So fifty is the new forty, they say.

There’s an upside and a downside, it seems to me about that. I’ve read a few articles about older women asserting sexuality post menopause. Yay. I think the upside is obvious–sex doesn’t belong to the young–but the downside is troubling.

All the anxiety about body issues that one experienced throughout one’s life and angst about appearance can now continue post menopause too.

I was very unhappy to read about rise in cosmetic surgery post menopause but also unhappy to read about less drastic solutions, such as living in a state of semi starvation.

See Eating Disorders Spike Among the Middle Aged.

“When you hear the term, eating disorder, many people may typically think of a perfectionistic adolescent girl heavily into sports or dance, being raised by an over-controlling parent. By starving herself or binge eating and purging, she is rebelling against the prison of her home.

However, an increasing number of middle-aged and older women are suffering from eating disorders, as well. It’s really no wonder when you consider our culture’s obsession with thinness and unrealistic bust-waist-hip combinations. You can’t thumb through a magazine without catching sight of a waifish figure or hit the highway without a seeing a perfect body in a bikini sipping a beer.

Statistics may lie about just how many women develop eating disorders later in their lives because the illness often goes undiagnosed by doctors. Weight loss and changes in appetite are common complications of another illness or side effects of certain medications. And physicians certainly aren’t looking for anorexia or bulimia in older age groups.

The Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Clinic published information about an Australian study that is among the first to investigate poor body image and eating disorders in older women. Karen Swartz, M.D., Director of Clinical Programs at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, writes:

Investigators surveyed a random sample of 475 women ages 60 – 70 about their eating behaviors, weight history, and attitudes toward their bodies. Around 90 percent said they felt very or moderately fat, and 60 percent reported being dissatisfied with their bodies. The majority of women had a body mass index (BMI) of 25, which is considered just slightly overweight, and wanted to have a normal-weight BMI of 23. Over 80 percent of the women made efforts to manage their weight.

Four percent of the women (18 total) met the diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder: One had anorexia nervosa, two had bulimia nervosa, and 15 had symptoms of an unspecified eating disorder that did not meet the criteria for anorexia or bulimia. In addition, another 4 percent of the women (21 overall) reported a single symptom of an eating disorder, such as using laxatives, diuretics, or vomiting to lose weight, or binge eating.

Typically, it has been assumed that as women age, these problems become less common, but this study suggests that the desire to be thin never fades. Some of the women may actually be experiencing recurrences of eating disorders they suffered from in their teens, 20s, or 30s. Others may have had continuous problems throughout their lifetimes. And still others may have developed the problems anew in their later years.”

Sigh.

I’ve written about aging before. See On not growing old gracefully.

There I quoted with approval Krista Scott Dixon on a model for aging well.

“Aging also helps us grow into ourselves. We start to know what we like and don’t like. We stop giving a fuck what other people think of us.Imagine, younguns, a world where you just don’t give a shit about looking stupid or what your friends think or falling down in public or impressing the Joneses or having to go along with the crowd to do things you hate. Imagine how awesome that would be. The liberation. The joyous freedom. The glorious sense of possibility. Well, if you’re lucky, that’s what getting older is.” Krista Scott Dixon, In Praise of Older Women

That’s the attitude I recommend.

I know that not everyone shares the view that older bodies can be beautiful bodies. I’ve written a post about that too. See Aging, bodies, and revulsion. I find that attitude very sad.

Personally I like Betty White’s attitude to birthdays.

“Now that I’m 91, as opposed to being 90, I’m much wiser. I’m much more aware and I’m much sexier.” 

It’s an exciting weekend for Canadian feminist philosophers as we all start heading to Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario for our annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy. This year, the conference is being organized by one of our guest bloggers, Kate Norlock. And the theme is “Good Appetite/Bon Appétit.”

It’s especially exciting for me because I’m the Keynote Speaker!  It gave me a great opportunity to reflect about some of the things we’ve been talking about on the blog, as well as some of my research on more global issues like collective responsibility.

Today I thought I’d share the abstract of my talk (if for no other reason than to prove that Sam and I do other things besides blog and work out!).

If you’re in Peterborough tomorrow night, feel free to attend! It’s a public lecture and you don’t need to be a conference registrant to come.

