Tag Archives: eating disorders

Long Overdue Links

Debbie says

So the site was down, and various things happened, and we’ve been posting a little less frequently than usual, and the links have been piling up like nobody’s business. I’m going to trim off some of the old ones from the list, but this will still get long …

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This will come as no surprise to many regular readers here, but the visuals are powerful, and apply in slightly less dramatic ways to so many of us:

The current World’s Strongest Man, Brian [Shaw] is 6’9″ and 420 pounds, and traveling can be a bit more difficult for him than it is for the average person. Especially when you fly commercial.

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You can read a lot of Internet without finding news as good as this:

Arunachalam Muruganantham was horrified to learn that his wife (in a rural area in Southern India) couldn’t afford decent menstrual pads and was using soiled rags. It got worse when he found out that other women were using even less hygienic substances. He went to great lengths to study the issue…

Four-and-a-half years later, he succeeded in creating a low-cost method for the production of sanitary towels. The process involves four simple steps. First, a machine similar to a kitchen grinder breaks down the hard cellulose into fluffy material, which is packed into rectangular cakes with another machine.

The cakes are then wrapped in non-woven cloth and disinfected in an ultraviolet treatment unit. The whole process can be learned in an hour.

Muruganantham’s goal was to create user-friendly technology. The mission was not just to increase the use of sanitary pads, but also to create jobs for rural women – women like his mother. Following her husband’s death in a road accident, Muruganantham’s mother had had to sell everything she owned and get a job as a farm labourer, but earning $1 a day wasn’t enough to support four children. That’s why, at the age of 14, Muruganantham had left school to find work.

The machines are kept deliberately simple and skeletal so that they can be maintained by the women themselves. “It looks like the Wright brothers’ first flight,” he says. The first model was mostly made of wood, and when he showed it to the Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, in Madras, scientists were sceptical – how was this man going to compete against multinationals?

You have to love this man:

“Imagine, I got patent rights to the only machine in the world to make low-cost sanitary napkins – a hot-cake product,” he says. “Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty – everything happens because of ignorance.”

He believes that big business is parasitic, like a mosquito, whereas he prefers the lighter touch, like that of a butterfly. “A butterfly can suck honey from the flower without damaging it,” he says.

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It’s no longer Black History Month (I’m in the camp that believes we need twelve months of that every year), but it’s not too late to be horrified by how racism and fatphobia can go hand in hand as co-opting partners:

"Celebrate Black History Month: 1-800-GET-THIN"

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It’s no longer National Eating Disorders Week either, but it never hurts to have good resources on this difficult topic.

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And then, there’s sex: A surprising number of my current links group under the subject of sexuality. First, I don’t know when I’ve read a better or more thoughtful article than Rich Juzwiak’s piece on Truvada, barebacking, and safe sex:

For those, like me, who were unaware of or uneducated about Truvada, it is an antitretroviral cocktail that was approved in 2012 for pre-exposure HIV prophylaxis (PrEP):

For some—say barebacking enthusiasts, sex workers, or people in serodiscordant couples (in which one person is HIV positive and the other is negative)—Truvada is a no-brainer. There are plenty of us, though, who occupy a gray area, in which barebacking isn’t exactly a lifestyle, and in which contracting HIV doesn’t exactly seem like an inevitability. For those of us in that group, the kind of introspection that Truvada requires is hard.

The understanding that I might benefit from using Truvada dawned on me slowly, like I was stuck permanently at 6 a.m. for a few months. It was other guys who helped prompt my decision, like the ones I had the sense not to fuck raw when they assumed that’s what we’d be doing on first meeting, or the ones who tried to fuck me bare so casually, it was like they were going in there to check their mail. It was the guy who told me, “Yes, I’m negative—I was tested in February,” in October. It was the guy that I hooked up with who then proposed a threesome via text: “My friend said he wants to fuck raw.” This was a few texts after I told him, “I play safe,” and he said, “Yeah, me too.” A few texts later, he admitted he’d already fucked raw with our prospective third.

And it was the condoms that have come off or broken during sex, rendering that session raw anyway.

Juzwiak combines his own experience and thoughts with careful statistics, analysis of the ethical/moral questions involved, consideration of the drug’s long-term side effects, the meaning of “barebacking” in a heterosexual context,” and more. Read the whole thing.

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I was pleased to see the work of Terri Conley, re-examining the differences between men and women in hook-up culture. Conley directs the Stigmatized Sexualities Lab (how cool is it that that exists!) at the University of Michigan:

“I like to look beyond conducting research that confirms existing stereotypes,” Conley told the Cut over the phone last week. “These gender differences that everyone knows exist, and they know they’ll always exist and they’re biological — when I started pressing on them I found that a lot of those assumptions hadn’t really been tested.”

… We have a paper under review that says there are no differences between men and women if you control for two factors: pleasure, which we define as how capable they perceive their partner to be, and stigma, which we define as someone believing you’re a bad person for engaging in casual sex. I like to think of my research as trying to rule out alternative explanations in a way that evolutionary psychology doesn’t bother to do.

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I don’t agree with everything Claire Dederer says in this article on women, sex, and writing about sex, but I like how she’s breaking down the questions and thinking about things. She’s at her best when she’s writing about herself (and, not surprisingly, at her worst when she generalizes from her own experience to what’s true about “women”):

Hell, I wanted to be having sex. I liked sex. Didn’t I? Well, actually, I was never quite sure. Growing up in a world where the adults were busy trying to find themselves and the kids roamed unsupervised, I loved the adventure of sex, and I loved the attention, and sometimes it felt great. But did I want it enough? How good did it truly feel? Was I doing it only because the other person wanted to? My desire was real, I could feel it there at the core of the experience, but if I let myself, I could also feel doubt braided tightly with the desire. As a middle-aged married person, I’m still, you know, very pro-sex, but even now that’s how it is with me. Second thoughts come right on the heels of first thoughts, and am I really supposed to be having thoughts during sex anyway?

