by Bruce Bawer
3. “Health at Every Size”: Fat Studies
In a 2010 article for the Daily Beast, Eve Binder reported on the rise of Fat Studies, a discipline that is, to a large extent, a subdivision of Women’s Studies. Some Fat Studies students, wrote Binder, “are recovering from eating disorders.” Esther Rothblum, a founder of the field and coeditor (with Sondra Solovay) of the 2009 Fat Studies Reader, says, “There would be no Fat Studies if there were no obesity epidemic.” Yet other leading figures in Fat Studies vehemently reject the idea of an obesity epidemic. Linda Bacon, who teaches at City College of San Francisco and speaks frequently at colleges about the importance of “size acceptance,” argues in her influential book Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight that what matters isn’t slimming down but staying healthy at whatever weight is “right for you.” The most remarkable thing in Binder’s article may be her reference to a Women’s Studies professor at the University of Michigan who, in Binder’s words, worries that Fat Studies “may lead to social proselytizing rather than serious study.” In short, identity studies are becoming so far removed from any hint of academic or intellectual legitimacy that even teachers of more established and only moderately asinine disciplines are reacting to the far more extreme asininity of newer ones.
At the National Women’s Studies Association convention in Denver, it’s clear that the overweight have won their places at the NWSA table. On Saturday morning, I attend a session entitled “Advancing Fat Feminism,” featuring four white females. The author of the first paper, Amy Farrell of Dickinson College, was unable to come, so the moderator, Purdue’s Michaela A. Null, reads it for her. It’s a chapter from Farrell’s book Fat Shame about how images of fat women have been used for generations to denigrate women. For example, while the suffragists’ own literature depicted them as thin, antisuffrage caricatures depicted them as fat. A century ago “fatness” was “seen as a marker of low status”: in cartoons, blacks, Irishmen, and prostitutes were generally fat. And that’s about all Farrell has to say. Next up is MaryAnn Kozlowski of Eastern Michigan University, who starts off by saying that she was worried she would have to buy an extra seat on the flight to Denver—the kind of injustice, she implies, that fat people are routinely compelled to endure. (I wonder how the person sitting next to her on the plane felt about the fact that Kozlowski, who is quite ample, was required to purchase only one ticket.) Kozlowski explains that she has “researched” representations of fat and weight in issues of Seventeen magazine published between 1967 and 1969. Her conclusion: that the magazine’s anti-fat message, while not explicit, was nonetheless “insidious.” For example, there were articles on eating right and on fitness. Over time, she adds, there was an increase in such “fat-phobic articles.” And that’s it.
Then there’s Patricia Bowling, also of Purdue. She’s an older woman—and apparently the token slim person on the panel. “As a beginner and a relatively thin woman,” she says, she’s hesitant to address “fat feminism” and “thin privilege.” But she’s chosen to do so anyhow. She discusses her own “lifelong addiction to exercise and discipline,” which, she says, is the basis for her positive self-image—an image that, in her mind, is connected to “hard work.” She worries whether she “know[s] enough about fat oppression” to teach the subject, and recalls that a colleague found it amusing when she saw that Bowling had The Fat Studies Reader on reserve at the library. While the hefty young woman sitting beside me chows down on tasty-looking baked goods, Bowling acknowledges that “there are health risks that are associated with being fat,” yet adds that “fears are exaggerated” and that “fat people are getting treated as scapegoats.” This said, she returns to her own “tight body,” repeating that she’s achieved her “bodily ideal” (in fact, she looks anorexic) as a result of “the sacrifices I’ve made all my life”—including swimming, exercising, and skipping meals. She says that “obviously” the “messages” about weight control that she’s been heeding all her life are wrong, but she doesn’t sound for a second as if she really means it (and to judge by her fellow panelists’ facial expressions, they’re not buying it). Bowling says that we need to “recognize thin privilege” and “fat prejudice,” that fat people need “positive role models,” and that we should reflect upon the links between “sizeism” and other isms and upon the problematic role of thin teachers such as herself who presume to speak for fat people. Her conclusion: like racism, fat prejudice “takes a visible obvious characteristic” as a basis for prejudice—and we must put an end to this. My conclusion: this is a passive-aggressive woman whose only motive for going into Fat Studies is to celebrate her own thinness.
