One of the more interesting parts of Susan Faludi’s Backlash isn’t as famous as her examination of the “women over 40 never get married” myth or her explication of the popularity of “Fatal Attraction”. Yet, I’ve always thought it was interesting the way that she examined how the fashion industry tends to put its full weight behind anti-feminist backlashes. In retrospect, the transition from the 40s to the 50s is probably the most obvious example—-as women were ripped from their jobs and bullied back into the kitchen, fashion changed dramatically from sensible, mature-looking clothing (that flatters a whole lot of different bodies) like this:
To clothes that had bigger skirts and often emphasized smaller waistlines and bigger bustlines that often required a lot more painful underwear, but limited movement either way:
In The Second Sex, published in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir praised Americans for sensibly embracing women wearing pants as a normal fashion, but from what I understand, this was also undermined in the 50s, where the casual pants look was increasingly frowned upon. Similarly, Faludi noted that the fashion designers of the 80s were, like those in the 50s, bound and determined to get American women to wear clothes that limited movement and were feminine to the point of parody—-heavy on ruffles and even on petticoats. The difference was that women were more empowered in the 80s to rebel, and they did rebel, and a lot of the more extreme clothes never sold well.
I bring this up, because I think the fashion industry has found a way to get around this problem. This time around, the backlash is less about making women look infantile and overly feminized, and more about making them feel they have to be skeletal. Nonny mouse at C&L had an angry post up about this situation, and while I think she’s a bit cruel to women who are super-skinny, I have to say this image she uses tells the whole story:
Robin Givhan should get some kind of award for the tone-deaf mean-spiritedness of her defense of a fashion industry that insists on models that are on the brink of starving to death—-and often beyond. Okay, it’s going too far to say Givhan is defending it, but she is far too blase, and it’s intellectually dishonest to ignore the fact that mandatory anorexia is not only harmful to the viewing public, but it has resulted in actual deaths of models. The fashion industry may think that models are nothing but “hangers with legs”, but they are human beings, and driving them to kill themselves with starvation is a straight up human rights abuse.
That’s the worst part of Givhan’s snitting at those of us who complain about the skinniness of models, but right on the heels of that is how close she comes to an insight before missing the mark completely. Because I do think that Givhan is right that the models are getting skinnier as the public is getting heavier.
All those emaciated models have to be seen against the backdrop of a population that is overwhelmingly afflicted with obesity. It has to be viewed in the context of a first lady who has taken up the cause of healthy eating and exercise because nearly one in three children in the United States is either overweight or obese…..
By its very nature, fashion is a business of falsehoods and costumes, all in service to self-definition. The uncomfortable truth about the fashion industry is it has a knack for tapping into unspoken cultural obsessions and taboos. Fashion sets up a rarefied world of perfection that is, in many ways, defined by how much it differs from the mundane, from the norm. And all indicators suggest that as a culture, we hate what we are becoming: fat.
Of course, part of the problem with her analysis is that Americans are not all people, but fashion anorexia is a worldwide phenomenon. Still, Americans have an oversized influence on manifestations of capitalist culture like fashion, and so I think Givhan’s probably not wrong to round up. What she is wrong to do is see something admirable in the shame about fatness she perceives. She compares skinny models to shows like “Biggest Loser” or moments like Oprah’s weight loss that got her into size 8 jeans, and sees this all as Americans working out shame over our deplorable health habits. But accepting that Americans eat way too much junk and don’t really exercise as much as we should, I still have to say that this kind of social projection is far from healthy. In fact, it’s trading a shame about fatness with a longing for anorexia. It’s not about wanting to be healthier, but about abusing and punishing any trace of flesh, all of which is seen as disgusting and impure, at least on women. I wrote about this at Double X, where I compared the public applause for anorexia to the purity movement in the Christian right.
The obsession with wiping out any traces of humanity from female bodies in the fashion industry reminds me of nothing so much as the obsession with sexual purity that flourishes on the Christian Right. In both cases, anxieties about the dirty biological reality of life are projected onto female bodies, and the solution proposed is an extreme form of control. As fashion designers balk at anything even resembling soft tissue on women’s bodies, some factions of the Christian right are moving towards extreme forms of premarital abstinence that ban even closed-mouth kissing before the wedding. But since the anxieties they’re trying to quash never actually go away, it’s worrisome in both cases to see what the next steps in appetite-denial will be.
