Fat-Hating and Eating Disorders

Somehow I was not one of the tens of thousands of people who have reacted to Maura Kelly's anti-fat-person blog entry on Marie Claire. The magazine has received 28,000 e-mails about the piece; the initial post itself has garnered 3,000 comments. It's in the Daily News, HuffPo, washingtonpost.com, etc.

Basically, she wrote a hateful post about how it's "aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room"--yes, that is a direct quote--and how even though she has a few friends who could be called plump, she would be "grossed out if I had to watch [fat people] doing anything." It's not hard to see why the fatosphere freaked out. There was even a protest staged in front of the offices on Friday, in which fat people were supposed to gather and make out, or something. (The post was prompted by Maura's editor asking about her reactions to Mike and Molly, a CBS show about two obese people in love. It's ridiculous that this idea in and of itself is a premise, incidentally.)

What's striking me is her apology, made after the post proved explosive. Here's where I should say that I've worked with Maura and have never found her to be anything less than honest, kind, and sincere. (I've also written for Marie Claire and haven't found their party line to be any more anti-fat than any women's magazine, though I wasn't writing about body issues.) When I read the apology, I could hear the words coming out of her mouth; they were in line with the person I know.

The post itself was anything but. I kept reading, waiting for a disclaimer better than "some of my best friends are fat!" and never got one; I kept waiting for the big reveal to this obviously farcical post (right? right???) and was left hanging. But as her apology makes clear, this woman has been in the grip of an eating disorder. It's behind her now--that is, she is no longer engaging in eating-disordered behavior--but manalive, do those mind-sets ever stick.

I'm sympathetic to how this grossly myopic view of fat people might be a symptom of an eating disorder. I don't want to believe that Maura's actual feelings are anywhere near as hateful as her words. So then I asked myself: Do I, deep down--as someone who's had an eating disorder--have the same reaction to seeing morbidly obese people? The answer was a swift, decisive no. I felt relieved to answer this honestly--rather, to come to that answer honestly--and vaguely righteous, suspicious that maybe Maura's post wasn't about her eating disorder at all but about something closer to bigotry.

But then I remember my mother and the mustard cape.

There was no plus-size store within driving distance of the South Dakota town where I grew up, so when I was a kid the only time my morbidly obese mother purchased clothes was during our annual summer visits to my grandparents in Dallas. These visits were as shrouded in mystery as her annual visit to the gynecologist: I knew it was something adult women did, specifically something my mother did, and it had something to do with something I wanted no part of. I pictured these stores--we didn't have words like "plus-size" back then; my father referred to it as the "big woman" store, and my mother didn't refer to it at all--as somehow dark, dank, with lighting that was harsh and low at the same time. I pictured eerily large dressing rooms with mean, ugly mirrors; I pictured elephantine, kindly saleswomen who were all very careful not to mention the fact that this was a "big woman" store. I pictured women filing out of there not delighted with their purchases, nor even relieved at having gotten it done, but furtive, ashamed. I absorbed so much shame from the very idea of the store that the thought of going there with her seemed like a punishment devised especially for me, designed to make me see my fate as a woman.

We eventually moved to an actual city, one with "big woman" stores of its own. My mother's shopping trips went from an annual basis to an as-needed one. It became a bit of a treat, actually--the best store (possibly only, even in the early '90s) was at a mall an hour's drive away; every so often after school she'd pick me up and announce we were going to that mall. I would go into Claire's and pick out cheap earrings, and would meet her back at the store. The first time she suggested this I felt squeamish, literally sick to my stomach at the thought of going into that store with her; she may as well have suggested we go to a sex-toy shop as a mother-daughter team. But it made the most sense, and I acquiesced; imagine my surprise when I saw that the store was just like any other, just with added digits on the clothing tags. If anything, they were preferable to the cheap, gaudy places that catered to teenagers like me. I read the simple, sunny decor and the saleswomen's perky attitudes as disguising shame. Perhaps it was simply maturity.

On one of her trips--one without me--she purchased a mustard-yellow cape. Why, I have no idea. She wasn't a dramatic dresser--the flashiest she gets even now is a red blouse instead of a black or forest green one--nor did she and my father go out to the sort of places where a cape would be appropriate. I suspect she just saw it and was in a good mood; the saleswoman probably told her it looked good on her. I can hear it now: Most people can't wear that color--but you! with that red hair! those hazel eyes! you owe it to yourself!

