Archive for the 'Food' Category

A note about leather, veganism, and the slow pace of transformation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2007
in Animal Rights, Food and Veganism
. 20 Comments

I’ve been promising more posts on the vegan life, and here’s another one. Today’s topic: what to do about leather. First, a general update:

I’m as close to being fully vegan as I’ve ever been. No eggs, no dairy, no meat, no fish. More fruit, more vegetables, more nuts, more seeds. I’m wary of how easy it is to turn into a “junk-food vegan”; I take it easy on the wheat products and the textured soy protein. There’s a limit to how much soy I want to pump into my body.

I pack a lot of snacks wherever I go. When I was simply vegetarian, I could always count on being able to find a protein bar or a prepacked salad somewhere. Being vegan means being very intentional about what I have with me; I don’t like being caught with no vegan options in the midst of an afternoon snack attack. Careful planning — careful shopping, careful filling of tupperware with nuts, fruit, and other fun things — helps prevent the tempttion to fall.

As for leather: I own a lot of it. I have a dozen pairs of nice leather shoes, leather belts, a leather wallet, a suede jacket. I don’t have the resources to immediately replace them all. I am committed to not buying any more leather items, and to asking my loved ones not to give me anything leather. As these items wear out, I can replace them one by one with vegan alternatives. But it seems wasteful to throw them all away, and I can’t afford to instantly replace them all even if I were to give them to charity. I’m aware that as a teacher and youth leader and “public vegan”, wearing leather sends a mixed message. My goal is to get to the point where I’m not wearing any animal product (and that will mean, I suppose, foregoing the pleasures of a silk shirt or boxers). It will mean not only buying vegan clothing, but doing my best to ensure that the human producers of that clothing were well-paid. It narrows my shopping options, but I’ve found some excellent sources for good things. In the meantime, I’ll have some leather on me more often than not.

I am a great believer in incremental change. I ran a 5K before I ran a marathon. I gave up alcohol and drugs before I gave up cigarettes, and I still haven’t given up caffeine (and may never do so.) I gave up reckless promiscuity before I gave up “flirting”. I worked on meditating for five minutes before I tried going for ten. And I gave up red meat before I gave up chicken, and I gave up chicken before I gave up cheese. I’ve given up buying leather before I’ve given up wearing it. Progressing in slow stages works for me.

Those who don’t want to see us change will be eager to point out where we’re not yet perfectly consistent. They try and convince us that we must do everything perfectly, or not at all. They try and discourage folks from making positive changes by emphasizing that it will be hypocritical not to change everything all at once. Their goal is to keep us stuck, to keep us believing that transformation is too difficult, too painful. They scare off the aspiring vegan by saying, “If you still wear leather, you’re a fraud.” Well, no. If you still buy leather, you might want to think about your values — but continuing to wear a useable item until it is no longer so is hardly proof of weak principles, only of financial limitations.

My veganism, like my feminism, like my faith, is rooted in the cry of Aslan at the end of the Narnia books: “Further up, further in.” There’s always more growing to do, and it won’t be finished for a long, long time.

A long post about PCRM, veganism and gettin’ evangelical

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 16, 2007
in Animal Rights, Body, Environmentalism, Food, Science, Traveling and Veganism
. 23 Comments

My prayers this morning go out to all those affected by the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy. I have a few Hokie alumni in my family (though far more who went to UVA), and I know a couple of folks still closely associated with the Blacksburg campus. I know that several of my readers are Hokies, and my thoughts and prayers are especially directed towards them.

It’s spring break (Pasadena City College has what must be America’s latest spring break), and I’m in our little study at home. I was in Virginia yesterday, if driving from the District to Dulles in a downpour can be considered being “in Virginia”. (We did find some great vegan Ethiopian food in a little strip mall in Ballston.) My wife and I spent the weekend in Washington attending the Art of Compassion gala to raise money for and celebrate the accomplishments of one of our very favorite charities, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

What I love about PCRM is that more than any other animal rights outfit, they adopt a holistic approach to personal and global transformation. PCRM is one of the leading organizations advocating vegan diets for all. Backed by a growing network of hundreds of doctors and nutritionists across the USA and Canada, PCRM is reaching out to millions through increasingly savvy media campaigns. (My wife and I are particularly pleased with — and particularly interested in supporting — PCRM’s brand-spankin’ new Spanish-language campaign.) PCRM also campaigns against the use of animals in medical research, and has played a leading role in developing alternatives. (PCRM helped create “Digital Frog” to help end school dissections; they’ve helped popularize TraumaMan to replace the use of live animals in emergency medical education.)

Most animal rights organizations — and Lord knows, they all do fabulous work — want to save animals. The folks who run PCRM, led by the remarkably energetic and charismatic Dr. Neal Barnard, want to do the same. But saving animals is about more than stopping a seal hunt, or shutting down a few fur farms or puppy mills. (All very worthy causes, mind.) PCRM’s point is that what is good for animals is also good for us and for our planet. A balanced vegan regimen requires far fewer natural resources to produce than a meat-and-dairy laden one. And the health benefits of veganism (or even its softer form, lacto-ovo vegetarianism) are sufficiently well-demonstrated as to be nigh on undeniable.

The world says: “Children need milk to build strong bones”. The world says “Beef is the best source of iron and protein, especially for women.” The world says “Without animal research, we can’t make necessary medical breakthroughs.” The world says “A vegetarian or vegan diet is too boring, too miserable, and too time-consuming for the average modern person.” And carefully, with painstakingly documented research, PCRM works to disprove all of these deeply-held myths. (PCRM helped expose the roots of the Vioxx tragedy: what had proved safe in animals turned out deadly for humans. Animal testing too often makes animals suffer and tells us nothing about what works for people.)

Sigh. This post is turning into an infomercial. That’s not what this blog is supposed to be about, and I apologize. This is how I feel after retreat weekends with my youth group, or after a men- against-rape training. I feel inspired and invigorated, and more than usually evangelical!

Last month, Stentor at Debitage put up this post: Moral Relativist Anti-Vegetarianism. Stentor, a trained amateur philosopher, has pointed out more than once that I have an exasperating habit of making sweeping moral statements — and promptly disavowing the idea that I am actually proselytizing, claiming at times that “this is just me.” He’s right. The truth is that a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle almost always is about making a universal moral claim. Stentor writes:

So what makes vegetarianism especially threatening whereas diversity in other parts of life evokes less hostility? One inescapable part of the picture — which unfortunately vegetarians spend a lot of time disclaiming in a usually futile effort to avoid the proselytizing charge — is that vegetarianism is a moral position. Aside from the small number of people who are vegetarians purely for health or henotheistic religious reasons, to become a vegetarian is to implicitly endorse a non-relativistic moral code*. Second, vegetarianism is threatening – becoming a vegetarian involves a significant change in a fairly fundamental part of one’s lifestyle. Third, vegetarianism is realistic. For all the joking about how life wouldn’t be worth living without bacon, vegetarianism is within reach of the majority of developed world adults. (It’s not without hardships for some, and I’m not endorsing a purely personal-lifestyle-change-based policy, but the fact remains that most North Americans could drastically reduce their meat consumption if they really put their minds to it.) Adding to the realism is the surface plausibility of the vegetarian position — it’s comparatively easy for even a committed omnivore to understand what makes vegetarians think they’re right. Bold emphasis is mine.

