Apparently, some universities are considering offering a course in “fat studies.” When I taught my Humanities course on “Beauty, the Body, and the Western Tradition”, we spent a fair amount of time on the cultural history of fat. I recall some terrific, spirited discussions — and some painfully awkward moments.
In a vaguely related note, we learn that “cohabitation” is bad for women’s health:
Dietitians have found that women tend to gain weight once they move in with male partners. “Living with a male seemed to put pressure on females to consume more of the ‘unhealthy’ choices,” Amelia Lake, a research fellow at the Newcastle University Human Nutrition Research Center in Britain, wrote this year in the journal Complete Nutrition, “while females had a positive influence on the diets of the males.”
That’s intriguing. Culturally, we teach women to monitor the health of their male partners. Men are generally permitted, even encouraged, to be somewhat irresponsible about their diets. Attention to food preparation and to nutrition is traditionally considered a female concern. Spend time with many couples, and you will often hear stories of what the guy “used to eat” back in his “bachelor days.” One tangible way to measure a woman’s success at “domesticating” a husband or boyfriend is to transform, or at least improve, his eating habits.
There’s a bit of the old “myth of male weakness” at work here. Both men and women buy into the myth (which is why so many folks don’t think it’s a myth at all). Call it the “men are big babies who can’t take care of themselves properly” topos; men “buy it” because it allows us to be irresponsible, women “buy it” because it offers the opportunity to measure one’s feminine power. A woman who can cause a man to change his diet is a “proper woman”. The worse he ate before they got together, the more impressive her achievement becomes. Obviously, lots of folks don’t buy into this, but the Lake study suggests that some people still do — and that it has real consequences for women.
And thirdly, I’m putting on a bit of weight. I’m cutting my exercise and increasing my food intake as we draw closer to Christmas. The exercise decrease is slight, and largely due to increased academic and social obligations. The food intake comes along with it. But I don’t mind putting on a few pounds, largely because I can look forward to taking them off beginning in January.
I’ve learned that my diet and exercise pattern is seasonal; I’m rigorous for a few months, and then slack off a bit. My joints need time to recover, and my body needs to rest. I “soften up” and then “trim down” at different times of the year. The softening up time is obviously pleasurable, but so too is the trimming down. For someone who loves setting goals and meeting them, it’s fun to put on a bit of weight and then take it off again. It becomes a challenge. Mind you, I don’t put on and take off huge amounts of weight; yo-yo dieting is never healthy. But I honor a certain rhythm and seasonality to my eating and my exercise. Though I expect to be ripped once more by Easter, from now until Epiphany, I’ll be in a more languid and indulgent mode.
What’s always puzzled me is why the myth never applies to the outdoor grill ;).
Men are generally permitted, even encouraged, to be somewhat irresponsible about their diets. Attention to food preparation and to nutrition is traditionally considered a female concern.
“Traditional” from the perspective of many industrialized Western cultures, as I see it.
Here’s another perspective, taken from a post by one of my friends at Heaven Tree:
“The prospective participants in the party discuss with utter seriousness: how about Chinese, oh, no, I had that yesterday. What about Nana’s? Hm… last time their rice was a little funny…
To my north European ears, this is quite hilarious – especially, when the four men engaged in this sissy pussyfooting are four bronzed tough-guy Japanese salesmen talking in the vulgar language of the army camp, like the modern day samurai ought to; or when they are four six-foot-three Punjabi Sikh truck drivers, in imposing red turbans, who had just slapped senseless an insolent porter. We north Europeans think it unbecoming for a man to pay attention to food. Weak. Sissy. Feminine. Food is food is food. Meat and potatoes, right?
Well, no. Listen to the Sikh truckers, or the Japanese salesmen, to the poetry of their descriptive language, their expertise, their immensely rich and effective vocabulary with which to paint the experience of their pallot in words. Listen and you will learn a thousand little things you have never noticed about food, things they are aware of, and notice, fine distinctions: this is self-aware taste in action, aided by cognitive linguistic machinery next to which we, white people, are babes in our swaddling clothes. (Except perhaps the French and the Italians).
Asian guys do not eat for nothing. They really know their stuff.”
