so one really simple piece of

advice in terms of social media that authors like lindy west have made, and that has been a positive in my life is curate your social media feed if there are accounts that your that celebrate ways of being bodily don't feel like they're serving you you can unfollow those accounts can meet them or whatever you know is appropriate to the platform where you're no longer seeing those kind. the inspiration images in feed and yeah that curation of social media. i think across many dimensions social media doesn't have to be something we passively consume. we can really ourselves is kind of content serving or is it a way of indulging in hierarchical ways of thinking that are a form of social injustice, that i don't endorse that don't reflect my values and that i don't want seeping my sense of how the

world is or should be. yeah. so i think it would be great to look at this myth that is, i think that i felt like your book really exploded, which is the idea that when it comes to body, gen z is all right, that the kids are right, that we've kind of gotten past the thin ideal somehow, which i think is unfortunately not the case but i wanted you to dig into ways in which that narrative is misleading and. yeah. why why is there that narrative when the data doesn't really back it up at all? so i think some of it is that, you know, if we look at body images in the media, they arguably have gotten better since the 1980s. when i was kid. right. so when i was a teenager. i got magazine in the mail once a month and yeah, they showed the typical kate moss or anorexic looking models of the

1980s, which i think we see less of in the media. but the difference is like i read the magazine often the day it arrived and then i was done it. whereas girls today i spend hours often day scrolling on their phones. and you know, one thing we know is that the so-called instagram body can usually only be achieved through surgery, but there's no signals to remind us girls or women that so many of the images we're on social media just aren't real. one of the things i call for in my book is for social networks to just tell tag in some way that this image has been manipulated and think that would send such a powerful to all of us. and so i think in that sense it breeds this body to satisfy action, but also just this larger with our lives and you know, in particular tend to start using social media at a

very vulnerable time. so they're seeing these images of all their friends together at a party, but they weren't invited. it's a common of youth culture to track in real time the locations your friends using snapchat i this over and over from teenagers. so now you know that your boyfriend said he wasn't free but he's out with his friends right and so it's body dissatisfaction but it's just larger dissatisfaction with life because on social media, everyone's life seems more glamorous. you invited to that party or your parents didn't let you go and so you're just left feeling less than and we know been a huge increase in plastic surgery since the year 2000 when social networks took off. i interviewed a plastic surgeon in, south carolina, who explained to me that, you know, before social media and i can remember this time, you had your

photo taken when. you went to a wedding. when you went to a party, and now all constantly bombarded with images that our friends post or images we take, but images of ourselves. and that's what's feeding all of this body. and one thing that's particularly interesting is how plastic surgery took off during the pandemic. plastic surgeons call the zoom boom. right, because everyone was confronted with their faces all the time on zoom and so that bred this dissatisfaction. and so it's just kind of this constant staring women's bodies. and it also, of course, affects how rest of the world judges us. so we know that employers, google people before they hire them and surprise, surprise research shows that when they google prospective employees, they judge men for the they post and they judge women for their appearances. yeah that is so powerful. i think, too, there is such a

ability to consume content quickly that is really distorting and. i saw recently a study showing that one in ten members of gen z who are female will have taken some kind of weight loss drug. most notably, quote unquote, budget ozempic, which is just a laxative. so people taking these unhealthy to you know in some cases dangerous suppleness and medications just because there are these trends that prolific on tock and yeah there is this sense that that is what you need to do in order to create an instagrammable or tik-tok worthy body, even though there is superficially more body positivity, there is also a lot of the same old standards which continue and have an influence on how people feel that they

need to be namely thin. and so i talk in my book about how one of the most important things we need to teach our daughters from a very young age is that you don't judge anyone, but in particular for their appearances. and one of my absolute favorite parts of your book, which kate keeps from me, is she writes about how during the pandemic when the family was isolated, she took out her and she opened instagram and she showed her young daughter photos of people's bodies. and you describe it as bodies of people of all different races and sizes and levels of ability. and what kate said to her daughter was just, i'm so happy people are in the world with us. and i thought was one of the most powerful ways ever heard of to a young child. this is how we look at other people. and so i wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about that practice and just other ways that you teach your

