Archive for the 'Food' Category

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.

“Further up, further in” and moving towards veganism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 4, 2005
in Animal Rights, Food and Veganism
. 23 Comments

I’ll be off-line over the weekend, and back at the computer on Monday with a fresh post.

My fiancee and I are moving forward on wedding planning, and we need to devote some time this weekend to that.  Church and other volunteer activities will eat up many hours, as will workouts on bikes or on trails or with various weights. Of course, there will also be some lovely sleeping in, playtime with Matilde, and perhaps some further progress towards our goal of seeing every Oscar-nominated film before the awards themselves.  (I’m thinking "Hotel Rwanda" for Saturday’s "date night".)

This weekend, with some small steps, we’re going to begin what we anticipate will be a slow and gradual transition towards first becoming full vegetarians, and then, vegans.  Lately, I’ve been praying and reflecting a lot on the subject of food, cruelty, and consistent life politics.  I’m a passionate defender of animal rights and  opposed to war, abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment — and yet, I still eat meat.  I still buy leather. But in recent months, it’s been starting to bother me more and more.  I know that I am called to live radically cruelty-free, but I’ve been resisting that call because I know just how much work such a lifestyle entails.  (Folks, by the way, I really do believe in the concept of "call".  Please don’t read my understanding of what I am called to do as an attack on those who feel otherwise.  How we eat is a matter of individual conscience.  Then again, our individual choices affect the world around us in countless ways.)

Those who know me well know that throughout my life, I have made a series of dramatic changes.  "Often in error, never in doubt" is my old family motto — and for years, I lived up to it.  I’ve  embraced new fashions and marriages and theologies — and then discarded them.  But in recent years, this manic obsession with novelty and reinvention has begun to diminish (praise Jesus for that).  What has come in its place is the quiet conviction that I am simply called to be he whom He intended me to be, and He intended me to be someone who leads a far simpler, far kinder, far more just and far more excellent life than I had ever imagined.  I’m not interested in resting on any laurels.  I know God calls us, as C.S. Lewis so perfectly puts it at the end of the Narnia books, to go "further up and further in."   That’s really all I want to do these days.  And  becoming fully vegetarian is simply the next step on that upward and inward journey towards that more just and more excellent life.

I’ve got a number of role models in the endurance athlete community who are vegans.  (Scott Jurek and Tim Twietmeyer, two contemporary legends of ultra-running, maintain vegan diets with their mammoth training loads).  I’m beginning the process of educating myself about supplements and meal planning; my fiancee is excited about joining me in this next step in our lives together.

As we begin this transition with faith and prayer, I promise to keep folks posted on how it goes.

Quick Saturday check-in on vanity, radio show research, and the Christian Eve Ensler

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 22, 2005
in Blogging, Food, Links and Vanity
. 13 Comments

I’m home from the gym.  My New Year’s Resolution to give up all diet sodas is going well.  I haven’t had a diet Coke in three weeks, and the cravings are diminishing.  Mind you, for years and years I drank gallons of the stuff.  My students often gaped at my huge, 52-ounce, Xtreme Gulp mug from 7-11 that I refilled faithfully  before each class with diet cola.  When the next semester starts, I’ll be sucking down the water.

I’ve also cut way back on my desserts and other treats.  After all, I’m 20 pounds heavier than I was when I was running my fastest races six years ago.  That weight has been gained slowly, but in the past year and a half, it’s really become a liability.  Now, I was a very skinny lad back in the late ’90s, and I never lifted weights.  I may have looked scrawny, but I could move on down the road a good deal faster than I can now.  If I ever want to run a sub-3:15 marathon again, I’ll have to face the fact that some of this poundage just has to come off. 

This desire to lose weight is a kind of "functional vanity".  It’s less about improving my looks than it is about regaining my speed.  But isn’t all vanity just vanity?   It seems easier to defend dieting for the sake of athletic prowess than for the sake of outer appearance.  Now, I don’t think wanting a faster marathon time is any less superficial than wanting to look hot.  So call me shallow…

Anyhow, I’m straying from my goal of not blogging on the weekends.   (I have all sorts of things whirling in my head that I am not going to post.)   I do need to spend some time now reading various articles in preparation for tomorrow’s radio show.   I’ll let you all know what I’ve been reading after the show airs. (Once again, in the spirit of self-promotion, here’s the link for all the info.) 