Food Insecurity: Dieting as Ideology, as Oppression, and as Privilege

Feminists have been talking about the oppressive nature of the feminine body ideal since Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue came out in the early eighties.  In  1996, Susan Bordo wrote about “Hunger as Ideology.” She argued that women’s relationship to food, as depicted in popular culture and advertising should be “considered as gender ideology – that is, as specifically…servicing the cultural reproduction of gender difference and gender inequality” (Bordo, Unbearable Weight,  110). In short, it reproduced gender oppression.

It’s no secret that women, even girls, are still starving themselves in order to be thin, that photoshop has made the ideal even more unattainable, and that arguably more women are on diets than are not on diets at any given time in the Western world.

For at least two decades, however, multiple studies have shown that diets do not work.  Not only do they not lead to weight loss, but several studies show that chronic dieters are more likely to experience weight gain over the long run.  Yet we in the west cling to dieting as an ideology not to be questioned.

At the same time as we in the West are obsessed with diets and weight loss, on an international global scale there is a food security crisis.  At the World Food Summit in 1996, food security was defined as existing “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life” [from the WHO website, http://www.who.int/trade/glossary/story028/en/].  At this time in the history of the world, food security and the related issues of food justice and food sovereignty are serious development issues. In stark contrast to the obsession with diet and weight loss among the privileged populations of North America and Europe, the majority of the world’s people do not have the luxury of dieting for weight loss.

In this paper, I argue that analyses such as Bordo’s, which see the ideology surrounding dieting as largely oppressive, still capture a well-entrenched form of gender control today. However, dieting is also an ideology of privilege, bringing into sharp focus the disparate relationship people in different parts of the world and in different socioeconomic circumstances have with food.  Given the global concern about food security, we might think of dieting, whether successful or doomed, as an ideology of privilege, unique to those who have the means to make choices, even if that choice is to starve. 

I invoke the feminist concept of “intersectionality,” as well as referencing Chandra Mohanty’s work as an anti-capitalist, antiracist, transnational feminist scholar to shed light on (a) how the same ideology can have its source in and produce both oppression and privilege and (b) how important it is to understand how the global food economy connects us all, and implicates us all.

My paper will be divided into three parts. In Part I, I review some of the key contributions of the eighties and early nineties on the topic of women, food, weight loss, and body image. I argue that there are still good reasons to think of dieting and weight loss as an ideology that deeply affects women in the West.  In Part II, I broaden my attention to the global context, and argue that global issues of food security and food sovereignty throw the Western obsession with dieting into a different light, thereby suggesting that the ideology of dieting is steeped in privilege.  In Part III, I talk about intersectionality and the global economy to help understand the way privilege and oppression can exist side-by-side within the same ideologies, and to highlight the way the globalization of food production and distribution connects all of us in an unjust and oppressive system.

A few weeks ago I got the chance to experience another kind of outdoor adventure- a 3-day canoe trip over Thanksgiving weekend in Algonquin Park. I’ve done a few canoe trips although the most recent one was around 7 years ago and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I went with the Western Outdoors Club and this was my first trip with them. It was a fantastic trip, great weather, great people. Several things surprised me about this trip:

1. The number of people- Around 45 students. More than I expected, especially since this was over Thanksgiving weekend (meaning giving up the chance to go home, Thanksgiving dinner, etc).

2. Variety of Skill Levels – We had people who had done canoe trips before as well as people who had never even been in a canoe! I was very surprised the first night when one of the people in our group said she had never slept in a sleeping bag before or set up a tent!

3. Teamwork- Because there were so many of us, almost everything became teamwork. Portages were good examples- with three people per canoe portaging was not too bad- two people carried their packs plus canoe and the remaining person carried everything else (paddles, loose stuff). Also, in my food group we divided up the shopping between everyone so everyone brought a couple of items and together we ended up with enough meals for everyone (I brought hot chocolate powder and muffins).

Mallory Brennan is a studying music and computers at Western University.  She enjoys Aikido, swimming and singing in many choirs.  During the school year, Mallory is far too busy for her own good but enjoys life nonetheless. You can read about her love of singing here.

