Me Neither
Hi guys,
It's been a really crazy week at work, and I have several things in the works but no finished product yet as of today.
I do, however, have a book recommendation that is not particularly political in nature. Last week I read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado. As someone who has really struggled with, and continues to struggle with, body image issues, this book was a breath of fresh air. He reviews the medical literature about weight and concludes that the health risks have been grossly exaggerated and that media reporting on the issue is almost uniformly distorted. He then discusses the political and cultural dimensions of our country's war on fat. Some of what he talks about is intuitive: for example, that fat is the last safe prejudice, and we have decided that overweight people are overweight because of their own bad choices and uncontrolled gluttony even though that is rarely true.
In all, the book was very thoughtful, deeply felt, and honest. Campos sees what our culture does to women (and increasingly to men also) and doesn't want it to happen to his daughter. It was an interesting decade-later bookend for me to The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, which I read almost exactly ten years ago. The books share a lot of similarities actually, even aside from their titles and subject matters -- both are a little polemical, a little scattered, very imperfect, but the kind of books that stay with you. The irony is that, despite the fact that we are approaching some clear biological limits with respect to what is possible for people to aspire to physically ... nothing has changed in a decade with respect to how pervasive this pressure is. If anything, things have gotten worse.
In the course of those ten years, I've flirted with anorexia twice, had cosmetic surgery, and lost and gained the same ten pounds several times, all very self-consciously (as in, I knew what I was doing even as I had my nose cut off to spite my face). I've hated myself with unimaginable depth for not looking the right way, for not being beautiful and perfect. And no matter how enlightened I get with respect to anything else, no matter how much I have accomplished, no matter how many people love me, it can't erase the cellulite or the weak chin or anything else that makes me "less than" in my mind and in our looks-obsessed culture.
People always ask me how I can feel these things and be a feminist. I say, it's my Achilles heel. I've resisted in so many other ways it was inevitable that they would get to me somehow. But I acknowledge that feeling this way about myself does not comport with my values. It's hard to resist a cultural pressure this strong. It's so endemic to the particular segment of the culture I live in, too, that it's hard to even carve out any psychic space that is free of it. It is no coincidence that my thinnest and fittest years were in law school, where there were very few overweight people (seriously, almost none) and tons of ultra-skinny women many of whom were rumored to have eating disorders. But I was at an Ivy League school with a bunch of rich white kids. This is a race- and class-bound issue as well as a gendered issue.
Campos' most original and interesting argument comes right at the end, when he muses that perhaps upper-class Americans are so disgusted by the supposed overconsumption of the obese lower classes because we are aware of and secretly alarmed by our overconsumption of material things and natural resources. I'm not really doing it justice, since he also ties in the history of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, etc.
Another thing that really struck me about the book is that, having no prior knowledge of his work, I could not tell what Campos' politics are (other than the overconsumption part, which suggests that he leans left). And looksism, or whatever you want to call it, is one of those odd issues that doesn't have a clear left-right split. No matter which side of the fence you're on, the weight of public opinion (pun intended) seems to cut the same way. Beautiful and thin= good, Ugly and fat= bad. I knew that in kindergarten, when I first lied about my weight, saying that I weighed 35 pounds even though I weighed 45. I knew at age 5 that it was better to be ten pounds less than what you were. Surely that is an indictment of something about our culture.
It's been a really crazy week at work, and I have several things in the works but no finished product yet as of today.
I do, however, have a book recommendation that is not particularly political in nature. Last week I read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado. As someone who has really struggled with, and continues to struggle with, body image issues, this book was a breath of fresh air. He reviews the medical literature about weight and concludes that the health risks have been grossly exaggerated and that media reporting on the issue is almost uniformly distorted. He then discusses the political and cultural dimensions of our country's war on fat. Some of what he talks about is intuitive: for example, that fat is the last safe prejudice, and we have decided that overweight people are overweight because of their own bad choices and uncontrolled gluttony even though that is rarely true.
In all, the book was very thoughtful, deeply felt, and honest. Campos sees what our culture does to women (and increasingly to men also) and doesn't want it to happen to his daughter. It was an interesting decade-later bookend for me to The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, which I read almost exactly ten years ago. The books share a lot of similarities actually, even aside from their titles and subject matters -- both are a little polemical, a little scattered, very imperfect, but the kind of books that stay with you. The irony is that, despite the fact that we are approaching some clear biological limits with respect to what is possible for people to aspire to physically ... nothing has changed in a decade with respect to how pervasive this pressure is. If anything, things have gotten worse.