Oh, and I’ve updated both my "favorite posts" and "regular reads" sections on the right.  I’ve added several new blogs I’ve found.  In particular, let me draw your attention to the Feminarian, whose blog header asks the question:

What happens when a socially liberal theologically conservative
inclusive tolerant feminist Episcopalian goes to one of the world’s top
evangelical seminaries?
Let’s find out.

Heck if I know.  But the anonymous Feminarian might just be my twin.  She’s got an interesting proposal:

A friend and I came up with a potentially marvelous idea for a play: a
Christian version of the Vagina Monologues
(http://www.dazereader.com/vaginamonologues.htm). Christian women have
a very unique relationship with their sexuality, largely influenced by
what they’ve learned at church. She and I want to put together stories
of our Christian sisters’ struggles, funny moments, revelations of
truth, etc. It’s not exactly the process the great Eve Ensler used, but
I was thinking that perhaps you might want to contribute. Just post a
story anonymously (unless you’re proud of it!) to my comments
(implicitly giving permission to use it). I don’t know how exactly this
thing will come together, and I surely don’t know who the audience
would be, but it feels important.

Love it.  If you have something to contribute, folks, send it her way..  And if you have nothing but trollish spite to share, send it my way and leave her site out of it.

Okay, research time.  God, I’d love a diet Coke right now!  But the water bottle it is…

Hugo and Martha

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 30, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness, Christianity, Food and People
. 4 Comments

I’m moderately irked at the moment, and this is to be a rambling post.

Downstairs in the kitchen, workmen are fixing the garbage disposal.  They are disturbing HRH Princess Matilde’s afternoon nap.  Their indefinite arrival time "between three and seven", forced me to forego my afternoon gym workout and Arroyo run.  I’ve responded to the lack of exercise by eating more.  Much more.

I’ve never been a very successful dieter.  I haven’t had to diet in years, mind you.  Giving up food was always much harder than simply increasing exercise.  I know how to "do more".  Doing "more" of almost anything comes easy to me.  Doing "less", restricting food or certain behaviors — that is much harder.   Why not just eat all you want and then run and run and run?  I’d rather do a 50K than practice self-restraint at the dinner table.

I’m often told by admiring folks that running so much must take discipline.  I suppose it does, but in some ways, it’s evidence of a lack of discipline.  Though running brings me genuine pleasure, it also serves the crucial dual functions of keeping me trim and burning off the anxiety I’ve carried with me all my life.  (And yes, that anxiety pre-dates my caffeine consumption!)  When I’ve been working out regularly, I’m a nicer man to be around.

On a spiritual level, I’ve always liked messages about going out on "great commissions", "taking up crosses", and that sort of thing.  Even if my enthusiasm eventually flags, doing the Lord’s will by staying busy now comes easy to me.  Drawing closer to God by getting still?  Hugo doesn’t do that so well.  As my New Agey friends say, I know how to do better than I know how to be.

When I was confirmed as a Catholic in college, I took the name Thomas as my confirmation name.  I chose it for the Doubter, but also for Aquinas, More, and Becket.  (I wrote several papers on Becket in my early grad school years; the Jean Anouilh play, as inaccurate as it is, still moves me incredibly).  Anyhow, if I were to "do it all over again", I think I might seriously consider going with Martha. (How does Hugo Martha Schwyzer work?)  I’ve always sympathized with her, and like her, been annoyed with and envious of the Marys who can just sit at His feet and be in His presence.

The workmen are finished.  The garbage disposal works!

And I have polished off another bagel with an extraordinary amount of peanut butter.   

Home and tired and profoundly overfed

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 27, 2004
in Family, Food, Photos, Politics and Traveling
. 1 Comment

We’re home from a happy Thanksgiving with the family in Northern California.   We had two turkeys this year: a traditional oven-roasted bird and a fine example of what is clearly the latest rage, a deep-fried turkey.  (Two of my more distant relations by marriage set up an outdoor deep-fryer, complete with its own propane unit.  It was a very exciting process, but call me dull for preferring the traditional  roasted white meat.)

