Gender bending and breaking

The NY Times had a great, detailed article on the subject of F2M transgendered students at women's colleges ("When Girls Will Be Boys", March 16). This is a topic with which I was already slightly acquainted on account of Smith's SGA changing some important charter document to gender-neutral language a year or so ago, baffling we alums who were under the impression that Smith is still a women's college (it is).

The article mentions that colleges are dealing with trans issues more directly nowadays specifically because "adults who wished to transition historically did so in middle age. Today a larger percentage of transitions occur in adolescence or young adulthood."

I was inclined to some eye-rolling about all this before, but the NYT article brought me up short a little bit by pointing this out:

"In a sense, transgender and genderqueer students could be said merely to be holding women’s colleges to their word: to fully support women’s exploration of gender, even if that exploration ends with students no longer being female-identified."

Oh, right. That Women's Studies major I did, it said something about all that.

(Pwned! By the NY Times! On the subject of gender conformity! Oh, the shame.)

Anyway, I've read and heard now a few different attempts to explain or understand this new trans* generation:

1. It's a natural extension of postmodern feminism, in which the very foundations of gender (and, often, biological sex itself! I've done it!) are seen as social constructs open to be questioned. (In other words, it's my fault. :) )
   


2. It's a fad. Possibly a dangerous fad, given the longer-term implications of hormones and even surgeries. Being queer, being "bi-curious", getting pierced, whatever, no longer edgy enough... so trans* is the next envelope-pushing idea. (In other words, it's my fault. LOL.)

Something kinda strange occurred to me the other day, though, when I started putting this together with the huge amounts of reading I've been doing lately on the marketing of gender roles.

I guess I can't substantiate, but I believe, that our culture is imposing gender roles on children a lot more than was commonly done in the 1970s and 1980s. Even parents and aunties who don't want to participate actively in this phenomenon are fighting an uphill battle (see "Unisex Baby Hell", December 2006). Just yesterday on outside the (toy) box was this:

"...my wonderful nanny recently told me about a friend who asked her pediatrician what to do because her son kept asking for a stroller. Not a boy with a stroller! Someone DO something!"

What if, by pressuring our very youngest children to conform to restrictive gender roles, we're sending them the message that if they are interested in anything remotely gender-nonconforming, their only solution is to become a conforming gender?

What would that mean? If gender roles are constructed, does that make it a bad thing to want to uphold the construct but just switch to a different one? Don't we go into a culture war with the culture we have? I've even heard it suggested that those who transition might even be selling out the rest of us who nonconform in the bodies we were born with! I don't think that can possibly be the case... it's not like extremely conservative/traditionalist types love trans* people for upholding all of their preconceptions about gender. :D

I wonder what the complementarians think...?!

Unisex baby hell

This is how bad it is. As I was shopping for friends' baby shower this weekend, I mentally applauded them for refusing to know in advance the sex of their baby, especially when I discovered how unbelievably difficult it is to find unisex baby clothes. No matter how many times you tell the relatives you prefer unisex, I thought, they're going to get stereotypically gendered stuff out of desperation because there's nothing else here.

It turns out it's worse than that. These same friends had a similarly-situated expectant friend or relative. Her family decided on their own that it would be a boy, and bought it blue boys' clothes anyway. Hmm... but I'm not sure what it proves that when the baby turned out to be a girl, they decided that the boys' clothes couldn't be used and now they're packed away, waiting for someone else in the family to have a boy. If you decide that your "unisex" girl baby "can't" wear "boys' blue"...?

I ended up going empty-handed to the shower because I hated the only unisex I could find and I wanted to take the time to shop better. Today it's looking like the entire mission is a fool's errand. Witness:

Amazon.com >
Apparel & Accessories >
    Kids & Baby >
        Infant & Toddler >
            * Girls
            * Boys
            * Shoes

Girls, boys, shoes? Surely....

