January Journal: Bodies and health
Jan. 29th, 2014 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livMy excellent brother gave me a challenging prompt:
So there's a fairly common rhetorical stance that we shouldn't judge people based on superficial things, what really matters is health. Which is not without merit as a moral position, but we also shouldn't judge people or discriminate against them based on health either. Some people are not healthy, because they have a serious illness, or are chronically ill, or they have the kind of disability that affects their health, or because they're just plain unhealthy, and all these people are valued and deserving of respect.
A classic example is the standard small-talk conversation with expectant parents, where the approved answer to "is it a boy or a girl?" is "I don't mind, as long as it's healthy". (Answers like "we won't know for a few years yet" or "it might be neither" aren't part of the acceptable script either, but that's a whole other can of worms.) But, you know what if the kid isn't healthy, what if it's born with or later acquires a serious illness or developmental issue? Are the parents going to love that child any less? Well, unfortunately, the world being what it is, they might, but they're probably not intending to declare that when they repeat the ritual phrase.
One place where this issue is prominent is around fat activism. A great deal of fat prejudice is at least made respectable by referring to the fact that being very fat is correlated with a number of health problems. (It's not clear whether that is the actual reason for bad treatment of fat people, but it's often the excuse.) It's natural therefore for activists to point to examples of fat people who regularly run marathons or compete internationally in their chosen sports or only eat pure organic vegetables watered with unicorn tears. Or fat people who have low blood pressure and perfect cholesterol and totally clear arteries, if you're the sort of person who thinks that health is about good measurements rather than physical abilities. I'm not against making this kind of argument, because it helps to illuminate the complexity of the connection between fat and health, and counter the prejudice that being fat "makes" people unhealthy. But as with the healthy baby (regardless of gender) problem, where does this rhetoric leave fat people who are not super-athletic and super-pure in all their habits and super-perfect in their body chemistry? Unhealthy fat people still deserve to be treated with respect.
As in fact do unhealthy thin people. Yes, in some ways health is more important than superficial characteristics like beauty or wealth. But it's just as wrong to treat healthy people as somehow more important than unhealthy or sick people, as it is to idolize rich, beautiful people and discriminate against poor, ugly people. It's true that some component of health is about personal choices and lifestyle, but those choices are constrained by all kinds of external circumstances. I personally don't believe that there's a moral obligation to "be healthy" anyway, if that means always choosing the option that maximizes one's health over any other priorities. But even aside from that, some people can improve their health by putting a bit more time and effort into exercise and choosing more nutritious foods, and some people can't.
I think it's great to draw attention to and celebrate the achievements of people with non-standard bodies, because one source of prejudice is the idea that only default bodies can accomplish anything. I also think that one should tread very carefully in this sort of celebration, because some people are in fact limited by their bodies, or by other factors, and can't accomplish great feats. Take the weird effects of the Paralympics on the way that the media talked about disability and disabled people. Sure, we had a few months when we heard about disabled people being heroes and stars instead of pitiable or lazy scroungers. Some of it was icky inspiration porn, and some of it was genuine celebration. Still, lots of people with disabilities are not in fact Olympic athletes; on one level this shouldn't be any different from the fact that the great majority of abled people are not world-class athletes either. On another level, though, it's important to make rhetorical space for people who actually are blocked from some accomplishments.
The thing is that it's not just being an international athlete which is out of reach for some people. For some people living a typical lifespan is out of reach. For some, living a life without pain and with the ability to take a full part in what are thought of as normal activities is out of reach. Let alone being healthy, if healthy means being able to complete all those expected activities without being excessively tired or suffering other negative consequences, and without an atypical amount of help or support from other people. Fixating on health as the ultimate good can be very harmful to people for whom some aspects of health are not feasible.
Not at all sure if this is what Screwy was after; I'll either follow up with more detail or I'll write an entirely different post if I've got the wrong end of the stick.
[January Journal masterlist]
can we have a post about Charlotte Cooper's criticisms of the body as a locus of health, and the way even fat activism focuses on health issues. That's assuming you have thought about her stuff. I figured it might be interesting to hear a biologist respond.The problem is that I'm not at all familiar with Charlotte Cooper. Furthermore, between my trying to make daily posts and the fact that Screwy is buried in the very final stretch of writing up his PhD thesis, we haven't managed to find time for a conversation clarifying what exactly he wants me to talk about. I can talk a bit about fat activism being fixated on (a narrow definition of) health, and follow up with a more detailed post once I've had time to do the reading.