We had 30 for Thanksgiving dinner; Democrats slightly outnumbering Republicans, Cal alums heavily outnumbering Stanford grads.  Our discussion of politics was brief and remarkably civil.  Those who had supported the president were gracious in victory, while the passage of three weeks had done much to soothe the disappointment of those who had supported the senator from Massachusetts.  Our discussion of Cal football was more robust, and the two elderly Stanford alumni at our gathering were gently but firmly ribbed.

I overate with compusive abandon.  Perhaps that ought to be a subject for a future post.

Since 1989, when I first started grad school at UCLA, I’ve always driven home from Thanksgiving on the Saturday following the holiday.  Of course, I always take I-5.  Today, we left the Ranch at 10:30 and did not arrive home until just past 7:00PM — by far the longest and most exhausting trip I’ve done on this route.  I suppose a little research could tell me just how many more people there are in California in 2004 than there were when I first began to drive the I-5 route sixteen Thanksgivings ago.

Some pictures folllow.  No, no pics of my lovely fiancee, but some of me and the family and the foliage.

Here I am with persimmons; my cousin Scott and his boys (note the empty plate)…PersimmonsP1010301

and here with my cousin Jay:

Jay

Feminism, food, and pleasure

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 25, 2004
in Body, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Feminism, Food and Sexuality
. 77 Comments

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.

Embarrassments, running, bodies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 13, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Food and Men and Masculinity
. 4 Comments

I had my first fall off my new bicycle yesterday. I’ve had my Shimano pedal clips for two weeks, and after some initial awkwardness have been doing reasonably well at clipping in and out of them. While riding with my fiancee (a veteran rider in her own right) through South Pasadena, I came to a four-way stop. Thinking I had the right of way, I began to head into the intersection. A BMW sport-utility had other ideas, however, and I had to put the brakes on hard. I came to an immediate stop, and my mind went completely blank. I had utterly forgotten how to “clip out” of the pedals. For one awful instant I teetered, and then collapsed in a most undignified heap in the street. Other than a slight strain to my knee, I sustained no physical injury.

Of course, when one falls off a stationary bicycle in the middle of the road, one’s first thought is not of injury! As soon as I had hit the asphalt, I felt my face flush with intense embarrassment. I got up, waved off the various concerned drivers, and walked to the side of the road with my bike. My gal came over to check me and the bike out, but all I could think of was the number of people who might have seen my fall. I was immensely grateful that no other cyclists were nearby at the time of my fall; it’s bad enough to embarrass oneself in front of motorists, but to fall over in the manner in which I did in front of other riders — ouch. I’ll admit it: I want to look competent! Decked out in new gear, on a nice new Trek 5000, I can pass for an experienced rider; forgetting how to unclip and falling over while completely stationary is ample evidence that I am anything but. Still, it’s all part of learning something new, and for the time being, I have to accept my inexperience. Honestly, falls like yesterday’s are probably good correctives for smugness.

I’m not giving up running for cycling, of course; I registered last week for my next marathon: the Saddleback Mountain Trail Marathon on November 20, which bills itself as “the toughest marathon in California.” (For those who know anything about marathoning, the fact that even elite runners can’t break three hours on the course ought to say something; the course record is a 3:16). I’ll admit it: if it didn’t appear to be so difficult, I wouldn’t be half as interested in running it! I’m not as fast as I was six years and twenty pounds ago, but like a lot of folks, my stamina has grown even as my speed has declined. I’ll be happy breaking five hours on a course like this.

I’ve been thinking about male body image again. We were at a nice dinner party last night, and I was seated next to an attractive couple in their early forties. Both are actors, both are in terrific shape and look at least a decade younger than their actual ages. The husband and I (I’ll call him Tim, not his real name) chatted about the “industry” and the struggle to keep in shape throughout the meal, and then dessert came out. (My fiancee was in charge of dessert, and had arranged all sorts of little cakes and tarts on to platters — all of it delicious, all of it fattening). I dove in with enthusiasm. Tim waved the platter away, though his eyes made it clear that he would like nothing better than to join me in a chocolate mousse or a fruit tart (or, as in my case, both). He’ll be going on auditions this week, auditions where he may well need to appear shirtless. Tim’s six-pack of ab muscles is part of his curriculum vitae, even in his forties. To play with words, how he eats affects whether he eats!