Her analyses of Anais Nin and Erica Jong, later in the article, are also worth reading.

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Finally for the sex section (say that three times fast), Grace Annam, not writing so much about sex as about sexual organs:

Hi, it’s us. Trans women who use bathrooms.

We know that you’re not comfortable sharing a bathroom with us, even though all the nakedness happens behind a stall door.

… We get it. There’s that penis in the room, and the whole entourage that can come along with those goddamn things.

We get it. Because when we go to the bathroom, there’s a penis in the room, too. Every time.

It’s right there in the stall with us.

She goes on to discuss trans women’s relationships with their own penises, a topic that is almost never addressed. And she does it without stereotyping or assuming that all trans women are the same. Here’s her unforgettable ending:

So we’d like to go to the bathroom, just like you. Ideally, we’d like to do it alone, but if we must have company, in that vulnerable moment, sitting over cold water with our pants down or skirt up, holding our clothes so that they don’t touch the floor (because, gah, ew)… we would like that experience to be gentle and brief, rather than nasty, brutish, and possibly followed by a stint in the hospital or the morgue.

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Finally, here’s a bit of black, sex worker, and American history that I didn’t know, very timely for this week.

1942 photo of Mardi Gras baby dolls

Calling your lover “baby” had just become part of the English language. Meanwhile, actual baby dolls, the toy, were rare. By dressing up this way, they flouted both gender and race rules. Women were largely excluded from masking for Mardi Gras and African Americans were still living under Jim Crow. Black women, by virtue of being both Black and female, were particularly devalued, sex workers ever more so. Asserting themselves as baby dolls, then, was a way of arguing that they were worth something.

One Sugar Plum too Many: Critics, Ballet Theory, and Anorexia

Laurie and Debbie say:

On November 28, Alastair Macaulay, dance critic for The New York Times reviewed the New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker. For whatever reason, he felt the need to criticize the size of two of the principal dancers, saying that Jennifer Ringer (dancing the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy) “looked as if she’d eaten one sugarplum too many,” and that Jared Angle (dancing the role of the Cavalier), “seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm.”

Ringer and Angle on stage in the Nutcracker, looking thin and fit

Outcry ensued, especially since Ringer has gone public about her struggles with anorexia. Chloe at Feministing (where we found the story) says, gently enough, “calling a recovering anorexic fat in the pages of the New York Times is a cruel and hurtful thing to do.”

Macaulay was struck enough by the responses to his review to write an article in his own defense. (Don’t do that; it never works out well.) He makes many classic mistakes in this article: he calls the people who responded sexist for caring more about his comments about Ringer than about Angle, he puts in some (incomplete and insufficient) historical data to defend his comments about size, and he commits the sin of trying to claim that he understands the issues from his own experience.

My own history makes me intimately aware of what it is like to have a physique considerably less ideal than any of those I have mentioned. Acute asthma in childhood gave me a chest deformity that often made me miserable into my adolescence. (It was ameliorated by major thoracic surgery at age 20.)

Whatever that intimate awareness gave him, clearly compassion wasn’t on the list. He also ducks the question of whether or not he knew about Ringer’s anorexia by saying: “Some of my correspondents feel I should know this history of hers …. I think otherwise. Dancers do not ask to be considered victims.”

To which we say two things: One, it’s never foolish to believe that a ballet dancer has struggled with eating disorders. In fact, it might be a wise first guess. Two, if dancers do not ask to be considered victims (does anyone?), where does he get the license to victimize them?

The utterly fabulous response, however, comes from New York City Ballet corps de ballet dancer Devin Alberda, in his blog Golden Perseid Showers (we’d love him for the name alone). In an open letter to Macaulay, Alberda says:

This summer you wondered what the future holds for ballet as an art of modern expression. Noting the heteronormativity of story ballets, replete as they are with regressive gender roles, you greeted their current resurgence with trepidation. I took refuge in your analysis. Being a young gay man dancing in a large classical ballet company who is deeply invested in issues of gender and sexuality, the fact that someone was finally subjecting this rapidly obsolescing art form to contemporary gender standards gave me hope for the future.

Months later you meet public outcry over snarky remarks you made about a ballerina’s weight in a review of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker™ with charges of reverse sexism? If you’re mystified by the lack of protest your criticism of male bodies has received, you’re forgetting the centrality of the female form. Do you really need to be reminded that classical ballet, especially as Balanchine quotably promulgated it, emanates from Woman? The wealth of historical context with which you supply your readers on a regular basis suggests that you do not. No one really cares what you have to say about the men’s bodies because no one’s really watching them during the pas de deux anyway.

No one is challenging your right to zing; we expect you to say that we dance “without adult depth or complexity.” You’re a dance critic, it’s what you do, but saying that it looked like a ballerina had “eaten one sugar plum too many,” without explaining how her size hampered her dancing exposes the facile nature of your snark. You contribute to the objectification of the ballerina’s body further by divorcing her appearance from her movement quality entirely. You can’t ponder the representational struggles of contemporary story ballet in the summer and then fail to acknowledge your injurious participation in the construction of the ideal female form in the winter.

The only thing we can add to Alberda’s trenchant analysis is to point out just how well he draws the point away from Ringer’s figure and toward the heart of the issue. The objectification of women’s bodies is a necessary building block for stereotypical heteronormative love stories, in ballet and elsewhere. Macaulay, like so many others, is shoring up and protecting the structures he wants to despise.