Just as the Christian right obsesses over the virginities of its teenage girls, and uses their bodies as a canvas to project all their needs for “purity” on, so fashion models become a similar canvas to project guilt and anger not about being fat, but about being “sinful”. Givhan comes close to realizing this, when she says that fashion models are also there to guilt the average, by which she means people who are actually thin by any reasonable measure. The fashion model isn’t there to shame you about overindulgence, but to suggest that any pleasure taken in food at all is an overindulgence, that eating itself is a disgusting habit that we should abandon completely. It’s also misogynist, just like the Christian right is misogynist, since the bodies all these scapegoating desires are projected on are invariably female. Whether it’s a matter of sex or eating, it seems that it’s mainly women who are expected to feel ashamed of having any desires at all, and only women who are expected to take the extreme measure of trying to wipe out the hated desire altogether.
I happened to post a link to an article in the News & Observer today, “N.C. to impose ‘fat tax’”, on my Facebook page and I couldn’t believe how many comments were generated there, opening up a somewhat heated dialogue revolving on the “blame the fattie” meme. So I decided to post it as an entry here for discussion. First, the news article:
North Carolina is poised to become only the second state to impose a fat fee on its state employees by placing them in a more expensive health insurance plan if they’re obese.
Smokers will feel the drag of higher costs, too, as North Carolina state employees who use tobacco are slated to pay more for health insurance next year.
State workers who don’t cut out the Marlboros and Big Macs will end up paying more for health care. Tobacco users get placed in a more expensive insurance plan starting in July and, for those who qualify as obese, in July 2011.
...The policies have generated a backlash among at least a portion of state workers. Some workers are anxious about the idea of tests for smoking.The tests involve examining a saliva sample for cotinine, a derivative of nicotine found in the system of tobacco users. Health plan officials recognize those concerns and are getting ready to take bids from companies that will perform the tests. The state plan has not yet developed a procedure to monitor members for the obesity standard due to take effect in 2011.
That last line says it all. There are serious problems with this policy that you don’t need a medical degree to see are going to crop up.
Is all obesity the same? No, but it’s treated in this policy as if it’s all about “stop shoving Big Macs in your mouth.” Obesity is a complex problem; if it were that easy to lose weight and keep it off, everyone would be thin, and we’d already have a pill that is safe, effective and can be taken long term. Speaking of pills, many medications to treat other illnesses (diabetes, depression) are the documented cause of substantial, sudden weight gain that is almost impossible to shed.
For fibromyalgia, for example, I refused to take Lyrica because it was associated with too many cases of weight gain, as in 30-60 lbs(!). On message boards I surfed, there were people so fraught with pain, and who never had a weight problem, suddenly finding themselves obese, but with reduced pain. Will NC employees in similar situations be told to stop those medications? I doubt it, but how does that solve the policy problem? If the state really cares about the health of these people (instead of naked costs), then they would have thought this through.
The no-win situation. The state says in order to stay in the 80/20 plan (the insurance pays 80%, the employee 20%), your BMI must be under 40. So if you kick your butt in the gym, do Nutrisystem or whatever plan of the month is, and gut bust down to 39 BMI you should be good to go, right? Nope. The state moves the goalposts the next year, because they lower the BMI qualification to 35. Sweet.
The onus is solely on the employee. The logical question is, will insurance then cover bariatric surgery for those who want to make the BMI goal? Something tells me I doubt it. Will it cover weight loss programs? What if the employee has two jobs and kids and can’t afford any gym membership, let alone the time to go? Is that person then punished with a higher premium?
What about yo-yo effect. It’s well-known that calorie-restricted diets simply don’t work. The weight does come off, but the vast majority of individuals put the pounds back on over time, and some end up even heavier than they were prior to dieting. The cycle of yo-yo dieting and the strain it places on the heart is well-known as well. Did the state take this into consideration? How about when you yo-yo and go over 40 BMI, drop to 35 and go back up to 40—do they keep switching you back and forth between plans?
As I said, on my Facebook page, the discussion escalated quite quickly. See some of it below the fold.