Stentor is frequently right, and here, he’s dead on. I realize that on this blog, I write about many things: diet, feminism, faith, exercise. As a progressive evangelical writing for a general audience, I’ve deliberately disavowed Christian proselytizing in this space. Do I wish more people would pursue a personal, transforming relationship with Christ? Yes. Do I believe that no one can be saved without consciously forming that relationship? No, I don’t. Do I wish more people — especially men — would embrace feminist principles of egalitarianism in every aspect of their public and private lives? Yes. Do I want every man (and woman) to stop using porn, to stop objectifying women, to stop the economic, sexual, and physical exploitation of their sisters? Yes.

So the question I’m wrestling with is this: does my veganism correlate more closely with my feminism or my Christianity? If it’s like my Christian faith, it’s a “personal choice” — one among many. I do believe that my Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Wiccan, animist, and atheist friends will be saved (though how, exactly, is not something I can always articulate.) I do believe that I am called to follow Christ, but I also believe that others follow Him even as they call Him by other names. What would make the world a far better place isn’t necessarily everyone becoming Christian; what would make the world a far better place is if everyone actually lived out the principles of their faiths and creeds. But if every man and woman on this planet saw women as equally worthy of dignity and respect, as equally entitled to share in resources and in decision-making, as equally prepared to lead, as equally deserving of being seen as a whole person — then heck yes, the planet would be better off. Feminism is, in that sense, essential.


And I’m prepared to start arguing that vegetarianism (or better yet, veganism) has the power to bring about tremendous change. It will improve the health of the individual and of the planet, and it will exponentially reduce the unnecessary suffering of sentient, conscious creatures. So yes, I’m going to risk alienating still more readers with a more explicit commitment to veganism here on this blog.

In the end, I’m trying to follow ever more closely Forster’s maxim: “only connect.” What I wear matters. What I eat matters. Everything we do connects us to other living creatures. Every darned thing I do every day matters. And my brothers and sisters, the same does go for you too. Every dollar you spend is a vote. The food you buy, the clothes you wear, the words you speak: these impact the world. And I’m asking you to consider making the best possible choices in your public, private, educational, familial, sexual, and economic lives.

My commitment to full veganism is relatively recent (I’ve been a vegetarian for longer.) It’s been a slow evolution rather than an instant decision. Like most lasting conversions, it has come gradually rather than in a flash of light. But you’re gonna be hearing more on this blog about animal rights, veganism, and how they connect to faith and feminism.

More about my PCRM weekend below the fold. Continue reading ‘A long post about PCRM, veganism and gettin’ evangelical’

Working out, eating right, self-acceptance and the call to transform: towards reconciling a series of contradictions

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 8, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite posts 2007, Feminism and Food
. 18 Comments

One of the things about going vegan this year: no more Cadbury cream eggs. I’m thinking about this because my sources tell me that I’ve had several visitors who came here with the search query “cadbury eggs sweden”. Sigh.

I’m thinking about feminism and bodies again this morning. I read Sara’s post at F-Words yesterday. She notes that a poster appeared on campus at Washington State (she’s got the photo) with the caption: “Better your Body”. That wouldn’t have been unusual as an ad for a gym, but it was a flyer advertising free body composition testing in conjuction with WSU’s body image awareness week. Body image awareness programs have been around on college campuses for two decades or more, designed to combat the epidemic of eating disorders and self-loathing that is rampant among college students, particularly among young women. And if there’s something at the core of all “body image awareness workshops” it’s the notion that feminists ought to resist the imperative to be thin, to be overly concerned with body fat, to be endlessly obsessed with having a “better” physique.

Sara points out the absurdity of all this, and moves on to muse about what a truly “body-friendly” gym would look like.

It seems like there is so much emphasis on the idea expressed in that image - that we need to change our bodies, that we need to quantify them and judge them to be responsible and healthy - that it’s not necessarily a mentally-healthy environment.

In my body-friendly gym, there would be no scales. What do we need them for? No one leading an aerobics class would remind us that “swimsuit season” is coming. There would be fitness classes geared toward people whose bodies are different - classes for the disabled, for example. Even a person’s size can significantly change their experience of a class. I’ve found out (the hard way, having gained a fair amount of weight over a period when I was really into pilates) that having a belly makes pilates harder….

Mostly, I’d like a gym where a person’s current body was what’s being worked out and enjoyed. No matter how hard you work, you’re not going to lose actual pounds or gain actual muscle mass during any gym session. I’d like the emphasis on a future, perfected body to take a backseat to the things a person can appreciate about their current body.

I’m thinking about this at the same time that I’m thinking about an e-mail I got from a wonderful former student of mine. She enjoys the blog, but recently went through my photo albums at my old Typepad place, and was troubled that several of the photos were of me, shirtless. As I’ve explained many times before, I almost always run shirtless. I hike shirtless. When I’m down in Colombia on my wife’s family’s finca , I spend much of my time shirtless. (Drenched in SPF 50 sun lotion, mind you; I’ve had enough battles with skin cancer.) Mind, my student was not suggesting that there was a sexual or flirtatious component to these photos. What bothered her was that these pictures came in conjunction with the frequent notes I make on the blog about diet, exercise, and sport. My student admitted that it made her feel bad about herself, particularly because she saw me (rightly or wrongly) as a pro-feminist role model. In a very thoughtful and polite way, she made it clear that there was a disconnect between my very public commitment to working with young people to combat eating disorders and body dysmorphia, and my almost equally public fascination with the endless improvement of my own flesh. And while she could accept that disconnect in print, she had a hard time with it reflected in photos as well.

So, I’ve cleaned up all of my old Typepad photo albums. No more shirtless pictures. (I will still be shirtless all over the greater San Gabriel Valley this spring and summer, in mountains and on roadways, as I up my mileage for a July marathon.)

The connection between Sara’s post and my student’s e-mail? They’ve both got me thinking about ways to create a pro-fitness, pro-health culture that is radically respectful of body diversity. It’s got me wondering how we can do a better job of articulating fitness goals that aren’t visual. Gyms and health clubs and personal trainers often speak the language of health, but as Sara makes clear, the atmosphere of most clubs is one that encourages a pre-occupation with achieving a specific size goal. There’s an almost universal double-speak going on in which everyone claims to be doing whatever they’re doing in order to “get healthy”, but most feel compelled to emphasize aesthetic achievement over true fitness. I don’t know a lot of young women who worry as much about osteoporosis, heart disease, and breast cancer as they do about weight.

