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 shes 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. Shes been writing for cnn opinion the social impact of social media and issues affecting women and girls since 2016. Shes 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 were very excited to have this conversation. And if were looking at our phones, its not were on social media. We just have a little for for our conversation planned out. So ill begin and were 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 id 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 whos 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 theyre 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, thats 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 shes 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, its really easy in the heat of the to issue the threats that you know will make your see what youre asking. But one big message i have to parents in this book is just never tell your kids youre going to take their away permanently because if thats the case, may be afraid to come to you when theyre 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, its that high is that i it. Yeah, i think its Something Like a third of girls will have some kind of an encounter like this, a male online. And so, you know, ive been talking to a lot of parents on this book tour and i think theres always this sense think but it wont be my child because thought enters my head right. But my child will know better. But my child wont be exposed to because shes a girl. My child would never sext. And i think its 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 didnt grow in this era. But are just so normal to them. Like they dont quite get why its 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. Theres all sorts of possibilities. But this is a Big Conversation to have. Yeah and we talking in the green room i hope you dont me sharing this about just the prevalence of threat to girls and women online and. So its tempting sometimes in view of these alarming statistics and suddenly ive been told many times as a woman who writes as a feminist in public to just delete my apps, thats a really common piece of advice. But you argue, i think, powerfully in this book. Its 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. Thats 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 im with social media and i just dont using it anymore. Fine. Thats a great decision, if that makes sense. In the context of your right now. But when youre 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 doesnt work, because i think whats happening on social media is making offline world so much more dangerous for women. This is the subject of my cnn opinion piece thats running tomorrow for International Womens day. And so we cant these problems without fixing whats 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 peoples 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 its complicated its nuanced and its 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 its worth, the bmi charts, the overweight category has the lowest all cause mortality, statistically speaking. So thats 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 dont 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 thats 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 im 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 wasnt 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, its 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, its 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 were 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 ive 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 were 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 dont feel like theyre serving you you can unfollow those accounts can meet them or whatever you know is appropriate to the platform where youre no longer seeing those kind. The inspiration images in feed and yeah that curation of social media. I think across many dimensions social media doesnt 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 dont endorse that dont reflect my values and that i dont 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 weve 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 doesnt 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 socalled instagram body can usually only be achieved through surgery, but theres no signals to remind us girls or women that so many of the images were on social media just arent 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 theyre seeing these images of all their friends together at a party, but they werent invited. Its 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 wasnt free but hes out with his friends right and so its body dissatisfaction but its just larger dissatisfaction with life because on social media, everyones life seems more glamorous. You invited to that party or your parents didnt let you go and so youre 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 thats whats feeding all of this body. And one thing thats 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 its just kind of this constant staring womens 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 tiktok 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 dont 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 peoples 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, im 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 werent 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 nonnormative, 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 its something that weve to continue partly through the represents portion of childrens literature, but yeah, also just the sense that we dont judge anyone based on appearance. Were just glad that theyre 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. Theyre 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