So there's a fairly common rhetorical stance that we shouldn't judge people based on superficial things, what really matters is health. Which is not without merit as a moral position, but we also shouldn't judge people or discriminate against them based on health either. Some people are not healthy, because they have a serious illness, or are chronically ill, or they have the kind of disability that affects their health, or because they're just plain unhealthy, and all these people are valued and deserving of respect.
A classic example is the standard small-talk conversation with expectant parents, where the approved answer to "is it a boy or a girl?" is "I don't mind, as long as it's healthy". (Answers like "we won't know for a few years yet" or "it might be neither" aren't part of the acceptable script either, but that's a whole other can of worms.) But, you know what if the kid isn't healthy, what if it's born with or later acquires a serious illness or developmental issue? Are the parents going to love that child any less? Well, unfortunately, the world being what it is, they might, but they're probably not intending to declare that when they repeat the ritual phrase.
One place where this issue is prominent is around fat activism. A great deal of fat prejudice is at least made respectable by referring to the fact that being very fat is correlated with a number of health problems. (It's not clear whether that is the actual reason for bad treatment of fat people, but it's often the excuse.) It's natural therefore for activists to point to examples of fat people who regularly run marathons or compete internationally in their chosen sports or only eat pure organic vegetables watered with unicorn tears. Or fat people who have low blood pressure and perfect cholesterol and totally clear arteries, if you're the sort of person who thinks that health is about good measurements rather than physical abilities. I'm not against making this kind of argument, because it helps to illuminate the complexity of the connection between fat and health, and counter the prejudice that being fat "makes" people unhealthy. But as with the healthy baby (regardless of gender) problem, where does this rhetoric leave fat people who are not super-athletic and super-pure in all their habits and super-perfect in their body chemistry? Unhealthy fat people still deserve to be treated with respect.
As in fact do unhealthy thin people. Yes, in some ways health is more important than superficial characteristics like beauty or wealth. But it's just as wrong to treat healthy people as somehow more important than unhealthy or sick people, as it is to idolize rich, beautiful people and discriminate against poor, ugly people. It's true that some component of health is about personal choices and lifestyle, but those choices are constrained by all kinds of external circumstances. I personally don't believe that there's a moral obligation to "be healthy" anyway, if that means always choosing the option that maximizes one's health over any other priorities. But even aside from that, some people can improve their health by putting a bit more time and effort into exercise and choosing more nutritious foods, and some people can't.
I think it's great to draw attention to and celebrate the achievements of people with non-standard bodies, because one source of prejudice is the idea that only default bodies can accomplish anything. I also think that one should tread very carefully in this sort of celebration, because some people are in fact limited by their bodies, or by other factors, and can't accomplish great feats. Take the weird effects of the Paralympics on the way that the media talked about disability and disabled people. Sure, we had a few months when we heard about disabled people being heroes and stars instead of pitiable or lazy scroungers. Some of it was icky inspiration porn, and some of it was genuine celebration. Still, lots of people with disabilities are not in fact Olympic athletes; on one level this shouldn't be any different from the fact that the great majority of abled people are not world-class athletes either. On another level, though, it's important to make rhetorical space for people who actually are blocked from some accomplishments.
The thing is that it's not just being an international athlete which is out of reach for some people. For some people living a typical lifespan is out of reach. For some, living a life without pain and with the ability to take a full part in what are thought of as normal activities is out of reach. Let alone being healthy, if healthy means being able to complete all those expected activities without being excessively tired or suffering other negative consequences, and without an atypical amount of help or support from other people. Fixating on health as the ultimate good can be very harmful to people for whom some aspects of health are not feasible.
Not at all sure if this is what Screwy was after; I'll either follow up with more detail or I'll write an entirely different post if I've got the wrong end of the stick.