My mother is a big fan of the Curves franchise. She’s been overweight much of her adult life, and is — thank God — a cancer survivor. She started going to Curves a few times a week back in 2002, and she’s really enjoyed her experience in a mirrorless, women-only gym. She would never have joined an ordinary health club, but she found the non-judgmental, accepting atmosphere at Curves to be just what she needed in order to experiment with an exercise regimen. I’ve never been inside a Curves, obviously, but I hear almost universal praise from the women I know who have become regulars.

It’s often hard for me to write about fitness and body image issues, knowing that I still have miles to go on my own journey towards radical and complete self-acceptance. I don’t work out merely to improve my body’s appearance, of course. I don’t work out for health alone, either, at least not only for physical health. I work out so much because I’m addicted to endorphins; I am a nervous, restless energizer bunny who needs to burn off tension constantly. Running, boxing, Pilates, cycling — to one degree or another, they all get me high. And I like being high. It just so happens that my addiction has the side effect of a lean and toned physique!

My views on diet, too, are rooted less in an obsession with my own health and appearance and more in a commitment to justice. I gave up meat a while ago because of my commitment to animals; I’m now embracing a fully vegan lifestyle out of that same commitment. If it keeps me healthy, great. But while my health matters, my choices about what I put in my mouth are linked first and foremost to a desire to live as cruelty-free as possible. I’m not willing to eat what I’m not willing to kill, and I’m not willing to kill many things.

There’s an element of defensiveness to what I’m writing, and that frustrates me. I suppose that in the end, I’m torn. I position myself, quite deliberately, as a role model. I do it in my teaching. I do it in my volunteer work with youth. I do it in my blogging. I believe I’ve hit upon a set of values for living, rooted in my faith and my feminism, that have not only made me a better human being but might very well work for others. I keep making the case, over and over again, that what we do in every area of our life matters. How we eat and what we eat matters, not least because we are called to be stewards of our own bodies and stewards of the earth we share.

I realize that what I want to work on is this: further developing and articulating a pro-feminist “ethics of diet and fitness.” My core assumptions: health, fitness, and a sense of well-being are a priori goods. Self-acceptance is also an a priori good. Self-loathing is an a priori evil. Concern for how our dietary choices impact the planet is an a priori good. And yes, pleasure — as long as that pleasure is not at another’s expense — is still another fundamental good. Somehow, I want to put all of these “first principles” together and articulate an ethic that embraces both transformation and self-acceptance, that promotes ultimate well-being and is simultaneously radically accepting of body diversity.

I’ve seen others try to create a synthesis of pro-feminist values and a commitment to maximum physical fitness; I’ve seen them fall woefully short. And I myself continue to fall prey to my own contradictions around the body and self-acceptance. Too often, my words to others say “Love yourself just as you are!” while my actions show a man who is relentlessly committed to his own transformation.

One of the paradoxes of a strong Christian faith is this: Jesus loves us just as we are. He could not love us more. He loves the child molester just as much as he loves the saint; He loves Jeffrey Dahmer and Mother Teresa, Saddam Hussein and Martin Luther King. But for Christians, realizing that God loves us just as we are is not the same as God’s endorsement of what we’re doing. God loves us no matter what, but He longs for us to transform, to become more and more like His Son. We hold in tension two seemingly contradictory ideas: we are loved whether or not we change, and God longs for us to change and grow. This tension is familiar to any serious Christian, and to the followers of many other spiritual paths.

I’m convinced that there’s a way to apply this mixture (radical, complete acceptance and the radical call to growth) to a culture of fitness and diet. I’m going to figure it out, Lord willing, and when I get a clearer idea of how to articulate it, I’m gonna let you know.

Or maybe you’ll have to wait for the TV show.

“Fat studies”, cohabitation, and why Hugo likes gaining weight

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 11, 2006
in Body, Food, Relationships and Vanity
. 35 Comments

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.

Another long post about pleasure, feminism, food, and sex

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 16, 2006
in Body, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Feminism, Food and Sexuality
. 15 Comments

In recent years, as I continue to fiddle with my women’s studies syllabus, I’ve moved away from emphasizing certain themes and towards others.  One theme that has become more and more important to me: tracing the cultural history of women’s shame in America, particularly in regards to sexual pleasure, food, and other "selfish" desires.

I’ve emphasized this many times before, but my students are, overwhelmingly, non-white.  They are, overwhelmingly, first-generation college students.  And in my women’s studies class, overwhelmingly female.  But whether they are black, Latina, Asian, Armenian, they’ve almost all been raised with one enormously important — and colossally destructive — discourse: pleasure comes with penalties.

I tend to focus on the close relationship between attitudes towards eating and attitudes towards sex, largely because they seem so often to be inextricably linked.  The pleasure of food is our first pleasure; when we were tiny infants, it was what we screamed for and it was gave us comfort and delight.  Long after many of our other appetites may have faded, we will still take pleasure in what we eat.  (I’ve spent a lot of time with the elderly; my experience has been that in nursing homes, the subject of lunch tends to dominate conversations.)  Throughout our lives, in groups or alone, eating has the potential to be one of our greatest physical delights.

And we do not live in a world where women are permitted to eat to satiety without a considerable degree of shaming.  While their brothers are often encouraged to eat to excess, the majority of my female students grew up with a sense that they had to monitor what and how much they ate.  Many were first introduced to the idea that "pleasure has penalties" by mothers who warned them, as they moved into puberty, "don’t eat so much or you’ll get fat."  Others grew up with parents who were happy to have them eat all they liked, but as they transitioned into puberty, found themselves under the crushing influence of the broader culture, which idealizes a female body type at odds with healthy, indulgent eating. 

Bottom line: few students get to college without a considerable amount of shame surrounding their eating.  Most, if not all, have incorporated specifically moral language to refer to their food habits.  When I ask them "What does it mean when you hear a friend say ‘I’ve been good today’", all of them know that that refers to a particularly successful period of restriction.  When another friend says "I was so bad at lunch today", that never refers to skipping out on a restaurant bill; it’s always a reference to prioritizing pleasure over self-denial.  And as a feminist, few things make me sadder than to see so many of my students caught in that trap of oscillating between self-denial and indulgence, between bouts of puritanical pride in their own restriction and crushing guilt for giving into the basic desire to be sweetly, pleasurably, full.

I always connect this struggle around food to sexuality.  Just as my students vary in their eating habits, they vary widely in their sexual mores.  I’ve posted before about just how diverse they can be; I’ve had porn stars sitting alongside those who insist that kissing before marriage is a sin.   But if I can make some generalizations, I can say with confidence that most have been raised to view women as "gatekeepers" who must carefully guard their bodies against lustful, predatory, men. Too many have grown up with a sense that lust is a one-way street in which women are objects but rarely subjects.  Many were taught by their mothers how to be pleasing  and desirable; they were taught how to attract men while at the same time keeping them at bay.  For far too many, male sexual desire is a tool to be used with great care.  But few were raised with any sense of their own sexual agency (at least in the service of their own pleasure.) During a discussion a few semesters ago about the "discovery of the clitoris" by the male-dominated medical profession, one bold young woman said frankly:

"I’d sooner admit to sleeping with dozens of guys than admit that I masturbate.  Bringing pleasure to men is always easier to cop to than bringing pleasure to yourself.  It’s almost like masturbating for yourself makes you more of a slut — it’s like you can’t control your own desires, and that’s bad." 