And the thing is, it did look good on her. I can see that now. At the time, though, all I remember was my mother showing off her purchase, twirling around the living room in a cape, and being horribly, horribly embarrassed. Embarrassed for her, that she was taking delight in an outlandish garment when she hadn't earned the right to do so by being thin. Embarrassed for myself, for being her daughter. Embarrassed that capes meant for big women even existed; embarrassed that there were fat women walking around out there right at this very minute wearing mustard capes and thinking they looked fabulous.

It became crucial to not allow my mother to wear her mustard yellow cape. Words I used include ridiculous, weird, how could you, terrible. Words I did not use include fat, fear, and I. I was 15. It was the same year I stopped eating breakfast, and lunch. Yes, fat people made me very, very uncomfortable.

I wish I could tell you that my mother heard her petulant 15-year-old daughter protesting her fashion choices and catalogued it along with her other sins, sins like making me use coupons if I went into the grocery store for her and calling parents of friends just to make sure that yes, a responsible adult would be there for the Friday night sleepover. Instead, she took off the cape, put it in its bag, and stuffed it into her closet, where it stayed until they moved out of the house.

I tried once, post-college, to try to get her to wear it. By then I could see my mother for who she was: a flame-haired, hazel-eyed woman with just the slightest hint of Texas twang whose charm lay partially in the fact that she didn't know she had any. I knew by then that the mustard cape would bring out that flame, highlight that hazel, and maybe send her a quiet alert about her own charisma. I took it out of its bag and brought it out casually. "You really should wear this, Mom," I said. "I know I made a big deal out of it when you got it, but" [it's not about fat, it's not about weight, it's not about you] "I was a teenager and anything out of the usual was mortifying. But try it on--I know it'll look great."

She laughed. "I don't know what I was thinking when I got that thing," she said. "Who am I to try to wear a cape?"



Maura, Maura, how could you not have seen? How could you not have known your own history so? How could you have looked at your own reaction--and for the record, while I find your reaction sad and even abhorrent, it's also an authentic reaction and I'm not going to ask you to deny that--and stopped at its face value? How could you not have put it together that a revulsion of fat people might not be about fat people at all, but about your own relationship with your body? You're a smart writer and a smarter lady, and this wasn't your best. It wasn't even your worst. It was your sickest. I have no idea where you're at in your recovery, only that you write about your eating disorder history as being in the past. And the eating may be, but the disorder lingers.

Jodie Foster Defends Mel Gibson, and Why I Think That's Okay

Jodie Foster, in her impassioned defense of Mel Gibson's character, unintentionally proves a point about domestic violence awareness: "incredible," "loyal," "loved" people are capable of being abusers.



I am downright bored by depictions of abusers as one of two types: 1) the bad-boy clod who gives "wife-beater" shirts their name (prototype: Stanley Kowalski), or 2) the "surprise!" abuser, who is the golden boy on the outside and a sadistic freakshow the minute the front door closes. And those types exist, sure, but the fact is that abusers are indeed, as they say of serial killers, "just like everyone else." Which is to say: Abusers, "just like everyone else," can be genuinely likable, and not in a false golden-boy way, but in a nice-guy-who-will-help-you-move sort of way. You can't spot them by the color of their eyes; you spot them when they start trying to control your actions, or shame you for yours, or when they push you, or more. There are certain red flags, sure, and I believe that intuition can serve as a strong guide here. But still: seemingly nice guys--vulnerable, witty, intelligent, accomplished, flawed, silly, helpful guys--aren't exempt from being abusers.

It's essential to ending domestic violence that we recognize this. As eye-roll as it sounds to someone who hasn't been there, it can actually be pretty hard to recognize abuse even when it's happening. Typing abusers means that the victims may be more willing to write off episodes of abuse as isolated. (Just as the "type" of victim--passive, weak, uneducated--means that every lengthy discussion I've had with an abuse victim has seen her say, at one point, something like "I couldn't believe that it was really me down on the floor/at the emergency room/actually saying that I'd fallen down the stairs.") Abuse is about the action, not about the entirety of the person, which is why it's impossible to use handy stereotypes for abusers. There is a definite cycle of abuse that's out there, and that template might not vary that much, but that cycle does not define the person; it defines the abuse, and that's what we need to focus on.

