A NewPost

I'm pretending to write a new post! Yay!

Travel Woes

I went to Kansas City last week for a conference. Deepest into the heartland I've been to date. And actually, I loved it. The first night I wandered around the hip part of town, Westport. I had a few beers at a pub, McCoys, and ate a bison burger made from local Kansas bison. Then I walked to the "Plaza," which was a bizarre combo of chain stores and cool sculpture. I headed back to Westport to check out another bar, and caught an open mic. I started chatting with a musician, and he took me to his favorite bar, Harry's Bar and Tables, and bought me a yummy blueberry lemonade. It was a great night.

The rest of the time I was pretty much hostage to the conference and the "plaza," though I did have a lot of fun wandering around the Nelson Atkins Museum and eating some good Chinese food at Bo-Ling's.

On my way back home, my flight got derailed. I spent an hour (at least) on the runway of the Kansas City airport because Denver, my stopover, had snow. Why oh why didn't they offer to let us out and book us on a flight in the morning? When I got to Denver, I discovered my flight had been cancelled, by calling United's reservation line. No one was waiting for me to help me when I got off the plane. I spent about an hour trying to get on another flight, which did not happen. United made no effort to get us out of the airport. I stood in line with other stranded travelers for an hour and a half, at least. While we were in line, United staff kept trying to get us to leave. Go get a hotel room, they said. That easy, eh? You can book a flight tomorrow by calling United's reservation number, they said. "What's the number?" people shouted. I don't know, call information, was the helpful response. By the time I got the desk and someone gave me a number to call about a hotel room, the only room left was 25 miles away. It was 11:30, so I decided to sleep at the airport and try to get on an early flight in the morning.

I know corporate accountability is a notion that has long been dead, and god knows I've had enough shitty treatment by corporations, but I was truly shocked by the disorganization and utter indifference of United Airlines. I want a public airline NOW. I hope United collapses, and Obama should let it. Why are we rewarding incompetence? Who built this fucked up system where consumers have no rights and corporations can walk all over us?

Managing the Down There

I recently came across this video on a great blog, Feminist Philosopher.

which made me think of a recent Salon article about, among many other things, shaving.

What's Best for the Girls?

A few years ago, I went with my mom while she had a mammogram. It was traumatic. My mom and I were taken into a room with a six-foot-tall machine. She had to put on one of those peak-a-boo paper gowns and then I had to hide behind the lead screen with the nurse. My mom's breasts, to be blunt, are fairly ample, and she had to heave them up on this vice-like apparatus that clamped down and squeezed them and then shot them through with radiation. The machine looked like it had been built in the 1950s. It was the size of a phone booth and had absolutely nothing to do with women's bodies. No attempt whatsoever had been made to make this technology amenable to the bodies with which it was designed to work. I find it extremely hard to believe that this technology could not have been improved in the last 59 years or so, and I certainly cannot imagine a man sticking his nuts into a machine like this.

A recent article in the New York Times suggests this annual torture may not be required to keep your girls healthy. Apparently, in Britain, regular mammography has been critiqued for resulting in over-diagnosis of non-fatal cancers. According to the article, for every one woman diagnosed by a mammogram and successfully treated for breast cancer, 10 women are diagnosed with a slow-growing, non-fatal form of breast cancer. However, the cancers cannot be distinguished, so it's impossible to tell if the cancer is the more benign, slow-growing type. A British panel concluded that early detection may not make a difference in survival rates of women with particularly aggressive cancer, and that only one death would be prevented after screening 800 women over 14 years.

Militant breast screening has been under fire of late in the culture zone. I heard an interview on NPR recently with a doctor who suggested that daily breast self-exams might not be necessary. More interesting than the interview itself was the reaction by women. Listeners called in en masse to complain about the interview, and to "testify" to the power of the self-exam to save lives. Perhaps women feel like breast self-exams give them power or control over a mystified illness. I wonder, though, if they would be so quick to defend mammograms?

My skeptical self also has to wonder about the differences between American and British approaches to cancer prevention. In the U.S., women typically begin receiving annual mammograms at age 40; in the UK, at age 50, women begin having mammograms every three years. The article in the Times doesn't mention self-exams, but I find it interesting that some British physicians are discouraging overuse of mammography, while some American doctors advocate less self-exams. What does this say about our health care systems--would American doctors discourage the annual procedure if our health system was not profit based? How do our health care systems determine what constitutes prevention, and even how we understand what it means to be healthy?