While some students vigorously disagreed, it was clear that that comment had struck a familiar chord with many of the young women in the room.  (Nota bene: I do NOT ask students to disclose details of their private sexual lives to me or the class; I do, however, try and create a safe environment where those who wish to take such risks can do so.) 

Many of my students seem to have a sense of their own sexuality that reminds me of many folks with eating disorders whom I have known.  I’ve known quite a few women who regularly starved themselves.  And yet, rather than avoid food altogether, they became marvelous cooks.  I once dated a woman (briefly) who wanted to cook for me every weekend.  She made full-course fattening meals; she spent hours in the kitchen.  And she ate virtually nothing.  It became incredibly uncomfortable for me to eat in front of her, as she watched me with tremendous interest, constantly asking if I wanted more.  Obviously, she took some vicarious pleasure in watching someone else eat, but she clearly also had a perverse sense of personal agency.  For this woman, pleasure consisted solely in the capacity to bring pleasure to another.  She had no ability to enjoy food for herself; her delight was entirely contingent upon mine.  It was absolutely awful.

I’ve told that anecdote to a few of my classes, and seen many nods of recognition.  And it seems evident to me that for far too many young women, that attitude of "contingent pleasure" seems to carry over from the kitchen to the bedroom.  Even in our hypersexualized culture, most of my female students are taught more about how to provide pleasure to another than to experience it for themselves.  The agency that they are permitted is the agency that comes with mastering the male ego and the male body, learning how to flirt, learning how to seduce, learning how to bring delight and pleasure. They see porn everywhere, but rarely do they see a storyline written for them, one in which their own ecstasy is central rather than something feigned to soothe male anxiety.

I don’t tell my students that they must masturbate without concomitant shame in order to be good feminists.  I don’t tell them they need to eat cheesecake without guilt  in order to be liberated.  It’s not the place of a feminist professor (particularly a male one) to prescribe specific steps for  transformation and growth in such profoundly personal arenas as sexuality and food.  But at the same time, I am clear that there are few areas of life where it is more important to live out our egalitarian values than eating and sex.  I am not advocating uncontrolled gluttony or destructive promiscuity. I am advocating an ethic that respects women’s pleasure as an a priori good. I am not advocating selfishness.  (Heck, I’m a monogamous vegetarian; I understand the importance of balancing one’s own desires with one’s commitments to others.)  I am challenging my students to see physical joy as their human birthright. 

Though not all of my students are yet sexually active, all of them are "food active."   They’ve been eating for as long as they can remember, and will do so for the rest of their lives.   Part of beginning a feminist journey is making a commitment not merely to self-indulgence, but to the principle that all human beings are entitled to seek out pleasure.  It’s one thing to say those words aloud, another to live them out.  And since feminism is never merely about transforming the self for the self alone, it’s vital that men and women commit themselves to being advocates for shame-free pleasure in the lives of their friends and family.  Though our understanding of when and how we seek pleasure may be informed by our own spiritual beliefs, and though we ought never seek pleasure at the expense of another’s happiness, we can still boldly, loudly, and continually proclaim the God-given right to delight in our bodies.   

Creation, in all of its messiness, is a good thing.

As and As — short note on blood types and grades

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 17, 2006
in Food, Teaching and Vanity
. 28 Comments

So, I’ve been experimenting with the "blood type" diet.  I’m not trying to lose a significant amount of weight, mind you.  But I am tired of feeling tired so much of the time.  Part of the answer lies in getting more sleep, but part of it surely lies in eating better!  According to this book, peanut butter and coffee are both good for me (I’m an A+ blood type).  Given that those two items are my two staples, I’m very pleased.

My summer classes are going well, though I regret not having office hours in which to meet with my students.  In my women’s history class, I passed back a batch of papers today, and included my explanation of my grading ideas.  It’s attached here: students_often_ask_me_about_the_criteria_i_use_in_grading.doc   Yes, I give more Cs than Bs, more Bs than As.

Invariably, students who get lower than an A ask me "what’s wrong with my paper?"  I always reply that a grade lower than an A is not evidence of wrong-doing.  Students think a teacher should start out with a presumption of an A, and deduct points for errors. But I start out my grading with a presumption of a C, of averageness, and then look for signs that this paper is more distinguished than the others to which it is compared. Bs and As are only given to papers that exceed the expectations.  The C is not a punishment, but an acknowledgement of requirements fulfilled.

I always ask my students "In a class of 40, would you rather be one of five As or one of forty, or does it matter?"  Some students say it doesn’t matter, but most tend to have that pleasantly competitive streak that would strongly prefer the former.  That’s how I always felt as well.  Grades ought to mean something, and in that — if nothing else — I am decidedly old school.

Links and a mini-rant

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 28, 2006
in Food and Links
. 18 Comments

I’m feeling a bit more chipper this morning; my cold is lifting and I got more sleep.  My wife has been an absolute rock — supportive and loving even as she copes with her own grief over losing a father-in-law she loved and a chinchilla that was very, very close to her heart.

I’m not ready for a truly thoughtful post, but want to put up some "notes and links".

Chris Clarke’s posts always make me tear up.  That’s a tribute to his talent and his vision, and to my sentimentality.

Jill at Feministe takes on the lamentable decision by animal control officials in Los Angeles to have Hooters sponsor a spay-neuter day.

My wonderful student Sarah has a terrific blog.  Read this post about a letter she sent to Brio, the Focus on the Family magazine for teen girls.

One of the best commentaries I’ve read on what is going on with the Episcopal Church, women and demographics comes from Lynn; it’s long but worth the read.

A good post from Jeff about feminist men and friendship  Key excerpt:

…if any of what my situation shows me applies to other feminist men, then I would hazard a guess that many feminist men are lonely for the company of other feminists, in general, and of other feminist men in particular.

He’s right.

And I’ve received a couple of e-mails to let me know that I am the recipient of a dubious honor at Rate My Professors.  Perhaps I ought not even provide the link, but I might be excused a little narcissism (even unmerited) in my current state! One thing is clear from looking at this list: Canadians are hotter.

Oh, and a rant:

I admit I go to Starbucks regularly — one opened last year just off campus.  I always get the same thing: "venti drip, no room."  Yet I always end up in line behind my students who are ordering expensive sugary things with impossibly long names.  I note that many of my colleagues go to Starbucks as well; invariably, they all order simple drip coffees.  It’s as if there’s a clear age demarcation: those under 25 can’t take their coffee without all sorts of expensive, time-consuming, calorie-laden additives; those of us who were raised on java before the days of Starbucks are quite happy just to have something good, strong, and hot.   I just wish, oh how I wish, that Starbucks would add an "express lane" for those of us who just want our bloody coffee without added sweetness or ceremony or expense!

