The Victoria University staff club is strange in many ways. It is tucked away in the library, undergrads aren’t supposed to go there, and know very little about it. But, despite the secrecy, it is very unexciting - except the alcohol is quite cheap, and sometimes the food is nicer and less over-priced than the rest of the university.

The staff club also has a mission, and that mission is to tell the people who eat there how to eat. As you go down the corridor every side is telling you to eat Blueberries! Low fat! Omega-3 Oil! and so on. Then they usually have little plastic triangle display things on every table - the sort that some restaurants put wine or specials on, but the staff club puts advice on how not to eat too much. Including one that said: “Eat like an Eskimo” followed by lots of praise of fish. Where do you even start?

1. Eskimo? For reals? After that shall we play Cowboys and Indians with any natives we can find on campus?

2. Advice about food is so fucking ridiculous. Why on earth should we eat like we lived somewhere where almost nothing grows? The fact that human beings have been able to subsist on large parts of the planet shows how resilient we are, and what a wide range of foods (as a species) we can survive on. The fact that historically people living in some areas have eaten predominantly fish, while people living in other areas have had very limited access to fish, is a reason to shut up about the one true way of eating.

3. These are workers at the university and post-graduate students. Are we somehow expected not to be able to feed ourselves? Are we in imminent danger of death from a blueberry deficiency? Is there a special section on the health deprivation index about how badly off staff and post-graduate students at the university are?

The Fat Nutritionist has a great post about how the vast majority people on weight-watchers are based on their socio-economic-gender-ethnicity profile are already going to live FOR-EVER. The same is true for the majority of people who work at university or those with post-graduate degrees.*

I’m not suggesting that this information would be anymore productive in, say, a meatworks tea-room. But given that you can’t get more urban-liberal-middle-class than the staff club at a university, and the behaviours that are described as ‘healthy eating’ are the behaviours of urban-liberal-middle-class women more than any other socio-economic group. What is the purpose of bombarding those most likely to be already aware, and following, the behaviours that have been designated ‘healthy’ with?

I would suggest that the purpose is self-satisfaction - the purpose is rewarding the virtuousness, as much as it’s about compelling compliance in those who eat there (they are after all only posters - the staff club doesn’t even sell that much fish). I want to explore this some more, and look at the impact that a moral model of food has on those who do not follow it. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that eating-places are most likely to push these messages among those who are presumed to be already following htem.

* And this in itself is telling. As PhD Comics can tell us post-grad students subsist on instant noodles and free food that can be scavenged around campus. While this stereotype isn’t entirely true, it does have a basis in reality, as post-grad students are lacking in both money and time - which makes acquiring nutritious food you want to eat tricky. And yet, post-grad students generally survive the experience, and go on to live to ages that befit their socio-economic position.

Historiann makes the most interesting comment I’ve seen on Michelle Obama’s dreadful anti-fat “Let’s Move” campaign, pointing out parallels to 18th century cleanliness campaigns:

…nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one’s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and/or have a “hired girl” in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters. Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness. Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children’s bodies as an index of their mother’s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools.

If we replace the words “unclean” with “fat,” and “cleanliness” with “thinness,” we’ll come very close to the rhetoric and language of the “Let’s Move” campaign.

Reading that reminded me of this quote about the politics of disgust from Martha Nussbaum (last quoted on this blog in 2004):

Thus throughout history certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.

Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation — all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.

(Thanks to Maia for pointing out the Historiann article on her google reader feed!)

For a more straightforward response to Michele Obama’s campaign, I’d recommend Kate Harding’s article on Salon, and Paul Campos’ article in the New Republic.

I’m not really interested in writing much about American politics. Partly because if I’m going to do day-to-day political stuff there’s so much to write about in New Zealand.* But mostly because I find it even more alienating than I ever did before. To comment on healthcare, or the escalating war on Afganistan, or even the budget freeze, with outrage implies that you expected anything different. And I didn’t. Obama was always going to act like president’s of the united states do and act in the interest of the rich and powerful, not of everyone else. I think the important political work that needs to be done in America at the moment, which is responding to Obama’s inability to meet expectations not with despair, but with organised opposition, is not something that can be helped from a blog. So I write about dollhouse.

But then it becomes the small things that rouse me to fury and writing - in particular Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. My favourite response to this was from a feminist historian. But I’m not even capable of that sort of rational analysis, because there’s only one part in all of this that can I respond to. Michelle Obama frames her entire programme by discussing her daughters’ bodies, what they were eating, when she got concerned about their weight, and what she did about it (out of general principle I’m not being specific about what she said - it shouldn’t have been said and I’m not going to repeat it).

It is not fucking acceptable to use your daughters’ bodies to make political points. It is a betrayal of your role as their parent to use your child’s body in this way. It will fuck them up. It’ll fuck them up even more if it’s going to be syndicated on every news feed in every part of the world, until someone in New Zealand is offering their opinion on it.

Another woman, whose mother took similar actions when she was a child wrote about it in this fantastic article, she lays the damage her mother did right out there (I got the article from a truly amazing post on fatshionista).

I wish that someone would say “You must stop using your children like this” to the Obama parents, before the kids have to say it themselves.