And why does the school board reserve the right to do this—no parental consent required?
Family members said this week that Atlantic high school officials forced five teenage girls to remove their clothes during an investigation into a theft.
The girls' families and their lawyers said the incident at Atlantic High School amounts to a strip-search, which is illegal in Iowa schools.
But school officials said the search was "allowable" under board rules.
The search took place during a gym class after a classmate charged that $100 was stolen from her purse. And it wasn't just stripped down to underwear—one girl was stripped naked. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that no school official has free rein to do intimate searches of students. Making a girl pull the waistband of her underwear away from her body constituted a strip-search, the court ruled. And after the indignities heaped on these girls—the money was not found.
What do you think occurred as a result of this egregious behavior on the part of school officials?
Atlantic Interim Superintendent Dan Crozier has confirmed that an Atlantic administrator had been placed on administrative leave, but did not name the individual. Unconfirmed reports have identified Activities Director Paul Croghan as the individual placed on paid administrative leave, pending further investigation into the incident.
Crozier said the faculty denied the searches were strip-searches, but he added that there are different interpretations of what the term means. "According to the people that we've talked to the first time, and I've talked to them maybe once or twice, they've said it would not fall into that category," he said. "I'm real careful about saying that because it could be interpreted differently."
OK, here are additional details. You decide:
Each girl stripped in varying degrees, families and the lawyers said.
Hudson's client, who is 15, "was asked to remove all of her clothing including her undergarments," he said.
One mother said the girl refused to take off her underwear in front of everyone, but went around a corner and did so.
Some of the girls didn't take off their underwear because it was more revealing than the other girls', making it more obvious that nothing was hidden underneath, said Noethe, one of the lawyers.
Hudson said, "Someone asked if they could just lift up their bra and they were told that wasn't good enough."
One of Noethe's clients was searched twice, he said.
"She was told to take her clothes off and put them back on, then told to do it again because we need you to take your bra off," Noethe said.
Is there some other meaning for "strip-search" that I'm unaware of?
This baffling article by David Leonard about trying to control fatness through punitive measures at the NY Times really drove home to me how much I’m convinced that the issue of what causes obesity—-one that gets the bulk of the attention in discussing the topic—-is a red herring. Outside of policies designed to make it easier for Americans to eat right and exercise, ideally policies that make eating right and exercising easier than not doing so, I don’t really see the value in discourse about individual responsibility. The notion that people are fat because we aren’t hard enough on them doesn’t gel with reality. In the real world, fat people are subject to so much social disapproval and punishment that it’s traumatizing for some. The high levels of punishment for fatness now haven’t done a damn thing to reverse the trend of growing waistlines for Americans. You can believe that obesity has no relationship to diet and exercise, or you can believe, as a scientist in this article states, that the law of conservation of matter is the relevant one when talking about weight gain and loss, but everyone in this discussion thinks Americans would do well to eat better and exercise more. And since we’ve seen that the punitive approach doesn’t work, then it’s time to shift gears, no matter where you stand on the science issues.
I knew that this article was going to get on my last nerve when it kicked off with the idea that smokers need to be treated not like people suffering from an addiction, but like spoiled children who need to be sent to their room.
Two years ago, the Cleveland Clinic stopped hiring smokers. It was one part of a “wellness initiative” that has won the renowned hospital — which President Obama recently visited — some very nice publicity. The clinic has a farmers’ market on its main campus and has offered smoking-cessation classes for the surrounding community. Refusing to hire smokers may be more hard-nosed than the other parts of the program. But given the social marginalization of smoking, the policy is hardly shocking. All in all, the wellness initiative seems to be a feel-good story.