Except we don’t. We learn that, at best, there’s a tendency to gain weight or change dietary patterns. (My guess would be more that you find more single women dieting, because of patriarchal expectations about body shape.). If they wanted to look at health, they could just look at mortality rates.
You might find this interesting- not so much on body image, but body composition– namely the skinny fat thing: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/11/nfat11.xml
next to which we, white people, are babes in our swaddling clothes. (Except perhaps the French and the Italians).
Don’t forget the Jews!
My fiancee has put on a bit of weight since we moved in together (and I’ve held steady), but the study’s conclusions don’t match us at all. I do all the cooking, and pay attention to nutrition, and my single diet was substantially healthier than hers was. (We do have a good alternative hypothesis for our case, though — at the same time we moved in together, she started working long hours at a stressful desk job.)
I think the key word from Ed’s quote that makes this a cross-cultural phenomenon in the way Hugo describes it is “expertise.” Traditional masculinity in any culture allows men to show an interest in food as long as they are the connoisseurs. So while women tradtionally do the drudgery of buying and preparing the bulk of food that is eaten in a home, masculine men can have a rich repository of knowledge of where to get, or how to prepare food as long as it is the best food or food for special occasions. Note how masculine western men can argue about the quality of wine, or the best way to prepare a steak, or carve a turkey.
My own theory is the Bagged and Tagged Syndrome. Once a woman has a guy in at least a semi-committed relationship–she’s moved in and calling it off at this point is going to be difficult, emotionally painful and possibly expensive for the guy–she feels free to let herself go.
The Chief, that implies that the only motivation for women to control their weight is being single. I think you severely underestimate the overall pressure on women to be thin in American society.
“The Chief, that implies that the only motivation for women to control their weight is being single.”
The only motiviation? No. But a big reason, I would argue yes.
Chief, with virtually every post of yours I am grateful, eternally so, that I met the challenges of late 80’s homophobia and came out of the closet. With men like you, lesbians don’t need to recruit.
Q Grrl, I thought homosexuality was a natural thing and you people didn’t have to recruit. Oh well, either way, believe me–I’m glad you’re a lesbian too. Thanks for not passing anything any further into the gene pool.
And with that, the thread drift will stop and we will return politely to the topic.
No, really Hugo. You put up with post after post of the Chief’s misogynistic dribble to the point that I don’t think you can see it anymore. Here’s a man who STRONGLY advocated his right to rape his wife simply because she married him who is now claiming that women “let themselves go” after marriage. Fuck that noise.
If he can force sex on his wife (is that why she committed suicide Chief?), then women sure as fuck can “let themselves go.”
I’m so tired of nice guys like you giving forum to men who OVERTLY hate women. Hugo, these guys aren’t even trying to hide it.
In my experience, the difference between male and female eating habits has less to do with some inherent belief in male weakness than with the fact that most men don’t feel overweight until a later age, so they don’t have practice in controlling themselves. Studies have shown that if you want to train people to eat a disciplined way you’d better get them young, because adults are incredibly hard to retrain.
Didn’t want to continue this pissing match since Hugo wanted it stopped, but I’m not going to allow a deliberate misrepresentation of my views–especially on a subject as sensitive as rape–to continue to stand: I never advocated rape. I advocated that in the case of a wife who had consistently refused to engage in sex with her husband, the husband has a right to seek sex elsewhere. He can’t and shouldn’t force himself on anybody, he should just switch to a willing partner when his legal partner stops being willing.
Not dignifying anything else with a response and I hope Hugo deletes both this post and Qgrrl’s last one.
The Chief, that implies that the only motivation for women to control their weight is being single. I think you severely underestimate the overall pressure on women to be thin in American society.
While I’d never put it the crude way Chief does, I think there is a small point here . Sure, there’s more general pressure for women to be thin, but one of the primary messages that reinforces that is “If you aren’t thin, you will not find love.” Thus a single woman can experience one source of pressure to keep the weight down that women in a relationship doesn’t feel to the same degree.
I think one major culprit, thought, is often just being inspired to eat more and more often - having dates at restaurants with portions that are too large (as most are), sharing meals with a guy who consumes more than you, etc.
And Hugo, isn’t there a bit of a mixed message here? You’ve encouraged women to indulge themselves a little more when it comes to matters epicurean in the past. Now you seem to be saying that men are having a negative impact on women’s health by indirectly encouraging the same.
