A "case of appearance-centric talk that is men-only"

Dieting.

Could New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's weight help him in running for President?

Paul Campos argues that Christie's weight could help him, in addition to hurting him:

Few things are more powerfully gendered in mainstream American culture than body size: Fatness in general is considered bad—and to some extent feminizing—but it is a more complex characteristic in men, and especially powerful men, than it is among women. While it’s true that it is bad for a man to be fat, it is unquestionably good for a man—and most especially a socially powerful man—to be big. Our language encodes this judgment in countless ways: For leadership we look to the big man, the man of substance, the heavyweight contender, the man who can throw his weight around, and so on. In this sense, [John] Corzine’s ad mocking Christie [for "throwing his weight around" to get out of traffic tickets] was inadvertently reminding viewers of a powerfully positive characteristic of his opponent. Indeed, I would venture to guess that a short, slim man who wanted to run for president would face more difficulties in regard to the cosmetics of power than Christie.

In addition, Christie’s weight could help him in another way, especially in the GOP primaries. In the context of contemporary American politics, an unapologetically fat body, at least a fat male body (again, it should be obvious that putting 50 pounds on Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin would instantly destroy their presidential aspirations), could well function as a kind of symbolic flipping off of the endlessly intrusive nanny state, so despised by both libertarians and cultural conservatives. Of course, this puts someone like Christie in a bit of a practical bind, since in order to take advantage of this sentiment he has to stop being a “good” fat person—that is, he needs to become unapologetic about his body, rather than putting on the shame-ridden performance expected of fat people by the health police.

So is Christie too fat to be elected president, or to at least win the GOP nomination? In my view, the contemporary politics of fat are too complicated to draw that judgment.

Is obesity caused by "food addiction"?

Medical News Today reports (via):

Some people really are addicted to foods in a similar way others might be dependent on certain substances, like addictive illegal or prescriptions drugs, or alcohol, researchers from Yale University revealed in Archives of General Psychiatry. Those with an addictive-like behavior seem to have more neural activity in specific parts of the brain in the same way substance-dependent people appear to have, the authors explained.

It's a bit like saying that if you dangle a tasty chocolate milkshake in front of a pathological eater, what goes on in that person's brain is similar to what would happen if you placed a bottle of scotch in front of an alcoholic. . . .

The authors believe that no studies had so far looked into the neural correlates of addictive-like eating behavior.

Those researchers say:

One-third of American adults are now obese and obesity-related disease is the second leading cause of preventable death. Unfortunately, most obesity treatments do not result in lasting weight loss because most patients regain their lost weight within five years. Based on numerous parallels in neural functioning associated with substance dependence and obesity, theorists have proposed that addictive processes may be involved in the etiology of obesity.

Food and drug use both result in dopamine release in mesolimbic regions [of the brain] and the degree of release correlates with subjective reward from both food and drug use.

The article goes on to cite some scientific research, but it's all about the general phenomenon of food addiction. I'm not seeing any correlation or causation between the addiction and obesity.

My question is: if food addiction is the real problem, aren't we all suffering from it?

On women, men, and bodies

I wouldn't normally highlight a specific woman's body proportions, but Megan McArdle is someone who's been unusually explicit about hers. As she says in this Bloggingheads clip, she's 6'2" and 145 pounds, yet she can't shake the admittedly irrational belief — which she says "every other American woman" also holds — that her life would be better if only she lost 5 pounds:



She also says (as you can see in the video clip):

If I were an actress, I would have to lose 15 pounds, probably, to keep my jobs. And I'm really pretty skinny. . . Almost no one looks like me, and almost no one can look like this over the age of 19. I'm not saying that I'm amazingly gorgeous. In fact, I think that being that thin isn't really particularly attractive — to men. Women think it is.

I remember seeing a study in one of my textbooks back in college. It found that men's views of the ideal female body type is, on average, about average. Women, of course, viewed the ideal female body type as much skinnier. You can find similar conclusions by Googling around (example: PDF). I wish I still had that textbook, though, because it not only stated the findings but also included realistic color illustrations of two women — one for men's ideal and one for women's. I wondered: if every woman in America could see these illustrations and absorb their significance, wouldn't we be living in a saner world, where the goal isn't always to keep losing more and more weight?

I don't mean to imply that women should only care what men think and not want to be attractive for themselves. It would be different if women were satisfied with a more realistic range of body types and men were the ones who wanted to see women get as skinny as possible. But since the opposite is the case — men are the less oppressive ones — I think it's fair to assume that something has gone wrong.