So: Mel and Jodie. I'm not thrilled to see anyone defending the character of Mel Gibson, who appears to be a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semite. But it's noteworthy that she's not proclaiming his innocence or even saying that his character as she knows it means that certainly he is incapable of doing such horrible things. She's not accusing Oksana Grigorieva of lying. She's talking about her friend as she knows him, and is saying that she hopes to stand by him during his "dark moment." (I reckon that the allegations against him compromise more than a moment, but whatever.) And I think that's actually admirable in a way. Abusers don't need complete ostracization in order to change; they need intelligent support from people who are willing to give it. Abusers abuse because, among other reasons, they feel utterly powerless; it's a cheap route to feeling utterly powerful, even if only for a split second. Just as victims need a safe place to go, abusers need a safe--though not oblivious--place to process their actions if they're ever going to be able to heal. Shame is part of the reason abuse is kept secret; the longer that we insist upon letting shame be the only legitimate response to abuse--even as, finally, the shame is being pointed in the better direction (instead of backward at the victim)--the longer we'll keep the abusers, and the abused, in the closet.

Jodie Foster, by all accounts, is a smart lady. I have zero idea what she sees in Mel Gibson, and zero idea of why she's breaking her usual low-key-media mode for this. But it's important to her, clearly, and if Mel Gibson is ever going to get his shit together and stop abusing women, he's going to need the smart, tough love of one smart, tough lady. Jodie, don't let me down.

Assorted Thoughts on Domestic Violence Awareness

I'm way behind on the feminist chatter regarding the "Love the Way You Lie" domestic violence-themed music video starring Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan, but in part that's because I was approaching it from a critical viewpoint from the beginning. I saw the video and immediately critiqued it for its cowardice (Rihanna, a known victim of violence, sings--but doesn't dare to act in the video, as it would be all too real for the audience), for its stereotypes (ooh, Megan Fox is craaazy in that, man!), for its leading man (Eminem: not exactly known for being a friend to the ladies). It wasn't until I saw this ridiculous anti-DV PSA starring the Cox-Arquette clan (with a special appearance by Kenneth on 30 Rock) that I recognized how complex and potentially effective the Rihanna/Eminem video is. As Kate Dailey points out in Newsweek, "almost no one disagrees with the notion that domestic abuse is 'just wrong.'" (The conceit of the PSA is that married people joking about their furries fetish is "just wrong," as is--yes--domestic violence.)

Part of the reason domestic violence hasn't just vanished is not that it's invisible, but that it wears a big ooga-booga-scary mask when really abuse is a small series of tears that get bigger and bigger, almost imperceptibly, to both the perpetrator and the victim. And people don't want to admit that those tears go both ways--that two people fighting is still domestic violence, and that a woman can instigate violence, and that one person's violence doesn't excuse another's. I don't know how common actual mutual abuse is--abuse being the systemic breakdown--but mutual violence is common in DV relationships. To see Megan Fox's character spit in her lover's face: It's ugly; it's gross. But you know what? That's one way domestic violence works. The problem with well-meaning ads like the Cox-Arquette PSA or this chilling, albeit confusing, ad from the UK starring Keira Knightley, is the assumption that roles in violence are black-and-white (literally, with this cinematography)--that DV is a woman cowering in the corner while a big bad man kicks her. That happens--horrifically, that happens--but every single woman I know who has been in a violent relationship has reported something much murkier, much more difficult to report and still expect sympathy, something much more difficult to put in an PSA and not have people scratch their heads and wonder whose side they're supposed to be on.

That was sort of my first reaction upon watching the Eminem video, but the more I hear the song the more I think that's actually effective. I can be at the gym and hear Rihanna's pleas to stand there and watch her burn, and I think of the dead-eyed stare she had in the days after her very public attack, and I get chills. I don't like the sort of glamourized prettiness of the video--especially because given that Megan Fox is supposedly the hottest woman in the galaxy, we see the erotic element of the violence as something we're supposed to understand--but I like that it's confusing; I like that it's not cut-and-dried; I like that it's gross.