Q Grrl, the animosity goes both ways. You have guys like The Chief and you have women like myth, both of which seem eager to make provocative sexist and otherwise derogatory blanket statements about people based on their group identity. And if fact, IMO you were the first one to become aggressive and sling off-topic personal insults.
I too have notice the “bagged and tagged” syndrome, but it seems to go for both men and women vis-a-vis letting themselves go after becoming comfortably partnered. As is the case in the vast majority of these sorts of things, what many call a “gender” issue is really a human issue.
However, I’m always astounded at how backwards feminists tend to be - the notion that shopping for food and preparing the meals is women’s purveyance is so last-century. I personally know of no homes where the man does not do at least half of all the shopping and cooking, and in most all the homes I know the man does far, far more of this than the woman. It’s very much a complete 180 degree turnaround from the 1950s stereotype (if that stereotype ever was valid).
Hugo, you said: “Culturally, we teach women to monitor the health of their male partners. Men are generally permitted, even encouraged, to be somewhat irresponsible about their diets.” and the two sentences seem in direct contradiction to each other. Would mind explaining this?
You go on to say “Call it the “men are big babies who can’t take care of themselves properly” topos; men “buy it” because it allows us to be irresponsible, women “buy it” because it offers the opportunity to measure one’s feminine power.” I disagree. Men aren’t copping out and being irresponsible, they’re giving in to their wives and allowing the woman to have control over the domestic sphere the way traditional society has evolved. Plus, if she’s willing to do the shopping and cooking for him (presumably while he’s at work and she has the free time, otherwise in my experience the duties are at the very least split evenly) then why shouldn’t he let her? Call it laziness if you must, but it’s not being “irresponsible,” it’s being typically human.
You know what? Men can take care of ourselves just fine; in fact, I’m a better cook than any - and I mean any and every - woman I’ve ever met. Further, all my male friends are splendid cooks and savvy shoppers, while their wives are complete losers in the kitchen. Like I said above, the tired stereotypes of helpless men vis-a-vis cooking, cleaning, etc., is so last century. Get with the program.
The reason men’s health is so bad is because men are now and have been for many decades discriminated against in literally every single aspect of Public Health. But that’s another topic for another day.
I agree that men can become complacent in a relationship too. I didn’t mention men’s complacency in my earlier post, however, for three reasons…
1) Men have more to lose–especially if children are involved–when a long term relationship breaks up, hence they can’t afford to indulge in “bagged and tagged” relaxation as fully as women.
2) We were talking about fat, and (at least according to the article) men don’t gain much if any weight during cohabitation. The article and everybody else here was ready to blame this specifically female weight gain on…wait for it…THE PATRIARCHY. I was trying to entertain another possible explanation.
3) I knew that there would be more than enough posters here more than willing to point out every real, exagerrated or imagined flaw of men. Figured I’d just leave it to them.
Chief and Mr. Bad: this is a feminist blog. MRAs are permitted here only when they are on their best behavior. This is not a free-speech forum, and that means that anti-feminist invective will be held to higher standard than feminist rhetoric. While Q Grrl’s remark fell short of the mark, but Chief, you do a great deal to provoke feminist ire.
In my experience, the difference between male and female eating habits has less to do with some inherent belief in male weakness than with the fact that most men don’t feel overweight until a later age, so they don’t have practice in controlling themselves. Studies have shown that if you want to train people to eat a disciplined way you’d better get them young, because adults are incredibly hard to retrain.
Heck yeah!
That exactly matches my experience: Whey a man hits thirty, suddenly his waistline starts to spread. He’s spent a lifetime eating whatever he pleases, and suddenly he is thrown into a bewildering landscape of fat grams, carbs, and calories. I’ve commiserated with friends over the sudden realization that microwave popcorn is bad for you, that ketchup is full of sugar, that avocados have fat—they’re a VEGETABLE for crissake!
Women by contrast, watch their diet from a young age. This is frequently a source of conflict between couples. I remember magnamously buying a pastry for a girlfriend, and having her scowl at me, “don’t you realize that I have food issues?” Once I upbraided a male friend who on different occasions had scolded his wife for not eating desert AND for gaining weight.