Back to Null, who confesses to a “feeling of awkwardness when I talk about my work.” Exhibiting a sweet, down-to-earth quality that one doesn’t often encounter in Women’s Studies (she actually refers to a female colleague as a “girl”), Null says that she “started at a place where I was fat-hating”: she was a “fat activist but was still on the Atkins diet!” She urges us to “talk about what that word [fat] does.” We need to “get past that word.” Her closing thought: “What would it be like in a world where you didn’t hate your body?” Last up is Sheana Director of Bowling Green State. “The most powerful word in the English language,” she says, “is the F-word—fat.” She provides a capsule history of fat activism: the National Association to Aid Fat Americans was founded in the late 1960s; a group called the Fat Underground came along a few years later. Since most fat activists were white women, they failed to address the “intersections” between classism, racism, imperialism, and “fatism.” Director underscores the need to discuss these intersections, lamenting that all too often, in discussions about fat, “there are fat people, poor people, people of color, but never fat, poor people of color.”
The next morning, there’s another session about fat—kind of—titled “Outsider Feminist Inclusionist Perspectives on the Body.” Patti Lou Watkins of Oregon State University kicks things off by introducing various “Fat Studies concepts.” She hands out a flyer on which is printed the equation “Fatism” = “Sizeism” = “Looksism” and gives a PowerPoint presentation containing several “fat-positive images.” And she mentions both intersectionality (pleading for the “need to bring in those other systems of oppression”) and the “‘health at every size’ paradigm.” While Watkins criticizes negative attitudes toward the word fat and preaches that “there are fat people who are very healthy,” my eyes are on the young woman sitting directly in front of me. Rolls of fat pour around the back of her chair, and her rump protrudes beyond and hangs over, and under, the edges of the chair. She is very young. And here she is being told that her weight is a fundamental aspect of her identity and that any expression of concern about it is bigotry.
Watkins is followed by Lillian C. Taylor, a very big, lively, and charming young woman from the American Public University System (an “online university”), who describes herself as “a self-identified queer, fat, vegan, feminist” professor and whose topic is “inclusionism”—meaning the rejection of all isms, from looksism to ableism. After coming out as a lesbian at age thirty, she says, she took some Women’s Studies courses. “Knowledge gave me courage,” she testifies, and for a while she focused on her “queer identity.” But she gradually recognized the “connections between oppressions” and began to see that “speciesism is at the root” of all other isms. “I started to see,” she tells us, “that I had no right to the flesh” of other “sentient creatures.” So she came out as a vegan—and got more hostility than when she’d come out as a lesbian. And much of the hostility, moreover, was from lesbians. (She says that some lesbians, not seeing the irony, actually tell her she’s one of the “okay vegans” because she “doesn’t flaunt it.”) But what complicates the picture further, she says, is that while there are vegan-phobic lesbians, there are also “fat-phobic” vegans. She speaks of vegans who say that “fat people are gross” and who are suspicious of her presence at veg
an get-togethers because they assume that since she’s carrying around so much weight she can’t possibly be a vegan and must be an “interloper” or “spy.” She stresses that she’s “not a vegan for health reasons” and that she refuses to drink milk, on feminist grounds: “Dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother.” Comparing the physical abuse of cows and calves to abuse of women, she intones: “No human can be free while other species are oppressed.”