daughter not to judge herself and others for their appearances? yeah. thank you so much for saying that was this moment where i felt, like our family, was really isolated. my husband is immuno suppressed and immuno compromised. so we weren't seeing many real people in the first year of the pandemic. and i was working on this topic and i was so concerned by the ways that we have been taught, all of us, me included, to look at bodies kind of on a scale as if we rank girls and women rather than viewing their bodies. as for them and no one else. and so what i would just do? because we were exposed to few people, is bring up pictures of all amazing people. i follow people who are fat and people who are fat and brilliant and people who are my favorite writers working, some of whom

are in bodies that are non-normative, are often judged harshly by the social standards that proliferate. and i wanted the gays to be very clear. we are so happy that we share the world with all these brilliant, wonderful people. how wonderful that we are all here in the world and that we get to be in communion with these people who we miss. and so that was how i tried to introduce her to idea that bodies have disabilities, facial differences, limb differences. we, of course, come in different skin tones and hair textures and facial features, but also different body types and sizes were an explicit part of that practice. and yeah, i think it's something that we've to continue partly through the represents portion of children's literature, but yeah, also just the sense that we don't judge anyone based on appearance. we're just glad that they're here. i love that.

thank you. so, cara i wanted to get into. two chapters that you write on misinformation and you look at how some misinformation online is targeted. specifically to mothers. can you into that and tell us what we can do about that? yes. so i have two chapters on this and i look at how mothers are vulnerable, in particular, after you have a child. a lot of women stay close to home. they're trying to expose the baby to germs. all of the sudden, you have a gazillion questions about how to get this creature to sleep, how to feed them, and you know, how to them alive. generally. and so women are going, searching for answers and. some people have learned to prey on that vulnerable. you also see this with in particular who've lost a child or had a child receive a

devasted medical diagnosis. and so know that a mother will do anything to try to help her child. and so they're prey to buying these quack, essential oils and other cures at, you know, vast cost and falling prey to these theories about how it was vaccines, which, of course it wasn't, which caused their child's autism or whatever the case be. and then some of it is probably unintentional. but there's so much bad information online that we receive from influencer. so most recently a big one was during the shortage of baby formula. all these people are posting recipes telling mothers they could make baby formula in their kitchens. unfortunately, there's no way to make baby formula at home. it needs a complex mix of nutrients that you can't in the supermarket right. and so i think there's so many reasons for this. part of it is that a lot of

mothers are trying to share their expertise. so what worked for their families? because there aren't that many other ways for mothers to get validation in our society. i think in particular, stay at home moms, have it really tough. and this is a form of seeking and what they're sharing probably did work for child. but everyone's lives are different and everyone's children are different. i know this from having to and so what worked for another woman's child may not work for mine and so many women consume this content then are left with this feeling of like you know here is the answer but i can't apply it i can't make it work. it's so easy to get your kid to sleep through the night. why like, why can't i do it after watching this tick tock and it was really interesting in my first book event tuesday night, the audience happened to be a lot of therapists and they were about how they have all of

these clients who watch doctor becky or whatever the influencer is, who has all the answers even people with credentials, with great who are really smart and sharing great advice, and then they feel like failures because can't operationalize it in the context their lives because it's really hard to do. it's not as simple as it looks. tiktok or on instagram. so for all of these reasons, i think mothers are just absolutely bombarded with information that is often just extremely unhelpful and you know, my radical proposition is if you have a question about your child, your pediatrician. yeah, i think that's really good advice. i mean, there is such a big problem online of in of one. you only have one person who is comparing to themselves in an earlier iteration or their child to a younger version of. the same child. but you know the reality is children often develop in ways.