Search >
Infant & Toddler >
    "Unisex" >
        * "Gerber" Onesie with Matching Cap and Booties (Unisex)
            Choose a color:
                * Pink
                * Blue

I give up. I guess the only way to avoid "gendering" a baby is to let it go naked.

Oh, wait. Hmm. Dammit.


Update: I'm not alone! Rigid lines between boys' things and girls' things removes options

"Healthy" processed foods: not so much

New York Times: The Package May Say Healthy, but This Grocer Begs to Differ

Hannafords' ratings expose that most processed foods labelled as "healthy" are misleading at best. I'm surprised the grocers haven't been sued or blacklisted.

I don't think we collectively care, unfortunately.

[S]everal customers said they had heard about Guiding Stars in radio advertisements or seen it in the store, but that it had not influenced their purchasing. Several shoppers said they did not see the point.

"I buy whatever it is on my list," said Karen Wilson, 43. "If my kids want Cheerios, I buy them Cheerios and don't look at the stars."

Wow, quality nutrition and quality parenting there.

LiseAnne Deoul, 34, said she liked the idea of Guiding Stars even though the system had not helped her narrow her choices during a quick stop last week to buy pasta.

"All of it was the same," she said. "They all had two stars."

It does not occur to people that this tells you something useful about pasta?

This is why dishonest food labeling works, and why it'll continue to work regardless of what the stores may do.

Stealth evangelism on the History Channel International

I sent a "shame on you" to History Channel International, owned by A&E, for the misleading marketing blitz surrounding their debut of "Drive Thru History". Apparently I'm not the only one who got taken in by the ads, which seemed to suggest that they would be using CGI overlays to show what historical sites and buildings would have looked like in their day. It's not that that didn't happen, though it didn't. It turns out the bait and switch was of a much different sort.

I have to say, I didn't hate the 2.5 episodes I watched on DVR. The host was a little much, but I didn't hate him either, just wanted him to dial it back a bit. I guess I'm not sharp enough on my ancient history to catch all the small inaccuracies that the folks on the reader boards are cranky about.

At first, I thought it was pretty cool that the show took a side trip to a (they said) lesser-known monument in Rome, the Arch of Titus, which commemorates the sack of Jerusalem. Then the show got awfully rhapsodic about the history of the Jews and the glories of their temple. OK, I kind of enjoyed getting such a colorful picture of the importance of the temple and how emotionally devastating its loss must have been for the Jews. But it seemed like we were pretty far afield from Rome at that point. And, hmm. Here's what the show had to say about the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam:

Today, a Muslim mosque, along with another Muslim holy site called the Dome of the Rock, sits on top of the old temple ruins, resulting in Jerusalem becoming a constant hotbed of religious turmoil, warring factions and struggle.

Bwah? Resulting in? Did they just say that all Middle East violence is a building's fault? A Muslim building's fault? But wait, there's more.

In this highly charged climate, some Palestinians and other Muslims have suggested that the Jewish temple was a myth, a political fabrication to give Jews a legitimate claim to the Holy Land. It would appear, however, that the temple and its treasures were as real as the carvings on the Arch of Titus back in Rome. And while there are no easy answers to the seemingly endless conflict, one thing is certain: there can be no just outcome by rewriting history.

Huh? Isn't this a show about Rome? Did we just do a 20-minute segment on an obscure Roman arch just to prove that the Jewish temple really existed and to put the Palestinians on notice?

Well, I figured maybe I was overreacting. And the rest of the show was quite entertaining and not particularly weird. So I watched the next one, which was mostly about Nero and particularly the great fire, which the show pretty strongly indicates (complete with a stay-tuned cliffhanger) was set intentionally by Nero so that he could blame it on Christians. Then, after a rather detailed digression about the persecution of Christians, including Saints Peter and Paul, we get this:

Christian tradition holds that, except for John, all of Jesus' apostles were executed for their faith. For many Christians, this is a strong argument for the truth of their claims. The apostles, because they were eyewitnesses, knew for certain whether Jesus' resurrection was true or false. This set them apart. History is full of people willing to die for what they believed, but it's difficult to find any sane person who will give their life for a cause they know to be fraudulent. Those who defend the Christian faith ask this question: how likely was it that a man would choose torture and death if all he had to do was simply deny a myth?

