Okay, perhaps I should clarify my angry entry of yesterday with less choler and more reason. Since this is an issue on which I often get into heated debates with people, I will, of course, benefit from having written as clear an explanation of my views as I can.
It's interesting, incidentally, that I do find myself in so many very heated discussions about my views on eating and fat-related legislation. Although I have and frequently express other opinions with which many people disagree --I have been characterized as "very, very opinionated" -- almost never do people want to debate or argue with me about them, even if they do in fact strongly disagree. My interpretation of this is that fat and body regulation are such enormously fraught issues in our society that they supercede even the careful position of tolerance-demonstrated-by-not-arguing to which so many of our generation tenaciously cling. People feel personal about these issues. I know I do. So, here goes. Sorry, this will be long.
First, I should be clear that I certainly don't want to promote poor health in children or in anybody. Rising rates of diabetes, both types I and II, should rightly be of great concern. So should lack of energy and poor growth caused by nutritional deficits. I believe, strong liberal and New Deal-ian that I am, that society's greatest responsibility is to the well-being of its children, and if they are pervasively sick, unhappy, and malnourished, society, in forms both governmental and local, has a responsibility to try to amend those problems.
Children have the right to be served healthy lunches in school. They have the right to have active modes of play (notice that I do not say "forced exercise." I refer to unstructured, enjoyable, natural play) open to them and offered every day. They have the right to clean air and safe streets. They have the right to be served balanced, healthy meals at home that their caregivers can both afford and have time to provide. These are ideal rights, of course, and as ideals they're unlikely to be perfectly realized, but I do believe very strongly that the government has a responsibility -- and so do I when I deal with children -- to try its best to work towards those goals.
What I object to, strongly, vehemently, and with all my heart, is a governmental and social attitude that, instead of pursuing these positive goals about health, instead of engaging in reasonable, healthy, and balanced investigation, instead of considering before acting, criminalizes, demoralizes, and degrades.
Now, I don't claim that any of this is new. Society and governments all too frequently leap to faulty conclusions on insufficient or false evidence, substitute fear and disgust for reason and care, and assume that greater regulation and constriction necessarily means a less anxiety-producing social state. But again, idealist that I am, I believe it is my duty (and also my personal proclivity) to protest against what I see as harmful social and governmental action. I don't know too many people who don't feel that way, really. (Yes, because I live in the academy, but again -- self-selected.)
I also don't claim that most politicians or, god knows, news magazines, think about these issues with the same intensity of analysis that I do. I don't claim that they intentionally demoralize or degrade (well, not most of the time), or that they are in a conspiracy to mislead. (I do think that some "diet researchers" do intentionally skew their findings to support the ideas they -- and our society -- already have, but I don't attribute to politicians anything like that level of thought. About almost anything.) I think that politicians, for the most part, believe they are acting on the side of "health" or "rightness." I also believe, however, that underlying their actions is a constellation of fear, harmful misinterpretation, abjection and self-hatred, class-based disgust, and troubling sexual politics that ought to be fought against and brought into the open. Because I -- and many others -- can and do think hard and deeply about these issues, we can criticize, we can hope to amend, we can protest.
I believe:
I should end this (very long) essay with a personal note -- as if it hasn't been personal enough already. But that's the point of this ending: as most of my friends know, I struggle desperately, and have long struggled, with disordered eating and disordered ideas about my body. I have also "struggled with my weight" -- a different but related issue -- most of my life. So of course my investment in these issues is personal and emotional. I don't claim to be dispassionate and uninvolved, though I do try to be as reasonable and well-informed as I can. I feel personally assaulted by law-making or legislative talk that purports to regulate my body, or my hypothetical children's bodies, without my consent. I think I do quite enough regulating of my body already.
I'm not blaming society or lawmakers for my own mental problems. They aren't responsible, any more than my family, or my middle school classmates, or Kate Moss is. But I am angry that lawmakers continue to perpetuate ways of thinking that I think contribute to diseased patterns of thought like mine and like so many other people's. I feel angry, I feel resentful, I feel infuriated by blind acceptance and praise of patterns of thought that convert the 19th century notion of masturbation as self-abuse into the 21st century notion of French fries as self-abuse. I think both societies are partaking of the same dangerous patterns of wrong-thinking, and I want to fight against it, both for my own sake and for others'. I don't apologize for my personal feelings about that fight.