You know what? Men can take care of ourselves just fine; in fact, I’m a better cook than any - and I mean any and every - woman I’ve ever met.
Every man thinks this.
Avocados are a fruit. Just sayin.
This is probably an anomaly, due to the fact that the college I attended has a notoriously high eating/body image disorder rate, but many of my recently-cohabitating friends seem to have started eating more - period - since they began living with their boyfriends. The Diet Coke and salad they’d been eating for two meals a day became impractical when they began preparing and sharing meals with someone else. In this case, the weight gain seems to be caused by a better diet, not a worse one.
Interestingly, even some boyfriends who were disturbed to discover their girlfriends’ constantly-on-a-diet eating habits were less than pleased at the contingent weight gain that came along with a more balanced menu.
In the west, people don’t do enough natural exercise. By that I mean walking, doing physical paid jobs (they’re getting less and less) and doing physical tasks around the house (a lot of labour saving devices have made these physical jobs redundant).
Instead westerners view exercise as something you do at a gym. So when you ask someone if they do any exercise, you invariably get a response like “well, I haven’t been down the gym for a week” or “yeah sure, I go the gym twice a week”.
And inbetween those isolated gym visits you get people driving everywhere, sitting down 99% of the day, and generally living a sedentry life.
In the past, people eat just as much fatty foods - it’s just they exercised more naturally because they had to walk to places and do physical labour at work and around the house.
Fat Studies seems to be a lot of naval gazing - that is if they can even see their navals (sorry, couldn’t resist) - while giving out a dangerous message that it’s OK to be fat, even if you’re limiting quite significantly your chances of a long, healthy life.
You could have resisted. You chose not to, presumably for the same reasons that racists don’t resist telling black jokes, and antisemites tell Jewish jokes.
Not that I’m mad; I just think your denial of responsibility for what you choose to write is kind of funny.
Actually, some major studies have shown that overweight people tend to live as long or sometimes longer than “normal” weight people. Even the scariest studies tend to show that all but the fattest fat people live similar lifespans to “normal’ weight people; if a fat person dies at 85 and a “normal” weight counterpart dies at 88, I’m not sure I’d conclude that the fat person didn’t live a long, healthy life.
Finally, I’d point out that as Americans have gotten heavier, we’ve been living longer. That doesn’t prove that heavy is healthy, of course, but it does show that increased weight across a population is not inevitably associated with shorter lifespan across that same population.
Ampersand, fat is not good.
I see people waddling around in public at 400 pounds or so.
If you look like the Comic Book Guy on the Simpsons (know anyone like that, Ampersand? LOL), then there’s nothing wrong with losing weight. If you’re happy with it, fine.
I guess the idea today is: If people don’t think something about me is cool, instead of just ignoring them or changing the thing that really isn’t so cool, I’m going to try to force the entire rest of the world to act like I want them to act, and I’m going to even start an “academic discipline” (LOL) that is aimed, in reality, at forcing people to act like I want them to act.
Instead of screwing in a light bulb, you’re going to just hold the bulb and force the entire building to spin around you.
Or something like that.
And, Ampersand, don’t bother citing “major studies”.
Most people have gotten the drift about you and your cherry-picking with regard to studies. Mary Koss, the wage gap, fat and health, discrimination etc. There are “scientist types” and “lawyer (advocate) types” when it comes down to studies.
You fall squarely in the advocate camp. You don’t want to really see or know the truth, you have already formed your opinion, and then you proceed like a used-car salesman holding up the broken bumper with his foot in your advocacy of studies.
:shrug: I stand behind my arguments on each of those issues. If you have any actual counter-arguments - beyond saying “LOL” a lot and a sort of general sneering tone - then you could present them.
But that you and others seem so much more inclined to attack me personally than attack my arguments suggests that you don’t have substantive arguments to offer.
Sigh….I do have a counter argument, but apparently it’s awaiting moderation, even after you’ve managed to post ahead of my awaiting-moderation post (lol) - Hugo - if you didn’t like the joke, at least present my response to Amp’s post which is only factual information from BBC’s website (that can’t be too radical can it?).
(on a side note, how comes Amp’s post is shown even though he posted it after myself? I won’t bother posting here again if you have a two-stream system of posters based on whose views you like and whose you don’t).