Driving home last night, I thought more about Tim. At first, I thought of him in terms of myself (how unsurprising.) I had a six-pack a few years ago when I watched my diet more rigorously; I settle for merely being “firm” today. I wasn’t happy when I watched everything I ate, even if it did pay dividends in terms of my speed on the track and in races. Of course, unlike Tim, my body is all but irrelevant to how I make my living. My students don’t care what I look like; casting agents care very much about what Tim looks like. But yet despite the fact that our different careers affected our different eating choices last night, I found myself jealous of Tim. I wan’t jealous of his six-pack; I was jealous of what I was interpreting as his greater self-control.

You see, those of us who work around body image issues (as I do) are not immune from cultural pressures! Being intimately familiar with “body history” and the origins of our own contemporary ideals are not prophylaxes against one’s own anxieties! Indeed, I know damn well I started doing so much work around body issues (and eventually, teaching entire courses on “body history”) because like so many women (and a rapidly growing number of men), I have struggled for years with what is often referred to as “body dysmorphia.” It’s gotten much, much better in recent years — but it hasn’t vanished completely. By the way, Brian has posted on this subject today; check him out here.

Sigh. I need to work up a whole post on male body image issues sometime soon. Though male anxiety about the body has similar features to women’s insecurity, there are also unique characteristics to men’s struggles that have been routinely under-reported and under-analyzed (often because so few men are willing to write about it!) I’ll try and touch on that in an upcoming post.

In the meantime, my knee is fine today. I’ve got four classes to teach today and 12 hours to spend on campus, so it’s time to do some other work.

Women, appetite, and male fear — UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 17, 2004
in Body, Feminism, Food and Sexuality
. 10 Comments

I know you’re all eager to know what I’m lecturing on this afternoon. Oh. You’re not? Here goes anyway…

We’re working this week on an interesting issue in body history: the relationship between the appetite, eating disorders, and female sexual desire. In her seminal (sorry) work “Fasting Girls“, Joan Brumberg traced the development in the 19th century of ideas about young women’s desire for food and their simultaneous sexual maturation:

The health of young women was definitely influenced by a general female fashion for sickness and debility… to the physician’s mind, a young woman caught up in the process of sexual maturation was subject to vagaries of appetite and peculiar cravings. Thoughout the medical and advice literature an active appetite or appetite for particular foods (especially meat or spicy items) was used as a trope for a dangerous sexuality. Mary Wood-Allen warned young readers that girls who masturbated ‘will manifest an unnatural appetite, sometimes desiring mustard, pepper, vinegar and spices, salt, etc.’ Because appetite was regarded as a barometer of sexuality, both mothers and daughters were concerned about its expression and control. A good mother was expected to manage this situation before it escalated into a medical or social problem.

With great understatement, Brumberg says that as a result of this Victorian conflation of sexuality and food,

Bourgeois society generated anxieties about food and eating — especially among women.

My students, initially, see little parallel between these notions and the contemporary American situation. But as Susan Bordo points out in Unbearable Weight (another instant classic in the field), that even in modern culture,

Eating is not really a metaphor for the sexual act; rather, the sexual act, when initiated and desired by a woman, is imagined itself as an act of eating, of incorporation and destruction of the object of desire. Thus women’s appetites must be curtailed and controlled, because they threaten to deplete and consume the body and soul of the male.