[January Journal masterlist]
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-29 10:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 07:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 07:50 am (UTC)I went to see a new doctor today and was absolutely gobsmacked when he was polite, explained things in detail, was not rude or abusive about my weight, and did not deny me treatment. This should be standard, but I'm really not used to even doctors being able to take my blood pressure without a long lecture on how fat I am and how high my blood pressure will be...when they find a cuff to fit. So I can absolutely understand the need to stand on mountaintops and shout "FUCK YOU I'M HEALTHY!" and at the same time feel alienated by it as a cancer survivor with a chronic illness.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 10:55 am (UTC)That is Charlotte Cooper's website. I'm not sure what I meant. The post is very interesting. I think CC tries to imagine a fat activism that is not about health. I think one of her thoughts is that the 'fat: healthy or unhealthy?' debate robs people of the experience of their own bodies. I guess the thought is that the lived experience of your body is altered by a medical model that sees bodies as, roughly, animate machines. I think of CC the really radical thing is not to reject the ideas that fat is unhealthy or that health is a good, but rather that bodies are animate machines. I figured, you being a medic, might have something interesting to say on that subject.
YAB
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 12:19 pm (UTC)I think the question "fat: healthy or not?" should be irrelevant to the question of "fat people : should we be nice to them?" (yes, yes we should).
But I don't think that asking the question "is fatness correlated with poor health" is "robbing people or their experience of their own bodies" correlation between fatness and poor health would not mean that every fat person would have poor health, but rather than fat people are more likely to have poor health, which is not at all the same thing.
Further it is not useful to say "being fat puts you at high risk of poor health; so don't be fat" unless there is a useful way to "not be fat". As yet we really don't have one of those.
It might be useful to say "being fat puts you at high risk of poor health, so we will more carefully monitor your health".
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 08:04 pm (UTC)I think you may have misunderstood my misunderstanding of CC (partly because 'or' should read 'of'). I think her point is about the experience of being a fat person. She is rightly worried about the unhelpful, moralising, pseudo-medical stuff, but she wants a fat activism that isn't about challenging medical orthodoxy on obesity.
The thought might be this. People are embodied things. A person can be touched, pushed, hugged, pinched and punched. As a fat person your body, and thus for non-dualists you, is seen as a problem or as broken in someway. This somehow denies you agency (that's vague). You don't experience the world as a normatively bodied person would. You are sort of othered and queered. Now, I get the impression Dr Cooper wants to embrace that otherness, but that, she thinks, requires a fat activism that does more than champion the possibility of health at any size. Probably, it involves rejecting the idea of health in terms of poorly functioning systems, because you reject the idea of a body as a system.
very vague, sorry.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-31 11:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-04 03:08 pm (UTC)But.. the body is a system, isn't it? And it can function well or poorly, can't it?
I don't understand how you can reject an idea which seems so self-evidently true without some fairly watertight logic. Does she have such a logical argument for why the body isn't a system?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 11:55 pm (UTC)Regarding her ideas about fat activism, she's got a lot on her website; can you point us at a manifesto, or position paper, or representative blog post, or some such? All of her most recent posts (what's on her homepage) don't seem to explicate her thinking on fat activism.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 03:18 pm (UTC)I think people need to take responsibility for their own health, but that it is not up to other people to decide or judge if they are or not. For example, a lot of type one diabetics don't follow the required health treatments and then when they get complications they scream the house down for doctors to 'fix them', which can cost a fortune, time, resources ect. Not all complications can be prevented. Mental and physical health as well as life can get in the way of the best intentions but I do think there should be some level of responsibility. But I do understand your statement and agree with it for the most part.
I also think that one should tread very carefully in this sort of celebration, because some people are in fact limited by their bodies, or by other factors, and can't accomplish great feats
YES. In general society does this. As a diabetic I get Steve Redgrave shoved in my face a lot like 'well he won these medals so you can ...' and, one we don't have the same illness (different types) and two we are very different people in very different circumstances. You might as well stop some random 'thin, health looking person' on the street and demand to know why they haven't just won the 100m race at the olympics. It also puts weight in people's mind as some sort of BIG BAD that needs to be overcome to achieve things, like X achieved this despite that and I think that is a very negative and cruel mindset to have.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-30 08:50 pm (UTC)-J
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-06 05:23 pm (UTC)Surely it's the other way around. Because they will love it, they want it to be healthy, because to love someone is to want the best for them, and to be healthy is better than to be unhealthy?
That's always what I have thought it means, anyway.