The mention of cake conveniently brings me back to Orbach. From these quotes, can we guess what I might want to say?
"When a British Cabinet member responsible for Children, Schools and Families erroneously compares the scourge of obesity to the danger posed by climate change without being ridiculed, we see the confusion and panic about the body today that create an ignorant and gullible stance, in this case towards the myth of obesity." (p24)Considering one of Orbach's most popular books is titled Fat is a Feminist Issue, it's probably not all that surprising that she was going to talk about weight a fair bit. I am surprised by these comments though. I don't think there is a "myth" of obesity. I think it is a very real problem. Most people I know are overweight. I am overweight, and trying to change that. It's not the size itself that is the problem, but the health issues that go along side. Since January I have lost about a stone (14 pounds / 6.35 kg), and I can't begin to tell you how much better I feel. More energetic, less lethargic, less strain on my chest when exercising, less out of breath from just going up the stairs... I'm more inclined to do exercise, because it feels easier. Obesity is linked to strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, and a lot of the time makes you feel generally more miserable. That's me extrapolating a bit, but think about how much easier it is to walk up hill without a full backpack than with a full backpack. The extra weight makes you tired and cranky if you have to lug it around everywhere.
"Literature that looks official and scientific, but has in fact been prepared by the public relations firms employed by the pharmaceutical companies, is placed in doctors' surgeries in the United States to extol the efficacy of this or that drug, as though a disease entity - obesity - existed that needed treating." (p98)
"To read the figures put out by the International Obesity Task Force, one might believe we were in the midst of an obesity epidemic which will swamp our health service and ruin the lives of the next generation. We are told that by 2050 half of the children in the UK will be obese. Without being glib we need to both question - as we shall see - and contextualise this prediction." (p98)
Now that's not to say everyone who weighs more is unhealthy. I'm also very aware that there are plenty of people who exercise a lot, and more of their weight is muscle than fat. If you're living healthily then the risks associated with obesity are minimised. But a lot of overweight people aren't living more healthily - a lot are consuming far too much fast foods and sugar etc. I'm rather thankful that I was put off from eating McDonalds at a fairly young age. I remember watching an advert on tv for their chicken nuggets, and at the end some writing appeared on screen with the words "Now made with real chicken". If they were only now using real chicken, what on earth was in them before? I also feel awful after eating junk food. It can be very tasty, and I eat it from time to time, but eating food made with fresh ingredients that you recognise all the names of is so much more satisfying and leaves you feeling better.
Sorry, we're on a food talk. I'm going to stop here before I take it too far. I love food. I love cooking. I'm aware not everyone feels the same as me, so I'll stop before I start to preach.
There probably is an element of media hype exaggerating the obesity problem. It's what the media likes to do, and coupled with society's ideal of thinness of course news about an overweight epidemic is good scare tactics. But I just feel like Orbach is trivialising the problem, or suggesting that it only exists in the minds of people who want to be thin. She uses figures to back herself up:
"In fact on the National Institute of Health's reanalysis of its own figures, one in fifteen children are seriously overweight in the US and some 26,000 will die from obesity-related diseases. Contrast this with the US figures for smoking-related deaths per annum of 600,000." (p101)
Seriously? That's how we're going to argue against an obesity problem? Comparing the figures to smoking? First of all obesity poses different health risks than smoking does. The health risks regarding obesity are to do with additional strain on the body, leading to things going wrong. It also only affects the person who is obese (unless a person is injured whilst trying to assist the overweight person). Smoking on the other hand is harmful because you are putting many poisonous, toxic substances into your lungs where they don't belong. Some of these chemicals cause mutations in your cells. You're not giving your lungs the oxygen the body requires, you're giving them smoke. You are just asking for problems. But aside from that, it's not only the person doing the smoking is at risk. Anyone who breathes in the cigarette smoke is at risk, and look at all these effects of second-hand smoke. Because people often smoke around other people and smoke moves through the air, far more people are going to be affected by one person smoking than they are one person being overweight.
Also, selective figures much? One in fifteen children might be the case, but the Centers for Disease Control and Protection website claims that over one third of US adults are obese. That paints a completely different picture of the problem than one fifteenth.