* National Standards ARGH! GST Rise ARGH!

So Southwest Airlines may have just a minor miscalculation in their ongoing war against fat people.

They booted Kevin Smith off a flight.

Yes, the writer and director who regularly has his on-screen alter ego Silent Bob described as tubby, was already seated, with armrests down and seatbelt buckled, when Southwest decided that he was the wrong size to fly.

Smith announced his defenestration via his (warning, at times incredibly NSFW — which goes without saying; this is Kevin Smith we’re taking about) Twitter feed. Kate Harding was kind enough to stitch a few of Smith’s tweets together:

@SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no “safety risk” (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was wrongly ejected from the flight (even [attendant] Suzanne eventually agreed). And fuck your apologetic $100 voucher, @SouthwestAir. Thank God I don’t embarrass easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don’t sulk off either: so everyday, some new fuck-you Tweets for @SouthwestAir.

Right on. Smith has no reason to be embarrassed — Southwest does. They’ve been actively trying to dehumanize fat people for some time now, and you just knew eventually they’d dehumanize the wrong one; here’s hoping that Smith’s very vocal and justified outrage over this will lead the airline to remember that fat people are, in fact, people. We shall see.

No matter what, it’s got Smith angry — and not just for his own situation. His last two tweets, condensed:

Hey @SouthwestAir? Fuck making it right for me just ’cause I have a platform. I sat next to a big girl who was chastised for not buying an extra ticket because “all passengers deserve their space.” Fucking flight wasn’t even full! Fuck your size-ist policy. Rude…

Word.

Incidentally, the title of this post is a play on a line from one of the great films in cinematic history.

Click to see it bigger.

So it’s the time of New Year’s resolutions (and if you live in Wellington grumbling about the weather).* The newspapers didn’t have much copy over the last couple of weeks, so they were full of: “50 ways to be healthier in 2010.”

So I was delighted to see this post on The Fat Nutritionist called Don’t be Poor (and other New Year’s Resolutions):

The traditional 10 Tips for Better Health

• 1. Don’t smoke. If you can, stop. If you can’t, cut down.
• 2. Follow a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables.
• 3. Keep physically active.
• 4. Manage stress by, for example, talking things through and making time to relax.
• 5. If you drink alcohol, do so in moderation.
• 6. Cover up in the sun, and protect children from sunburn.
• 7. Practice safer sex.
• 8. Take up cancer-screening opportunities.
• 9. Be safe on the roads: follow the Highway Code.
• 10. Learn the First Aid ABCs: airways, breathing, circulation.

The social determinants 10 Tips for Better Health

• 1. Don’t be poor. If you can, stop. If you can’t, try not to be poor for long.
• 2. Don’t have poor parents.
• 3. Own a car.
• 4. Don’t work in a stressful, low-paid manual job.
• 5. Don’t live in damp, low-quality housing.
• 6. Be able to afford to go on a foreign holiday and sunbathe.
• 7. Practice not losing your job and don’t become unemployed.
• 8. Take up all benefits you are entitled to, if you are unemployed, retired or sick or disabled.
• 9. Don’t live next to a busy major road or near a polluting factory.
• 10. Learn how to fill in the complex housing benefit/asylum application forms before you become homeless and destitute.¹

[these are quoted from a wikipedia article.]

There’s a visual illustration of the same idea at the food for thought pyramid. I disagree with the proportions, but I think it’s kind of beautiful. I particularly appreciate the large space given over to luck.

Oh and if you obsess over what you eat and exercise and still get cancer - it must be your attitude. “Healthy living” has to be a goal that is always out of reach, a set of behaviours that can always be added to.

The endless health tips and New Year’s advice are about policing, and making people feel bad so they will buy products (if you stop drinking one soda a day I will gratitously link to a Sarah Haskins Video). But that’s not the only purpose they serve.

The reason for repeating over and over again that we can individually control our own health, is to hide the fact that we can’t. It is to hide the fact that collectively, societally we could do heaps to improve people’s longevity and quality of life and we don’t.

I’d make a New Year’s resolution to write more about that, but I probably wouldn’t keep it.²

1. It’s a great, but obviously incomplete list - don’t have ancestors who were colonised, be selective about the country you were born in… we could go on and on. (back)
2. For the record my New Year’s resolution is to keep up with what Joss Whedon is doing. I’m setting myself up for success. (back)

Shorter Naomi Seligman: “Fashion magazines, designers, and talk show hosts are too supportive of fat people, and should do more to make fat people feel like crap.”

More goodness in her post: A funny fat pun in the post title. Because that hasn’t been done a zillion times before. I bet that if she wrote a post about comics, it would be called “pow! Zing! Comics!” or something like that.

And the idea that people who are fat-positive are making money off fat people. It’s true, in the sense that anyone who appears on TV or in a magazine, and is paid for it, is making money. But the money to be made telling fat people that they suck is exponentially larger.

North Star Liberal, which decided to launch by calling Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, fat and mannish. Of course, it’s okay because they also mocked the appearances of male politicians, which, er, only makes things worse. Also, it’s “snarky,” which is evidently now code for “place where people who claim to be liberals can ignore liberal values.”