I wonder about the premise of the Newsweek piece, though--"Can PSAs End Domestic Violence?" the headline reads. Obviously PSAs can't end all social ills; really, all they can do is raise consciousness and possibly garner funds. Anti-violence campaigns are often critiqued for targeting victim instead of the abuser, but I don't know how to raise the consciousness of abusers, given that very few abusers think of what they're doing as abuse--it all makes a sick sort of sense in the moment. This British PSA (courtesy of a related Jezebel thread) is one of the few ads targeted toward abusers that I've seen, and while I can't speak to its actual effectiveness, I think that it gets at the heart of the matter--that abusive relationships are, well, relationships: that the people in them cuddle and hang out and spat, and that the abusers actually aren't irredeemable and that the victims aren't just interchangeable blanks. (Which is possibly what I hate most about the cowering-woman type of awareness ads--no victim of abuse wants to identify with her, so what awareness is raised, really?)

"We Are They": The Blame Game in Unrealistic Images of Women in Fashion

Fascinating rundown at Jezebel of a panel for the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Health Initiative, started in response to the eating-disorder-related deaths of three young models. (And having little result, per Anna Wintour.) Jenna and the commenters bring up pretty much everything I have to say on the issue, so I won't comment too much except to say that I'm relieved to read that so many people called bullshit on the neverending blame game.

Magazines say they "can't" feature models whose bodies are above the sample size (which is very small), because designers don't provide them with sample sizes in, say, size 8. Designers say they "can't" make their samples larger because they are responding to the norms of the industry. Which is dictated by...magazines and other designers. Model agencies say they provide prepubescent girls as models because that's what the industry demands, and hell, there's just so many of them from countries with shaky economies (unsurprisingly, often the same countries where sex trafficking is an enormous problem for this same demographic). The models themselves say they are powerless to stand up for their bodies' needs, because they often have families back in their native country to feed, and there's always another girl who will live on cigarettes to fit the norm to take her place.

I wish I knew the identity of the female fashion designer who said during the Q&A portion of the panel: "Trends start by agreement. We keep saying 'They started it,' but we are 'they.' We are they." I'd buy her clothes in a size 8 minute.

Superbad Superbowl

I'm just as disgusted as the next feminist by this year's Superbowl ads. What's striking me more than the rotten way women were portrayed in the alternate universe of SuperbowlLand is the way the target audience--men, presumably--was depicted.

The Dodge Charger ad begins with men talking about not women, but The Man. The actors were shown giving a litany of promises: I will be at work by 8 a.m.; I will sit through two-hour meetings. It quickly becomes clear that being good middle managers is only part of the deal, though, as the list grows to include "watching your vampire movies," recycling, and other things we're supposed to see as tedium.

I often wonder who these sorts of overtly pandering ads are pandering to, exactly, since nobody I normally hang out with thinks that way, at least not openly. I watched the Bowl with three men, all of whom are thirtysomething beer-drinking football lovers--the Bowl's target audience--and the irony of hearing them groan just as loudly as I did at these ads was not lost on me. But reading reactions from car geeks and Twitter reactionaries (annoyed Tweeters appeared to be men and women in equal measures) revealed that it wasn't just my little self-selected group of men who were turned off by the blatant appeals to an outdated mode of thinking.

I'm guessing that the thinking of the ads creators went something like this: The economy ain't so hot >> men's status as breadwinners is suddenly in jeopardy >> ergo, men must be in an ENORMOUS PANIC about this >> let's assure them they're still men by getting them to spend money on these terrifically masculine products >> Dove body wash. (I bring this up not because body wash is gendered, but because the ad, even in pushing a product that has feminine connotations, relied on such lazy stereotyping of what it means to be a man--this from a company that has done some decent work in trying to show a more authentic version of its customers than most companies would dare. The Dove ad was by far the least gross of the don't-worry-you're-still-totally-dudely genre, but still.)