Even more than at other sessions I’ve attended, the Q&A period this time around proves to be heavy on group therapy. Audience members exchange anecdotes about things doctors have told them (“Your BMI is too high”). Apropos of the “health at every size” paradigm, one woman warns: “You don’t want to reinscribe another binary”—in other words, let’s not privilege people who are fat and fit at the expense of people who are fat and unfit! Watkins worries: by preaching “health at every size,” is she “pushing healthism” in the classroom? (Believe it or not, healthism is a real concept, introduced in the 1980s and ’90s by academics who, drawing on Foucault, argued that encouraging people to watch their health is a coercive and potentially fascist act linked to capitalism, racism, and Nazi-style eugenics.) Several women complain about media coverage of the “obesity epidemic” (though none of them will admit that such an epidemic exists)—coverage that they view as “blaming and shaming.” Asked about the role of capitalism in all this, Watkins cites the diet industry’s lust for profits, in response to which a slim, beautiful young vegan with Pippi Longstocking braids pipes up: “I did a Marxist analysis. . . . It blows my mind how capitalism has worked to erase these things.”
I hear about fat not only at the Women’s Studies conference in Denver but also at the Queer Studies conference in Berlin, where Rachel White, a heavyset young lecturer in Women’s Studies and sociology at the University of Westminster, gives a paper titled “No Fat Future?” Just as Lee Edelman, she notes, depicts “queers” as people who embody no future because many of them do not have children, so, she says, fat people are often depicted as having “no future” by a society that is constantly linking fatness to mortality. In a PowerPoint presentation, White shows us British tabloid headlines and advertisements linking inactivity and fatty diets to weight gain and, in turn, to death, and the audience joins her in laughing at these visuals, even though there is nothing particularly unreasonable about the concern expressed therein about the health risks related to obesity. Echoing Heike Raab’s observation about disabled people, White concludes that fat people “disturb the heterosexual picture,” thus making them “potentially queer.”
4. “Why Are Men So Awful?”: Men’s Studies/Male Studies
On an early spring day when the campus of Monterey Peninsula College—a motley collection of utilitarian, barracks-like buildings which looks like a military base (and for good reason: this used to be Fort Ord)—is almost totally deserted, I find my way across it to David Clemens’s tiny, book- and paper-cluttered office. Clemens, a professor of English, welcomes me and we start to chat. There’s much to talk about, including the college’s Great Books program, which Clemens introduced. But what makes my head turn is the news that one of the six courses he’s teaching this term is about “literature by and about men.”
Men?
“Most literature,” Clemens explains, “is universal and intellectual. But some of it can be looked at through sex, through gender.” He put together the course because courses on literature by and about women abounded in American universities, but nobody, he says, was teaching about literature and men.
The course covers books, poetry, and films that explore such topics as men at war and fatherhood and that illuminate male codes, such as chivalry and the samurai code of bushido; the syllabus includes the Faulkner story “The Bear,” stories by Sam Shepard, Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays,” James Dickey’s Deliverance, and the films Seven Samurai and Fight Club. One issue that comes up in the classroom is misandry, or hostility toward men, which is, of course, alive and well in today’s academy and which also shapes a good deal of contemporary film and literature (although Clemens suggests that this tendency “disappeared after 9/11”). One interesting detail: several of the students in his men’s lit course are females who signed up at least in part because they feel their fathers have been denigrated by society.
The men’s literature course caused problems: at first, students who took it and later transferred from MPC to universities in the California state system were denied transfer credits on the ground that it was too “narrow” a course and had no counterpart elsewhere in the system. But when the National Association of Scholars (NAS) took up the issue, “someone very high up in the university system said, ‘Let’s just make it transferable and get out of this.’”
