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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day “body positivity” edition “I’m not entirely sure what loving one’s body might mean, beyond the obvious off-colour jokes. But apparently, it’s something that one is supposed to proclaim as an accomplishment, a credential of progressivism. I have, however, noted that it tends to be announced by people whose declared triumph in this matter is not altogether convincing, and whose basis for doing so is generally much slimmer than they are.”
– David Thompson. As a take-down of nonsense, this article is brutal.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Being fat (like me) is now presented as some sort of virtue – as is ugliness.
The Frankfurt School Marxism (“Critical Theory”) of the modern West has collapsed in on-its-self.
It has become a total absurdity – and the Corporations that follow the DEI absurdities of Frankfurt School Marxism can only do so because of the flow of (Henry Saint-Simon style) Credit Money to them.
This fake (this Credit Money) economy is going to come to an end – the end will be brutal, I will not survive it, but at least it will be the end.
Progressive Trend A: Local and national authorities increasingly hector people about being overweight, limit by law how much sugar can be in ready meals, and do stuff like banning “Buy one, get one free” offers.
Progressive Trend B: The same authorities pass laws against discriminating against fat people even in roles where being fit is an obvious necessity for the job, and progressive opinion denounces anyone who says being overweight is objectively unhealthy and/or expresses their subjective but widely shared opinion that very fat people don’t look good.
I hope it should be obvious, but in case anyone is trawling over my comments in the year 2034 looking for bad stuff, my opinion is that how much a person eats is their business. I am happy to express a general opinion that most citizens of rich countries, including me, would be healthier if they shed a few pounds, but, having been properly brought up, I refrain from making rude personal remarks about someone else’s appearance, unless that person is an exhibitionist.
“This fake (this Credit Money) economy is going to come to an end”.
Even though I like to tease you about your singular focus on this issue, Paul, I can draw a parallel between the inflationary economics that is now the default approach in much of the developed world, and how our diets have become increasingly sugar-laden, and our lifestyles more sedentary. And now folk are pushing back (keto diet, intermittent fasting, high-intensity exercise and weight lifting, getting interested in “Austrian” economics, understanding how holding rates below a natural level is toxic, worries about “zombification” of the corporate world, etc).
Notions of creating real savings to produce capital for investment are akin to putting in the work in a gym, eating clean and getting good sleep. They speak to notions of health and balance. A person who eats empty carbs is out of balance and ends up getting fat, with diabetes and the rest. An economy that relies on the sugar rush of cheap money and endless expansion of the money supply suffers a similar fate.
Maybe “body positivity” people are a bit like those who try and make out that our distorted, debt-laden economies are beautiful and vigorous, when they are not.
Although I think the mom in the original article is being ridiculous, and possibly a bit abusive of her kids, there is a certain underlying truth to what she is saying. Unrealistic expectations about body shape is extremely toxic in two different ways. How this applies to men and women, boys and girls, is very different, but males are not immune from this. However, I’ll focus on the female side.
The pressure on women to have a certain, largely unrealistic shape, is damaging in two directions. On the one hand, for some with horribly damaging eating disorders, or at the very least a very unhealthy relationship with food. But on the other hand for many when they find out they can’t be that girl on the runway or magazines or Tik Tok influencer, they give up all reasonable constraint.
I’m going to be in the UK next week and I’ll be interested to see how this has impacted over there, but here in the USA it is not that people are a bit overweight, they are overweight to a crazy degree. It almost makes me weep to go down to Walmart and see these 18 year old girls driving around in electric carts because their weight is so high they can barely walk down the grocery aisle. I certainly understand that there are certain medical conditions that leave people in really bad shape but they are rare and this is extremely common. Honestly, you Europeans, you’d be utterly horrified what you’d see in the average American grocery store.
There is a big difference between carrying an extra 10 or 20 pounds like I do, and carrying an extra 100 or 200 pounds. And I think that to some extent, when young girls can’t meet the entirely unreasonable expectations they see all around them they just go “f–k it” and eat in an unconstrained manner, whatever feels good. And when you get to that point, while trying to present an “it’s perfectly normal to scoot around in a cart because, even though I’m 18 I can’t walk two grocery aisles and you are a bigot if you disagree” she has within her an intense self loathing that consumes every part of her life.