For the record:

1. Fat jokes aren’t funny.

2. Jokes that portray women are mannish aren’t funny.

3. A site that claims to be “liberal” would understand that.

Yeah, you can steer clear of them. They aren’t liberal in any meaningful sense of the word.

UPDATE: I guess we can at least be glad they pulled the part making fun of Paul Wellstone’s death — which they used to attack Minnesota State Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, Minn. Incidentally, where were Paul and Sheila going again when their plane crashed?

On October 25, 2002, Wellstone died, along with seven others, in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, at approximately 10:22 a.m. He was 58 years old. The other victims were his wife, Sheila; one of his three children, Marcia; the two pilots Richard Conry and Michael Guess, his driver, Will McLaughlin, and campaign staffers Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy. The plane was en route to Eveleth, where Wellstone was to attend the funeral of Martin Rukavina, a steelworker whose son Tom Rukavina serves in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Wellstone decided to go to the funeral instead of a rally and fundraiser in Minneapolis attended by Mondale and fellow Senator Ted Kennedy

Oh yeah.

You guys stay classy, now.

I haven’t paid much attention to the New Jersey governor’s race. Oh, it looks kind of close, and that might be marginally interesting, but the choice for residents of the Garden State appears to be the classic one between the evil of two lessers. Fighting from the blue corner is the incumbent Democrat, Gov. Jon Corzine, who is the kind of stalwart progressive one would expect the former head of Goldman Sachs to be. His challenger in the red corner, Chris Christie, is a former Rove bobo and U.S. Attorney who has the kind of ethics one would expect from a guy with that resumé. It’s a classic battle between the movable object and the resistible force, and while I suppose I’m predisposed to hope the Democrat wins, I certainly wouldn’t be dancing merrily to the polls to pull the lever for four more years of Corzine.

Now, as noted, the race between Corzine and Christie is close, and the campaign has turned relentlessly negative. And Corzine has launched a brand-new add hitting Christie on his driving record. And, unfortunately, something else:

Did you catch it? Maybe not. Frankly, it isn’t surprising if you didn’t; the message is so culturally ingrained that you’ve probably saw similar images a dozen times today. Still, think about what you just saw, and consider the words that the Corzine campaign used in the ad. Need a hint? They said Christie “threw his weight around” to get out of a ticket.

Interesting choice of words, that.

Interesting choice of video, too. Yes, we’re all aware that negative ads try to use unflattering images of opponents. But this was something else — not just a weird picture, but a classic fat-guy image, the guy slowly, awkwardly getting out of the car.

Yes, Jon Corzine has gone after Chris Christie because Chris Christie is fat.

Now, it wasn’t an overt smear. It wasn’t Corzine standing up and saying, “My opponent mainlines chocolate shakes and eats 23 Big Macs a day.” It was a dog-whistle. But it was a pretty freakin’ loud one. And pretty blindingly obvious to anyone not wanting to will away that fact, or excuse the behavior. Heck, the New York Times clued right in to meaning of the ad, and their description is pretty accurate for those without YouTube:

It is about as subtle as a playground taunt: a television ad for Gov. Jon S. Corzine shows his challenger, Christopher J. Christie, stepping out of an S.U.V. in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once.

In case viewers missed the point, a narrator snidely intones that Mr. Christie “threw his weight around” to avoid getting traffic tickets.

In the ugly New Jersey contest for governor, Mr. Corzine and Mr. Christie have traded all sorts of shots, over mothers and mammograms, loans and lying. But now, Mr. Corzine’s campaign is calling attention to his rival’s corpulence in increasingly overt ways.

Mr. Corzine’s television commercials and Web videos feature unattractive images of Mr. Christie, sometimes shot from the side or backside, highlighting his heft, jowls and double chin.

Meanwhile, Mr. Corzine, 62, is conspicuously running in 5- and 10-kilometer races almost every weekend, as he did last Saturday and Sunday, underscoring his athleticism and readiness for the physical demands of another term — and raising doubts about Mr. Christie’s.

Next, he and a fellow fitness buff, Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark, will run through the streets of that city together next Tuesday.

Yes, Corzine is super-fit. Why, I hear he might swim in the Yangtze River next week, he’s so fit. Not like that fat Chris Christie, who probably has to use a Segway to go to the bathroom, the fat fatty.

But as much as I want to lampoon this, let’s face it, it probably will work, because it plays on the sort of ingrained stereotypes about fat people that already exist among the electorate:

In a recent survey conducted by Monmouth University, voters were asked to say the first thing that came to mind about Mr. Christie. “Fat” was one of the most frequent responses, said Patrick Murray, the director of the poll, who attributed the results to the Corzine ads.

And in focus group sessions conducted for the governor’s campaign over the summer, voters called attention to Mr. Christie’s size without being prompted, and those who were themselves overweight expressed the same concerns, said a Democrat who was briefed on the sessions.

I’m not surprised. Nobody hates a fat person like a fat person. We can never get away from fat — it’s covering us. If we’re lucky, we at some point stumbled on Shapely Prose and started to figure out that we weren’t horrible people, but even then the sense of personal shame remains, because it’s overwhelming in our society.