Rituals

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 18, 2006
in Athletics and Fitness, Food, Sports and Vanity
. 5 Comments

I’m in the midst of my pre-marathon rituals.  Eating, drinking, laying out my running gear.  Deciding whether to run shirtless or not (I will if the temps will climb above 55 degrees, even if I frighten small children); deciding which socks to wear.  Packing my gels and deciding whether to wear a water belt.

Every serious marathoner I’ve ever known becomes a creature of ritual sooner or later, and after a  great many distance events, I make sure mine include the following:

1.  No caffeine after 2:30PM the day before a race.  That means I can still work on my coffee until then.  After that, water, water, water.

2.  Bagels, bagels, bagels.

3.  A one mile run.

4.  Thirty pushups, forty crunches.  Nothing else.

5.  Anxious worrying about faint twinges in my muscles.

6.  My wife marking up my race bib with encouraging messages for me to read when the going gets tough.

7.  Listening to the Leontyne Price recording of "He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands", over and over again

Today, I’m also watching college basketball.  And flipping back and forth between the men’s and women’s tournaments.  Two fundamentally different but equally compelling ways of approaching the sport are on display with the men’s and women’s games, and as a fan, I appreciate both.  I’ve picked the Duke men and the Oklahoma women to win it all, but I really just enjoy all of the drama.  And it’s keeping me distracted.

Reposting an oldie

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 30, 2006
in Body, Feminism, Food and Sexuality
. 6 Comments

I’m doing something today I wouldn’t normally do — reprinting an old (October 2004) post of mine.  I know several of my current women’s studies students have recently started reading this blog, and the subject of this post was the subject of today’s lecture.

The final paragraph continues to sum up my beliefs about pleasure and the body, but I’ll try and write more about it soon…

Feminism, Food, Pleasure (first published October 25, 2004)

My students, particularly but not exclusively my female ones, report a great deal of fantasizing in classes. No, silly, it’s not about their teacher.

It’s about food. In journal after journal, I read about my students’ love/hate relationship with food. Compared to food fantasies, sex comes in a distant second as the subject about which so many young people are preoccupied. And though I’ve touched on this before, I feel compelled at this point in the semester to bring it up again: food is a feminist issue.

A number of feminist writers (Susan Bordo chief among them) have noted that in recent decades, our eating behavior has been increasingly couched in moral terms. Only far-right social conservatives use terms like "decadent" to describe contemporary culture — but we all use it to describe rich, fattening desserts. We speak of "devil’s food" and "tempting tastes." More basically, my students talk about themselves as "good" and "bad" in terms of their eating behavior. When I hear a girl say "I was so bad today", I can be almost certain that what will follow is a food-related confession. When I hear another say, "I was good all morning", I am fairly confident that she will not then relate a story of volunteering at the homeless shelter! Good, in contemporary parlance, means abstinence, self-control, self-denial; bad means indulgence, eating to satiety, pleasure.

Of course, there are always those students of both genders who claim to be blissfully unaffected by our cultural preoccupation with thinness and concomitant food restriction. I suspect that some of them are in denial (the old "refusing to be a victim" bit), while a lucky few may be genuinely untouched by concern about eating. They are fortunate, but they are also rare among American tween, teen, and twenty-something women.

I am a great believer that one of the most important narratives in feminist history is that of women’s struggle to gain the right to pleasure. Broadly speaking, patriarchal culture tells women that their only source of permissable pleasure and happiness is centered on others: one can derive joy from feeding one’s child, but not from feeding oneself; one can derive joy from pleasing one’s husband in bed, but not from masturbation; one can derive joy from putting one’s husband through law school, but not for putting oneself through. And so on. This is what feminists call the "doctrine of contingent happiness" — the old fancy that virtuous women only derive real, enduring joy solely through sharing with others.

As a Christian, I am a profound believer in the importance of self-sacrifice. There are times and places where self-denial is indeed virtuous, particularly when self-indulgence would cause obvious harm to others. But traditional culture makes the mistake of turning self-sacrifice into an idol. Self-denial is blessed when it draws us closer to God or when it benefits others — but it is not blessed in and of itself. Dieting for the sake of beauty is a form of destructive self-denial that follows an old pattern: "good women" repress and control their base, physical desires.

To paint with broad strokes, earlier periods in American culture demonized women’s sexuality. (Certain elements in our culture continue to do so.) But a healthy percentage of American society has, for better or worse, become reluctant to use moral terms to describe their own sexual behavior or that of others. The language of "to each his or her own" has become dominant, and I’m fairly confident that that is something of a good thing. But today, we demonize women’s appetite for food using the same language our forebears used for sex: "sinful", "decadent", "bad." We have stopped condemning one essential human activity and begun to attack another.

Food is our first pleasure, I tell my students. Our first experience of joy as children may be of being fed, of having our hunger satiated. In our old age, when we are too feeble to do much else, one of our final pleasures will be our meals. (I note that my great aunt, 95 this year, has one daily event she anticipates above all else: lunch.) Far more often than sex (presumably), delicious food will bring us delight over and over and over again over the course of our lives. Therefore, any ideology that seeks to limit that pleasure for the sake of beauty or conformity is inherently anti-feminist and anti-human.

I am not advocating over-eating as a feminist act. Eating far more than is healthy is an act of self-loathing, not self-love. But I am arguing against what I see as a "war on pleasure" in our contemporary culture. I want the young women I work with and teach to be unashamed of all of their natural, healthy, appetites. I want them to see that their own desires for food and sex are good in and of themselves. I want them to see their bodies as their own, and I want them to understand that while pleasing others is indeed a source of joy, it ought never be the sole source of delight in their lives.

And so this week, I’m giving them the following optional assignment: While out with friends or family or others whose opinion they value, I want my students to eat as much as they want of something they truly, deeply, crave. And they need to do so without describing themselves as "bad". (This is a tough one for most of my students, I’ve found.)

Again, I’m absolutely convinced that real liberation comes in the bold assertion of one’s right to pleasure — and pleasure ought never be solely about bringing joy to others. Women’s bodies are not merely for making babies and pleasing husbands (or parents, or peers, or fashion designers): they are gifts of God intended first and foremost for the delight of their occupants! And when we as embodied persons delight in our flesh, we honor the extraordinary gift that is Creation itself.

Two kinds of fasting

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 23, 2006
in Body, Eating disorders and Food
. 5 Comments

I’m very tired this morning; the worst Santa Ana winds in several years kept me awake much of the night.  This morning, I had to move dozens of palm fronds just to get the driveway gate open.  And there’s talk that the mountain trails will be closed due to fire danger until we get some more rain.  What a difference from last year’s torrential downpours!