Bordo references the tiresome 1980s Hall and Oates song “Maneater“:

I wouldn’t if I were you
I know what she can do
She’s deadly man, she could really rip your world apart
Mind over matter
Ooh, the beauty is there but a beast is in the heart

(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater
(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater

What’s the point? I’m convinced that even as we teach young girls ever more extreme strategies to make themselves objects of desire, we remain decidedly fearful about women — of any age — as agents of desire. To eat is to satisfy one’s body’s demands. A woman who feeds herself in response to hunger, who eats to satiety, may well be a woman who might make similar demands upon men. In a world where men are increasingly anxious about their abilities to satisfy women sexually (witness the veritable explosion of drugs to treat impotence), one unconscious strategy to cope with that fear is to depress women’s appetites. Given the longstanding connection between sexuality and eating in women’s lives, it thus follows (according to Bordo, Brumberg, and others) that our cultural obsession with controlling what women put in their mouths is, at least in part, a manifestation of a fear about the power of women’s sexuality. In this analysis, our culture “reads” a slender woman as submissive and undemanding; she is “safe” for a man who doubts his own ability to satisfy her. Thinness is thus less about aesthetics and more about a twisted combination of morality and anxiety.

We’ll see where the discussion goes.

UPDATE: Had a great discussion this afternoon, focusing on the phrase “too much“. I asked how many of my female students had ever been told that they were “too much”. When applied to a man, it refers to his sense of humor: “Oh, that Hugo, he’s too much.” When applied to a woman, it has a far more condemnatory tone: “She’s too loud, too obnoxious, too aggressive, too sexual, too hungry, too demanding, too much like a man.” Virtually all of my students had stories about being warned — usually early in adolescence — about eating too much, showing too much, talking too much, asking for too much. A few also related deeper fears that they were too much: too intense, too filled with emotion, too complex and needy to ever be loved or understood. We talked at length about how what we often perceive a woman as being “too much” when she makes reasonable requests to be treated like a human being and to be allowed to have the same desires (and the opportunity to satisfy those desires) as her brothers.

I realized today, not for the first time, that when we men tell women that they are “too much”, we are really asking them to lower their expectations for us. Often, the demands that “uppity” women make on men are demands not so much for sexual performance (or a nice meal) as they are that we men simply show up emotionally and physically and engage them as fellow rational human beings. That’s a scary thing for many men, and it is far easier to label otherwise natural and reasonable requests as evidence that a woman is “too much.”

Surgery, sex, shame and paternalistic feminism

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on April 6, 2004
in Body, Feminism, Food and Sexuality
. 65 Comments

Okay, MAJOR rant coming:

I had a good discussion in my women’s history class this morning on shame and body image. We talked about 19th century notions of women’s bodies, and the culture of modesty that left young women often woefully ignorant of their own physiology. Joan Brumberg, in her book The Body Project, cites an 1852 study that suggested that 25% of American adolescent girls were “totally unprepared” for the onset of menstruation, to the point that they believed they were seriously ill or injured at menarche. During that same period, clitoridectomies were regularly performed on young girls in America and England to cure them of what one doctor called “the moral leprosy” of female masturbation. (They were usually performed as a last resort on adolescent girls; some such operations were performed on young masturbators as late as 1958). My students are always stunned to hear that; they falsely assume that female genital mutilation was never a Western practice. Young women were shamed for the inevitable (menarche) and the normal (masturbation) to a far greater degree than they are today.

But what occurs in the 20th century is a shift from morality to aesthetics, with shame being the constant. Though public discussions of menstruation and masturbation (even in an academic setting) are still sometimes awkward, most of my students seem to consider themselves far more educated and enlightened on those subjects than their Victorian sisters. But all too frequently, my students loathe their bodies with the same puritanical intensity as their forebears. They may not be as ashamed of their sexuality as their great-grandmothers were (though some are still understandably shy), but they are still ruthlessly critical of their own flesh. The negative judgments however, are now rooted in aesthetics. Fat has replaced desire as the primary enemy to be contained and controlled. If self-control and exercise fail, there is always the surgical removal of the offender (fat) through liposuction and body sculpting.

I try — with limited success — to make the case that Victorian clitoridectomies and contemporary plastic surgery are remarkably similar procedures from a feminist analysis. Yes, the former were performed on the young and the vulnerable, often against their will. But I’m not sure that the young students of mine who save and scrimp and go into debt for liposuction and breast enlargements (and I can think of quite a few who have done just that) really have much more agency and autonomy than their forebears. Slicing up the body to conform to a societal ideal is inherently a woman-hating act, whether the offending body part is the clitoris or thigh fat. There is no progress in moving from a culture that shames sexuality to a culture that shames any divergence from an unrealistic aesthetic ideal.