In the course of those ten years, I've flirted with anorexia twice, had cosmetic surgery, and lost and gained the same ten pounds several times, all very self-consciously (as in, I knew what I was doing even as I had my nose cut off to spite my face). I've hated myself with unimaginable depth for not looking the right way, for not being beautiful and perfect. And no matter how enlightened I get with respect to anything else, no matter how much I have accomplished, no matter how many people love me, it can't erase the cellulite or the weak chin or anything else that makes me "less than" in my mind and in our looks-obsessed culture.
People always ask me how I can feel these things and be a feminist. I say, it's my Achilles heel. I've resisted in so many other ways it was inevitable that they would get to me somehow. But I acknowledge that feeling this way about myself does not comport with my values. It's hard to resist a cultural pressure this strong. It's so endemic to the particular segment of the culture I live in, too, that it's hard to even carve out any psychic space that is free of it. It is no coincidence that my thinnest and fittest years were in law school, where there were very few overweight people (seriously, almost none) and tons of ultra-skinny women many of whom were rumored to have eating disorders. But I was at an Ivy League school with a bunch of rich white kids. This is a race- and class-bound issue as well as a gendered issue.
Campos' most original and interesting argument comes right at the end, when he muses that perhaps upper-class Americans are so disgusted by the supposed overconsumption of the obese lower classes because we are aware of and secretly alarmed by our overconsumption of material things and natural resources. I'm not really doing it justice, since he also ties in the history of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, etc.
Another thing that really struck me about the book is that, having no prior knowledge of his work, I could not tell what Campos' politics are (other than the overconsumption part, which suggests that he leans left). And looksism, or whatever you want to call it, is one of those odd issues that doesn't have a clear left-right split. No matter which side of the fence you're on, the weight of public opinion (pun intended) seems to cut the same way. Beautiful and thin= good, Ugly and fat= bad. I knew that in kindergarten, when I first lied about my weight, saying that I weighed 35 pounds even though I weighed 45. I knew at age 5 that it was better to be ten pounds less than what you were. Surely that is an indictment of something about our culture.
posted by Sandi | 1:43 PM
4 Comments:
Lying about weight at the age of 5. Says a lot, obviously, about how young we learn the values of our culture. I really like the part of your article where you mention the delimma of being a feminist who is concerned at times about appearance. There is a certain image of a feminist that most people have in mind -- and beauty isn't usually part of that image. I've no original thought here, but I would love to hear more about how you try to balance that or explain it. Or simply how you discuss it with people. I've known some very attractive feminists who weren't taken too seriously because they were beautiful. It was interesting to hear a professor or another grad student casually mention something about these women's appearance at the beginning of class or in the halls as a way of somehow undermining the "beautiful" women's ideas. It was a power move of sorts: you can't fit into the cultural idea of beauty AND be a feminist. Sorry. I'm off topic.
Who is going to write a book for me, the skinny wimp excuse for a man?
Seriously, there is a bit of reverse thinking on this side of the fence. Extreme obesity is looked down upon in males, too, but so are skinny people like me. At least I've always been self-conscious about it. I felt I had to lie the other way.
Yes, Al, body dysmorphic disorder (the name they've given to obsession with body shape) in men usually centers around the adding of muscle mass to the body. I definitely knew men in college and beyond who were self-conscious about being slender. Since I have always gone for the slender types myself (wonder what that says about me?), I never understood it. But the idealized images of men in the media now are just as out of reach for most as the images of women. For men, the ideal is very low body fat with a good deal of muscle mass, especially in the upper body. And of course the washboard abs. It is certainly true that this is not just a women's issue anymore. In fact one of the things Campos points out in the book is the fact that being significantly overweight, for men or women, is a career-killer in certain fields. (And he wasn't even thinking about the entertainment industry, the most well-known example). Plus, he himself has struggled with weight issues and lost 50 pounds during the time he wrote the book.
Those of you that know me know that I have struggled with my weight all of my life. I have lost and gained the same 25 pounds at least ten times. Being a male I have never faced the same problems with bias that a female does. I own my own business and am very good at it(so I am told) so I have not had to deal with a prejudice in the workplace. The place that I have had to deal with prejudice is in recreational activities. I have heard the comment that fat people shouldn't be playing golf, or how can a fat guy like you exercise. I have even had one lady at a gym tell me that I shouldn't be using the treadmill because I might break it. We went to the mountains for a ski week during the spring and while tubing I had a kid tell me that I was too fat to tube. I showed him. I tubed without problems and I enjoyed it. I long for the day when fat people are no longer allowed to be picked on. I also know that the skinny people are picked on too much also. My wife's cousin is extremely thin and he gets the business on a daily basis and I know that he does not like it. I think our goal as a society should be to improve overall health not set a standard for how everyone should look.
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