And so, I think it is important in a sense to say, sure if you are greatly overweight it doesn’t mean you are a bad person. It is only by finding some degree of self acceptance that a person in that dreadful situation has any hope of returning to a more normal weight and reducing the horrendous health consequences of what she is doing to herself.
And maybe this is controversial to say, and I can only back it up with my gut feeling, but I think a disturbing amount of this comes from a lack of fathers in these girls lives — especially when you see it is more prevalent in the black population where fathers are absent more often statistically. I think if you don’t have a daddy who loves you no matter what, it makes it way easier to enter that cycle of self loathing that puts people in this dreadful position. (It is also true that this massive obesity problem is a lot more prevalent in the Southern US, and I’m not sure why.)
It is also worth pointing out that the national health authorities are not helping at all. First of all with their dreadful food pyramid that encourages people to eat exactly the wrong things, and their BMI charts which set entirely unrealistic expectations of what counts as a healthy weight. When the charts don’t see 200 pounds as much different than 400 pounds then you know you are in trouble.
“The pressure on women to have a certain, largely unrealistic shape…”
I find it an interesting question to ask where this pressure comes from. I’m assuming that straight women want to feel that they’re attractive to the opposite sex. The vast quantity of men don’t like their women to be too thin. They seem to want to put the blame on something called The Patriarchy but I Think that most of the pressure comes from other women.
At home we have a pretty relaxed attitude toward nudity and I think that is a healthy attitude to have, although we don’t have horribly grotesque bodies like the woman in the article. Few seem to care about being naked in the men’s locker room at the gym and there is a whole range of different shapes there.
@Stonyground
I find it an interesting question to ask where this pressure comes from.
Honestly, I think it is endogenous rather than exogenous. It is more about what she expects of herself. And that I think comes from the plain fact that to a terrifying degree women’s value to society (male and female alike) is judged by how they look. This might be rooted in sexual desirability, but it isn’t really overtly sexual. Women’s success in many non sexual areas of life, work, clubs, social groups etc. is also strongly correlated with physical attractiveness. This is complicated, because there are confounding variables (for example, a more attractive woman is, in general more confident, more comfortable and similar attitudes which in and of themselves makes her more successful, there are some really fascinating experiments backing this notion up.)
FWIW, and to be clear, I am not at all endorsing this view in society, in fact I think it is kind of horrible and destructive but it is a fact. I have a dear friend who was a total knockout when she was younger but her looks have gone downhill fast (babies, menopause and destructive relationships will do that to you). And she has often talked to me how dramatically this changes her place and perceived “value” in almost every area of life.
So I don’t think it is all, or even mainly, about hooking the perfect guy. It is about a relationship to broader society as a whole. But I’m not a girl, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
As to lesbians and bi-sexual women, I don’t really know how that changes the dynamic, though I think not much.
Jonathan Pearce – yes indeed.
The system can not last – so it will not last.
Let’s be upfront about this: The whole of the grand bargain between the sexes about roles and duties within society is currently so horked up that we should all just throw up our hands and say “Ya know what? Why don’t we just work things out from first principles, and start over…?”
Much of what we have today is an outgrowth of times when it really was true that a woman’s sole value to society was her fertility and what she did to ensure that the next generation (or, two…) got raised properly. The job sucked, bluntly put.
Just as the man’s role was to provide and protect, both of which aren’t a whole lot of fun, either.
This has been the case for so long that it’s actually influenced our very biology; we’re a sexually dimorphic species because roles were so different, and to be blunt, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of sense in the evolutionary process for the concept of “equality”. Men are bigger than women because that’s what the roles they filled required: Muscle mass and size. Women were smaller because a.) that cost a hunter-gatherer band a hell of a lot less in terms of energy budget, and b.) they didn’t need to be as big or bigger than the males.
There was also the whole “childbirth mortality” factor to consider… Big heads? Traumatic birth experiences, as Momma Nature tried shoving that big brain through someone’s pelvis. For thousands of generations, women were not just smaller and weaker because that’s what the energy budget required, but because them being that way meant that there was less investment in them because they weren’t all that likely to survive. Why waste the resources?