Um.

The second half of the show visits the Pantheon, and gives lots of illustration and detail about its architecture and engineering, which is way cool, and also a perfectly reasonable overview of the Roman and Greek, well, pantheon. In comparing the Pantheon's dome to other domed structures, we get another mention of the Dome of the Rock, with a conspicuous reminder that it "sits over the site of the former Jewish temple in Jerusalem". They digress again about the persecution of Christians for refusing to worship Cæsar. And then, the big finish: a celebration of how the Pantheon was later consecrated as a Christian church.

And, in the course of a few centuries, Christianity had overtaken the Roman Empire, establishing itself as a fundamental foundation of Western civilization. This upheaval has done nothing less than shape our world as we know it today. The architectural marvel that once stood for the glory of the Roman gods now stands as a monument to their insignificance, and the triumph of a Galilean carpenter who professed himself to be God.

Dude.

I guess I'm a slow learner, though, because I coasted through the digression into the Acts of the Apostles from the Oracle at Delphi in the third episode. It wasn't until halfway through, after they used the Olympic Games as a hook to show a lengthy quotation (with dramatic reading and graphics) from I Corinthians about the Christian "crown that will last forever" that it occurred to me to Google this show and try to figure out WTF was going on.

Well, well, well.

Turns out Drive Thru History was produced by ColdWater Media, an evangelical studio. DTH's editor and host, Dave Stotts, is described as a seminary student with twelve years' experience in "Christian media production". Christian bookstores stock the DVD sets, and it originally ran on the Trinity Broadcasting Network in June before being picked up and run as-is on History International.

Wow. Let me emphasize again that this show was marketed as if it were neutral, secular, scientific and fact-based programming. Some critics on the HCI message boards are also pretty upset about what they say are historical inaccuracies. The small debatable stuff doesn't bother me nearly as much as the Trojan Horse (pun intended): a deliberate framing and interpretation of history to emphasize Christian supremacy, Christianity as Truth, the inevitability of the rise of Christian dominance. Dismissing and denigrating Muslims bothered me, and they haven't even gotten to Turkey yet. And then, identifying Christianity as "a fundamental foundation of Western civilization" (I'm not sure why they bothered to say "a", but they did, I checked) can really only have one purpose: the fundamentalists' favorite, the claim that America is a "Christian nation" founded on "Christian principles". That's provably false, but provable falsehoods never stopped these people before.

Oh, look. Here's what Focus on the Family has to say about an upcoming episode: "Then it's on to Washington, D.C. to see how Greek, Roman and Christian influences shaped the foundation of America."

I don't dispute the History Channel's "right" to evangelize if that's what they really want to do, but stealth evangelism is creepy and uncool.

If you should happen to also be disturbed by this, you could send feedback to HCI/A&E via their contact page and let them know that you'd like their TBN evangelism content to be properly identified as such in their ad campaigns. Alternately, if you love this show and want to see lots more like it, it'd be swell if you'd contact them and ask them to identify it prominently in their ads so you'll know when to watch it....

In the meantime, History Channel International, which I added to my satellite "favorites" just because I thought this show looked cool, is back off of the list. I'll be viewing the other A&E networks warily as well. Back to Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs" and "Mythbusters", which haven't let me down yet.

Fat in Paradise

Several weeks ago now, I saw a special on TLC set at the Freedom Paradise "size-friendly" resort. It seemed to be some sort of "fat acceptance" workshop or retreat, not just vacations. Interesting, because I thought the FA movement was kinda over in the 1990s, but there it was on everybody's favorite cable lifestyle channel.