Now, some on the left have tried to preempt any complaining about these tactics by noting the old standby that “politics ain’t beanbag.” Big Tent Democrat over at TalkLeft makes the basic argument:

For some wonks, Republicans, who have called Dems, traitors, godless, gay, race baited, lied, stolen and cheated in elections, are to be treated with kid gloves. But NJ Dems don’t play that sh*t. Corzine has ripped the bark off of Chris Christie and now is in position to maybe win this thing. Matt Yglesias thinks the Corzine campaign is too mean and there will be a “backlash.” Yeah, right. The GOP is going to whine about Corzine picking on Christie? Really? Yeah, that’ll work. The good news is I am confident that Corzine’s people know what to do down the stretch - continue to rip Christie a new one right up to election day. The political arena is not for the meek. Look at Creigh Deeds.

Look, politics isn’t for the meek. But that doesn’t mean that anything goes. And it especially doesn’t mean it for Democrats.

In 1988, the Republicans ran an ad hitting Michael Dukakis on his furlough of William Horton, a criminal who while out of jail committed armed robbery, assault, and rape. Not a nice guy, Horton, and the program perhaps could be criticized. That said, you don’t know Horton as William, which was the name he used; you know him as Willie. Why? Because Republicans weren’t concerned about making a point on furlough programs, they were arguing that Dukakis wouldn’t keep African-American criminals from hurting good, God-fearing white folk. And William Horton doesn’t sound as scary as “Willie,” the hypothetical black criminal that GOP consultant Larry McCarthy called “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”

The ad worked. Why? Because it fit into the GOP narrative. Minorities aren’t true Americans, they’re criminals who want to rape your white daughters and steal jobs from hard-working white American men. Who cares if an ad reinforces that idea? That only benefits the Republicans, only reinforces the Southern Strategy-approved message that all black men, everywhere are criminals, leeching off good white people.

Democrats do not believe in marginalizing people. We do not believe in creating an “us against them” America. When Democrats use appeals to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or other bigotry to win elections, we undermine the very principles our party is founded on, and do long-term damage to our party in the long run. Every argument that a woman is unqualified because she’s a woman hurts women, and hurts the Democratic message that women and men should be equal. Every argument that an African-American is unqualified hurts African-Americans, and hurts the Democratic message that people of all racial backgrounds should be equal. Every argument against any person’s qualifications simply because of who they are undermine the bedrock principle of civil rights, that one’s genetic code and familial heritage is not a basis for judgment — one’s actions and principles are.

So yes, politics is messy and tough, and by all means, Corzine can pip Christie for any one of a zillion offenses. But when Corzine argues, even obliquely, that Christie’s weight disqualifies him from serving as a governor, he’s saying by that argument that everyone who carries extra weight is ipso facto incompetent. There’s a word for that: bigotry. And Democrats should not countenance it for a second, even if it originates on our own side of the aisle.

This post uses Dollhouse as a way of examining some ideas. If you haven’t watched Dollhouse, but want to, then I recommend avoiding it, since it has some significant spoilers, and the show really will be better if you don’t know. But if you’re never going to watch Dollhouse then read ahead, you don’t need to know anything about the show to understand the post. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Armbinder is enlightened, as “anti-obesity activists” go; he admits that obese adults aren’t going to be losing weight¹ and he dismisses as useless any policy based on hectoring people to lose weight.

But he also writes:

And with obesity, we’re dealing primarily with children and prevention. Obese adults are not going to lose weight unless they decide to have their stomaches separated from their digestive tracts. Megan is pessimistic about any policy intervention and questions any such intervention from a moral level. But any sensible policy is designed to change the environment for children, not for adults.

I don’t really object to the idea of trying to reduce the frequency of obesity in the next generation; although I think the health effects of obesity per se² have been greatly exaggerated, I do think there is legitimate reason to believe that obesity has negative effects on health for a sizable number of people. If it’s possible to make children healthier without stigmatizing fat kids or making their lives worse, then I’m all for that. (I don’t really believe that Marc or anyone else has a practical, proven method for reducing obesity in kids, but that’s another post.)

However, I can’t agree with Marc that because “obese adults are not going to lose weight,” it follows that “any sensible policy is designed to change the environment for children, not for adults.” This assumes that “changing the environment” is only worthwhile if it leads to weight loss. Just because obese adults aren’t (by and large) going to lose weight, however, doesn’t mean they should be written off. An obese adult who doesn’t regularly exercise — just like a thin adult who doesn’t regularly exercise — could benefit a lot from policies that encourage regular, moderate exercise, like making cities more walkable and bikable, creating public parks, or subsidizing gym memberships. A policy that increased the frequency of moderate exercise among adults, even if no one loses much weight, could lead to lower health-care costs in the long run.

The preliminary research on Health At Every Size techniques to improve health among fat people looks extremely promising; some NIH funding for further research along these lines would do a lot of good. But thanks in part to the myopic focus of anti-obesity activists, there’s no money for interventions that make fat people healthier but don’t promise to make them thinner.

