No Diploma For You!

First, let me say that I am a big unfan of nonacademic requirements in the pursuit of gaining an academic diploma. That's one of the reasons I chose the college I did - it didn't have any phys ed requirements. No foreign language requirements (I'm not morally opposed to those, just academically insufficient), and private bathrooms for the dorms were also key factors.

So you can imagine how I feel about Lincoln University making a physical education class (HPR 103 Fitness Walking/Conditioning) a graduation requirement. But not for all students. No, just the students with a BMI over 30. Actually, you don't have to imagine how I feel at all; I think it bites. I think it bites hard.

One of the reasons it bites so hard, aside from my obstinate streak that makes me keen on doing the opposite of what is required of me, is that the BMI is, actually, mostly bunk. It is as inaccurate a way of testing someone's true body fat ratio as any method devised. Why? Well, as this handy BMI calculator I found on the interwebs demonstrates, BMI is nothing but an approximation of body fat based on a person's height and weight. So

If you’re going by your body mass index, or BMI, a measure that factors in your weight and height, you are considered overweight if that score is 25 to 29, and obese if it’s 30 or higher. But a surprising new study finds that some people with a BMI pushing 28 actually have little body fat — and some folks with a BMI as low as 24 have too much.

And why might that be? Well,

Because the BMI is dependent only upon weight and height, it makes simplistic assumptions about distribution of muscle and bone mass, and thus may overestimate adiposity on those with more lean body mass (e.g. athletes) while underestimating adiposity on those with less lean body mass (e.g. the elderly).

So, just based on those things alone, the idea that a facility of higher learning would use this particular test to decree sections of the student body too fat to graduate is somewhat horrifying, considering exactly how unscientific the body mass index actually is.

But beyond that, the university is playing into the same old trope that thin is automatically healthy, and people who are obese based on the BMI are automatically not. Which is, well, wrong. It is impossible to tell, simply by looking (or by analyzing a simplistic statistical measurement), who is exercising regularly and eating the requisite fresh fruits and vegetables and who scarfs down fast food and whose only exercise is from the car to the house. That isn't to say there is no correlation. It is just that you can't tell. And that's a problem if your stated mission is,

"As health educators we're concerned with the whole student, not just the academic part, but all the components that make up health and wellness."

Instead of demonstrating that, what this policy is doing is emphasizing the external differences of some of the student body, and punishing them by adding an extra requirement to their goal of graduation that is wholly separate from teaching the student body as a whole all the components that make up health and wellness. What you're doing is assuming that those other, skinnier, students already know and practice health and wellness. And hey, maybe a lot of them do and are. But I'll bet you some of them are naturally skinny.

Now, if the class was for all students to take, I'd still be a little pissy. Because I would not want to take Fitness Walking/Conditioning. Because (a) it sounds really boring, and (b) I didn't go to college to become a healthier me. I went to college to absorb some academic knowledge. If I felt like being a healthier me, I could take one of the many phys ed type classes offered, I could walk around my campus, and/or I could go to the gym - and I did all of those things.

But to make only certain students subject to this sort of requirement is pretty atrocious. And seems more in line with certain cultural aesthetic standards than any real and true concern for students' health. Because if there was an overwhelming concern for the students' health and wellness, then every student should be pressed to take such a course.

Who *Wouldn't* Bring An Assault Weapon To A Political Rally?

So.

At the town hall meetings President Obama held, protesters arrived armed with weaponry like assault weapons. Which is totally cool, right? So not threatening. After all, carrying weapons to a political event in full view of other citizenry is totes fine. It's not like African-American men - or presidents - have historically been victims of gun violence. It's not like we live in a country where this specific man, this specific president, has had "kill him" shouted out during political rallies.

Oh, wait.

That is exactly the country we live in.

We live in a nation where "one out of every eleven presidents has been shot and killed, and more than twenty percent of presidents have had shots fired at them". We live in a nation where prominent African-Americans have been murdered because they dared become prominent, because they dared to rise above what White America had delineated as their station, because they dared fight for the right to be treated as a full and equal citizen under the law. Because of that, I have to agree with Jeff Fecke when he says, "it’s impossible to view this as anything other than a direct threat on the president’s life".

If we were a nation where the implicit violence of the gun was mostly theoretical, where people have not been cut down because of their viewpoints or their skin color, then perhaps carrying guns to political rallies would not be as bone-chilling and as stifling as it is. It would still be stifling. It would still be silencing. It would still hold that threat of death and destruction (what else is a gun truly for when shown to others, other than to scare those around you into *not* taking a specific action?), because it is still a mechanism used first and foremost to destroy - whether it be bullseyes, deer, human beings, a gun alone is a neutral destructive force, but a destructive force all the same - but it wouldn't be as bad.

However.

