If societal mores are designed for the comfort and prosperity of human beings, they are also necessarily designed to restrict the movement of human bodies. Some of these constraints seem only fair, and even intuitive: don’t step on people’s toes, keep your saliva inside your mouth, refrain from farting in elevators. After all, our bodies — precious vehicles that contain all we are and move us safely through the world — are machines possessed of various functions, fluids and pointy bits that other people would rather not have in their laps.

But when that body is also fat, the question of how to constrain it for the sake of other people’s comfort becomes fraught — not only for the person who lives in it. And now, amid the usual spate of New-Year-new-you books aimed at teaching overweight people to accept their bodies, or starve their bodies, or sculpt their bodies, comes another idea entirely. “I believe that when it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to improve our self-image or love our bodies better,” writes Kate Manne in the introduction to her new book, Unshrinking. “It is nothing less than to remake the world to properly fit fat bodies, and to effect the socially transformative recognition that there is truly nothing wrong with us.”

Before we get to the question of how, exactly, such a remaking would take place, it’s important to acknowledge what Unshrinking is — not a science book, but also not exactly self-help, since Manne’s central thesis is that helping yourself, be it by losing the weight or learning to love it, is a fatphobic trap (one of many). Instead, the reader is invited to marinate in an absolute sense of victimhood, safe in the knowledge that her misery is the job of the world to remedy. “We are wronged bodies, not wrong ones,” Manne writes. Chapter after chapter painstakingly martials grievances on behalf of the fat-bodied in a world that refuses to make space for them, both literally and figuratively. Whether in air travel to academia, the medical system to the dating landscape, fat people are subject to endless excruciating indignities, all of them fuelled by the racist, sexist, ableist and all-around intersectional hatred known as fatphobia.