Mark writes that “The idea that anti-obesity activists think the problem will be solved by putting grocery stories in urban areas is kind of a myth.” Well, there are plenty of anti-obesity folks who think that putting grocery stores in cities is part of the solution, although I’m sure none of them think it’s a magic bullet. But more to the point, even if policies encouraging grocery stores in urban areas doesn’t “solve” obesity, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be beneficial to health, by enabling urban people to eat healthier even if they don’t lose weight.

Which brings me to the title of my post. The problem with “anti-obesity activists” is that their goal isn’t a healthier population; it’s a less obese population. But treating “health” and “not obese” as synonymous is harmful, because it places many policies that would increase health for everyone — including the obese adults Marc writes off — out of bounds. “Sensible” health policy should attempt to improve the health of all people — including those “obese adults” who aren’t going to lose weight.

(A note about the top image: I hope the top image, by Flickr user ~Twon, doesn’t come off as a “headless fatty” image. There simply aren’t many non-mocking images of fat people exercising, or at least not many I could find. And even though the head is cut off, this photo doesn’t seem to me to contain the same “ew, gross!” subtext contained in most “headless fatty” media photos.)

1. I assume he means “most” obese adults (back)
2. As opposed to the health effects of factors that tend to be correlated with obesity, such as lack of exercise, and the stress from anti-fat discrimination. (back)

Over at The Economist blog, it is written:

It seems self-evident to suggest that if schools that have eliminated physical education and recess reinstituted them, there would be fewer obese adolescents in America.

Evidence suggests adding phys ed isn’t the cure for fatkiditis the Economist imagines. Quoting Gina Kolata¹ in the New York Times:

In the 1990’s, the National Institutes of Health sponsored two large, rigorous studies asking whether weight gain in children could be prevented by doing everything that obesity fighters say should be done in schools — greatly expand physical education, make cafeteria meals more nutritious and less fattening, teach students about proper nutrition and the need to exercise, and involve the parents. One study, an eight-year, $20 million project sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, followed 1,704 third graders in 41 elementary schools in the Southwest, where students were mostly Native Americans, a group that is at high risk for obesity. The schools were randomly divided into two groups, one subject to intensive intervention, the other left alone. Researchers determined, beginning at grade five, if the children in the intervention schools were thinner than those in the schools that served as a control group.

They were not. The students could, however, recite chapter and verse on the importance of activity and proper nutrition. They also ate less fat, going from 34 percent to 27 percent fat in their total diet. Alas, said the study’s principal investigator, Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “it was not enough to change body weight.”

What I’d really like to know — but this article doesn’t say — is if the kids were healthier, as measured by blood pressure, cholesterol levels, ability to walk on a treadmill and so on. There’s an unfortunate attitude that an intervention that doesn’t lead to thinness is necessarily a failure, which leads us to ignore many important indicators of health.²

So why does “it seem self-evident” that we can make thinner kids by adding gym and stirring, when the evidence says otherwise? Well, part of the reason is that “self-evident,” in this case, means that the blogger is reciting conventional wisdom. And conventional wisdom is selective:

The paper appeared in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003 to no acclaim, Dr. Caballero said. No press release, no media coverage, no invitations to speak about the results at scientific meetings. On the journal’s Web page, a search of articles that refer to the study comes up empty. It has not been cited anywhere.

1. If my last name was “Kolata,” I don’t think I’d name my child anything that rhymes with “Pina.” Just saying. (back)
2. Somewhat related, from the same Times article: “Nearly 49,000 women were randomly assigned to follow a low fat diet or their regular diet for eight years while researchers kept track of their rates of breast cancer, colon cancer and heart disease. Not only did the diets have no effect on these diseases, they also had no effect on the women’s weights.” (back)

Paul Campos is interviewed over at Megan McArdle’s blog. There’s a lot there worth reading, but I’ll highlight this bit in particular, since the study he’s discussing has been much in the news:

Consider the methodology of this study. It tried to calculate changes in health costs if everybody with a BMI over 30 had a BMI under 25. But leaving aside the preposterous assumption that all increased health risks associated with a level of body mass are caused by that level of body mass, the idea that somehow we could make fat people into thin people is bizarre.

A study like this isn’t talking about turning 180 pound women into 165 pound women, which at least in theory might actually be possible. It’s talking about turning 200 pound women into 130 pound women, on statistical average. The success rate for such attempts is about .1% Even stomach amputation does not turn fat people into thin people.

So even if it were true that we knew it would be beneficial to turn fat people into thin people (which we don’t) it’s not something we have any idea how to do. The statements in the study indicating that there are known methods for doing this are simply lies of the most egregious sort.

Now lets talk about excess health care costs. if you look at the study, nearly half of the excess health care costs associated with being fat are from higher rates of drug prescription. But why are fat people being prescribed more drugs than thin ones? Largely, because they have the “disease” of being fat, which is then treated directly and indirectly by prescription drugs!

For instance, statins. Statins are a multi-billion dollar business, but there’s very little statistical evidence that they benefit the vast majority of people to whom they’re prescribed. Basically the only people who have lower CVD [cardiovascular disease] mortality after taking statins are middle-aged men with a history of CVD.