I did agree with some parts of Orbach's discussion on obesity however. For one, she points out the uselessness of using the BMI to judge how healthy your weight is. All BMI takes into consideration is your weight and height. It doesn't take into account whether that weight is made up of fat or muscle (and remember, muscle weighs more than fat), nor does it take into consideration any other factors such as how much you exercise or what your diet is like.
Another quote:
"The fat body could be challenging our overpowering preoccupation with image. It might signal a dismissal of childhood eating regimens. Or it might be more a statement about consumerism and the impossibility of so-called 'choice'."Yeah, this is where we see things in different ways again. I don't know that you have to have an underlying psychological reason for having fat. It could be a societal influence - in Fiji "a variety of traditional cultural norms and social mechanisms strongly support robust appetites and body shapes in the ethnic Fijian population. For instance, the importance of food preparation and feasts as facilitators of social exchange and networks supports consumption of relatively calorie-dense foods. Even routine meals are accompanied by somewhat extraordinary efforts by hosts or family to encourage appetites, including a noteworthy
frequency of pro forma and quite genuine entreaties to eat heartily (e.g., “kana, mo urouro,” or, “eat, so you will become fat”) (Becker 1995). In addition, similar to other Pacific Island populations (Gill et al. 2002; Pollock 1995), robust bodies were traditionally considered aesthetically pleasing. In Fiji, this was in part because a large body reflected both the capability for hard work and also indexed care and nurturing from a dense social network (Becker 1994)." [Becker, A. 2004: 538]
Oh Anne E. Becker, how we do so love to reference your article. I find you so very, very useful.
Orbach does go on to briefly mention the link between aspects of society and the increase in obesity such as the prevalence of "long shelf-life foods saturated with fats, soy and corn syrup", and "it is also the case that the rise in obesity statistics coincides with our increasingly sedentary lives and the preponderance of images of the incredibly lean" (p102). Here, I completely agree with her. I don't see why this has to be tacked on to the end in a sort of defensive way (at least, that's how I saw it).
Hmm, I've written a first year essay worth of content on just my first point. I'm really not very good at keeping things short am I? At least I didn't bother waiting to finish this before eating the cake.
My next point is a rather small one. On page 120, in the chapter on sex, Orbach has been discussing the sexual development and insecurities of young girls. She then goes on to say,
"Their acts express the sexual confusions and conundrums of late modernity in which sex is for show. They may also in part be a consequence of the way in which sexual hygiene is featured on a school curriculum: in sex education classes girls learn how to put a condom on a partner rather than how to locate and relish their own sexual pleasures."
I think Orbach might be missing the point of sexual education classes in schools. Learning to put a condom on a partner is not because girls have to learn how to please a man, but so that they know how to prevent STIs and pregnancy. Yes, it is male-bias - there's no reason why girls (and boys) shouldn't learn about female methods of contraception, and I'm sure many do (unless they teach abstinence-only sex education, which is really, truly idiotic). On a slightly related note, I'm not sure why boys and girls are often separated for the sex education talks. When I first had the school talk I was in the last year of primary school (or it might have been second-to last year, because I was in the same class for both years) we weren't split up. We discussed one sex and then another, and the chalk drawing of a uterus was left on the board for about three weeks. I remember someone from a younger year coming into the classroom one day and being told that it was a sketch of a cow's head. It might be to save time, so that girls can learn about the things they'll go through as the boys learn about the things they're going to go through, but I think if everyone was told everything together there'd be less awkwardness between girls and boys over natural things everyone goes through. Like teenage boys knowing very little about menstruation and the girls not liking to mention it around them. It's life, it happens, it shouldn't be seen as something embarrassing or shameful.
Off-topic.
I do also agree with Orbach that girls are not taught or told to locate and relish their own sexual pleasures. It's a male-dominated world, where girls who have multiple sexual partners are "sluts" whilst guys are not. No one wants to be called a slut, so I think girls are less likely to explore what makes them happy. There's also possibly a lack of male exploration beyond the obvious because of the dictates of masculinity, but that's something that we might go further into at another time because I need to move on with my points.