We don't live in that kind of nation. We live in a nation where gun violence isn't a small thing, where "in 2006, there were 30,896 gun deaths in the U.S: 12,791 homicides (41% of total deaths), 16,883 suicides (55% of total deaths), 642 unintentional shootings (2% of total deaths), 360 from legal intervention (1.2% of total deaths) and 220 from undetermined intent (.8% of total deaths)."

We live in a nation where threats of violence have been used to stifle political debate. We live in a nation where we have the freedom of speech, but the words "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" carries a particularly harrowing message, with a relatively recent and violent allusion I can't imagine we're supposed to miss.

Even if we were to give these particular gun-toting protesters the benefit of the doubt, even if the argument can be made that these particular protesters are obtuse and bereft of historical knowledge (and that argument, at least for one of these men, cannot be made, because as Bill Moyers pointed out on last Friday's Journal, his Myspace page makes it clear "he admires white supremacists"), it doesn't change one fact.

The freedom to bear arms is a right, but it also carries with it a responsibility. Even if none of these men would ever point a gun at President Obama, even if none of them would pull the trigger, they are still playing a deadly game. Because there are those out there who would, who wish to. And to add more guns - even legally displayed - to a crowd when the President is present, is at the least highly irresponsible and at the most incredibly dangerous. In their willful arrogance, they may not recognize that fact. They may actually believe that they are merely expressing, as the man carrying the assault weapon stated, that they "still have some freedoms". But they are responsible for being yet more people who could qualify as legitimate threats. They are responsible for the effect they have on the debate as a whole, a debate not even about guns or their control. They are responsible for racheting up the intensity and the fear and the uneasiness surrounding this particular issue. And they are responsible for their gross negligence of historical precedent.

Women Don't Need Real Food - We're Good With Gum

I hate this commercial, and I'm pretty sure everyone else in the world should as well. Why? Well, watch it.

Let's see; it has a skinny woman who can't have that white chocolate macadamia nut cookie because she "caved" on eating that brownie yesterday. Her internal battle is between that bad craving, and her "good" self that really doesn't want to do anything that might jeopardize her skinniness. So what does she do? Well, she does what any smart woman who wants to be good does: she eats a piece of gum instead. Right, that isn't at all problematic.

The fact is, women should not feel like they've been bad for eating a brownie, or like they can't eat that cookie even though they've done some cardio. The fact is, self-denial in pursuit of bodily perfection does us no good. The fact is, this form of food-consumptive shaming has been going on for too long. We should not be congratulating the woman in the video for resisting her wish for a cookie. The woman in the video should not consider it a battle won that she not consume that cookie. This should not be held up as a triumph. It should not be held up as triumph because eating one cookie (or even 3) is not the end of the world or a negative action. Eating a sweet is not a bad thing, and it is continually depressing that women are taught and told to believe that it is. A while ago on Feministing, this very thing was highlighted by Courtney on her Ten Things I Could Do Without list; clocking in at number 5 was:

"Hearing my otherwise enlightened girl friends say they're "bad" because they just ate dessert."

Samhita responded with Ten Things Samhita Can Do Without. At number 3?

"Having my weight scrutinized by friends and family on a regular basis even though I am a grown ass woman and it is none of your business."

And it is present in the story told by Darla on We Are The Wave, when her mother gladly bought her diet microwave dinners to eat and took pride in her daughter's weight loss.

Weight loss or gain is only morally good or bad if we find something deficient in those who actually want to do that crazy thing called eating. Sure, there are people who overeat. But too often, we feel ashamed that we have these cravings at all, that we truly want that piece of chocolate or that brownie or that cookie. And that shame and that denial is not healthy. It does not lend to a healthy relationship with the food we eat, or the shape our bodies take. We shouldn't have to work out as penance for doing so, as though those extra fifteen minutes on a treadmill "make up" for that deviation the night before.

I eat. I personally don't eat a hell of a lot; and because of my hypoglycemia I have to be careful of my intake of sugar, lest I pass out and freak out those around me. I do eat what I want and generally when I want, though again the hypoglycemia leads to a somewhat more structured meal routine if I want to remain upright and cognizant. If I want a cookie, I have a cookie. I just make sure it's close enough to bed time so when I start getting dizzy I'm already laying down. I learned long ago that denying myself something I wanted - be it sweets or books or CDs - just meant that I would later binge on that very thing; which, by the way, is how I end up with things like Scott Weiland's solo CD. That still doesn't stop my some of coworkers from commenting about "how much" I eat and what I eat and how one day my metabolism will stop working for me and I'll have to be "good" like most of them. But I don't want to be. I want to be active; but I want to be active for the sake of being active, and not as a kind of Hail Mary when I do something like eat a piece of cake. And I want my cake, sans guilt. I want to not see commercials on my television set informing me that good girls and women chew gum after agonizing for dozens of seconds about whether or not they could rationalize actually eating something. I want a world in which women are considered good for actual acts of goodness, instead of self-denial. I want a world in which weight is no longer a measure of a person's moral worth. And I want a world in which people chew gum because they honestly want to, and not as a substitute for something else.