I don’t feel good about it. You know what’s not great for someone trying to stop smoking? The stress of being unemployed. But this sort of punitive attitude assumes something that doesn’t jibe with reality, which is that smokers are doing what they do because they’re proud of themselves for having an unhealthy habit. The only smokers I’ve known that weren’t eager to quit were the ones who just started, and were still trying to convince themselves that they wouldn’t get addicted. But smoking is, if I remember correctly, the second most addictive drug there is (after heroin), and so if anyone can lay claim to the fact that their habit is actually a disease, it’s smokers. And if you were going to pick an addiction for an employee to have, I’d guess it would be smoking! Most drug addicts see a marked decline in their productivity. All smokers want is occasional smoke breaks. Because you’re a smoker doesn’t mean you can’t administer good health care. No one knows better than a smoker how much it affects your health in the here and now, and they can share that information with patients. I know that one reason I was able to drop the habit before it got too bad for me was that I kept recalling a school teacher I had who got winded after climbing a single set of stairs, even though she was young and skinny and had no other health problems.
But you can see how this attitude of doling out severe economic punishment to smokers is going to translate to obesity policies. In this case, the clinic can’t refuse to hire fat people, but they’d dearly like to. That’s fucked the fuck up. Again, if you want to reduce obesity rates, look at the facts: Obesity is strongly correlated to poverty. Making more poverty amongst fat people isn’t going to help them out in any way, even the way you’d hope, which is by causing them to lose weight.
Then Leonhardt makes a patently false claim:
You can disagree with the doctor — you can even be offended — and still come to see that there is a larger point behind his tough-love approach. The debate over health care reform has so far revolved around how insurers, drug companies, doctors, nurses and government technocrats might be persuaded to change their behavior. And for the sake of the economy and the federal budget, they do need to change their behavior. But there has been far less discussion about how the rest of us might also change our behavior. It’s as if we have little responsibility for our own health. We instead outsource it to something called the health care system.
Yesterday, Marc Ambinder had an epic post that was an amalgamation of a bunch of research he’s been doing and conferences he’s been attending on the topic of rising rates of obesity with Americans. The focus of his post was on preventing obesity in children, but I’m going to talk about this little bit at the end that actually surprised me:
The heritability quotient for obesity is .65, which means that obese people tend to produce obese children; whether this is a consequence of genetics, epigenetic factors, pre-natal nutrition—it’s not clear. As kids and adults, obese people tend to cluster with obese people…..
Without reversing the trendline, obese kids will continue to self-segregate; stigma within their group will be reduced, which is good, but it will grow among thin people, there will be more intergroup tension. John Edwards’s two Americas: a fat America and a thin America, coming in about 15 years to neighborhoods near you.
I was surprised to read that there’s evidence showing that fat and thin people self-segregate. Why? Because while like does tend to run with like, I usually assume that “like” means something deeper and more related to your personality and cultural markers you’re comfortable with rather than your weight. But after I thought about Marc’s post, I realized that our culture is beginning to treat fatness as if it were one of those traits that says something about you, an identity marker.
For instance, take this show “More To Love” that’s been well-discussed in the feminist blogosphere. The entire premise of the show is that fat is enough of a identity marker that fat people should date fat people and thin people should date thin people, and crossover relationships are so unusual they aren’t even to be considered. (Until they get their own reality show, I suppose.) Renee Martin wrote a piece about it, where she noted this:
Why did FOX choose a large man to date full-figured women? Is it impossible to picture an average size man who pursues plus-sized women? There is no better way to show that these women just don’t fit in than by pushing the myth that only a large man could find fat women attractive.
Of course, to ask the question in the first place is to fall into a rabbit hole, because obviously, if you’re going to do a dating show that makes the very un-TV-like claim that fat women can be sexual, then of course they’re going to say that fat men deserve love, too. And asking the question, “Why a fat man?” implies, unfortunately, that the “prize” of the man doesn’t count unless he’s thin. I suppose the flip side of that is how many sitcoms pair fat men with thin women, and so you could ask, “When do women get their turn on TV?” But again, that buys into the idea that thin is automatically more attractive.
But if you look at it from the cultural perspective Marc Ambinder lays out, then it becomes interesting. Is “More To Love” reflecting and reinforcing the sense that where you fall on the fat/thin scale is a “like” that attracts like? TV shows are even more aggressive than the public in assuming that you want to hook up with someone who not only thinks like you but looks like you. Still, that reality shows are pairing fat with fat and thin with thin indicates that producers, at least, suspect that these categories make sense with the public, and as the research Ambinder is reporting on indicates, then those producers are right. If so, why do people feel this way about body size? Is it a matter of discrimination—-i.e., thin people refusing to socialize with fat people—-or is it more a matter of self-segregation? Or is it that other cultural identifiers that keep people in a group are ones that determine weight, so perhaps yuppies are skinnier than the public on average and hang out because they’re yuppies, and that leads to these numbers. I’m guessing the Pandagon readership has some interesting theories and opinions on this.