Our "Fast Relief" project at All Saints Church was successful on a number of levels.  We raised a few thousand dollars for Episcopal Relief and Development.  Of equal importance, the twenty-seven high schoolers and the three adult leaders who did the fast had a terrific experience: physically and spiritually challenging, yes, but immensely rewarding. I’ve always liked the power of a shared painful experience to bond people together.  And I suppose I’ve also liked doing these 30-hour fasts (this was my sixth year in a row participating through All Saints Pasadena) because it represents how radically different my own attitude towards food and hunger has become in recent years, especially since my conversion experience began. 

I posted last week about eating disorders, and I’ve written about food and body issues several times.  (BTW, see this fine response from Jen to that post and those who commented upon it.) So…

Growing up with a very unhealthy set of attitudes towards eating and my own flesh, I tended to experience food privately.  As an adolescent, I became a private binger, starting with (I kid you not) my regular breakfasts in junior high school of 8-12 Hydrox cookies and two big glasses of fruit punch.   They say adolescent boys daydream about sex a lot, and I’m sure I did — but even in the throes of puberty, my waking and sleeping fantasies were as often about sugar as they were about girls!

When I first began to diet and exercise compulsively in my early twenties, my "food" experiences were again private.  Like many folks with eating disorders, I became good at "pretending to eat" while actually consuming very little.  (I rarely threw up my food.  It wasn’t for lack of trying; I never have been able to make myself vomit on command, despite countless sad attempt in my youth.)  I binged alone, starved alone, exercised alone.  I didn’t talk to many folks about food because (and here’s where being a male hurts), frankly, we don’t live in a culture where young men are given sanction to complain about their bodies the way that women do. 

When I first began to take steps to get over my eating issues, I had a "food sponsor". I called this person, a woman I’d met through mutual friends, every day.  I practiced what she called "declaring your food".  I told her exactly what I’d eaten, and I also told her how much I’d exercised.  My food and workout behavior ceased to be my own private concern.  I found a group of folks with whom I was able to share my own anxieties and my progress, and I discovered (as is the way of such things) that my fears and obsessions were not all that unusual.  That was humbling, in that I had a rather grandiose perception of my own "terminal uniqueness"!  I began to experience food as a shared experience with others, realizing that how I ate did affect everyone around me.  If I binged or if I was starving myself, my close-knit community of folks with "food issues" would know — and I would be setting a poor example for those newer to recovery than myself.  (Most folks who know the language of Twelve Step will know the program I’m talking about, but I have an odd compunction about not naming the actual program.  The tradition of anonymity in Twelve Step programs is very powerful still.)

Bottom line: over the years, especially since coming to the church and to Christ, I’ve seen some huge changes in my relationship to food.  From a global perspective, my food choices (and those of other affluent First Worlders) have consequences for folks everywhere else.  From a social perspective, my food choices affect those around me — if I’m eating to soothe myself or starving to punish myself, my friends and family are going to be impacted in ways of which I am not even aware.   And from a Christian perspective, I’ve come to see that we are called to eat and fast in community.  Jesus may have fasted for forty days alone, but the Bible is filled with stories that illustrate the importance of eating in fellowship with others.  Food is not, it seems, intended to be one’s private pleasure alone.

The difference between starving myself in isolation and fasting in community is enormous. The former was an entirely self-centered activity, as I sought to make my body fit a particular and elusive standard that, if ever achieved, I believed would bring me an enduring sense of peace and joy.  When I fast as I did this weekend, with "my kids" and fellow volunteers, I fast to raise money.  I fast to express solidarity with those hundreds of millions around the world for whom genuine hunger is not a choice but a daily reality.  I fast to draw closer to God, as my hunger gives me a heightened sense of dependence and vulnerability.  If I’m feeling hungry and a bit weak, but am still needed to entertain and inspire teenagers, then I’m going to have to rely more than usual upon Him!  And I fast to have a shared experience with people whom I love, knowing that communal discomfort has the power to bind us together.

I’m grateful that my experiences with food have changed so radically since my adolescence.  I no longer have Hydrox and fruit punch for breakfast.  I no longer get "high" on solitary self-deprivation. I do still choose to go without food for a day or two from time to time.  But now, that choice is exercised publicly, in community, and it is done in solidarity with those who suffer far more than I.  It has damn all to do with staying thin and fit, and everything to do with building the Kingdom.  That’s an amazing blessing.

Fast Relief and an autobiographical Friday 10

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 20, 2006
in All Saints Pasadena, Faith, Food and Friday Random Ten
. 5 Comments

Not much time for posting today. I’ve got separate lunch and afternoon coffee dates today with two young men whom I am privileged to mentor, and then it’s off to church to participate in this year’s "Fast Relief" to raise funds for Episcopal Relief and Development. "Fast Relief" is the All Saints answer to World Vision’s successful "30-Hour Famine Program".

Frankly, I’d be just as happy to continue to raise money for World Vision.  But the folks who know better than I thought that our efforts ought to be going directly towards a specifically Anglican relief agency.  I understand that sentiment, but I am also saddened by it.  I confess that I prefer multidenominational relief agencies to the ones that are created by very specific churches.  What does it say about the body of Christ that the Presbyterians, the Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Baptists, and so forth all need to have their own unique organizations for helping the poor and needy?  I like World Vision precisely because of its inclusiveness of folks from both evangelical and mainline backgrounds in its work, and though I honor the fine efforts of Episcopal Relief and Development, I’m not at all sure that denominationally-specific agencies are doing much to create ecumenical unity and understanding.

But I’ll be fasting for thirty hours alongside my kids, and doing so with resolve, prayer, humor, and enthusiasm!

And here are the Friday random ten on our Itunes.  Read and shudder.  I think I’m headed for a new level of "uncoolness."

1. "Hallelujah", Ryan Adams
2. "Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now", Jefferson Airplane (or Starship, or whatever)
3.  "Caught Up", Usher
4.  "Make Me Lose Control", Eric Carmen
5. "I’m Gonna Be an Engineer", Jane Sapp and Pete Seeger
6. "The Road Goes on Forever", Robert Earl Keen
7. "You’re Crazy", Guns n’ Roses
8.  "Time will Reveal", DeBarge and Stevie Wonder
9. "A Dios le Pido", Juanes
10. "Two More Bottles of Wine", Emmylou Harris

Bonus Track: "His Grace is Sufficient", Jennifer Knapp.

Based on titles alone, it’s not a bad soundtrack for my life.  Way to go, Party Shuffle!  (I suppose if it were truly autobiographical, I would arrange the songs differently.  If you’re interested, it would be 8,5,3,4,10,7, Bonus Track,9,1,2,6.  That took me a fun five minutes to figure out!  Off to meet Richard for Thai food, and to start my fast thereafter…)

Pyramids and conflicts of interest

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 26, 2005
in Body and Food
. 16 Comments

I’ve been thinking about the new food pyramid.  It was unveiled just over a week ago with considerable fanfare by the USDA, replacing the now-familiar 1992 "pyramid".  To put it mildly, it’s considerably more complex than its predecessor, with (if you visit the website) twelve different pyramids to choose from based upon your age, sex, and exercise level.