The insight that I had while watching the show was that there are (potentially) two totally different levels of FA.

One is more like a fat-pride movement. Fat is fabulous. Fat people shouldn't ever change. This leads to some predictable stuff that I think is lame (fat isn't my fault, weight loss is impossible), delusional (lots of fat people eat right and exercise vigorously and are still fat), and/or dangerous (fat is a safe and healthy lifestyle choice). It can get downright weird (everyone should find fat attractive and sexy). Emphasis on discrimination. Everything would be OK if only the MSM would show fat in a positive light. Fat celebrities who lose weight viewed as turncoats. Not much left of this one these days. I think it pretty much lost the war with science.

Someone on the TLC show said something about how nice it was, as a fat person at a fat resort, to be able to go back to the buffet again and again without anyone being judgmental. That's old-school FA for me in a nutshell. Delusions and coverups notwithstanding, it's pretty much Gluttony Acceptance, and that's just sad.

On the other hand, I don't think it's helpful to vilify fat people, to moo at them out of passing cars, or for department stores to cram the fat women's clothing section in a dark corner of the basement and fill it with polyester and muumuus. Fat is so locked up with self-esteem and self-worth that ironically, it's necessary to think well of yourself in order to sustain the motivation and discipline needed to lose the weight!

It's a dilemma and I don't really know whether it's possible to balance meeting fat people's basic needs against trying not to enable fat and make it so comfortable that it really does become yet another alternative lifestyle. I like the idea that fat people can have a normal and relaxed vacation on a beautiful beach with respectful staff and sturdy beds and chairs. On the other hand, being pinched in an airline seat serves as a helpful reminder that my size is not normal and what I'm doing is not OK in the long term. It encourages me to straighten up and fly right, as it were.

I figure regardless of what should or should not be, the marketing niche will win out and fat will be accommodated because fat money is worth just as much as the skinny kind (and there's increasingly more of it). And yet, since the TLC show was filmed, Freedom Paradise has abandoned their size-friendly theme and don't market themselves as such any more. I don't know if that means there isn't support for the niche, or they need to partner with a size-friendly airline to make it work. Maybe it means that all resorts catering to Americans are becoming size-friendly anyway and it isn't a niche any more!

Diet revolution, part IV

Amber Waves, June 2005: Obesity Policy and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Amber Waves is a publication of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, whose job is not to look out for your health. The USDA supports agriculture; they're dedicated to making sure that US food producers can sell things.

And thus, I'm not sure whether this journal article is just an appalling piece of agricorporate propaganda*†‡, or an accurate reflection of the futility of trying to change gluttonous habits, or both.

Either way, it's some serious obfuscation of the role aggressive marketing plays in the fattening of America.

---

* Suspicious:

Numerous studies, though ongoing, largely conclude that aggregate cigarette advertising has a small or negligible impact on overall cigarette smoking.

† Highly suspect:

The American Dietetic Association says that each additional 3,500 calories a person consumes results in an additional pound of body weight. That implies that a person who gave up 100 calories (equivalent to a piece of toast) each day for a year would end up approximately 10 pounds lighter at year's end.

‡ Coincidence? The biggest processed food companies are owned by tobacco companies....

Diet revolution, part III

It's a simple plan. It, like anything else in life, is not guaranteed. Here it is anyway.

• Count calories.

This is unglamorous, but it's physics. Fewer calories in and more calories out is all there is. Gather data, determine basic calorie needs to maintain current weight, then set a reasonable daily caloric target to achieve a reasonable pace of weight loss.

Never, ever, ever substitute marketing claims ("low fat!" "low carb!" "healthy whole grains!" "wholesome!" "vitamin-enriched!") for calorie count.

• Measure.

We got into this mess in part because our idea of portion sizes is so far out of line. We need to take our brains back from the restaurants and marketers and learn how to perceive the food correctly.

• Trust the math.