Go and read Oedipus Revisited: Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male Today by Shere Hite in the meantime. That being said, don't expect too much from the book. I gave it 2.5 stars out of 5 and the following review:
I didn't like it enough to give it 3. A lot of this book was an interesting read, and the author poses some good ideas, but there was too much in it that annoyed me for me to rate it any higher. Mainly three things: 1) I felt she generalised far too much about things not necessarily answered by her survey and didn't provide any evidence to back these generalisations up. 2) Too much repetition. This book could have been half the length. Occasionally I'd read a sentence or two and realise I'd read the exact same sentence just a page or two before, or a chapter before. Sometimes she didn't seem to answer the questions she posed, just repeated things she'd already stated. And 3) being just plain scientifically wrong over some things. I didn't pay too much attention to the footnotes, but the one chapter I looked at, she gave two incorrect scientific "facts". One of these was a "correction" to a man who in the survey had actually got the thing right. I can understand getting obscure scientific facts incorrect, but some of the things she got wrong were basic facts that a secondary-school student could tell you.
Overall this was interesting but sloppily written and too long. Maybe good as a first draft.
Look at that - I've complained about generalisations again. And I'm not really selling the book to you. So don't buy it, just get it out of the library. It's only short, and as I said it is an interesting read. It just makes you want to read a better written book on the same subject.
I feel the need to break up this wall of text with one of my favourite comic strips.
Page 123 states that "once our bodies were used to make things - to build dams and stone walls, plough fields, paint frescoes, scrub clothes, gather the needs of daily life. Now those who work with their bodies many hours a day are a class apart." Well, yes and no. Yes, we did used to all do a heck of a lot more physical labour. At the same time, we didn't evolve into anatomically modern humans and suddenly be doing all of these things. We didn't plough fields until just over ten thousand years ago for starters, despite being anatomically modern for about 200,000 years. Our bodies then were used much more to hunt and gather, which I suppose you could claim is making things (it's certainly using them a lot more than most of us do today), but Orbach seems to only be focussing on what we used our bodies for maybe a century or two ago. What we did a century or two ago isn't really relevant for what we do today. I mean, yes, we're influenced by it, but just because we used to build dams by hand and now we sensibly use machines to help us out doesn't mean that we're using our bodies the wrong way. We weren't designed with the purpose of building dams. Not that we were designed. You know what I mean.
Page 111. "The body is experienced as menace. [...] we feel that the problem lies in the ineptitude of our individual endeavours. We have failed to create the body as it should be or how we want it to be. We have only a temporary peace, with the next opportunity to take "it" in hand and attempt to keep refashioning it medically, emotionally and physically around the corner. There is no such thing as a body that can simply be."
Again, I would like to quote Shilling (1993: 5 in Klesse, C. 1999: 20), "In the affluent West there is a tendency for the body to be seen as an entity which is in the process of becoming; a project which should be worked at and accomplished as part of an individual’s self-identity". I don't agree that the body is necessarily experienced as menace, and I'd like to see the data Orbach has to back her statements up. I don't think it's a feeling of failure to create the body how it should be, I think it is more a tendency to see the body as an unfinished creation that can always be worked on. Because of the ideal of "thinness", that work might be us trying to make ourselves thinner, in which case we might get annoyed by our biology and experience it as menacing. But I don't think there's a general sense that our body is a menace. I also don't think that it is this "failure" which makes us use medical and physical refashioning - I think that's more related to the way we view the body, as machine-like and malleable.[1]
"There has never been a 'natural' body: a time when bodies were untainted by cultural practices" (p134). Good. Even chimpanzees show evidence of cultural differences of using the body.[2] If that is the case, why were you complaining earlier about 'once our bodies were used to make things' etc, suggesting that you were dissatisfied by the way we use them now? To be fair, Orbach might not have been suggesting she's unhappy - I may be reading too much into her words. But reading into things is what people do, so this is entire post is a response to the way I took it.