That’s the iron logic of why we’re sexually dimorphic, and why male/female behavior has evolved to be different. Women were following different strategies for genetic success from the dawn of time forward, and for good reasons. They still follow that programming, just as men do. Biology is a bitch, and unless you can be self-knowing enough to recognize the things your genes are urging on you are no longer valid strategies, well… You’re gonna conform to what your genes are whispering into your inner ear.
The real deal with all of this is that what was once “necessity” is no more; we’re not adapting very well, partially because these things have multi-generational timelines, and because we don’t bother to think so much about all the little rules of society that are there because that’s “how things work”.
Case in point: Nobody educated women back in the day because it was a huge waste of resources. She’d likely be dead in childbirth, so sending Suzy Homemaker off to college was a dead waste of limited resources for families and societies. Males were somewhat more likely to survive, being as it was random chance if your horse kicked you in the head of a morning, so… The resource risk was minimal. This was also why the upper classes were the upper classes, because they could afford to put more resources into the kiddies, plus keep them out of harm’s way better. Johnny the boss’s son didn’t have to worry about getting his head kicked in, ‘cos Timmy the groomsman’s son was there to do the risky stuff like hold the horses…
Conditions have changed. People haven’t. The lag hasn’t caught up, in terms of either the social software of “custom” or in the firmware of the underlying biology. The hardware is what it always has been, and evolution ain’t changing that any time soon, although we may start doing our own engineering. God alone knows what idiocy that will engender, because I doubt we really have even the beginning of an ‘effing idea of what influences behavior at the genetic and cellular levels.
Two things really need to happen: One, people absolutely have to start paying attention to the social water in which we swim, instead of just ignoring it and assuming that it’s not there. You have to start examining the environmental roots to behavior, to include our own biology, and understanding why people do what they do. Once you’ve at least recognized that, and begun looking at it, you can then move to step two, which is trying to understand why things are set up the way they are, and how to influence each and every little daily Skinner Box we go through.
Instead, I fear, the idjit class is going to continue to ideate this whole thing as a product of some vast conspiracy, blame others for their problems, and go on to create newer, bigger problems for the next generation. Which, from indicators, will be a wonder if it even exists.
I doubt anyone is really pushing the “fat is beautiful” theme. More like “fat is natural and common, so lay the eff off!”
Remember all of those kids in high school and junior high who never really got popular? The fat kids, the nerds, the autists . . . I remember quite a few categories of them.
Our population got large enough so that all of those people realized that they had compatriots and co-sufferers all over, and they decided that they weren’t going to take society’s crap any longer. Thus, we got the militant fat, the militant Aspergers, the militant pocket-protector nerd – all finally a bit freed to say screw you all, this is me, go hang.
And, yeah, the fat thing is distinctly unhealthy. But . . . I bet the mental and physical health effects of a lifetime of being shunned and ridiculed were worse than the huge rear end.
So I have some sympathy for this crowd.
(No, I’m not fat.)
It seems to me that a lot of this is about today’s cult of youth, which is much more pervasive than we often think. Women – unrealistically – expect themselves to continue looking like teenage girls into later life, although it is never phrased that way. The same underlying idea appears elsewhere, though; we avoid getting “tied down” in marriage long past the age where that makes sense, we emulate the enthusiasm of youth for the latest trends and fashions, we listen to the likes of Greta Thunberg where we might ignore the arguments of long-experienced scientists.
It has been picking up speed at least since the “Flapper Vote” era. Unfortunately this “body positivity” idea is the wrong reaction, approaching as it does one particular symptom. We need to start admiring experience, wisdom and success in life rather than their ability to extend the lack of those. Less “55 year old actress shows off her toned body on the beach”, more “actress, 55, wows audiences with her insightful performance”.
The “Cult of Youth” isn’t something that’s always been around…
If you were to take a look at how things were done back in the 1890s, youth wasn’t quite as revered. Nor was it until the post-WWII Baby Boom, which is when/where a lot of people developed a distinct antipathy for the narcissism and overweening self-importance that a lot of that generation displayed. Still displays, in all too many instances, TBH. Not all, but enough that you can make a case for the stereotype being valid.