Holy crap. I’m speechless. Take a look at not-so-svelte Neil Cavuto and Anti-Gym hardbody proprietor Michael Karolchyk, who sports a “No Chubbies” T-Shirt, take a crap on the President’s nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Regina Benjamin (see my earlier post).
A screen cap of Benjamin is on the right. Does she look wildly obese to anyone? Did anyone protest about C. Everett Koop’s portly figure as a disqualification to serve? Wow. Weight-proportional-to-height status is not the sole marker of health anyway. Jim Fixx, a slim long-distance running advocate, dropped dead of a heart attack. Obesity is clearly a health risk, but so is family history of cardiovascular disease, or Type II diabetes, whether you smoke, along with a variety of other factors. I certainly don’t see Dr. Benjamin, who, by any stretch of the imagination, is qualified to serve, is worthy of this sort of disgusting slam.
H/t TPM
In the aftermath of Dr. Tiller’s murder, I’ve found myself pondering the nature of terrorism. I was actually quite surprised by where this line of thought took me; I found myself, of all places, in a position of empathy with those on the right for whom the Islamofascist [sic] menace is the paramount concern.
Note, of course, that empathy is not sympathy, and it especially important that the two terms not be conflated in this context. Furthermore, it is to some extent fruitless to empathize with those who have no empathy themselves, but nevertheless, as I considered the lengths to which I’d like to see the state go in response to his murderer - and indeed his murderer’s fellow travellers - I won’t lie and say that heavy handed scorched-earth ideas didn’t enter my mind. “And why not?” I thought. “These domestic terrorists are a growing scourge, a threat to our way of life; if we don’t crack down hard now other fringe assholes will simply be emboldened by the success of this murdering piece of shit and become murdering pieces of shit themselves.”
Even as I thought this, of course, I recognized what is obvious to anyone smart enough to read this blog, which is that if there’s a point of separation between my thought processes and those of people like Michelle Malkin or Erick Erickson, it’s difficult to identify. And, lest anyone think I’m worried that I’m not better than people like that, have no fear; I’m way better than them. So are you. So, frankly, are most people - and yet I would argue that people who are better than Malkin and Erickson (and even me) nevertheless have had moments where they think like I have been.
And so I thought, why should it be that when a country that I am a part of is attacked and 3000 people die, my mind doesn’t run to an offensive position, but when one man is gunned down, I’m loaded for bear? Could it be that I’m really exactly as anti-American as the conservatives suggest? Could it be that I’m more protective of a doctor I’ve never met than of a college classmate? What am I, some kind of liberal monster?
* Miss California emerges as ‘opposite marriage’ spokeswoman. She’s going to make an appearance at the National Press Club tomorrow, a presser hosted by the National Organization for Marriage. No lie. She’s been recruited to save the reputation of this tattered flop of an organization by appearing in its next ad:
What happens when a young California beauty pageant contestant is asked, “Do you support same-sex marriage?” She is attacked viciously for having the courage to speak up for her truth and her values. But Carrie’s courage inspired a whole nation and a whole generation of young people because she chose to risk the Miss USA crown rather than be silent about her deepest moral values. “No Offense” calls gay marriage advocates to account for their unwillingness to debate the real issue: Gay marriage has consequences.
How’d I miss this disgusting screed by true leader of the GOP the other day? I think the guy must be back on the Hillbilly Heroin.
CNN’s Rick Sanchez couldn’t hold back his contempt as Rush Limbaugh mewls that England’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s positive comments about President Obama will lead to Brown’s “anal poisoning.”
Sanchez: “Then you have Rush Limbaugh who doesn’t like the fact that Gordon Brown was impressed with the U.S. President. Didn’t like the compliment…in fact, Limbaugh was so upset about it, he made what may be one of the most disgusting comments anybody could possibly make. I mean, this is the type that would make me wash out my kid’s mouth, the type that even for Rush Limbaugh seems beyond the pale. Some of you no doubt will find Limbaugh’s comments offensive.”