But what is so shortsighted about this is how A) outdated, and B) erroneous it is. Let's look at the erroneous part first: Yes, men have lost out financially more than women in this recession. But the logical way to assure dudes that they're still manly is not to tell them to either spend more money or treat women as the enemy: It's to widen and reconstruct what manhood is. Any man who has been in an equitable relationship that is supported by his peers knows it's a helluva lot more fun to have partner-as-partner, not partner-as-enemy. And you know what? Women who don't act as harpies and rip men's balls out via forced Twilight viewings? We, too, like to have sex, and it will be more fun than it would be with the constructed harpy, because neither party will secretly be dreading the act. (I'd bring up other benefits of equitable relationships--relationship health, stability--but as we learned from the Megan Fox Motorola ad, really all men can think about is sex anyway.) As for the other things that are supposedly culturally castrating men--the job, the recycling, the responsibility--those are no longer merely the province of men.

Which leads me to how outdated this line of thinking is. I'm reading The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment by Barbara Ehrenreich, which was written in 1987. It's, in part, about how constructed masculinity led to the epidemic of middle-aged crises among men, during which our fathers and grandfathers supposedly ran out, bought sports cars, and had affairs. I haven't finished the book yet so can't say what Ehrenreich's thesis is and how it stands up to today, but what's striking me is how much of what she's writing about applies to everyone now. Most women are in the work force now and are often the sole breadwinner. Escapist fantasies written by and for women in the '50s and '60s--when the men of 1987 were growing up--by and large reflected a desire to escape the monotony and drudgery of housewifery, because that was the feminine sphere then. There's no absence of that kind of tale today, but there's acknowledgement that women's lives outside of the home can feel like a trap too. I'm imagining an ad geared toward a unisex audience using the Dodge Charger premise: A series of close-ups of men and women listing the series of compromises they are willing to make in the world at large so that they can have this one amazing thing that will make them feel glad to be alive. That ad would be able to keep the marginally creative conceit without assuming that the audience secretly hates their lives. Hell, if you must, you could even still make it gendered by adding in the sort of daily work that is still often left to women (diapers come to mind). It's still gross on a consumerist level (whose life is made better for longer than a week by having a really cool car?), but it's not offensive.

I also don't think that the men-trapped-by-their-lives idea the commercials were promoting is as effective in 2010. Generation X supposedly created the nation of prolonged adolescence, without shame. Much of what Ehrenreich addresses as the cause for the flight from commitment is our idea of what constitutes "maturity," which doesn't have much latitude according to the rules that she cites. But with men and women getting married and having children considerably later in life, and with "bachelor" no longer being a euphemism for "homosexual"--indeed, "bachelor" now has a ring of glamour to it--men who once would have been considered hopelessly flighty or immature because they're choosing not to "settle down" now seem normal. As I wrote above, women are just as tired of men as the corporate grind--but more importantly, tales of alternate, noncorporate lifestyles aren't exactly hard to find these days. We're supposed to take glee in the fact that even though we may be married and bear children and maybe even actually like our boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife, we're still cool--isn't that why Judd Apatow movies exist? Isn't that why people liked Juno? Because they prove that we're different somehow from our yuppie parents? Maybe the answer is that as Generation X ages, we realize that we're not any different--maybe the Dodge ad is more relevant than I want to acknowledge.

There's another big loser in the Superbowl, besides men, women, and the Colts: creativity. I really couldn't care less about football; I watched it for what was supposed to be the showcase of America's collective advertising talent. (And for The Who. Which, really? No. Just, no.) I don't think the process of advertising can ever truly be creative, but from journalism school I do know that there are some brilliant creative minds working in advertising, and this was supposed to be their time to shine. I remember watching the hysterical Emerald Nuts commercial during the Superbowl a few years ago and thinking for the first time that maybe I was actually missing out on occasion by not watching more television ads. Last night, I kept waiting for the "real" ads to start--many of the ones that weren't ugly with sexism were just confusing instead of clever (why was there a whale? why was he pretending to be dead while eating Doritos?) or plain old boring (Shape-Up shoes couldn't have come up with something remotely clever?); and according to my fellow viewers, several of the ads weren't new at all. I get that this was a tough year for advertising, but c'mon! When Charles Barkley offers the evening's best non-football performance, something is amiss. At least he was just lovin' on tacos, not hating on women. Or himself.

Food Trends

Somehow I got on a PR mailing list that sends me press releases on a variety of things. (My favorite thus far was the "Sugar Daddy Ken Doll" press release sent out by Mattel.) I recently got one about food trends of the decade: cupcakes, sliders, açai. Some of the trends I did indeed recognize as trends (serious, what is up with the hipster bacon thing?*); others were baffling (whole grains and olive oil--even with the attention paid to HDL vs. LDL cholesterol, since when is olive oil newsy?).