The Department of Agriculture’s website now allows you to customize your eating plan by entering that sort of data, but the results that were spit out to me were fairly unhelpful.  As a 37 year-old man who works out a great deal, I’ve been told I need to make sure to get 8 teaspoons of oil a day.   Thanks.  How on earth do I do that?  Who out there monitors the number of teaspoons of oil they ingest in a given day or week?  Anyone?

Obviously, one problem with the new "MyPyramid" site is that millions of Americans most in need of dietary advice don’t have access to the web.  Marion Nestle, an NYU nutrition professor pointed out:

More seriously, Marion Nestle, nutrition professor at New York University, took one look at the new pyramid and asked: "Where’s the food?"

"There’s no ‘eat less’ message here," Nestle said. "There’s nothing about soda or snacks or about how many times you should eat."

USDA officials said that if people track their eating on MyPyramid.gov, they will eat better and eat less. But Nestle said poor, uneducated people are both more likely to be overweight and to lack computer access.

"I would say this is a clear win for the food industry," Nestle said. "It’s a clear win for personal responsibility. You need to know a great deal to make this thing work for you."

Clearly you need to know more than I know, as I’m trying to figure out to get those 8 teaspoons in.  How many teaspoons of oil are there in my raisin bran?  In my burrito?   But in any case, as I’ve written before, personal responsibility is linked to the availability and affordability of responsible choices.  In an urban area like Los Angeles, supermarkets with broad selections of inexpensive, healthy food are disproportionately located outside low-income areas.   Fast food outlets and mini-marts, stocked with fattening, cheap, and unhealthy foods, are ubiquitous.  Once I figure out how to use MyPyramid, I’m pretty sure I’ll have an easier time following it by shopping at my local Gelsons than many of the urban poor will have at their local mini-marts.

The one responsible decision that the poor can exercise as well as the rest of us is portion control.  As most nutritionists argue today, what you eat is less important than how much you eat.  Reducing portion sizes — of everything — is a key tool to developing a healthier lifestyle.  And as Nestle (what a great name for a nutrition prof, huh?) points out, advice about portion control is completely absent from the MyPyramid site.  After all, the US Department of Agriculture spends most of its budget helping farmers sell their product.  Talk about a conflict of interest!   If consumers eat less, Big Agriculture makes less money.  Funding for the USDA would disappear in a heartbeat.  Far better to advise people to simply eat a variety of foods than to tell them to restrict how much they take in.

As those close to me know, like many folks, I’m compulsive with eating, especially sugar.  I continue to struggle to limit my own portions, and to stay away from the sweet stuff.  I compensate for all this eating with lots of working out, but that doesn’t fully make up for the damage that I continue to do to myself.  Obviously, it’s not the government’s job to save me from my own impulses.  But I do think that the agency charged with giving the American public dietary advice ought to be separate from the agency charged with protecting the profits of those who grow food.  That doesn’t seem too much to ask.

Food and breasts, two stories on the body front

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 12, 2005
in Body, Feminism and Food
. 45 Comments

From the "body project front", a few notes.  First off, an interesting op-ed by Karen Stabiner in today’s Los Angeles Times: Girls Want the Media to Shape Up. Excerpt:

Everywhere we look, we see the contradictions of a culture obsessed
with women and weight: Big is beautiful, as long as it’s not too big;
you can’t be too rich or too thin, but please, honey, don’t be
anorexic. Emphatically skinny is still in, but fat has achieved a
certain political correctness; it’s been redefined as a healthy
rejection of the undernourished look. Kirstie Alley boogieing on the
one hand, and Mary-Kate Olsen, a scrawny waif whose thrift store chic
is now being hailed as the new hip style, on the other. Talk about the
great divide.

When it comes to our daughters, the extremes
beget a lot of hysterical hand-wringing — you’d think that teen girls,
as a group, were always eating too much or too little. And yet the
truth is that only about 3% of teen girls have diagnosable eating
disorders, although 15% have a "disordered" attitude about food.
Statistics say between 15% and 30% of adolescent girls are overweight,
depending on the study — but that’s part of a national trend from womb
to tomb, not something that distinguishes our daughters from the rest
of the population.

I think that figure of 15% with disordered attitudes can be misleading.  Compared to other North American studies (Stabiner does not cite her source), the figure also seems low.   "Disordered attitudes" is a medical diagnosis, of course, and excludes those young people who are engaged in dieting behavior that does not pose an immediate risk to their health.  A recent Centers for Disease Control study notes that 43% of the more than 11,000 girls surveyed were on diets, and most of these were in no way clinically overweight.   15% is certainly a number that doesn’t jive with my anecdotal experience as a youth leader.  Virtually all of my girls report at least some dissatisfaction with their bodies, and about half report being on a diet (or some other form of food restriction) at any given time.

Stabiner is relying on carefully chosen language to downplay to the problem, and that is a bit bewildering.  I assume she’s anxious to stop using "victim language" to describe adolescent girls.    After all, the greater the number of young women suffering from disordered eating, the more inevitable it may seem that one’s own daughter will suffer from body dysmorphia or a "food problem."   By downplaying the statistics, Stabiner makes it appear less of a crisis than most folks in the field think it is. 

But despite this, there’s some good stuff in Stabiner’s piece. I gave her an "amen, sister", when I read this, answering the question "What do young women want from the media":

Real girls are harder to portray because they don’t telegraph the easy
emotions, so real girls disappear from the collective consciousness.
But they’re getting tired of being left out of the entertainment
industry’s vocabulary.

What do they want? Complexity. A variety
of images that more accurately reflect the real world, where most girls
are neither too fat nor too thin, but somewhere in the general
in-between, where no one is paying enough attention. (Bold emphasis is mine).

Right on.

On a related front, the battle over silicone breast implants is heating up again.  More than a dozen years after silicone was banned for use in breast augmentation (though it is available in other countries), the FDA is considering approving its use once again.  NOW president Kim Gandy gave this address to the FDA yesterday, urging the ban to be maintained in the interests of women’s health:

The FDA must not allow women to fall victim to the greed of two
companies, Inamed Corp. and Mentor Corp., that want to bring these
implants back to the open market without protecting women’s health. It
is incumbent upon the FDA to side with women, and not big business.
It’s time for the FDA to put science ahead of politics.

FDA regulators now estimate that up to 93 percent of silicone
implants rupture within 10 years. What happens when these implants
rupture and silicone enters a woman’s body? The data provided by Inamed
and Mentor continues to be unimpressive - despite years of clinical
trials, silicone implant manufacturers simply have not provided
regulators with the necessary data.

According to a five-year evaluation of seven mammography centers,
breast implants obscure and greatly reduce the accuracy of mammogram
readings - 55 percent of breast cancers went undetected in women with
breast implants, which is 67 percent greater than in women without
implants.