The PETA People Are At It Again!

I've come around to the conclusion that the advertising director for PETA is some sort of fetishist, and uses the promotional messages PETA sends out on a regular basis in order to facilitate his (or her) own ha-has. Very little else explains the incredible degradation of human beings (and, in many of those cases, specifically women) in an attempt to bring some attention to the cause of Animal Rights. After all, these are the people who bring us a strip tease quiz game,who use a beheading in the news in order to make a point about animal deaths, who equate the horrors of the Holocaust with animal cruelty (that is the one that gets my personal Gold Medal for absolutely horrific advertising), and who consistently place women in "shocking" positions like the animals PETA cares so much about:

And this one:

And my personal favorite out of this particular ad campaign:

The last photo especially is something I would expect to see on a show like Bones or any one of the numerous CSIs. It seems clear that there is some serious antipathy for women going down here; not that PETA doesn't use men in their ads. See?

But Rahul Khanna there is fully clothed, unlike, say, her:

And when they do have nude male models, like Dennis Rodman:

those men still tend to look more in control and more assertive than the women:

who are, like in the photo above and the one with Charlotte Ross, in passive poses meant to emphasize their femininity; which is, unfortunately, traditionally directly related to a woman's vulnerability. I could write (and there have been, by others) whole pieces about PETA's photo ad campaigns in relation to a continued and pervasive sexist and racist attitude that floods their thinking; and how PETA seemingly continues to value animals over their women models. Instead, though, I would like to direct some attention to PETA's newest 'ingenious' campaign, and that would be a letter to Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream: 

Dear Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greenfield,

On behalf of PETA and our more than 2 million members and supporters, I'd like to bring your attention to an innovative new idea from Switzerland that would bring a unique twist to Ben and Jerry's.
Storchen restaurant is set to unveil a menu that includes soups, stews, and sauces made with at least 75 percent breast milk procured from human donors who are paid in exchange for their milk. If Ben and Jerry's replaced the cow's milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers-and cows-would reap the benefits.
Using cow's milk for your ice cream is a hazard to your customer's health. Dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies, constipation, obesity, and prostate and ovarian cancer. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America's leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow's milk to children, saying it may play a role in anemia, allergies, and juvenile diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease-America's number one cause of death.
Animals will also benefit from the switch to breast milk. Like all mammals, cows only produce milk during and after pregnancy, so to be able to constantly milk them, cows are forcefully impregnated every nine months. After several years of living in filthy conditions and being forced to produce 10 times more milk than they would naturally, their exhausted bodies are turned into hamburgers or ground up for soup.
And of course, the veal industry could not survive without the dairy industry. Because male calves can't produce milk, dairy farmers take them from their mothers immediately after birth and sell them to veal farms, where they endure 14 to17 weeks of torment chained inside a crate so small that they can't even turn around.
The breast is best! Won't you give cows and their babies a break and our health a boost by switching from cow's milk to breast milk in Ben and Jerry's ice cream? Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Tracy Reiman
Executive Vice President

I tend to think that a commentator by the name of kristin over at Feminocracy is partially correct when she says, "With this stunt, they want to make people see the parallel between human and cows [sic] milk. In today's society people think human breast milk is disgusting and unfit for an adult to consume, they want people to have the same reaction to cows [sic] milk." At the same time, PETA invokes the image of a Swiss restaurant that actually has begun to use human breast milk in their recipes; the restaurant is part of an exclusive resort, so this isn't just happening in some strange underbelly of the restaurant business. This is an actual event, so the point kristin makes about the consumption of human breast milk is slightly nullified, or at the very least altered, by the very practice PETA is referring to in a positive manner.

Which leads me back to my first point about PETA and fetishism. It seems to me that there is a strange amount of fetishism present in many of PETA's ads, from chaining women (and some men) up, to putting them in cages, to recreating a bloody death scene, to describing a beheading and invoking the specter of a human who was recently beheaded, and now this recent "Let's drink human breast milk" light bulb moment. There may be something to be said about this kind of fetish, but since it simulates sadism and since it requires the degradation of human beings to fulfill it, I am not on board - especially in an ad campaign meant to further a cause against cruelty and exploitation, even if for them that reprieve should only be granted to animals. Because what PETA's ads do is force us to focus on the sadistic positions they have often placed women in; I suppose the logical leap for them is that this is just as bad as what is happening to the animals. But for those of us who place human beings and their suffering and their death on another plane, that connection does not come quite so quickly if it comes at all. For those of us who value women and their autonomy, the ads do very little other than to cause us to react in revulsion.