Yes, I have heard from my students who say they feel better about themselves after their surgeries. But the number of women in Somalia or Mali who support female infibulation are high as well. 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.

Go ahead, call me paternalistic. I’ll wear that title with pride, thank you. I see my students not merely as independent, autonomous agents whom I need to empower, but as vulnerable young people whom I — and others around me — need to protect. And I still have the nerve to call myself a feminist.

Hugo made dinner!

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2004
in Feminism, Food, Relationships, Teaching, Vanity and Youth ministry
. 1 Comment

Last night, once I was done working out, I had nothing pressing to do. No meeting of any kind to go to, no class to teach. Between my Monday night classes, regular Mennonite meetings on Tuesday nights, church youth group on Wednesdays, other meetings most Thursdays, small groups on Fridays, and date nights on the weekends, I almost never have a chance to stay home. No Mennonites last night; Hugo was free!

So my girlfriend suggested that I make dinner. Though I may pride myself on being enlightened in terms of my gender studies work, I am a neanderthal in the kitchen. When I lived alone years ago, I once went a whole week eating three meals a day from 7-11. (I even fueled my first marathon with goodness purchased only from that wonderfully convenient establishment). But women do seem — as a rule — to encourage a higher degree of attention to food preparation, and last night was my night.

I came up with the following BY MYSELF. (Well, almost). I sliced up some chicken breasts (which were defrosted in the fridge), threw ‘em in a pan, and sauteed them in olive oil. Added celery and onions (the only veggies in the house), and then every kind of salt and garlic powder I could find in the cupboard (we have lots and lots of strange little bottles of seasoning, I added a pinch of each). I then poured in half a jar of pasta sauce, and let the whole concoction simmer. I made some fettucine, and then poured the results from the pan on top of the pasta. It was a hit! I was proud! Matilde the chinchilla looked on in benevolent approval from inside of her mansion, and my girl was very pleased when she came home: “Honey”, she exclaimed, “this tastes good!” 36 years-old, and never before had I heard those words come from another’s lips in response to my efforts in the kitchen! (Well, I did bake chocolate chip cookies once, back in 1988, and those were a hit with my college roommates).

I also let myself watch television, something I so rarely have time to do anymore. One of my favorite movies of last year, A Mighty Wind, was on HBO, and I laughed and cried through the last half of it. I caught a bit of Larry King, and was reminded of why I don’t like him much.

Today, I’m back to the usual. I’m lecturing on Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot at 10:25. I’m lecturing on Sappho of Lesbos at 12 noon. And at 1:35, I’ll be leading a discussion on 19th-century anorexia, and the similarities and differences between the disease then and now.

Church youth group is tonight, and hosannas shall be sung (or said)! W., the girl in my youth group whom we were sure had lymphoma, was sent home from the hospital after doctors discovered she did not have cancer after all, just an unusually aggressive infection of her glands. That after two major biopsys, a spinal tap, and a bone marrow test. Still, God is good.

Obesity, poverty, and choice

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2004
in Body, Class, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006 and Food
. 23 Comments

The House today passed The Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act , which may be the most absurdly named piece of legislation to appear this year. Designed to forestall lawsuits against fastfood franchises, the bill was passed just one day after a study revealed that obesity is rapidly becoming a greater health hazard than smoking.

As much as I detest the bill and the spirit behind it, this infuriated me:

Steven C. Anderson, president and CEO of the National Restaurant Assn., said in a statement: “The notion of holding restaurants and food companies legally responsible for choices all of us freely make each day, such as what to eat, when to eat and how much to eat, is absurd.”