People used to look at youth with a jaundiced eye, for good reason. Callow, inexperienced, too prone to making these great pronouncements and so forth… With no real basis of experience. They were generally ignored, and for good reason. Conditions did not change rapidly enough for the “new” to outweigh the “old”.
Today? It’s a bit different; you’ve got the new technologies constantly coming along, and some of the older generations can’t quite keep up, so the kids are (perhaps rightfully…) contemptuous of them.
What cracks me up, though? I’m a member of the cusp generation between the Boomers and whatever you claim came next. I grew up in the 70s, became an adult in the 80s, and watched the entire computer revolution happen in real time. I wasn’t an early adopter, but I by God learned and mastered the ‘effing things, because I had to. Today? LOL… The kids? The “Digital Generations”? They’re technical ignoramuses that don’t even understand how to install an OS or use a file system efficiently. I don’t know what they got in school, but it’s seriously embarrassing to have to tutor both my elderly mother who’s in her mid-eighties, and my nieces and nephews who can’t quite master the intricacies of working with modern computers. I mean, they’ve got the various social media things down, but ask them to print a document, or compile a .pdf? Find files, deal with viruses? None of that is accessible to them; I’m still having the lot of them emailing me things they need printed, even though I’ve put the printer on their computers. Don’t even get me started on the chaos to be found on their hard drives…
Frankly, you look at someone’s personal computer? I fear that what you’re going to find is a metaphoric representation of their mind… That desktop is crowded with innumerable random files, nothing organized in their email accounts? Do not, I beg you, expect any clearly laid-out or rational thoughts from that individual. You will go mad waiting for something to coalesce out of the chaos.
Youth was never what it was cracked up to be, and never what it thinks it is. Generally, it’s inexperience and shallow thought, because they’ve never actually been out in the depths.
What I know about young people, especially young girls, would fit on a postage stamp – one of the small ones.
But I have a friend who is a family practitioner (GP), and she observes that being morbidly obese a) takes quite a bit of work, time and money to achieve and b) seems to be generational, and much-more-so among women. Very-fat mothers beget very-fat daughters. Her opinion is that it’s partly a psychological thing, somewhere in the space between a mother’s psychoses and a desire for helplessness and indolence (fat people don’t have to do much because they can’t do much), and a growing acceptance of cultural norms of obesity as a signifier of status and wealth, as it is in some other parts of the world. She also opines that for some subset of the morbidly obese, it’s quite simply a very-blatant ‘f**k-you’ to the entire world, conveniently expressible in a continuous but non-verbal way.
Me, I’m just bemused. Sure, I could lose 10 or 20 pounds – what man my age couldn’t? And I had to
accept that making it up along Inyan Kara was a
bit more work last time than in years past. So I just can’t imagine getting myself into a state that I’d have to work that hard just to go to the store.
llater,
llamas
Totally off-topic, sorry, but my favorite non-southern boondocking spot is about 25 miles from there. Great area!
@bobbyb – the view looking West on a sunny day in mule deer season from near the top is about as close to perfect as it’s possible to be, and in Wyoming, that’s saying something. I hope to be saved to drag myself up it at least one more time. Where away do you camp?
llater,
llamas
@llamas: West of Custer, then up a 7-mile forest service “road” onto the mountain. There’s a deserted logging site hidden up there – flat, cleared out, tons of old wood chips blanketing it. Mountain views. Beautiful, empty. When I go, I typically stay 3-4 weeks, and run down to Custer almost every day on the motorcycle to run the Needles Highway loop.
I thought Inyan Kara was inaccessible through the surrounding private owners. How do you get up there?
@bobbyb – oh, that’s pretty country indeed. Have you been up along the old mine workings around Tinton? Strange to think that you can stand where there was a bustling town, just 150 years ago, and now there’s – nothing.