I've never wholly understood how foods become trendy, at least not without an invention or clear-cut reason for the trend. Arepas were trendy for a while during the "wait, Latinos are EVERYWHERE!" media blitz a few years ago; likewise, while kombucha tea has been around for centuries, it wasn't until G.T. Dave came along that the market for commercially produced kombucha expanded to the point of a trend, at least in NYC. Sometimes the reasons for food trends are buried deeper in shifts in trade policies, agriculture, and production technologies--I remember reading a story in the business section of the Times in 2001 or so about how California was growing its non-artisinal large commercial batch of pomegranates, and sure enough, in 2002 Pom hit the shelves and became a bartending favorite.

Curious geneses aside, food trends strike me as problematic because food is nourishment above all else. Food is also fun, and fun to talk about, and with the widespread advent of "food porn," fun to look at--I get all that. And food trends aren't mutually exclusive with proper nutrition. But A) describing food as a "trend" socializes food outside of our intimate circles (food as social event with friends and family can be good; food as something to be parsed for its trend value is not), and B) in hyping up these food trends, lazy food writers (of which there are many) will reach for the easy instead of actually investigating why a certain food is becoming trendy. We're in a recession, have some mac'n'cheese (which had nothing to do with the recession and more with the idea of a recession); hey, superfoods are a great way to lose weight.

It's sort of related to the problem I have with the fetishization of the slow food movement--except that I do endorse the values of slow food, and don't endorse the values of the PR machine**. Once we take something that we need for human sustenance and make it a value in and of itself--a political value, a trend value--we continue to view food as something other than sustenance. And while it can and should be more than a mere collection of nutrients, I'd like to see more of those values accumulate organically rather than being told by a publicist that I should be eating kashi because it's trendy.

*Full disclosure: I have made both bacon baklava and bacon-infused bourbon. I am a part of the problem, not the solution.
**Except when it comes to the #4 "Food Influencer of the Decade": Food Safety. I mean, really.

Demise of the Magazine Industry, and What It Means for Health Information

This entry at Weightless got me thinking about the role of Internet reporting and blogging in the way that health information is disseminated among women. (I'm copping out of answering the question posed in the headline, because while I don't think that the master's tools will dismantle this particular master's house, I do think that progress is being made--I'm particularly pleased to see that Marie Claire fashion blogger Ashley Falcon is not only regularly blogging about plus-size fashion for a major women's magazine, but is actually plus-size--so much body image focus has been on women who are "in between," which is important to look at but doesn't really further the goal of body acceptance for all.)

I fear that the movement away from traditionally produced magazines toward user-generated content and free labor will only make things worse. There will be voices of sanity out there, but the very nature of the web--bits and clips that will grab our attention and make us want to click--ensures that the holistic nature of any health plan will be diluted to the point of being lost altogether. Say that a women's health website has good intentions. In order to generate daily content, they will need health news. Health news comes in bits and pieces--this nutrient was proven to reduce this symptom in this study; this study showed a reduction in X when subjects did Y. In the minutiae, the essence of health is lost. The holistic approach to health--i.e., the healthy approach to health--isn't sound-bite-friendly. Scientific studies, by their nature, are extraordinarily limited in scope. They often isolate one cause and one effect in order to contribute to a larger body of study.

Print isn't immune to this, naturally: A good magazine editor wants to maximize the takeaway her readers will get from every word of information printed, especially in bitsy, designy pages (like the health content of most women's magazines). So if there's a study about how depression is a risk factor for osteoporosis, an editor might want the takeaway to be about getting enough calcium if you're depressed--it's something that the reader can take action on immediately. The problem, of course, is more complex: If you're depressed, you're less prone to do exercise, especially of the osteoporosis, weight-bearing kind; you're also less likely to feed yourself properly, including getting enough of the nutrients that would not only help with your brain chemistry, but also with your bone health. Treating the depression could lead to a reduced risk of osteoporosis, and treating depression requires a holistic approach, often combining psychotherapy, medication, behavior and lifestyle changes...that is, nothing sexy, or new, or saleable on the newsstands. But "The Secret Disease You Don't Know You're At Risk For, p. 147" feels like all of those things.