I've written down the quote "post-modern myth of self-invention" without adding the page number, and I can't be bothered looking through the whole book to find it. What I will say though, is why on earth does Orbach throw around the word 'myth' so much? Ignoring the traditional stories definition of myth, dictionary.reference.com gives us the following definitions: a) any invented story, idea, or concept. b) an imaginary or fictitious thing or person. and c) an unproved or false collective belief that is used to justify asocial institution. So Orbach is essentially saying that the post-modern idea of self-invention is a load of nonsense. Why? Just because you disagree with an idea doesn't invalidate it. Plus the idea of self-invention is everywhere in Western society. If it weren't, we wouldn't try to express ourselves through our clothes, our houses, our lifestyles, our hobbies etc.
"May well be the last generation to inhabit bodies which are familiar to us" - again I've not noted down the page number. Actually, glancing through the remainder of my notes, this is becoming common. But yes, this is not necessarily the case. As we've already discussed, how we relate to and interact with our bodies is culture/society-specific. There is no reason why we, in future generations, will not inhabit familiar bodies. Unless you mean the bodies of those in the future will seem unfamiliar to us in the present. In that case, yes, they might. But you're also assuming that our bodies today would be familiar to those in previous generations, and that's possibly not true. For example, anorexia nervosa is a modern illness [see Fasting Girls mentioned above for explanation why]. The body of anorexia sufferers would not be familiar to those living a few hundred years ago. The prevalence of tattoos and piercings would also not be familiar, and whilst people have bleached their hair for a good few generations now, what about those who dye their hair bright, unnatural colours? They have unfamiliar bodies to those a few generations ago. So Orbach's sentence here is a bit meaningless, or pointless.
At some point (again, I don't want to search through the whole book, but I'm pretty sure it's near the end) Orbach claims that perfecting the body is a recent thing. This just isn't true. Is Orbach conveniently forgetting corseting, foot-binding, head-binding, Spartian training, eugenics to name just a few?
At another point she references the Anne E Becker reading I mentioned above. Again, A. E. Becker, you are infinitely useful. It really is a fantastic paper.
On page 138 I had another "seriously?" moment, as Orbach says that women "can't help but participate in a kind of self-mutilation and violence" as we "engage with the highly restricted visual language available to us". Two issues with this: 1) generalising, see my previous post, and 2) you get the impression that she doesn't believe men participate in self-mutilation and violence. We focus on women being influenced by cultural images, but men are also affected. Think of how many men in the media have well-defined muscles, how they wear particular styles of clothes, how they interact with each other. The way men are portrayed in media affects the way men behave in reality, we just don't notice it quite so much as we notice women being affected. I know more men who visit the gym regularly and wish to change their physical appearance than I know women who are engaged in shaping theirs. Sweeping statements are just not my thing.
I'm going to disregard my next two notes on the book, as I can't figure out what problem I had with the statements, so I'll move on to my final point. Page 145 - "Our bodies should not be turned into sites of labour and commercially driven production" and "We need bodies sufficiently stable". Why should our bodies not be turned into sites of labour? Why is the way we create our identities inherently wrong? And what on earth do you mean by a sufficiently stable body and why do we need one? You can't just throw around statements like that without explaining yourself. I'm not saying that our attitudes towards our bodies are good ones, or that I agree with the way we use the body as a work site. We might all be much happier if we didn't care at all about the way we looked, how much we weighed or whether we'd be able to run a marathon or lift a piano. But our bodies are such a big part of ourselves that I think we are unlikely to change in our wanting to use them and change them any time soon. Especially since 'attractiveness' has always been an important part of mating behaviour cross-species. It's just what constitutes attractiveness that changes cross-culturally.
To conclude, my general feelings about this book can be summed up pretty much by this:
[1] See Good, Byron J. and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good. 'Learning Medicine: The Constructing of Medical Knowledge at Harvard.' Medical School in Knowledge, Practice, Power: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Eds. Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. and Sweetman, P. (1999) 'Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity', in Body and Society, Vol 5 (2 - 3): 51 - 76.
[2] Boesch, C. and Tomasello, M. 1998. "Chimpanzee and human culture". Current anthropology. Vol. 39(5). pp. 591-604
No comments:
Post a Comment