I care because it is personally important to me. I am passionate, and I am probably sometimes unreasonable because I am as implicated in all these things as anybody else. More so, I suppose, than some. But for someone of my temperament, my way of thought, that is the only way I will really become politically invested. I am not a dispassionate political analyst -- that's one of the reasons why I'm not a politician myself. I am a very partial observer. And from my biased, personal, passionate standpoint, I form opinions and I try my best to act upon them.
And I will, I promise you, if the need arises (this refers to a discussion I had with a classmate a few weeks ago), march on Washington in support of Cookie Monster. As a childhood friend, an artistic expression of childhood desires, and a cool blue monster, he's really and truly good enough for me. And I'll stick by that.
It's interesting, incidentally, that I do find myself in so many very heated discussions about my views on eating and fat-related legislation. Although I have and frequently express other opinions with which many people disagree --I have been characterized as "very, very opinionated" -- almost never do people want to debate or argue with me about them, even if they do in fact strongly disagree. My interpretation of this is that fat and body regulation are such enormously fraught issues in our society that they supercede even the careful position of tolerance-demonstrated-by-not-arguing to which so many of our generation tenaciously cling. People feel personal about these issues. I know I do. So, here goes. Sorry, this will be long.
First, I should be clear that I certainly don't want to promote poor health in children or in anybody. Rising rates of diabetes, both types I and II, should rightly be of great concern. So should lack of energy and poor growth caused by nutritional deficits. I believe, strong liberal and New Deal-ian that I am, that society's greatest responsibility is to the well-being of its children, and if they are pervasively sick, unhappy, and malnourished, society, in forms both governmental and local, has a responsibility to try to amend those problems.
Children have the right to be served healthy lunches in school. They have the right to have active modes of play (notice that I do not say "forced exercise." I refer to unstructured, enjoyable, natural play) open to them and offered every day. They have the right to clean air and safe streets. They have the right to be served balanced, healthy meals at home that their caregivers can both afford and have time to provide. These are ideal rights, of course, and as ideals they're unlikely to be perfectly realized, but I do believe very strongly that the government has a responsibility -- and so do I when I deal with children -- to try its best to work towards those goals.
What I object to, strongly, vehemently, and with all my heart, is a governmental and social attitude that, instead of pursuing these positive goals about health, instead of engaging in reasonable, healthy, and balanced investigation, instead of considering before acting, criminalizes, demoralizes, and degrades.
Now, I don't claim that any of this is new. Society and governments all too frequently leap to faulty conclusions on insufficient or false evidence, substitute fear and disgust for reason and care, and assume that greater regulation and constriction necessarily means a less anxiety-producing social state. But again, idealist that I am, I believe it is my duty (and also my personal proclivity) to protest against what I see as harmful social and governmental action. I don't know too many people who don't feel that way, really. (Yes, because I live in the academy, but again -- self-selected.)
I also don't claim that most politicians or, god knows, news magazines, think about these issues with the same intensity of analysis that I do. I don't claim that they intentionally demoralize or degrade (well, not most of the time), or that they are in a conspiracy to mislead. (I do think that some "diet researchers" do intentionally skew their findings to support the ideas they -- and our society -- already have, but I don't attribute to politicians anything like that level of thought. About almost anything.) I think that politicians, for the most part, believe they are acting on the side of "health" or "rightness." I also believe, however, that underlying their actions is a constellation of fear, harmful misinterpretation, abjection and self-hatred, class-based disgust, and troubling sexual politics that ought to be fought against and brought into the open. Because I -- and many others -- can and do think hard and deeply about these issues, we can criticize, we can hope to amend, we can protest.
I believe:
- That the moralization of eating -- except in the sense that it is immoral to starve people or feed them poison -- is harmful and wrong. It is not "sinful" to eat cake. A burrito is not a "bad food." There is, and should be, no moral or Puritanically religious stigma attached to choice and consumption of food. We have way more than enough self-shame and disgust in this culture. It is wrong to glorify and exemplify modes of thought that criminalize and degrade people for eating what are, in fact, inherently normal foods.
- That it is especially wrong to convince children that they are doing something wrong when they take pleasure in eating, say, a piece of pizza or a candy bar. The repressed, as we know, always returns, and when what is repressed is the most basic of biological urges itself, the urge to eat, to take sustenance, it returns in very, very warped ways -- leading to many of those health problems I mentioned at the beginning of my essay. Binge eating, wildly unbalanced eating, anorexia, bulimia, poor self-image with regard to food are all violently exacerbated by restrictive dieting and the use of shame and guilt to motivate unnaturally reduced eating behaviors.