Now: A magazine editor who is trained for her position and makes a living at her craft is also conscious of the true needs of her readers--it's part of what makes a good editor. But web laborers, even those who are skilled writers, editors, and curators, are also more at the mercy of the attention economy than print journalists. And those reductive views of health information are worth more in such an economy.

It goes the other way too, happily: A peek at the number of bloggers committed to creating a dialogue about health, body, food, eating reveals that the two-way information flow can also easily lend itself to a more complete understanding of those issues. I don't know enough about the arc of the web to predict what effect Internet info will have on health reporting and writing, or of readers' understanding of health. But I know enough about the print world to say that the constraints it's under don't set a template of optimism.

Legitimizing Binge Eating Disorder

This L.A. Times story about whether to include binge eating disorder in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has been making the Internet rounds, usually with a sufferer refuting the supposed claims in the article.

But the piece suffers from a case of badius journalius: In a piece with the headline "Is binge eating a psychiatric disorder?", there is exactly one source who cautions against adding BED to the DSM--and he's a professor of literature. A literature professor with an emphasis in psychology, yes, and the author of books about the evolution of diagnoses (his book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness is his sole given credential in the Times piece), yes, but a professor of literature nonetheless. Not a clinical psychologist; not a treatment practitioner. Christopher Lane isn't even representing the voice of the trollish Everyman who hangs out on fat-acceptance blogs to harass the participants. His main argument against making BED an official diagnosis is that it would medicalize a complex behavioral disorder, encouraging treatment practitioners to shove pills down a patient's throat instead of look at the underlying issue. In other words: His problem with BED as a diagnosis is a problem with the contemporary direction of psychiatry.

(Side note: What's interesting to me is that patients with eating disorders usually develop their behaviors to mask the underlying issues of anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc. In other words: binge eaters are already medicating themselves. I wholly believe that psychiatric medications are overprescribed, but if someone is numbing themselves with food or the absence thereof, I'd rather see the needs unmasked in an appropriate, monitored setting--and if medication rather than binge food is the prescription, so be it.)

I wish that the Times piece had dared to interview people willing to give voice to the true stigma against pathologizing BED. That is, what the Internet trolls pop up to say on fat-acceptance sites: That it's just gluttony, plain and simple. In the heat of the debate over the "obesity epidemic," the rush to judge what those evil, evil fat people who will make everyone's health insurance rates rise, the thought of legitimizing what may appear to be sheer gluttony seems absurd. First you want us to accept fat people, and now you want our insurance to cover their treatment--not for weight loss, but for a "disorder"? Yeah, buddy, I had a "disorder" last night at Cold Stone Creamery, knowwhatimean? Because that, I believe, is the starting point of having an actual dialogue about whatever controversy may surround BED's possible inclusion in the DSM. (That is, assuming there actually is a controversy; since the article didn't interview anyone with any power within the American Psychiatric Association, it's hard to tell. I can only go on the word on the street.) If detractors--or, hell, even the writer of a piece for a major newspaper on something that directly affects 3% of the population--had dared to be honest about the gut feelings against BED's inclusion, the myths could begin to be dispelled. (For starters: BED sufferers aren't eating out of a love of food, or a lack of willpower; they're not all overweight, and not all overweight people have BED; treatment for the disorder, not weight loss, is the goal.)

Anorexia and bulimia are widely recognized as legitimate disorders. I don't know if there were professional skeptics on the matter at the time of inclusion in the DSM, but I imagine that public acceptance of the legitimacy of these disorders was aided by the misperception of glamour surrounding them. As a culture, we have a fascination with thin women--even those who are clearly ill. (One sweep of the newsstand proves that.) There's even sort of a casual, ignorant envy of some patients--I've heard people say they wished for "a hint of anorexia," when clearly what they mean is a hint more thinness, or a desire to eat whatever they wanted without worrying about their weight. But nobody glamorizes someone lying on the couch downing 15,000 calories in a sitting, especially if that person is overweight. I'm beginning to suspect that BED won't be legitimized until our culture's fat hatred is eradicated. And that, my friends, spells a quiet death knell for its acceptance.