But the heavier than average are prescribed statins at higher rates simply because they’re heavier than average, even though there’s no evidence this is beneficial for them. And of course this doesn’t touch on the costs of all the treatments for “obesity” itself, which are uniformly ineffective. [...]

I mean, there’s no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don’t know how to make people thinner. But apparently this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it’s about as well established as that cigarettes cause lung cancer. So all these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. They are as non-sensical as anything being proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.

It’s conceivable that through some massive policy interventions you might be able to reduce the population’s average BMI from 27 to 25 or something like that. But what would be the point? There aren’t any health differences to speak of for people between BMIs of about 20 and 35, so undertaking the public health equivalent of the Apollo program to reduce the populace’s average BMI by a unit or two (and again I will emphasize that we don’t actually know if we could do even that) is an incredible waste of public health resources.

Also well worth your reading time is Megan’s followup post, in which she refutes the usual objections people posted in her comments. (Thanks, Sebastian!)

Years ago, my favorite part of the Drew Carey show was the opening credits, which featured Drew, who is fat, dancing.¹ (Apparently Carey liked dancing — dance scenes were crowbarred into the story of several episodes, e.g..)

So if there’s a show featuring fat people dancing, I’ll give it a try, even if it’s a goddamn fucking weight loss show.

The dance part of the show is entertaining enough. The dancers aren’t as good as the dancers on So You Think You Can’t Dance (most of whom are professional dancers), so the choreography can’t be as interesting or challenging. But it was fun and perky, and often a lot of fun to watch.

So what about the fat politics? Well, for the most part, they’re awful. Being fat is constantly spoken of as the opposite of being healthy; that dancing, moving and eating well could be a good thing even for people who don’t lose weight isn’t even on the radar here. And, of course, the contestants are graded (or eliminated) based not only on how they dance, but on how much weight they lose. There are lots of tearful confessions connecting life goals (teaching their kids well, getting a girlfriend or boyfriend, etc) to losing weight, and the inevitable close-ups of the fat people eating fries, donuts, and the like.

So does it “work”? Do they lose weight? Of course they do. These fat people, for the weeks they’re on the show, are essentially full-time weight losers, in the most unrealistic environment imaginable. They don’t have jobs; they don’t take care of kids. They have a nutritionist, a work-out room with a dedicated trainer, and when they’re not in the work-out room, they’re dancing.

Like most weight-loss plans, it’ll work… for a while. The dancers will lose seemingly incredible amounts of weight — I’m guessing the ones who make it to the end will be 50-100 pounds lighter than their starting weight. But it’s not sustainable. Because, for the vast majority of fat weight losers, nothing is sustainable. Weight-loss plans don’t work. ²

And because this show is teaching contestants to measure victory mostly by their waistlines — not by a sense of accomplishment, or joy in movement, or good health measured in any way but weight — I worry that this will actually be bad for the dancers, in the long run, if they gain weight back and it makes them feel they’ve failed.

But it’s not all bad. Inevitably, despite itself, the show includes fat bodies moving, fat bodies being sexy, fat bodies being competent. Fat bodies, in short, dancing. It’s impossible not to notice that some of the fattest dancers, like Mara, are also the most talented. Heather MacAllister once said:³

Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it’s political. Add physical movement, then dance, then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act.

I wouldn’t call “Dance Your Ass Off” revolutionary, or even really fat-positive. But it has fat-positive elements despite itself.

1. Actually, the show had a bunch of opening credit sequences over time, but at least a few of them were dance numbers. (back)
2. The show includes a professional con man — I mean, weight-loss doctor — as part of the cast. I’d really like to see a complete accounting of all his patients from prior to 2004, and how his services have helped them in the years since. (back)
3. Yeah, this is the second time I’ve quoted this in a month. (back)

By any measure, Dr. Regina Benjamin has had an enormous positive impact on our nation. The first African-American woman and first physician under 40 to serve on the AMA’s board of trustees, Benjamin is the CEO of Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in the small gulf coast shrimping village of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a practice that she had to rebuild after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. She’s a recipient of the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights, was listed as one of Time magazine’s “Nation’s 50 Future Leaders Age 40 and Under,” and has been awarded the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice from Pope Benedict XVI. She served on the Florida A&M University Board of Trustees as an appointee of then-Gov. Jeb Bush, and was appointed to multiple committees of the Department of Health and Human Services the Clinton administration.

In short, it’s hard to see anything on Regina Benjamin’s resumé that indicates anything other than a strong work ethic, a keen intellect, a pure soul, and overwhelming qualifications to serve as America’s 18th Surgeon General. Yes, as a Democratic appointee, there are a few things that will cause her to run afoul of the usual suspects on the right, such as her commitment to abortion rights and her support for a radical overhaul of America’s broken health care system. But as a Democratic president is unlikely to appoint an anti-choice, pro-insurance surgeon general, there’s really nothing to suggest that Benjamin would receive anything other than overwhelming support for her confirmation.

Except for one thing.

She’s a bit overweight.

Now, you may think that it’s bizarre to suggest that a MacArthur Genius Grant-winning, papal award-receiving, universally respected physician should be denied the position of Surgeon General because she, like many Americans, is somewhat overweight. You might think it beggars belief that we could even be discussing the idea that someone should be denied a position because of her weight. But if you’ve been paying attention to the overwhelming fat phobia in our society, you can’t be surprised.