it's not clear that the introduction of cucumber water is what made the difference. maybe they're just sleeping through the night. they're now developmentally ready, sleep through the night. so you get all these understandably and genuinely, they're trying to help. and they're saying things like, know this is how i did it as a parent or this is how i lost weight and. you know, many people share that goal and they will consume that content avidly. what i eat in a day videos. what diet and exercise works for this person. but what you're not seeing is a that's just one person. and b what to most people is after they lose weight and most and exercise programs are, you know, to some extent successful, the short term for many people. but the weight gain then is almost for the vast majority of bodies. so you can lose weight in any number of ways between, you

know, five, ten, 15% of your starting weight. but the weight comes back nearly inexorably over a 4 to 5 year period. and that's not just one or two studies showing that that is really meta analysis of every diet study to date. and yet what you get is showing, oh, here i lost this weight over six months and you're not seeing that again. it's one person. and what is the aftermath of that. how much the metabolism slowed. how much are they going to regain and have problems of potential immune dysfunction, metabolic problems, cardiovascular problems and so on? when the weight is undergoing weight, cycling? so yeah, it's just to say there is this of not really looking at enough evidence what works for a large enough population and and instead seeking advice in these ways that are just super limited data wise. and speaking of the data in, your book, the other thing that just absolutely shocked me reading your book was where you

talk about this idea that the reason why people are fat are less healthy, may actually not be because of the size of their it may be because of all the prejudice they face in our society. yeah. i mean, look, i think no one knows exactly to think about the complex question of correlation versus causation and i want to make it very clear that even we do discover incontrovertible evidence that at certain weights there are health risks and health problems, fat people still deserve compassion, dignity and adequate health care and humane treatment at every turn in ways that are currently denied to people on the pretext of all we care so much about your health. we care so much your health that will humiliate and shame people in ways that are demonstrably for their health. but what is clear too, is that it may not be just as simple as a larger body size causes health

problems. given that larger people are facing rampant discrimination. most notably at their health providers. so this isn't just implicit bias. this is explicit bias. physicians will say things like patients are more likely to annoy them, that fat patients, they will as a waste of their time, that they're less likely to want to help a fat patient. so really explicit that stuff in one study about a quarter of nurses said they were repulsed by fat patients and 12% said that they didn't want to touch a fat patient's body. and then we wonder why people are having poor outcomes at high weights. part of the answer is they're receiving in medical care and part the answer too is that demonstrably as a woman gets larger, she will avoid health care in direct to her body mass. so then she often isn't receiving important preventative

care and care for symptoms that are arising. and if she does seek care, she may be dismissed on the basis, well, you're fat, so just go away and lose weight, forgetting that we don't actually have good ways to have people sustainably humanely lose weight permanently and often the true cause of her symptoms. so i have a number of cases in the book that are case studies where a patient has gone to see the doctor and been told to go lose weight when she actually has endometrial, when she actually has lung cancer, when she actually has bone marrow cancer and yeah again nothing to do with weight in these cases. so yeah it's it's a these are anecdotes but they are reflective of the fact that upon or autopsy patients who are as obese which is in a word i don't like because stigmatizing but patients who are in so-called

obese bodies a 1.65 times more likely to have serious undiagnosed medical conditions like. endocarditis like lung cancer noma serious conditions that could have killed them and were not picked up during their lifetime. so yeah it's a it's a really dire situation if we really care about fat people's health, then we have to combat fatphobia right. so sorry. that was a little bit of a rant. i love it. so i wanted ask you about this idea of body positivity has become such a social media hashtag tag and i, you know, have problems with it. but i think you really brought out in the book ways in which it can be shallow and can be a way to selfie to consumers who feel certain kinds of and are being marketed, including feminism. yeah.