Realize, accept, and make peace with mathematically-determined portion sizes. That is the amount of food we need, even if our bad habits tell us otherwise.

Rely on the numbers and use them to learn new and better habits.

• Make conscious choices.

There are no "forbidden foods", only trade-offs we make to achieve our daily caloric target. Instead of feeling deprived and resentful, we are empowered to make these choices. We need to pay attention to the real consequences of each choice, and be aware of which decisions support our weight-loss goals and which ones sabotage us.

• Question "convenience".

Things marketed to us as convenience often aren't. The time it takes to stop at a restaurant or a drive-thru or to assemble a processed food from a kit often are not meaningful savings over the time it would take to put together our own real food at home.

• Be wary of processed and restaurant foods, even in small doses.

Make sure that the additives and artificial flavors aren't stimulating cravings or reinforcing bad habits.

• Learn to love whole, natural foods.

One of the scariest things about artificial marketed foods is that they teach us the wrong things about what food is "supposed" to taste like. We then reject reality because it doesn't taste fake enough.

Reclaim the flavors of grape, orange, cherry, cheese and meat! Say no to the Kool-Aid- and Cheeto-ization of our everyday diet!

• Learn, get angry, stay angry.

Practically everything about the American diet has been engineered by corporations. The urge to eat harmful foods, the gimmicky diets that don't work (and the deliberate undermining of confidence in simple calorie-counting), the reluctance to exercise, the frantic drive toward elusive convenience, the fallback onto artificial supplements for ourselves and our children, and much, much, much more, are all dreamed up in marketing departments and inflicted on us for nothing more, nothing less than profit... with our enthusiastic participation. Recognize it and reject it.

Diet revolution, part II

It's a little creepy to me how much the media looove gastric bypass surgery.

I got curious; I looked it up. Gastric bypass is normally described as something like "stomach stapling" (which has been around for years), where the stomach's capacity is reduced. I didn't realize that it also includes partial removal or bypass of the intestines, which causes "malabsorption". If the patient overeats beyond the stomach's capacity, the intestines' ability to digest is also reduced and excess food passes undigested. In other words, diarrhea. (I assume this is the "dumping syndrome" that is sometimes cryptically mentioned by the media; they don't describe it or explain its cause.)

What I'm wondering is how this is any different from a bulimic who uses laxatives to purge after a binge.

On the other hand, desperate times call for desperate measures.

I'm thinking there's some math that goes into a weight loss surgery decision. Diet and exercise takes time. If a person has serious weight-related health problems, it's possible that the time it would take to lose the weight the "right" way may be greater than the time they may have. Those people probably need surgery. But even in our obese society, those folks are still outliers.

Nobody targets a major advertising and media blitz at just a few outliers.

Pretty recently, I had hopes that weight loss surgery might rescue me from this problem of not having my head in the right place to lose it the right way. Just fix it once and for all. I was annoyed, but also relieved, to learn two things: one, surgery doesn't work unless you also get your head in the right place (hence the 50% failure rate), and two, I don't qualify. Yet.

"Educational" saturation

This New York Times article, "See Baby Touch a Screen. but Does Baby Get It?" is right in line with conversations I've been having lately.

(Due to login required and future fee-based archiving by NYT, I'll try to include pertinent quotes below.)

NYT focuses specifically on media: video games, computer-based games, and videos. I'd immediately add "educational" television into the mix, but also any of the interactive "learning" toys pitched for infants and beyond. Some of these items are relatively recent crazes; others go back to my own childhood and beyond.

Despite the commercial success, though, a report released yesterday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, "A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers and Pre-schoolers," indicates there is little understanding of how the new media affect young children - and almost no research to support the idea that they are educational.

Parents are asking, and I suppose not unreasonably so, all else being equal, why not have kids playing with "educational" toys and gadgets and watching "educational" shows rather than non-specifically-educational ones?