The balanced, mainstream concern-troll look at the story comes from ABC News, which is just wondering, you see, whether this could be a problem:

Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, Obama’s pick for the next surgeon general, was hailed as a MacArthur Grant genius who had championed the poor at a medical clinic she set up in Katrina-ravaged Alabama.

But the full-figured African-American nominee is also under fire for being overweight in a nation where 34 percent of all Americans aged 20 and over are obese.

Critics and supporters across the blogsphere have commented on photos of Benjamin’s round cheeks, saying she sends the wrong message as the public face of America’s health initiatives.

Indeed. If Americans see a healthy, hard-working — but overweight — surgeon general, we might get the idea that being fat isn’t horrible, and then we might actually wonder whether fatness is actually equal to health. We might have a discussion about fatness that is honest. Horrors! We can’t have that!

My favorite part of the story, though, is contained in a sub-header:

40 Pounds Over, Size 18, Blogs Speculate

Yes! Blogs speculate! It’s pretty much exactly like truth, especially since, last I checked, sizes weren’t specifically tied to weight!

Yes, there are a few voices of reason. Joanne Ikeda, a nutritionist at Cal-Berkeley, says, “Maybe now we will stop making the assumption that all fat people are unhealthy particularly in light of new data coming from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.” And Steven Blair, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Carolina, quite reasonably adds, “The focus should be on Dr. Benjamin’s credentials and accomplishments. What difference does her size make?”

But of course, these questions are buried between people concern-trolling that Benjamin is a bad example to African-Americans, just like Oprah. Because for heaven’s sake, who would want their daughter to grow up to be a multi-billionaire talk show host or a world-renowned physician if she might be a little bit overweight? It boggles the mind!

Still, while ABC’s story is obnoxious, to really do completely unfair character assassination, you need the professionals at Fox News, who brought in Michael Karolchyk to discuss the issue.

Remember Michael Karolchyk? Sure you do! He’s the jerkface owner of The Anti-Gym in Denver, which, if you recall, featured such innovations as cupcake-throwing at people on treadmills, a “ravish room” for the men and women who had acceptably low BMIs, and “live DJs [and] cage dancers,” because, you know, that’s what the gym needs. If you want to feel worse about humanity, go ahead and check out his commercials.

Of course — funny story — in a rare example of divine retribution, Karolchyk is actually now the former owner of The Anti-Gym, because he lost it in January after failing to pay over $180,000 in tax bills. He then subsequently put his clients’ personal info, including credit card numbers and abusive comments about them, in an open dumpster.

You might think that a failed gym owner wouldn’t be the first person you’d turn to for a discussion of whether someone is qualified to serve as surgeon general, but alas, you’d be wrong:

Yes, he is wearing a “No Chubbies” shirt.

Doubtless, there is no shortage of racism and sexism feeding into this discussion. A similarly overweight white male wouldn’t be getting quite this level of opprobrium, and we wouldn’t be talking about what his waist size was. But more than that, it’s a sign of just how hateful attitudes remain about people who weigh more than the “ideal.” The idea that Benjamin could be accomplished, brilliant, and of superlative character is nothing compared to the fact that she’s overweight. It’s damn dispiriting.

(Spoiler warning!)

1) We paid the extra couple of bucks to watch in 3-D. The 3-D was so well-done, so utterly natural and looked so good that we all stopped noticing it after the first fifteen minutes. Not really worth the money.

2) Why is everyone saying this film is such a weepy? Yes, right at the start of the film (in the film’s best sequence), the main character meets a girl, falls in love, gets married, has a long and happy lifetime with his love, and then she dies once they’re both in old age. We should all have misery like that.

Because I had heard so many “bring a hanky” comments, I really expected a major character (maybe the dog?) to die at the end of the film. This probably improved the film for me, since I actually thought a major character might die.

3) The bad: Even for Pixar, the lack of female characters in this movie is extraordinary; of two important female characters, one is the protagonist’s wife who dies in the first fifteen minutes, the other is a bird named Kevin. Why is Pixar unable to imagine a story with a female lead? Needless to say, it fails the Bechdel Test.

4) The good: The main character is elderly, which makes UP the only children’s flick I can think of to feature an old protagonist.

5) The even better: The secondary protagonist, Russell, is a fat little boy — and there isn’t a single joke about his size, anywhere in the film.¹ A positive, non-buffoon fat character with no fat jokes — That’s pretty much illegal in a children’s movie, isn’t it?

Heather MacAllister once said:

Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it’s political. Add physical movement, then dance, then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act.

6) In addition, Russell is a positive, non-stereotypical Asian character, and the actor who did Russell’s voice, Jordon Nagai (who was seven years old when they cast the part), is also Asian-American. In a more reasonable world the race of actors doing the voices in animated films wouldn’t matter at all; but with major live-action movies casting white actors to play characters that were originally Asian (as in “21″ and “The Last Airbender”), it’s nice to see Pixar go the other way.

7) And by the way, good story, good animation, and lots of great visuals. The dog characters were pretty consistently funny, as well.