I have no doubt that the overall aim of PETA is a good one; that doesn't mean that I am going to stop eating meat or eating my ice cream, because I won't. But there is a balance to be struck between ensuring animals are treated well for the span of their life - however long that may be - and the opposite end of factory farming and keeping baby calves in stalls barely large enough to hold them in order to ensure their supple flesh stays that way. I am against factory farming. I am morally opposed to veal, and I boycott its consumption when I can. And part of that comes from thoughtful discussion at home and thought provoking and inventive messages, like the "Meatrix" campaign:

What PETA does is hold up a fun house mirror to us and tells us to see ourselves in it, even though we have been distorted and are no longer recognizable. That doesn't help their cause, it doesn't help the animals who are suffering, and it instead perpetuates other issues many of those who could - in better circumstances - have been PETA's allies are fighting so hard against. And that breeds resentment and places the attention where the attention is not due: on the ad campaign's construction rather than the message held therein. And that is the opposite of good for the animals.

The HHS And You!

I don't like writing about things I don't know an awful lot about. It makes me nervous, and it also makes it harder for me to build up the type of righteous and argumentative authority I generally like to have if someone disagrees with me on the subject at hand. Without that, I may have to *gasp* admit that I'm either wrong, or that I don't know what I'm talking about. Both of those scenarios would be unnecessary blows to my (large amount of) self-esteem, and so I generally stick to topics I know a fair deal about - or can at least bluff about knowing a fair deal about.

That isn't a position I'm writing from right now, but I'm discussing this particular issue because I think it is important. Hillary Clinton (Senator from New York) and Cecile Richards (president of Planned Parenthood) joined forces to write an editorial in the New York Times about a new proposed rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that would "require that any health care entity that receives federal financing - whether it's a physician in private practice, a hospital or a state government - certify in writing that none of its employees are required to assist in any way with medical services they find objectionable".

On the surface, this seems like a fairly benign rule. But as Senator Clinton and Ms. Richards expanded upon the ramifications about the rule, it became more and more apparent that we as Americans should speak out against it. The rule would allow physicians to deny patients contraception; it could be used to deny women patients information about their options or even denied care - and denied a referral to a doctor who wouldn't find the medical services asked for objectionable. Since the rule is also nebulous and unspecific about what, indeed, the employees could deny upon deciding the request was in some way objectionable, Clinton and Richards ask:

Could physicians object to helping patients whose sexual orientation they find objectionable? Could a receptionist refuse to book an appointment for an H.I.V. test? What about an emergency room doctor who wishes to deny emergency contraception to a rape victim? Or a pharmacist who prefers to not refill a birth control prescription?

These questions resonate with me, and I would hope they resonate with many others. Yes, those who give medical care should have some protections in place; but those protections should not infringe upon patients' rights. Patient rights only begin where those who have been entrusted with giving them sound medical advice's rights end. And for my own sake, I want a doctor who is compelled - not just by morality, but by the law itself - to give me all of the information, or direct me to someone who will. Because of that, I went to the ACLU's page about the matter and filled out the required fields to send a letter to the HHS. And why I'm going to be calling 1-877-696-6775 on Monday to personally voice my displeasure with this measure. And I hope others will too. We have until September 25. Sorry for the short notice. I'm a bit of a procrastinator...

For more information, I'd suggest reading this blog post, this handy-dandy explainer by the ACLU, and/or the actual draft regulations, linked at the bottom of the handy-dandy explainer.

Sugar Makes Me Sleepy

In an ironic twist, all of the sugar I've been consuming to help me stay awake has instead been the cause of my problems. Apparently, I have hypoglycemia. This explains so much!

It also, unfortunately, limits the amount of sugar I can eat. Like, none. No sugar in the iced tea, no ice cream, no cookies... Life has taken a slightly less sweet and savory turn and I just don't know what to say about that. Anyway, hopefully with my new diet many of my problems (dizziness, fatigue, blurred vision, passing the hell out, etc.) will pass into the night, never to be spoken of or experienced again. Go medical treatment!

From here I think I should probably segue into another argument, something about the state of health care in this country and how the amount of people who can afford health insurance is a paltry amount and that we should be doing our utmost to fix this problem even if it means taking a slightly more socialized bent than Americans are comfortable with/used to. As if we aren't the country of innovation that would and could manipulate those socialized systems to best benefit us. But I haven't really done enough research yet and am still just basking in the glow of knowing what the hell has been wrong with me since almost before I can remember but also being slightly mopey about the fact that I should give up most of those treats that I love ever so. So this is more of just a naval-gazing post than anything of true substance. Oh well.