Earlier this week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by lauded feminist philosopher Kate Manne misleadingly titled “Diet Culture Is Unhealthy. It’s Also Immoral.” Anyone passingly familiar with diet culture knows that it is an immoral, and often amoral, mimetic hellscape of false promises and Sisyphean foothills strewn before mountains less picturesque than bulbous, a crass and superficial country populated principally by neurotics, naïfs, hucksters, and amphetamine hustlers. But Manne’s piece is less about diet culture than about dieting as such. Rather than admonish her readers to forgo participating in a culture designed to brutalize their self-esteem and instead to pursue healthier approaches to weight-control and eating for nutrition, Manne offers her readers a council of breathtaking moral imbecility: pursue pleasure, specifically the pleasure of eating, without regard to its long-term consequences.