Yet another concern that has not been fully evaluated is the hazard
to children born to women with silicone breast implants, particularly
breastfeeding infants. Women of childbearing age must know all the
facts before they become pregnant, so they can make informed choices
about getting or keeping breast implants. (Bold emphasis is Hugo’s).

The Mercury News captured this great exchange among several women outside the hearings:

A group of 12 young women opposed to implants wore T-shirts saying, “100 percent all natural.’‘

Arlene Nicole Cummings, 38, of Palm Beach County, Fla., confronted them in the hallway.

“I am offended that you’re saying I’m not natural,” said Cummings, who received saline implants in 1998.

Cummings said if she had them replaced she might opt for silicone.

“Women need choices,” she added.

“Choice?” asked Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization
for Women, who helped coordinate the group. “The choice is to be
sick.”

Ah, choices.  I’m delighted with Gandy’s answer.  Anytime organized feminism moves beyond a robotic commitment to "choice" on every conceivable issue, we’re making progress!   Authentic feminism is about so much more than what one individual woman chooses to do with her body.  It’s about ensuring that women can live free from the pressures of a culture that demand a narrow ideal of beauty.  It’s about a commitment to the health and well-being of all women collectively, not the narcissistic choices of a comparatively affluent few.  I blogged about this last year, and I stand by what I wrote then:

The fact that some women feel personally empowered by cutting up their
bodies (or allowing their bodies to be cut) does not vitiate the
essential horror of the practice. Some feminists are so in love with
the notion of "choice" that they will defend any action a woman takes
to alter her body. But choices are only exercised within a cultural context that decrees that certain choices are better than others.
In this culture where even slight physical imperfections are seen as
barriers to happiness, most young women who choose plastic surgery are
not making a genuinely free choice.

I’m not optimistic that the FDA ban will remain in place, but I’m heartened by the stance that NOW has taken in supporting the continuation of the general prohibition on silicone.   And the exchange between Arlene Cummings and Kim Gandy is really priceless, capturing as it does the distinction between a shallow self-centered feminism and a justice-centered commitment to all  women.

Fasting Recap

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 7, 2005
in All Saints Pasadena, Christianity, Food and Youth ministry
. 12 Comments

This was our first year doing a thirty-hour fast for Episcopal Relief and Development.   The previous four years, we’d done World Vision’s 30-Hour Famine.  If it had been up to me, I’d have been happy to continue to work for World Vision, but a number of folks at All Saints felt (with some justification) that our relief efforts ought to be directed towards our denomination’s own relief agency.  I suppose that in a time of crisis for the Anglican Communion, it’s all the more important that progressive churches take a major stand in supporting specifically Anglican relief work.  It’s vital that folks see that we at All Saints are not simply interested in fighting for gay and lesbian equality; we are as concerned with the cry of the poor, both here and abroad, as are our more traditionalist brothers and sisters.  (Note: I didn’t say more concerned, I said as concerned.)

Our teens don’t really care about the politics of picking a relief agency.  They cared about counting the money.  (This time, they didn’t quite get enough to shave any youth leader’s head; last year, as faithful readers will recall, they did.)  They care about going without food, too!  I’m happy to report that we had less complaining about hunger than in some years past.  Through trial and error, those of us who have been doing this for a while know that the key to avoiding the whining is to provide lots of fun, structured activities for the kids. 

Every year, we play a game that we invented at All Saints by marrying two traditional youth activities together: Spin the Compliment/Spin the Web.  It’s a variation on the old "Spin the Bottle" game.   Kids are in a circle, and take turns spinning a bottle.  The person who spins gets to offer a sincere compliment to the person at whom the bottle ends up pointing when it stops.  What makes it more interesting is that we also have a huge ball of yarn; the complimenter throws the ball to the complimentee, holding on to a strand while he or she does so.  As the bottle keeps spinning, and more and more folks get complimented, we begin to all be tied together in a web.  We had 28 kids and 3 adults in the game on Friday night; by the end, we were all tied together in a web of praise and affirmation, all inter-connected.  It feels great to stand up together, still holding on to our strands,and feel each and every other person’s contribution to the web. 

Saturday morning, we fed the homeless at Union Station.  I was proud of the kids for cooking up huge breakfasts of eggs and sausage, all the while knowing that they couldn’t have a bite to eat for many hours to come.  At one point, a number of our kids (who are in our youth choir at All Saints) began an impromptu serenade; several of Union Station’s clients joined in on the first and last verse of Amazing Grace.  (I always laugh when we sing that at All Saints, since the number of folks at our church whose theology matches that hymn can be counted on one hand.  It’s like hearing Ave Maria in a Baptist church, which I once did at a family wedding in Vicksburg, Mississippi.)

Besides the great bonding time with the kids, the spiritual highlight of the weekend was walking the labyrinth.  (Pictures in the album.)  All these years, and I’ve never walked the labyrinth as an act of spiritual devotion.  We did it around 3:00PM; by that time, we’d all been without food for 27 hours or so.  To slowly and meditatively make the twists and turns of the labyrinth, while acutely cognizant of one’s own hunger and need for God — that was an amazing experience!  We worried the kids wouldn’t have the patience for it; instead, they walked it with such care and mindfulness that the adults were amazed.  A couple of our youth cried openly from emotion; I teared up as well.  I’m certainly going to make this a regular spiritual practice.

I know that many conservative Christians read this blog.  I need them to know that we at All Saints Pasadena are also capable of self-discipline and self-sacrifice.  Our youth, like yours, are being raised with a commitment to follow Jesus and to feed His lambs.  Though it may appear to traditionalists that we have hopelessly capitulated to the worst aspects of contemporary American culture, I assure you that there are few things more counter-cultural than asking teenagers to give up food and comfort for thirty hours in the name of Christ.

It’s good to be able to eat today.

Busy Friday

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 4, 2005
in Athletics and Fitness, Books, Christianity and Food
. 8 Comments

I’ve got little time for blogging this morning:  at 12 noon today, I must stop eating to begin participating in All Saints’ 30-Hour Fast Relief for Episcopal Relief and Development. (This will be my fifth such fast since 2001).  The first six hours, for kids and adults, are "on your honor"; from 6:00Pm tonight until 6:00PM Saturday, we will be together.  Tonight we’ll stay up late at the church, pray and play games, have a pajama fashion show (there MIGHT be pictures), and sleep on the hard floor of the youth room at the church.  Tomorrow, in our hunger and our discomfort, we’ll be off to Union Station to feed folks.  I’m very much looking forward to it.

But between now and then, I need to get in a 10-miler in the rain, and of course, I’ll need to replenish with food afterwards.  If all of that is going to happen by noon, I best be running soon.

Oh, and last night, I finally started reading Eugene Peterson’s Message Remix version of the Bible.  Where have I been that it took me this long?  I started with Romans (where else would I go), and was absolutely transfixed with emotion.  I can’t wait to do more devotionals with it.