1. He does have trouble climbing a rope, but the way they depicted that didn’t emphasize his fat. (back)

On another thread, Ron asks a 101-style question about the term “cis”:

So “cis-gender” would be that your physical and your … what, mental? … gender are the same…

Not mental and physical. Rather, it’s that the gender you were assigned at birth, and the gender you identify as, are the same. (See Julia Serano’s excellent FAQ on this subject.)

Except that “cis-gender” is pretty much the default, so there’s little need in normal discourse to use the term.

Maybe it doesn’t come up in your “normal” discourse, Ron, but I find that the term is useful in my day to day discourse.

Plus, as a political matter, it’s important that the unmarked “defaults” have names. Imagine if, instead of the words “Jewish” and “Christian,” we had only “Jewish” and “normal.” Or if, instead of “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” we had only “normal” and “homosexual.” We can’t discuss things on an equal basis without an equal vocabulary.

* * *

Which reminds me: We really need a vocabulary for weight. The current, official vocabulary is “underweight,” “normal weight,” “overweight,” and “obese.”

I’m happy to replace “underweight” with “thin” or “skinny” (although of course, the real question is if those people medicine labels “underweight” are okay with that), and “overweight” and “obese” with “fat.” But I really hate calling the medically/socially approved default body “normal” (or just as awful, “healthy”). Suggestions?

“In the boy scouts, they came first for the homosexuals,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a homosexual;
And then they came for the atheists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an atheist;
And then they came for the fat people,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a fat person;
And then… they came for me…”

Via You’re Reading Too Much Into It, The New York Times reports on a new trend: super-skinny male models.

Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt. [...]

Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? [...] The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.

“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”

The new male model is supposed to look younger, pubescent, rather than adult; and like with female models, that means casting them young and skinny.

It is disturbing that this is happening. I’d much rather see female models get more latitude; this is moving towards equality in the wrong direction.

The article makes a couple of “this was a big deal when women were thin, but no one cares that the men are now expected to be thin” comments. (”Far from inspiring a spate of industry breast-beating, as occurred after the international news media got hold of the deaths of two young female models who died from eating disorders, the trend favoring very skinny male models has been accepted as a matter or course.”)

The article should have pointed out that male models are still allowed to carry a lot more weight, proportionately, than female models. Which is probably why we haven’t yet had any young male models die of heart attacks (although if the thin trend continues, probably that will happen, alas).

According to the article, “Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm… about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.” Later, a booking agent says that a male model who is 6 foot one should weigh 155. Both of those work out to a BMI of 20, which is officially categorized as “normal” weight. But a BMI of 20 would probably make a female model unemployable:

Many suspect that some of the world’s top models, from Kate Moss to Jacquetta Wheeler, will be banned if a cut off BMI of 18 in enforced. [...] The average runway model is estimated to be 5 feet 9 inches tall and to weigh in at 110 lbs.– resulting in a BMI of just 16, according to the British newspaper the Evening Standard.

According to the standard BMI categorization, BMIs under 18.5 are “underweight.” That doesn’t make what’s being done to the male models acceptable. But for people who aren’t naturally superthin, trying to maintain a BMI of 20 probably isn’t as unhealthy as trying to maintain a BMI of 16.

Finally, the article’s language sometimes seemed to suggest that thin male models aren’t male. Not everyone will see it, but comments like “underfed runt” and “chicken-chested” feel loaded with sexism, implying that the models are not only thin but also inadequate as men.

Via conservative David Link, who liked it despite himself.

• Demand Respectful and Accurate Reporting on Lateisha Green. Lateisha Green, a murdered trans woman, is being persistently referred to by mainstream news sources by her prior name and gender. This is offensive, and it also goes against standard journalistic practices, as described in both the AP and NYTimes style guides. Cara has email addresses so you can request that the news agencies refer to Ms. Green by her correct name and pronoun.
• Oh, and do check out Queerty’s “10 best responses to The Gathering Storm.” Not all my favorites were there, but there were also a couple of good ones I hadn’t seen before.
• While at Queerty, I noticed that M*A*S*H star David Olgen Stiers, an actor I’m fond of, has come out of the closet. Stiers, 66, says that he hasn’t done this before because he was afraid it could hurt his career if (Stiers does a lot of voiceover work for Disney cartoons). He’s coming out now, however, because “Now is the time I wish to find someone and I do not desire to force any potential partner to live a life of extreme discretion for me.”
• Over at Polymorphous Perversity, “a discussion of the concept of sexual “deception,” inspired by the pernicious suggestions of some commentators that transgender hate crime victims such as Angie Zapata themselves committed criminal sexual assault by failing to disclose their anatomy/gender history to sexual partners.” Part one, and part two. Highly recommended.
• Interesting history from David Link: “There are many reasons for the increasing acceptance today of same-sex marriage among the American public, but one has received virtually none of the acclaim it deserves: the invention, in the late 1940s, of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. The gay rights movement owes a lot to that little shaker.”
• Why Publius changed his mind and learned to like the Courts finding a right to same sex marriage.
• Here’s something I’ll probably never say again: “Nom is right.” Of course, they’re also hypocrites.