Hey, Mr. Anderson do you spend much time in the inner city? Been to South LA lately? How about my own Northwest Pasadena? “Choices” abound for those of us in affluent areas, with supermarkets and health-food stores and disposable incomes. Many folks I know (including some of my students) live in areas where there are no supermarkets; food comes from corner liquor stores and from Jack in the Box, McDonalds, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fast food is unhealthy. It is also relatively cheap, it is quick, and it is abundant. The urban poor in my classes don’t have access to sushi and fresh vegetables, they work long hours (and commute still longer on the bus). Many come from single-parent households where the overworked adult has no time to cook. The food available on campus? Overpriced nachos, burgers, and Snickers bars.

To make choices freely, Mr. Anderson, one has to have the income to afford choices. One has to have access to the choices in the neighborhood in which one lives. And one has to have the time to prepare and consume a healthy meal. Big Macs cost less than tofu. Fried chicken wings cost less than a grilled boneless breast of chicken. Obesity is epidemic among the poor in my beloved Los Angeles, Mr. Anderson, not because of poor personal decisions but because of a lack of the very choices you celebrate. Personal responsibility matters, of course. But in order to exercise personal responsibility effectively, ya gotta have access to healthy, low-cost, time-efficient alternatives to fast food. Me? I do. I can pop into Gelson’s and drop $7 on sushi and a Hansen’s soda. I can afford to spend hours a day working out.

I don’t make healthy choices because I am virtuous. I make them because I am fortunate. Period.

End of rant. Off to youth group…

They raised enough…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 28, 2004
in Food, Fun, Money, Photos, Vanity and Youth ministry
. 9 Comments

hugo_buzzed.jpg

It’s Saturday night, I am home from 30-Hour Famine, and I am completely bald. The photo above (of me with one of the kids from church) was snapped on a camera phone, but it shows the colored mohawk I was given last night by my youth group. I challenged them to raise $5000 for World Vision; they raised $7900 and change.

I decided the mohawk could not stay. So, after half an hour with the razor in the shower, I am balder than on the day I was born. Next year, I’m going to challenge them to raise at least $10,000!

Odds and ends

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 27, 2004
in Blogging, Clothing and Fashion, Food, Money, Politics and Youth ministry
. 6 Comments

The 30-Hour famine fast began a few minutes ago. After some quality time this A.M. with my gal and Matilde the chinchilla, I went on a quick 14-mile run from my place, traveling down through the Arroyo Seco and up into the Monterey Hills neighborhood of L.A before making my way back. I have made quick trips to Noah’s Bagels and Jamba Juice to refuel, but from noon today until 6:00PM tomorrow, nothing more. I’ll be off to church in a few hours, to help check in the kids (we think we might have over 35 show up tonight), count the money, and prepare for a sleepless night with hungry and rambunctious teens. Whether or not they will have raised enough to shave my head remains to be seen; I’ll report.

I got some nice props last night from Rudy Carrasco; he linked to my post below on my feminist cred, and he wrote:

Hugo is one of the more fascinating characters you will come across. As the self-described only Evangelical male in America to teach Gay and Lesbian studies, he is absolutely and literally in a class of his own.

Very cool. Thanks, Rudy!

As I gather with the kids this weekend, I will be praying for Haiti. Almost no one seems to want to “blog Haiti” this week! Here we all are, Christians devoted to social justice and non-violence, and we are all far more riled up about a movie than we are about this horrific and tragic situation unfolding right here in our hemisphere. Is it because the problem seems too intractable? Is it because there is no opportunity to issue thundering and self-righteous orations? Writing about Haiti just isn’t as sexy as writing about marriage or the Passion. I am as guilty as everybody else. I have no answers. But I do have prayers.

Also, I am praying for the grocery workers of the UFCW as they vote this weekend on whether to accept the latest offer from the supermarket chains. I am definitely looking forward to being able to shop once again at my neighborhood Vons. I am tired of the high prices I’ve been paying at Gelson’s, the unionized (but pricey) grocery store that is just down the street. By the way, I am trying to decide if I want to buy “Union Jeans“, sold on the UFCW website. I like the idea of wearing only union-made American stuff. On the other hand, I love good clothes. I spend far too much on dressing myself (lately, I have been buying a lot of stuff from Lucky Brand), and most of what I buy is not union-made. I think I have some room for growth there.

Time to focus on the famine!