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feldmanI don't believe in conspiratorial institutions. I do believe that people and groups of people will naturally tend to make full use of any advantages (over others) they happen across if they can logically get away with it. Like a useful gene, it's a trait preserved through the generations between replicating slime and us.
Socialize people into a group and they begin to share an outlook, which shapes how they view the world and sets the parameters for what they think is a good idea or not; in the group's opinion, a good idea is one that protects or builds the group. 'Them' vs. 'us' thinking is a human trait that can't be eliminated; we become more inclusive by expanding our vision of what constitutes 'us', and our ability to define 'them' with abstract concepts instead of people.
Life has a current, and depending on the net result of how a person is variously categorized as 'us' or 'them', one either coasts along or has to swim against it.
The results of oppression are quantifiable, but the practice is complicated and insidious and without an identifiable enemy. It works by compounding a thousand tiny pushes and slightly graded slopes and burying the really untoward shit deep in the fine print and in the punchlines of executive suite chit-chatty jokes. It works by running distracting games and domesticating people into herds of consumers to be yoked and milked and fleeced.
So I never got an official memo that I should be on a Diet (defined by avoiding teh fatz), or that my body must meet certain standards of shape and weight. I never had to. These concepts were assumed from the moment I could parse a television picture, were the unquestioned foundation of the advertising it has been increasing impossible to escape from since the time I could read. As a fat woman in the United States, I'm assumed to be somewhere in the cycle Dieting, either abstemious in the service of reducing my shameful ass, or off the wagon on a stress-and-low-willpower-induced bender. Bonus points for products that purport to assist with both, such ascheap plastic cups of sour milk, preservatives and corn syrup 'yogurt' desserts.
Aside from the pressure of one's worth being determined by how successfully one embodies a fantastical, biologically implausible ideal, the game itself is rigged in favor of the house. And the house doesn't care what size you wear, it simply wants you hungry and desperate, soul bruised and cash in hand.
Socialize people into a group and they begin to share an outlook, which shapes how they view the world and sets the parameters for what they think is a good idea or not; in the group's opinion, a good idea is one that protects or builds the group. 'Them' vs. 'us' thinking is a human trait that can't be eliminated; we become more inclusive by expanding our vision of what constitutes 'us', and our ability to define 'them' with abstract concepts instead of people.
Life has a current, and depending on the net result of how a person is variously categorized as 'us' or 'them', one either coasts along or has to swim against it.
The results of oppression are quantifiable, but the practice is complicated and insidious and without an identifiable enemy. It works by compounding a thousand tiny pushes and slightly graded slopes and burying the really untoward shit deep in the fine print and in the punchlines of executive suite chit-chatty jokes. It works by running distracting games and domesticating people into herds of consumers to be yoked and milked and fleeced.
So I never got an official memo that I should be on a Diet (defined by avoiding teh fatz), or that my body must meet certain standards of shape and weight. I never had to. These concepts were assumed from the moment I could parse a television picture, were the unquestioned foundation of the advertising it has been increasing impossible to escape from since the time I could read. As a fat woman in the United States, I'm assumed to be somewhere in the cycle Dieting, either abstemious in the service of reducing my shameful ass, or off the wagon on a stress-and-low-willpower-induced bender. Bonus points for products that purport to assist with both, such as
Aside from the pressure of one's worth being determined by how successfully one embodies a fantastical, biologically implausible ideal, the game itself is rigged in favor of the house. And the house doesn't care what size you wear, it simply wants you hungry and desperate, soul bruised and cash in hand.
"We know from these studies that if we feed people a carbohydrate-rich diet of fifteen or sixteen hundred calories a day, they will be obsessed with the "persistent clamor of hunger," so much so that they might be willing to mutilate themselves to escape the ordeal."
--Gary Taubes 'Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, carbs, and the controversial science of diet and health'
--Gary Taubes 'Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, carbs, and the controversial science of diet and health'
I've enjoyed the book so far, as it's a great story of physiology, bad science and even worse public health, I was particularly stricken by that one sentence. Ostensibly about the data gathered from a study of semi-starvation in the 1940's, it also handily explains a great deal of my experience with women in groups from high school onward (and before that, if you count my five aunts and their love/hate relationship with weight watchers). Avoiding fat, avoiding meat, struggling with weight and constantly fucking talking about food and sin. Playing a losing game.
Let's set aside for a moment the compelling questions of who gets good meat and real food in this society (people with time and money) and who gets processed grains and industrial meat and oils (people without time or money). Let's set aside the power implications of the gendered conception of men working up an appetite for big meat and women being naughty by eating a cup of sugary dessert. Let's also set aside the huge issues of sustainability, ethics and the nasty underbelly of class and power issues in the food system and in many of the movements to reform it. We need to do a lot of quick hacking and thoughtful rewiring as a culture, because the system quo is fucked, eats some of us whole and makes a good portion of the rest sick. I've had these questions on my agenda for awhile, no easy answers, just trying out household level solutions and running deprogramming interference on the young child when advertising can't be avoided.
There's a whole world of power, food and both real and imagined sin to explore, but what really stopped me this morning was this: given that both the goals and the methods of the USian fat woman's presumed diet are optimally crafted for failure, and have established negative psychological effects, how much human effort, drive and potential is thus channeled directly from spring into sewer?