so i look at how so much of the so-called content that's shared on social is created by brands and the big one that i feel like started this trend was dove's real beauty campaign for those of you who remember it and it told supposedly that, you know no matter what you look like, you are beautiful and you just need to be confident about how you look. okay. so, you know, these models were i would argue they were generally very conventionally attractive women. maybe with one thing that made them not look like a typical supermodel. and again the message stays on our bodies right rather than getting us out of looking at our appearances altogether. and it was so clear that dove didn't really into this message itself because the parent company at the same time as was running these so-called femme verities, was running ads for ax deodorant, telling that, you know, if they use this

deodorant, they will be dating, you know. small blond women and, you know, these kinds posts are hugely popular. women love them. women cry, share them. but i think have to think about some of the underlying. you know, this idea that feminism is something that you purchase with a product. right. rather than something you practice by looking at the things that are holding women back in our society and you know top of that list for would be corporations and the way they treat the women they and what they pay men versus and just the general challenges that women have in our society when we're expected to be in our office until 6 p.m. and we're also expected to pick up our kids at o'clock when school ends. and, you know, corporations not very helpful on that front. so it bothers me that that tends to be the popular kind of feminist content that on social

media, rather than about issues and, ideas that could actually improve our lives. yeah, i, i found this really powerful because i want to be clear that i don't begrudge anyone the starting point of body positivity and it works for someone great. i think that's to the good. but my worry about it is partly that it's shallow and i think we've seen that in ways that the advent of popular, much hyped new weightless drugs, a zen pick has sort of overridden of the supposed body positivity in the online sphere, but it like is very hard to do for me. body positivity can feel like a form of toxic really. that saying you have to be positive about your body or else it's kind of relentless and if i'm not really relentless positive about anything, so let

alone which are a fraught subject for most us. and then there's of course, option of body neutrality, which says to cultivate an attitude of neutral loyalty towards your own form, which i think is closer to the mark. but it can feel a bit wan, a bit lackluster, a bit lacking and a bit depressing. and when i was writing my book, i began to think, well, why do we need positivity or neutrality or this idea? an implicitly quantitative metric as an alternative to negativity? what if we were to throw out the idea of an assessment or a scale and regard the body as just not there for kind of comparison or can assumption or correction. and to me, that was a more transformative than liberating idea that the way i came to think of it is my body is for me your body is for you and so on and so forth for everyone. and i think every nonhuman creature as well.

so that's an idea i call body reflexivity and it's really this idea we can get past this implicit assessment and look at bodies in a way that isn't positive or neutral negative. it's saying someone else's body is, none of my business. and it's just them. it's not job to be judging it. that's just the wrong way to think about bodies and funnily enough, we do that easily when it comes to, i think, children's like imagine having body positivity as a way we had to look at children. when i see my four year old daughter running around her friends, i don't need this idea. oh, we need to be positive about these kids bodies. weird, because we're not in the business of assessing. hopefully young children's bodies in the way that almost automatically apply once a girl turns a certain age. so yeah, i think maybe that's that i loved about that converge runs between our criticisms of

body positivity. so another idea that i wanted get into of yours that found so powerful is a message in this book that is so important and we've touched on it but i wanted you have a chance to say more is how has social media how has the online world made the world a less safe place for girls and women in real life? so i think the misogyny that we see on social networks started out in dark corners of the web. reddit, like the menace sphere, where men with deep hatred and grievances towards women all found one another and got to commune right because all the sudden they didn't have geographic barriers to doing so. and we know that when minded people get together, their views become more extreme. but then happened about, i would say roughly six years ago is that this kind of misogyny started permeating onto

mainstream networks. and so now it is a common part of. youth culture on tiktok to share things like quote unquote, jokes about violently abusing women. and this is really unique to other forms of extremism because kids generally on are not joking about beheading people. right. or other forms of or extremism, but somehow this has become funny and it's all over networks probably. you or i have a facebook friend who shares this content and i think what it's is it has normalized treating women poorly offline and so the cdc out its youth risk behavior survey year which documented a huge increase over the previous ten years in the percentage of teen girls who said they'd been forced to have sex. what could explain this? well, there a huge literature in