- That virtually all of America's fear and disgust about the so-called obesity epidemic stems not from legitimate concerns over health but from self-abjection and negation of the body, particularly the female body.
There are some people for whom massively unbalanced eating is a legitimate health problem, of course. I am, in fact, one of those people. Changes to my personal eating ought to be made with regards to establishing a healthier pattern. What does society tell me, though? It tells me that the vastly reduced caloric intake towards which I strive, that the obsessive worry about exercise that I harbor, that these behaviors and thought patterns are good! That this is the "healthy" way to be! During the year of my life where I weighed under a hundred pounds, people repeatedly told me that I looked "so healthy." I knew that I was starving myself -- to death, if I could -- but our views are so warped that people perceived my behavior as actually better adjusted than when I weighed an average and pudgy 140.
I can tell, of course, that this is patently untrue -- it is not healthy to restrict one's natural behaviors to the point at which one no longer recognizes them (like all dieters, I can no longer tell when I am actually hungry). It is not healthy to obsessively worry about anything. It is not, in fact, healthy to repeatedly engage in an activity -- like running on a treadmill -- that makes one completely unhappy. (Some people like treadmills. Those people should use them. I really hate treadmills and love to walk outdoors, so I should engage in that form of exercise. Walking, though, doesn't make you thin.)
- That most of the talk about "health" related to body size and food intake and exercise has almost nothing to do with that real health issues. Nor does it have to do with concretely and carefully researched conclusions about blood pressure, heart disease, or diabetes. Many of the assumptions politicians, especially, cite are false. The idea that the body mass index of a kindergartner can give you any indication whatsoever of his or her health is ludicrous. The BMI is ludicrous itself -- it's almost completely scientifically unsupportable. The truth is, and I will stand by this point, that our culture judges what it is calling "health" by how far a particular body diverges from the (sexual -- or desexualized and de-differenced) ideal of slim, tapered limbs, flat stomach, small (un-ethnic) rear.
- That many of these fears and abjections stem also from sublimated class, racial, and sexual fears. The people whose behavior is being characterized as massively (pun intended) stupid are not Governor Mike Huckabee with his recourse to a nutritionist and a personal trainer. They are the poor, who work three jobs to stay afloat and have little energy for marathon training, who don't have funds to buy lunch from the organic market instead of MacDonald's, who already don't have an excess of pleasure in their lives, and from whom incessant messages of self-hatred steal even the pleasures of mental comfort.
The people whose bodies we repeatedly deem "wrong" and "unhealthy" are also those abjected by society: those who look too ethnic in one way or another (think about the Polynesian and Hawaiian body types that are so beautiful, healthily large -- we typically characterize that type of body as "morbid," but it's perfectly natural); those whose bodies put on fat in areas that don't fit in to our models of beautifully (un)gendered bodies; those who are, in some sense, socially repulsed and repulsive.
- That the idea that people somehow don't make the association between calorie intake and social rejection and thus need to be regulated into it, is patently ridiculous. (For realizing this, I do give the Time article credit). Of course people realize it. How could they not? In which case there's something very, very wrong with the assumption that people are fat because they're stupid and don't "get" how to eat or exercise properly. Everybody in American knows the mantras "eat right and exercise" and "reduce calorie intake and up calorie burn" well enough to repeat them in our sleep (and we do). So why don't we get thin? Because knowing those mantras patently doesn't make you able to "obey" them (the quotation marks are for Foucault); nor does it prove their truth. The issue is clearly far, far more complicated than that.
- That what is Orwellian about a lot of these proposed measures is the idea it is okay -- that it is morally right -- to regulate, constrain, prescribe by law people's actions with regard to the most basic things about their bodies and their thoughts. This is not the same as anti-smoking legislation (though I'm not too keen on that either, to be honest).
Food is not a drug. It is not an addiction. It is a basic life need. Treating eating as if it is inherently a diseased behavior is itself deeply diseased. The Ministry of Health, Truth, and Beauty, though (meaning all of us, exemplified by the politicians who propose measures they hope will make them look good) wants to tell us exactly the opposite. It wants to tell us that self-hatred and the criminalization of basic pleasures is healthy and beautiful.