I began to hunt in the early 90s on a deeded place south of the mountain, every year I could win a tag. After several years in which I apparently showed that I was not the total idiot I first appeared, but also that I had an interest beyond mere points-and-spread, I began to be introduced around, and to visit out-of-season. mrs llamas and I have hiked the mountain several times as a result. “Mountain” is a bit of a misnomer, it’s a steady hike, but nothing technical. You can see where the early settlers who made it through the Black Hills must have thought they’d reached the Garden of Eden – gentle rolling meadows as far as the eye could see, endless game, plenty of water, and grass so tall that it brushed the stirrups.
We haven’t been for several years now, but I hope to see it at least once more. Last time I was out there, my buddy and I rode Ducatis from Rapid City up to Rushmore, and You Know What We Did :-).
llater,
llamas
I remember my first visit to the states, and realising that the ‘disability turnstyles’ at Florida theme parks were more often used by people who couldn’t fit through normal turnstyles than by the people in disability scooters they had been provided for.
That was several decades ago.
Classical Marxism, the stuff of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was based on real theories about philosophy, history and economics – the theories were incorrect (false), but they were real theories.
Modern “Critical Theory” or “Intersectional” Marxism, with its weird obsessions with race-sex-body-positivity (and so on) is just utter drivel – it is nonsense.
Yet every major institution in the Western world, including the “capitalist” corporations, backs it – backs it fanatically and persecutes people who do not support it.
Why?
Paul:
By “real theories”, i assume that you mean “theories with a minimum of internal logical consistency”.
If so, then i agree.
“Nonsense” presumably meaning “lacking internal logical consistency”.
If so, then i agree.
(But i don’t know how much internal consistency was in the theories of the original Frankfurt School.)
That is a question that you’ll never worry about, if you are convinced of the brain-damaging effects of the modern Western diet.
From the quoted article:
Leaving aside the question of what constitutes a “perfect body”, I note that fat on the hips, upper legs, and breasts, is nowhere as dangerous to health (physical & mental) as ectopic fat. This lady might have nothing to be ashamed of.
Might.
I don’t know that the aformentioned cult of youth is all bad. People have realised, in early middle age mostly, that if you put in a bit of work you can slow the inevitable decline into old age considerably. You do need to strike a balance between a joyless puritanical existence and just not looking after yourself at all but extending the active and healthy period of your life has to be a good thing surely.
No you don’t.
You can live a life of full pleasure… as long as you learn to enjoy only what is healthy for you. It’s not too difficult, in my experience.
Although i do not know as a fact that i have learned to avoid all what is unhealthy for me.
Snorri – yes I agree with your interpretation of what I wrote.
Thank you, Paul!
I think a lot of people have missed perhaps the most critical reason behind the rise of the “cult of youth”. The reasoning went that the “world had changed”, and that the old wisdoms no longer applied, and the brave new hearts of the young would be better able to deal with the changes…
Stop and think about that, for a moment: At what point did we start shifting from “Yeah, we’ve always done it that way, it works…” to “Oh, that’s old and outmoded thought, the young need to reinvent the wheel, and only they are capable of it!!”?
Because, that’s a large part of what happened. The trends began back around the end of WWI, when a lot of people decided that the older generation had led them down a primrose path to disaster and death on the Western Front, so therefore… They were discredited and not worth listening to. That thinking was part of a pattern that led to the excesses of the Weimar Republic, and the reaction thereto was what helped the Nazis into power… Who were also a bit prone to fetishizing the young and “youthful thinking”.
Every single time I hear this line of thought, the thing I keep noticing is that it’s always some “wise one” telling me to ignore precedent and Chesterton’s Fence, because they “know better”.
And, ya know what? Over the course of my life and experience, the one thing I’ve noticed is that the “New” ain’t necessarily or automatically better than the “Old”. The number of times I’ve had to go back and research past experience and precedence when “current thought & practice” has failed me? Innumerable. New Math? Kiss my ass; I lived that pedagogical experience, and it left me crippled for dealing with mathematics until I did the work and went back and did the old “drill and kill” stuff and got my facts down before going on to algebra. Ever since, I’ve viewed these brilliant intellectuals of “the new” with a very jaundiced and highly suspicious eye.
A lot of the “cult of youth” was and is a scam, meant to enable a certain line of bullshit laid down by a certain political alignment. You hear that tune, you may want to take a long, hard look at just who it is grinding the organ for all the flying monkeys.