Rush: “So here is a full-fledged, committed global socialist praising the president of the United States for all of his achievements in the first 70 days—a global socialist happy with the changes Obama has made, and ‘you have changed America’s relationship with the world,’ which is why all of the losers that make up the protesters are breaking bank windows, but the slobbering, the slobbering - this guy, folks I’m telling you - if he keeps this up throughout the G20, Gordon Brown will come down with anal poisoning and may die from it.”
We all got the crude sex joke, Rushie. He is a disgusting homophobe. Why else would he make such frequent references to people having to “bend over and grab their ankles”?
The fixation of conservatives like Rush on sex acts is really troubling, I mean worthy of the couch. There is something seriously wrong with them. I mean considering how many closet cases and deviants are in the GOP’s ranks, it’s a motherlode for shrinks. It makes you wonder what is in the cache of El Rushbo’s browser.
Every time there’s some sort of high-profile vaguely sexuality-related event - Janet Jackson, Prince - hordes of parents line up to complain. It’s not because they’re prudes, they say, it’s just that they were forced to answer questions - FROM THEIR KIDS! ABOUT SEX! And although I think those parents are by and large betraying their irresponsibility and/or their ability to blame all their own neuroses on concern for their children’s welfare, at least I understand the surface reasoning. Sexuality is commonly thought of as the kind of thing you don’t spring on kids all at once, for fear their little, um, minds won’t be able to cope with the full story while they’re still trying to figure out how to pee in the toilet.
But recently the BBC has been dealing with another issue that’s leading parents to complain about the idea that their little pwecious* might have some questions.
A children’s show host who was born with one hand is facing criticism from parents over her disability.
The BBC is receiving complaints about kids’ show host Cerrie Burnell, who was born with one hand.
BBC spokeswoman Katya Mira said the corporation has received at least 25 “official” complaints recently about Cerrie Burnell, new host of two shows on the BBC-run CBeebies television network, which is aimed at children younger than 6.
First of all, CNN (and BBC), that’s really stretching the generally accepted use of the word “criticism”, don’t you think? I mean, really, the fact that this even makes the news is problematic - in a world that has not gone mad, these “complaints” would get all the attention paid to letters complaining about the secret messages aliens are sending through the digital advertisements during football matches - but given that we’re going to write a story about this unbelievable bullshit, we can at least refrain from implying that anyone has a fucking point.
This isn’t a joke. One father wrote that he didn’t want his daughter to watch any more, lest it gave her nightmares. Another said: “Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?” Yet another was more to the point: “How do you explain to a three-year-old child why one of the presenters has half an arm?”
“I mean, she can’t even pronounce teratogenic, let alone understand the concept of genotype-environment interaction!”
And yeah, given that most of the complaints came from a message board, this definitely a case of Someone Being Wrong On the Internet - which is the message that needs to be delivered to the BBC and CNN. In truth, the story here is that I heard about it at all. I really hope the BBC controllers didn’t have any meetings about this.
——————-
* Actually, given that the complaint is inevitably “but I had to talk to my kids”, I’m guessing that most of these parents don’t actually like their kids all that much.
If you haven’t seen this already, it’s one of those “are you kidding me?” stories. Amanda Palmer, who headed up the Dresden Dolls, put together a video for her song “Leeds United” off her new solo album. The song leaves me cold (I was amused to read that Ben Folds produced it, and then congratulated myself for relatively consistent taste), but the video is pretty looking, and owes a lot to the creepy scenes with the Master of Ceremonies in “Cabaret”.* It seems like the least controversial thing ever.
So she’s not allowing that sort of thing in her new movie. Good for her.
I do wish, however, she’d gone the extra mile and said, “Attention assholes who impose these impossible standards—-you can have scrawny, or you can have bosomy, but you can’t have both. Get over it.”
Sure, it would have been parsed for days on the blogs for offense to the scrawny yet bosomy minority out there, but it still would have be awesome. But saying something like that in Hollywood is worse than being a biologist who took a piss on a communion wafer.
I happened to post a link to an article in the News & Observer today, “
This 
Yesterday, 
Just peruse these headlines…