"I know one leading baby book says, very simply, it's a waste of money. But there's only one thing better than having a baby, and that's having a smart baby. And at the end of the day, what can it hurt?" [says the parent of a wired 11-month-old.]

"There's nothing that shows it helps, but there's nothing that shows it's does harm, either," said Marcia Grimsley, senior producer of "Brainy Baby" videos.

This brings to mind a few questions for me.

Is all else really equal?

Are educational media really better than entertainment media?

The parents and corporations quoted in NYT have already stipulated that there's no proof they're any better, and no research to show that they're really educational. So the best we can do at this point is that they're supposedly not harmful.

Are interactive toys really better than, we'll call them static toys?

Well, they certainly separate parents (and kids) from their money at a higher rate.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the barrage of interactivity is stifling kids' natural curiosity, creativity, and ability to entertain themselves. My mother's generation honest-to-God played in the yard without toys, for hours, every day. They explored; they improvised with sticks and rocks; they role-played. This had already become unfathomable to me even in my youth.

I've read authors who are concerned that we are raising generations whose drive to consume pre-packaged experiential and sensory products is practically insatiable.

That leads us right into....

Is it true that the interactive and educational versions do no harm?

Depression and other mental illnesses are caused by imbalances in the brain's stimulus and pleasure processing centers. I don't know whether it's true that rates of mental illness among Western youth are really increasing (as opposed to diagnostic tools improving), but it wouldn't be difficult to imagine a link between an unfillable and growing need for external stimulation and pleasure, and a brain's difficulty managing the same.

What about the mysteriously skyrocketing rates of autism, a disorder in which (among other things) kids can't manage sensory inputs?

OK, that's pretty tenuous. I'm not really a member of the "save just one child" school of risk management. But it's an interesting thing to ponder, especially considering how disproportionate the rates of these disorders are in the US compared to the rest of the West, and the West compared to the rest of the world.

Do I even need to mention obesity? No, I didn't think so.

Another angle is the question of whether parents are more likely to use interactive toys and media as a babysitter, and whether such things reduce their investment in personal interaction and directly teaching things to their own kids themselves. I'm cynical, so I definitely suspect that this is happening. If the presence of the "educational" gadgets results in children getting even less of adults' attention, I'd have to call that a harm as well, especially if the gadgets then turn out to have little or no educational benefit....

And finally, although I'd certainly grant that kids should play with toys, is it really inevitable that kids are going to be consuming media extensively? Preschoolers? Toddlers? Infants?

"There are all these babies watching videos, and we wanted to address the reality that's out there and come up with something that is at least appropriate," said Gary Knell, Sesame's president.

"All these babies watching videos"?

So the debate is over, and the Teletubbies won?

Infants and toddlers do not instinctively know how to watch and listen to TV. They're not clamoring to do it... they don't even know what it is, other than a noisy blinking box. (Realizing that a photograph is something different from an oblong piece of paper is considered a developmental milestone.) For them to become viewers of the Teletubbies, someone first has to teach them how to watch.

(Is that why LG never figured out, or cared anything about, her expensive Microsoft "Intellitable"? We didn't train her enough? )

There may or may not be a vast global consipiracy of media and marketers aimed at turning your infant into a TV consumer by appeasing you with "educational benefits". But I think it's undeniable that for well-meaning parents (and infants), this is an unintended consequence.

Does it make any sense for parents to put in time teaching a kid to watch TV so the TV can teach the kid to read, which it may or may not do? What if we cut out the middleman and just taught our kids to read?

I also wonder whether V.Smile and Leapster are more effective at educating, or more effective at training kids how to play video games (and training them to want to)?

These forms of media consumption are not inevitable... but as devices and programming are targeted at younger and younger "markets", parents are participating in making them inevitable.

If we think about it, I wonder, is that really what we want?

"As a society, we are in the middle of a vast uncontrolled experiment on our infants and toddlers growing up in homes saturated with electronic media," Mr. Anderson said.

I guess we'll find out.