the realm of communication that tells us that when people witness acts of violence in media they are in fact more likely to commit acts of violence. so i don't find this terribly shocking. another example would be the repeal of roe versus wade which an argument i make after battling it out with several male editors at cnn for the past two days. but it's going in my know and you know so. obviously the repeal of roe versus wade has been dissected. we know it is. the result of a decades long conservative fight. but think the part of this that hasn't been considered as part of public is why the supreme court justices were so that it was politically and socially feasible to take a potentially life saving legal protection that women enjoyed in this country. and i think that part of the explaining issue could be, again, that it's normalized to

abuse women, deprive women of their rights online. and that is permeating culture. and since we're probably going to be cut off, i have a last question for you, but i'll just leave you on a more positive note, because i know i've been terrifying people at my book events. so me just say this that, you know, ultimately the message of my book is that i call on all of us to radically change how we use social networks to more women. one thing we know is that when women use social media to bolster their careers, they often end up with fewer followers, fewer repost, and fewer resulting opportunities like speaking than men in their fields actively follow more women actually put a list of feminists to follow on my if you know me, that's not surprising. so follow more women, amplify their posts, post about issues that affect your life. call on lawmakers and corporations. call them out when they things. and then the last thing is to change what we do when we

witness sexism and misogyny online. i it's a really bad idea generally to call people on social networks because when we engage with this content. it sends a signal to algorithms that we like it, want to see more of it, and so they show people of it. if we know person who's posting this content, i would say have an offline conversation with them. loretta ross, who's a feminist i really admire, calls this calling people in rather calling people out for these conversation actions. and then finally, when you see this kind of content on social networks report, it to social networks and you may that social platforms are infamous for either not responding to these reports or for responding and telling women know that rape threat did not violate the terms of service. but the thing is that if all of us started doing this in mass, i think it would send a very powerful message to social networks about the fact that we're not happy with this and that we want to see it off platforms. and as we end this conversation,

wanted to ask you about one last statistic. of course, in your book, which is women born in the 1960s, had a basically wage gap, right? that women born in the 1960s had a lower wage gap than fat, women born in the 1980s. and what's so to me, of course, is that i was born in the 1980s, and i was the first generation that got social networks. and so i wonder what you ascribe this to. and if you think part of it is social media. yeah, that's such a good question. i mean the wage gap for millennial women and i think we're both millennials 41 i think we're similar ish age and i was shocked when i was researching this to find that for women our age and a little younger, the wage gap for between very fat and very thin women. is $40,000 annually on average.

like, that's a whole low salaries worth of difference between very thin and the very fat. and that is for women with the same qualification as with the same kind of educational background who should be earning something like on a par. so i think, you know, it's probably attributable to a couple of things i think social media and the fact people are as employers screening basically women's appearance now is it's got to be part of it as you call attention to. and i think it is partly to attributable to the fact that fatphobia here is one of the very few forms of prejudice that is actually on the rise to some measure. so out of harvard showed in 2019 that when you look at implicit across most categories not everyone because they didn't research everyone but all the ones they looked at race skin, tone, age, disability, all of

those forms of implicit bias were declining some quite dramatically the only form of implicit bias that was increasing was weight based. implicit bias, and it was also the form of explicit bias was decreasing the most slowly. so it looks like fatphobia is not getting better and that's something that i really wanted my readers to sit with and think about because yeah, think we need to do better on behalf of so many of us who are in bodies that are constantly being told to shrink in ways that again, we don't really have humane, feasible long term ways to do that. and we're being told to shrink ourselves partly just because of esthetics standards that as carr's brilliantly draw attention to, are so pernicious, a so social media based and are so misogynistic. so yeah, that's sorry i didn't

end on a very hopeful note, but let's do better. agreed so we have the brand applause. we do have time for a few question this evening. i asked that if you have a question gently raise your hand, we're going to bring microphones. there's a few in the space, please. clearly into the microphone. if there are no questions, give these folks round of applause. thank you. if you do have a question that you still want to ask these folks, are we sticking around and they're going to be personalizing books or signing a book that you might have brought from home? if you would like to do so, you can line up here. otherwise, we have lots of copies available in the back. thank you all for coming. get safe and let's do one final round of applause