Where do women's misperceptions come from? The easy, politically correct answer is that "society" bombards women and girls with unrealistic images of supposedly ideal women. You know the drill: models in advertisements, Barbie's body proportions, etc.

First of all, speaking of unfair expectations, I think it's unfair to expect a doll to have proportions that would be realistic if they were blown up to the scale of a real adult. Isn't it possible that on a purely aesthetic levels, exaggerated proportions work better on a tiny scale?

More to the point, though, the "skinny models" explanation can't be true. Can it? Or at least, it's leaving a whole lot out.

Here's the problem: pick up a copy of Details magazine and look at the male models. Even though the articles are about macho topics like whisky, meat, and the military, the models are extremely svelte. I'm pretty skinny, but I'd have a very hard time if I were to try to conform to those body types.

At the other end of the spectrum, what about male action figures? People love to gripe about Barbie, but what about the dolls for boys? No one would argue that He-Man's muscles are a realistic, healthy standard for boys to aspire to.

We don't expect boys/men to be incapable of thinking through for themselves whether these are really the right standards. Yet it's considered the enlightened position to suggest that women are mere passive victims, hypnotized by whatever images the big bad "media" or "society" puts in front of them.

An aside: many liberals/feminists will rail against female genital mutilation — as well they should. But how many of them are upfront about the fact that it's primarily practiced by women? (One person who isn't upfront about this is Eve Ensler, who included a long piece in her famous play The Vagina Monologues about female genital mutilation, but oddly never mentioned who actually does it.)

Liberals/feminists will also rail against unrealistic female body ideals — as well they should. But could it be that the crux of the problem is women going after other women?

When I think about what kinds of body types straight guys really consider attractive, I think about two random exchanges I've had with some friends (both of these were situations where young guys were the only people in the room):

1. Four of us — old friends who had gone to college in different cities and were back home for winter break — were catching up with each others' lives. One of them was telling us about his new girlfriend. He said that she has a nice "medium" body, and that he's never been specifically focused on skinny girls. Two others said we felt the same way. The fourth guy disagreed, saying he's mainly just attracted to skinny girls.

2. Three of us were watching the movie Ghost World. (Aside from me, these were different guys than the ones in the previous exchange.) Thora Birch isn't overweight by any means, but she's definitely curvier than the typical Hollywood actress in that movie. Two of us thought she was extremely attractive, but the other guy couldn't really see that.

That's the real world. Two-thirds of us (4 out of the 6 guys) didn't have a strong preference for especially skinny women.

Of course, this is completely anecdotal and unscientific, so I have no idea if my "two-thirds" conclusion is statistically accurate. But when I think about those conversations in light of the sociological studies, I have to conclude: most men are not fixated on skinniness as an essential criterion for female attractiveness. This isn't to deny that most men do find plenty of skinny women attractive, but just to say that it's not a requirement.

Of course there are some men who really do have an overwhelming interest in skinnier-than-average women. And that's just fine. There are also some men with an overwhelming interest in heavier-than-average women. That's fine too. But most men's tastes aren't so austere, in either direction.

Although, as I said, I make no moral judgment of men who are attracted to a relatively narrow range of body types, I do feel sorry for them, just as I feel sorry for women who insist on only dating men who are over 6 feet tall.

I don't object to the superficiality. Everyone cares about looks. Everyone is superficial. This isn't about trying to enforce some kind of rule that we have to be earnestly respectful toward "plus-size" women — which is doomed to be a joyless affectation if it's done out of a sense of duty. I just think that finding curvy women attractive is more fun for everyone concerned.

I'm writing this because it's on my mind, not to boost anyone's self-esteem. In fact, based on my experience, there's not much I can say to convince women that life isn't a contest where the goal is to be as skinny as possible. Whether women have that perception is not going to be affected by what I say. And it can't fairly be imputed to that imaginary scapegoat known as "society." The only one with the power to convince a woman she does have a beautiful body is the woman herself.

Why the silence about Tim Russert's weight problem?

Yesterday's Meet the Press was, of course, a tribute to Tim Russert. You can watch the whole show here.

As you can probably guess from my post about how shocked I was by Russert's death and how important the show was, I found it hard to watch at points. (I was talking to A____ yesterday, who told me: "I read your post on Tim Russert. Now I want to hug you and buy you a drink." Thanks! I'll take you up on that.)