Joe Smith said: “Every man thinks this.” And your point is?
Ampersand said: “Actually, some major studies have shown that overweight people tend to live as long or sometimes longer than “normal” weight people. Even the scariest studies tend to show that all but the fattest fat people live similar lifespans to “normal’ weight people; if a fat person dies at 85 and a “normal” weight counterpart dies at 88, I’m not sure I’d conclude that the fat person didn’t live a long, healthy life.”
This isn’t a very compelling argument Barry because the same thing is noticed in, e.g., smokers, heavy drinkers, et al. Like morbidly obese people, many smokers and heavy drinkers live long and fulfilled lives; both of my parents were chain smokers beginning in their teens and lived well into their 80s. I believe the real issue relative “fat studies” is addressing the public health cost of obesity as it pertains to morbidity, not mortality. Overwiehgt people suffer from a plethora of health problems that don’t kill them outright but incur significant healthcare costs and other societal burdens. Therefore, the point of “fat studies” is to reduce morbidity, increase quality of life and reduce the burdens on society associated with obesity, not necessarily to prevent mortality. By the time people are dead it’s too late.
“Overwiehgt people suffer from a plethora of health problems that don’t kill them outright but incur significant healthcare costs and other societal burdens.”
To say nothing of the fact that all that fat just doesn’t make them happy. I’ve known many overweight people who have sworn “I’m happy just the way I am.” In the meantime they’re trying every fad diet possible, lamenting the fact that few people want to date them (and, as I’ve said here before, trying to insist that everybody else in the world change their attitude towards fat instead of them just losing the weight), etc, etc.
As Andrew has said, our sedentary lifestyle is ruining us. While we do seem to be living longer (because of advances in medical technology), the pounds we keep piling on are often ruining our quality of life.
Amp - you really are giving out dodgy, inaccurate information here. Being overweight is not healthy. It increases your chances of :-
* Hypertension (high blood pressure)
* Osteoarthritis (a degeneration of cartilage and its underlying bone within a joint)
* Dyslipidemia (for example, high total cholesterol or high levels of triglycerides)
* Type 2 diabetes
* Coronary heart disease
* Stroke
* Gallbladder disease
* Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
* Some cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon)
Info source: http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/consequences.htm
More info on the health risks of being overweight:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/healthy_living/your_weight/whatis_facts.shtml
Quote:-
….being overweight, and especially being obese, increases our risk of many health problems, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, stroke, back and joint pain, osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, gallstones, fatty liver, infertility, breathlessness, depression, snoring, difficulty sleeping and excessive sweating.
Being obese is not a cosmetic issue. It can stop us getting the best from life and put our health at serious risk. In fact, a report from the National Audit Office concluded that obesity could shave an average of nine years from our lifespan. (my emphasis)
Quote some sources next time Amp.
Amp - you really are giving out dodgy, inaccurate information here. Being overweight is not healthy. It increases your chances of :-
* Hypertension (high blood pressure)
* Osteoarthritis (a degeneration of cartilage and its underlying bone within a joint)
* Dyslipidemia (for example, high total cholesterol or high levels of triglycerides)
* Type 2 diabetes
* Coronary heart disease
* Stroke
* Gallbladder disease
* Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
* Some cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon)
Info source: http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/consequences.htm
More info on the health risks of being overweight:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/healthy_living/your_weight/whatis_facts.shtml
Quote:-
….being overweight, and especially being obese, increases our risk of many health problems, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, stroke, back and joint pain, osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, gallstones, fatty liver, infertility, breathlessness, depression, snoring, difficulty sleeping and excessive sweating.
Being obese is not a cosmetic issue. It can stop us getting the best from life and put our health at serious risk. In fact, a report from the National Audit Office concluded that obesity could shave an average of nine years from our lifespan. (my emphasis)
Quote some sources next time Amp.
(apologies for the double post)
Sure, there’s more general pressure for women to be thin, but one of the primary messages that reinforces that is “If you aren’t thin, you will not find love.”
I just thank God that love found me anyway, because I was born fat, grew up fat, will die fat and I’ve still never found the bottom in the well of self-hate that was installed in me for the crime of being what I am.
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title , cohabitation, and why Hugo likes gaining weight at Hugo Schwyzer. Thanks for informative article