#4: On Shrinking
January 29, 2024
Cambridge
Little Simz–Angel
Last Monday, at her encouragement, I went with Morgan Carmen to a book talk by Kate Manne, author of the new book Unshrinking. The book is a rigorous rejection of fatphobia and its relationship to gender, race, health, and beauty. I haven’t read it yet, but what I learned from Manne at the talk and from Morgan afterward (keep your eyes peeled for an interview between the two forthcoming at Ms.) put Unshrinking very high on my list, and it probably should be on yours, too.
The title Unshrinking has a double meaning. First, it means rejecting the rule that fat people, particularly women, trans, and nonbinary people, are not entitled to total respect and dignity unless they physically shrink themselves. Second, it refers to the relationship between fatphobia and other, nonphysical ways that society requires people to shrink themselves: in order to be women, or Black people, for example. Starting in childhood, people learn these shrinking rules from adults (both loving and ill-meaning ones) and from other kids, who threaten and enact cruelty or violence against rulebreakers.
The morning after the talk, I found myself thinking about what it feels like to shrink in a more general sense. I’m a white, cishet man. I’m not able to speak on the experience of being molded by social oppression. But I do know the feeling that my relationship to something—a job, a grade, a person, a social circle, or even my own mind—is making me smaller, pinning me into one way of being.
When I think about shrinking or alienation, I think about choices over time. My choices. Specifically, I think about choices that I made for reasons that weren’t my own. One of the coolest things about the mystery of my life is that it comes with an internal guide for how to spend it. I get hungry; I admire friends and strangers; I fall in love; I relax when I hear certain music; I light up inside when I read an interesting or beautiful passage of a book. I don’t mean that I should give into every impulse. Sometimes I want to do something, but another part of me tells me not to. (I really just want to nap right now, and I really ought to be writing a fellowship application, yet for some reason I’m doing this instead.) All I’m saying is my life came equipped with the tools I need to make my own choices, and if I cultivate and listen to those tools, I can make my life into a story that I enjoy living.
But a lot of the time, I find myself giving into reasons that don’t come from me at all. Those reasons tell me to make all kinds of decisions—to “be a man,” to care about my grades in law school, to worry about closing doors in my career five or ten years in the future, or to hold my tongue when something wrong is happening. Reasons of this kind always ask me to accept two premises: First, they are a threat. They imply that if I don’t do what they ask me to, I will suffer something that I should be afraid of. Second, they are condescending. They imply that my internal voice is wrong or unreliable or that I will be made to regret the consequences of listening to that voice.
These reasons aren’t attached to a particular person, not really. I hear them from mentors, friends, enemies, and even myself. They’re more like viruses, little ideas that spread by reproducing themselves. Once you let that kind of reason govern your behavior, you implicitly accept its premises: that you are small, that the consequences of nonconformity will be large, and that your own instinct will lead you astray. When you accept those claims about yourself, you also will accept them about others. You’ll harm your enemies with them—putting them down for their perceived failures—and warn your friends about the dangers of nonconformity. And whether or not anybody agrees with you, the idea that was once outside of you has now been reproduced in your own mind.
These are the kinds of thought processes that shrink us. They occur whenever we deny our own instincts (moral, physical, emotional) in the name of conformity to some external measure. And as soon as we accept them, we inflict them on others. In the words of James Baldwin, they are “masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
The answer, of course, also from Baldwin, is love, which removes those masks and “releases [us] from the tyranny of [our] mirror.” This is love as a political act, love as risking our lives for what we believe in. To love in this way—to love yourself, to love your friends, and to love your enemies—is to “walk on air against your better judgment.”
Or, as Little Simz puts it: “Never cared about being immortalized—how could I stand with the opps and not with the tribe?”