If you watch starting just a few seconds before 46:00, you can see Tom Brokaw had a hard time getting through the show too.

The clip at the very end is just heart-breaking.

I thought the tribute was well-done overall, but I couldn't help but notice one omission.

When George Harrison or Peter Jennings died at a too-young-to-die age, every single reference to their death in the media was accompanied by "and he died because he was a smoker!"

Yet out of all the media coverage of Russert's death (and I've soaked up more than enough of it this past dreary weekend), I've seen only one reference to his weight problem:

Dr. Michael A. Newman, Mr. Russert’s internist, just told Andrea Mitchell that Mr. Russert had coronary artery disease, but no symptoms. He had done everything he was supposed to do to manage the disease, although his weight was a problem. The doctor said that such attacks can’t be anticipated, but a defibrillator can make a difference.

And that's not even akin to the statements that were made about Harrison or Jennings. The above quote about Russert's weight is safely couched in the words of a doctor, but when George Harrison died, everyone seemed to feel free to connect it to smoking.

Now, I do think it's slightly crass to use someone's death as a springboard for lecturing the public about health, but I can accept that that's going to happen. There shouldn't be a rule that you're not allowed to mention a few of someone's faults as you're eulogizing them. And there's something to be said for the idea that if it saves a single life by prompting someone to quit smoking (for instance), it's worth it.

But what seems inexplicable is a double standard in which a famous person who's obviously very overweight can drop dead of a heart attack in his 50s, and no one in the media points out that his weight problem killed him.

If I had to come up with some principled basis for this, the one distinction would be: eating right is complicated. It's hard to know how to stay fit, and it's harder for some people than others. And it's not just eating, but also exercise, and some of it could be genetic, and so on.

Weight is also complicated by the fact that being underweight can be worse than the opposite. I would love to see Americans loosen up their attitudes about weight if it would reduce the incidence of anorexia and bulimia ... or if it would help people who might prefer to lose 10 or 20 pounds feel good about themselves the way they are.

So America's weight problem is complicated even though it's serious. Our smoking problem isn't just serious; it's simple. You shouldn't smoke at all, end of story. It's correct to say "The less smoking, the better," but it'd be idiotic to say "The less eating, the better" — or even "The more exercise, the better."

But let's face it. Smoking doesn't guarantee you'll die of cancer (or another smoking-related illness), just as obesity doesn't guarantee you'll die of a heart attack (or another obesity-related illness). They're both bad simply because they raise the risk of death.

It's not that smoking always leads to death; it's that it specifically caused George Harrison's death. And it's not that being severely overweight always leads to death; it's that it specifically caused Tim Russert's death.

So, I don't see the distinction.

According to Russert's doctor (from the same article linked above), he was very conscious of his heart disease and was trying to do something about:

Mr. Russert was managing his risk factors well, through diet and exercise. He had a stress test April 29, got to a high level of exercise and was pleased with himself. This very morning [the day he died], he was on his tread mill and was always excited about how he pushed himself.

By all means, let's remember him and admire him as someone who was fighting against his problem. But let's not forget that it was a problem.

And another reason why it's worth bringing up: there are specific reasons to believe that Russert himself would have wanted us to talk about it.

What makes me think that? Well, a couple of instances:

1. I remember watching an episode of Meet the Press where the guest was Ralph Nader. Russert proactively brought up the fact that Nader had criticized Michael Moore for his weight problem. Nader — who, back in his pre-reprehensible days, was an impassioned advocate for consumer protection — put his criticism of Moore in the context of America's increasingly serious weight problem.

So, Russert himself was willing to have someone talk about the health consequences of someone's weight problem to his face. Granted, Nader didn't explicitly mention Russert's problem. But Russert was a smart guy — he knew what he was getting into by bringing up the subject.

2. On Russert's other show (The Tim Russert Show), he was showing clips of Johnny Carson, who had recently died. You could plainly see Carson smoking a cigarette in the clips. After each one, Russert would talk about how terrible it was: "He was addicted!" (He also mentioned that he, Russert, was never a smoker, and that his guest on the show, Mike Wallace, used to be a heavy smoker but had quit.)

So, Russert himself approved of the idea of using Carson's death as an opportunity to criticize his health practices.

As we've been hearing over and over since Friday, one of Russert's favorite things to do was exposing people's inconsistencies on important issues. Surely if Russert could see the coverage of his own death, he would point out — with his characteristic exuberance — the media's double standard.