I have a history of breast cancer in my family, and my mother thinks I should begin having mammograms this year when I turn 35. I think this year I'll compromise and start doing breast self-exams. I'll hold off on the mammograms until they update that radiation torture chamber, and maybe even until we have universal health care.

Fat Camp

I recently read an article in the New York Times about the inaccessibility of fat camps to low income overweight youth that raises some interesting -- though unaddressed in the article -- questions about the relationship between class and the so-called childhood obesity epidemic. The article critiques the potential for exploitation of the children by the media as well as the camps themselves. Children who can't afford to pay the upwards of $1000 a week for fat camp can compete for one of very few scholarships offered by the camps. The competition requires the children write essays that then become the property of the camp and/or their sponsors, and the winners can be encouraged to participate in media promotions.

The author makes an important point that the would-be campers must exploit their own experiences of humiliation and abuse in order to make themselves into the most eligible or needy applicants. It also places their weight loss struggles under a public spotlight, which sets them up for potentially further humiliation considering that on average two-thirds of all campers gain the lost weight back.

Getting back to what the article did not address -- class -- I can't help but wonder at the neglected mention of the relationship between obesity and income. There is a real correlation between poverty and obesity, because healthy food is often hard to come by in inner cities, where higher numbers of people rely on public transportation. Grocery stores in urban core neighborhoods are often difficult to access via public transportation, and corner stores often lack fresh produce. Low-income jobs often mean that people have to work more than one job to make ends meet, which means less time for preparing healthy meals. So more low-income people rely on fast food as a quick and cheap way to get calories. The problem with this food, as has been documented by recent critical works like Fast Food Nation, Supersize Me, The Omnivore's Dilemma, to name a few, is that it is devoid of nutritional value and is loaded with sugar. So we're seeing obesity grow in poor populations who lack access not only to "luxury" health benefits like fat camps, but to good basic health care.

This makes me wonder who these fat camps are really for. The scholarship winner featured in the article in the Times is captured in a picture with other campers who are noticeably thinner. I don't know enough about the issue to make a definitive statement about this, but I did find it troubling. It suggests to me the possibility that these camps are not for the obese but for the chubby, who want to slim down more for aesthetic reasons than for health reasons. I'm envisioning legions of Celia Hodes (from Weeds) -style parents who demand perfection from their children and refuse to tolerate average 'tween chunkiness that is common for some children during the transition to puberty.

If we (the imaginary cohesive social community we call Americans) were really interested in "fighting" the "epidemic" of childhood obesity (and I put those words in quotes because I think they are overused as a scare tactic by the mainstream media), we would begin to think about the inequity in food resources, in health care, and in education, all of which are important contributors to the problem of obesity in some (often low-income) children. It seems to me what the young woman featured in the Times article is looking for from fat camp goes beyond weight loss; it is access to a different social world, which she imagines comes with thinness. Somehow thinness has come to represent wealth and status, and quick-fix ways of getting there are imagined as the panacea for a mixed bag of social ills. What I suspect she'll find is that losing weight won't change her social reality much if it doesn't come with a lot of other changes, which we Americans haven't yet made the commitment to tackle.

Obligatory New Years Resolutions Blog

How many posts have been written today about what we're all going to do to change our lives this year? Urgh. I have some goals, however. Some make me skiddish -- lose weight being the big shame-inducing resolution. So cliche. So antithetical to embrace-your-body feminism, which I tend to vehemently argue for while in the company of those who would subject me to a beauty myth predicated on an impossible standard of thinness. And yet, I too want to lose weight. Though I know now that being thin won't guarantee happiness -- a sad fact that it too took far too long to figure out. In my defense, I jut want to lose the 15 pounds I've put on since starting grad school. Grad school is an unhealthy fucking endeavor, and I find it very hard to maintain balance while buried in the bowels of academe. So my goal is to get back on a regular exercise schedule and cut down on the ridiculous amount of sweets I've been eating since I started my cookie baking binge 2 months ago. Not too rigid.

I also want to get serious about saving. My partner and I are working out a budget to pay of our credit cards by the end of February and start putting money away every month.

Writing is also on my list. I really want to commit to this blog more, and to have a regular writing schedule for my dissertation and other projects.

And last, travel! I'd like to go somewhere I've never been this year!

Issues

So here's my dilemma: On the one hand, I am well-versed in feminist theory, and feminist movements, which tend to be grounded in critique of Western patriarchy as it exists under capitalism. That is, I get that women's role as mother and caregiver is undervalued and often devalued. But on the other hand, I have issues with my sister in law. She is a stay at home mom, who actually never really worked before having kids, other than waitressing part-time for a few years after high school.