I object deeply to legal constraint of people's bodies when it comes to reproduction. I also object deeply to legal constraint of people's bodies when it comes to eating. Both are, as Freud would have noted if he wasn't kind of an asshole, dangerous suppressions of the most basic drives -- when the superego goes into overdrive, you have, of course, a recipe for neurosis. (I hate to be a Freudian, but we do live in an age that grounds itself almost exclusively on assumptions most famously expressed by Freud.)
- That, if we're talking about appropriate vs. dangerous regulation, gastric bypass surgery is a very strong example of an extraordinarily dangerous procedure that should virtually never be performed. I do very strongly and with much evidential reasoning believe this. Gastric bypass surgery is a dangerously irresponsible medical proceeding. Only in the most extreme of cases is it at all acceptable to remove parts of people's vital organs (and yes, the stomach is a vital organ, as are the intestines). Surgical starvation should never be an option. We no longer believe that we can cure people by cutting them and draining their blood or removing parts of their brains at will -- why do we believe that it is all right to completely decimate their digestive systems in the name of cure?
I completely understand, of course, why a patient would request or choose the surgery. I know personally someone who has done so, and though she suffered complications that kept her out of work and confined her to bed for a long time, she is now recovered and able to live a relatively normal life. She is happy with her choice. And it is her choice to opt for a surgery that is legal and that has been recommended to her by her doctors. She did not make this choice uninformed. Neither do most people who opt for gastric bypass surgery.
But I think it is irresponsible and wrong of the medical establishment in this country to continue to offer such a drastic surgery to people who are not at the point of death (and say what we will about "risk of heart disease" the fact remains that being fat, even being really, really, really fat, is not something that kills you immediately, like a stroke or an accident trauma. It is, if anything -- and again, the research is not sufficient -- a bad risk) when it has not been properly studied and evaluated. We don't know what happens to people in the long run if you take away nine-tenths of their stomachs and put their bodies on a starvation diet for the rest of their lives. We don't know really why these "morbidly" obese people are so far outside the norm to begin with. The "obesity epidemic" isn't really focused on those statistical outliers who weigh 350, 400 pounds and have tremendous difficulty living their lives. For a body to become that large, there's something else, something glandular or metabolic, going on that causes such an extreme loss of function.
I believe that medicine in this country has an absolute sworn responsibility to investigate this surgery further and curb its risks drastically. I also believe that to recommend surgery for what is not a problem of a malformed organ or bodily structure is a misuse of the practice. Surgery should be for things that can't be helped any other way. I am not at all convinced that this is true in the case of so-called bariatric surgeries.
I should end this (very long) essay with a personal note -- as if it hasn't been personal enough already. But that's the point of this ending: as most of my friends know, I struggle desperately, and have long struggled, with disordered eating and disordered ideas about my body. I have also "struggled with my weight" -- a different but related issue -- most of my life. So of course my investment in these issues is personal and emotional. I don't claim to be dispassionate and uninvolved, though I do try to be as reasonable and well-informed as I can. I feel personally assaulted by law-making or legislative talk that purports to regulate my body, or my hypothetical children's bodies, without my consent. I think I do quite enough regulating of my body already.
I'm not blaming society or lawmakers for my own mental problems. They aren't responsible, any more than my family, or my middle school classmates, or Kate Moss is. But I am angry that lawmakers continue to perpetuate ways of thinking that I think contribute to diseased patterns of thought like mine and like so many other people's. I feel angry, I feel resentful, I feel infuriated by blind acceptance and praise of patterns of thought that convert the 19th century notion of masturbation as self-abuse into the 21st century notion of French fries as self-abuse. I think both societies are partaking of the same dangerous patterns of wrong-thinking, and I want to fight against it, both for my own sake and for others'. I don't apologize for my personal feelings about that fight.
I care because it is personally important to me. I am passionate, and I am probably sometimes unreasonable because I am as implicated in all these things as anybody else. More so, I suppose, than some. But for someone of my temperament, my way of thought, that is the only way I will really become politically invested. I am not a dispassionate political analyst -- that's one of the reasons why I'm not a politician myself. I am a very partial observer. And from my biased, personal, passionate standpoint, I form opinions and I try my best to act upon them.
And I will, I promise you, if the need arises (this refers to a discussion I had with a classmate a few weeks ago), march on Washington in support of Cookie Monster. As a childhood friend, an artistic expression of childhood desires, and a cool blue monster, he's really and truly good enough for me. And I'll stick by that.
Labels: anger, bodies, feminism, politics, spirit of the age
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