For all the radicalism of David Clemens’s course in men’s literature, he’s not the only humanities professor out there teaching about men. There is, in fact, a whole discipline called Men’s Studies, which has taken root at about a hundred North American colleges and universities. But, to quote Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger (who coined the term “male bonding”), Men’s Studies is “a wholly owned branch of women’s studies,” examining maleness through a feminist and social constructionist prism. Robert Heasley, president of the American Men’s Studies Association, states unapologetically that “Men’s Studies came out of feminist analysis of gender.” (Clemens puts it this way: Men’s Studies is a “camouflage version of Women’s Studies” in which the “operative question” is “Why are we men so awful?”) Its founding father and “presiding guru”—to borrow a term from Miles Groth, a sometime key player in the discipline—was Australian sociologist Robert W. Connell, whose 1995 book Masculinities is the main text in the field. Connell coined the term “hegemonic masculinity,” which refers to the supposed fact that society teaches men to dominate women and one another; the concept—which, Connell has acknowledged, derives from “feminist theories of patriarchy”—is at the very heart of Men’s Studies.
Given that Connell helped establish an academic discipline the entire point of which is that men are authoritarian bullies, it’s not irrelevant that he is now a she: in 2008, it was revealed that Connell had undergone a sex-change operation and was now a woman named Raewyn Connell. Connell’s colleagues accepted this change in politically correct fashion, but one must be permitted to ask: what does it mean that the male founder of a discipline called Men’s Studies turns out to have been, all along, a transsexual—a person, that is, whose self-image was that of a woman trapped in a man’s body, and who viewed that body as alien and abhorrent? Groth, who is chair of the Psychology Department at Wagner College on Staten Island, points out that, astonishing though Connell’s transformation is, it “has never been addressed by the Men’s Studies group.”
Groth was active in the American Men’s Studies Association for two years and edited two Men’s Studies journals—one about men’s health, the other about “boyhood studies.” But he lost both editorships when he became involved in a new academic discipline that offers an alternative to Men’s Studies. It is called Male Studies, and its leading figure is a psychiatrist, Edward M. Stephens, who established the Foundation for Male Studies in 2010 at a conference at Wagner hosted by Groth. Among the participants was Tiger, who criticized feminism’s “denigration of maleness” and dismissed social constructionism, noting that “male and female organisms really are different” and citing the “enormous relation between . . . biology and . . . behavior.” Other attendees were Christina Hoff Sommers (author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys), who talked about “male-averse attitudes” in American society, and Paul Nathanson, a religious studies scholar at McGill and author of Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (2006), who stressed the need to question “some fundamental features of ideological feminism over the last thirty or forty years.” When Inside Higher Ed asked Heasley what he thought of Male Studies,
he called it “a Glenn Beck approach” to the subject; the even more hostile comments about Male Studies by Women’s Studies professors make it clear that, in their view, the idea of a nonfeminist approach to the study of maleness is sheer heresy.
New though Male Studies is, it appears to have already divided into at least two streams. Groth now shares Heasley’s opinion that the brand of Male Studies represented by Stephens is “reactionary” and “embittered.” “The newness of Male Studies,” Groth admits, “has drawn to it a variety of individuals with very different motivations.” He describes his own motivation in this way: “The national ratio of male-female students is now 39–61, an all-time low. . . . Boys are failing in elementary school. . . . They are not drawn to college and if they enroll, they are dropping out in greater and greater numbers. . . . Graduate programs have only a handful of men in them nationally. They are not entering the professions.”
Groth characterizes the goal of Male Studies as follows: having “recognized the spread of misandry in culture,” he and his colleagues “are ardent about restoring balance in areas where men are now in a precarious situation”—everything from schooling and child custody to the criminal justice system and media images. He contrasts the concrete and practical approach of Men’s Studies with the ideological bent of Women’s Studies, which, he maintains, “is not an academic discipline. At universities, where it appears in curricula, it is a congeries of courses that represent ideological feminism.” (He distinguishes “ideological feminism” from “egalitarian feminism, which no one would deny was a laudable movement.”) He rejects the whole concept of patriarchy, “a shibboleth for blaming all men for the behavior of a few, who have harmed women and most males.” And he finds Women’s Studies courses “fundamentally misandric. My course is among only a few in the country that have successfully run the gauntlet of academic affairs committees to find a place among courses offered for credit. Academe has systematically turned down proposals for such courses for more than thirty years, even while adding more courses in Women’s Studies.”