It’s been a rough week for resisting apocalyptic thinking, especially on the environmental front. I’m a die hard relentless optimist but even I’ve been knocked back by megafires in Australia, super smog in China, jellyfish taking over the ocean, and the thought that it’s time we all just stopped flying.

When I start thinking about life in a war torn world with few natural resources and with a government that’s falling apart, I tend to look at my friends and family and our collective skills a bit differently.  I start thinking about my children and their future in terms of their resourcefulness and resiliency. And yes, I know that the world I’ve just described as my nightmare is the world that an awful lot of people live in now and I’m lucky to be here in Canada. Philosophers think lots about luck and its role in human affairs. My ethics grad seminar last year was on egalitarianism and we spent a lot of time talking about luck and justice.

But I know my knowledge of moral philosophy won’t be the most important skill I’ve got come post apocalyptic Canada. It doesn’t matter so much which disaster you’re dwelling on, whether it’s peak oil, climate change, or the dreaded zombies. (Luckily they’ll lose out to the other animals after killing off the humans.) I start to think about fitness and about survival and about my ability to protect myself and the weak and vulnerable. Aikido might come in handy.

To be very clear, I’m not endorsing this reaction or claiming it’s rational. Obviously, political change and collective action matter more than physical fitness.

However, I think it’s no surprise in this cultural climate with its heightened sense of drama, illness, and disaster that we’ve started to think about zombies and fitness. There are the zombie runs, of course. And the Zombies, Run! app. And as Are You Fit Enough to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse?? points out there’s more than just running required.

Nerd Fitness points out in How to Survive the End of the World that technology won’t be our friend in natural disaster.

“Essentially, if technology goes kaput, we’ll be reverting back to survival of the fittest. 

Start building your apocalypse body NOW.

Stop eating junk food.  Start exercising regularly.  If you’re holding off on getting elective surgery for something, get it done now.  Add a pull up bar to your house and build a regiment completing the Konami workout, hotel room workout, or beginner body weight routine.  The stronger you are and the faster you are, the better chance you’ll have at surviving whatever end-of-days scenario gets thrown at you.  Here’s a great article on the skills that every person should have to save their own life.

Take care of yourself, because the world needs you.“

There are dozens of post apocalyptic fitness sites out there, a real mix of nerdy gamers, fundamentalist Christians, terrifying white supremacists, the usual anarchists, and environmental doomsday sorts. I made the mistake of googling post apocalyptic fitness and discovered a horrible mixed bag of angst and worry and racism.

Horrifying attitudes aside (if you can put them aside), I think the focus on fitness is partly sensible and practical (and being fit can’t hurt even if the world chugs along just fine) and partly something one can do in the face of widespread anxiety. My personal favourite are the progressives worried about the fate of the suburbs after we run out of oil.  The preferred answer: the cyclocross bike. We’ll still have paved roads for quite a few years but they won’t be maintained and so they’ll be in rough shape. I’m so glad I have one ready.

Things I’m doing now that I never thought I’d be doing:

1. Riding my bike to work most days (and I turned in my parking pass to make sure I do!)

Some years back I put away my bicycle. Whenever Sam asked me about riding, I said I was too scared. More than a decade ago one of our local cycling clubs met with a horrific accident when out for a group ride one weekend morning. A truck driver ‘didn’t see them’ (‘distracted,’ according to reports) and plowed right into the group. A colleague in our philosophy department was among the seriously injured. And a well known local artist, Greg Curnoe, famous for his paintings of bicycles, was the one fatality.
Staying off a bike forever because someone died in a rare accident is like never driving again because someone else got killed in a car accident. That reasoning could keep me hiding under the covers for the rest of my life.

So I bought the commuter bike. And then the road bike. And now I’m riding with clipless pedals!

2. Running

When I started back into weight training with a personal trainer almost two years ago he urged me to start running.
“Not going to happen,” I said.

Why not? Because almost every runner I know has been injured.

I polled my Facebook friends about it. Lots had been injured and lots hadn’t. Sam made the most compelling point: if you’re injured in running it usually only stops you from doing one thing: running.

So I tried it. Slowly and cautiously. Then Chi running came to my attention (thanks Mum!). And though I’ve not yet found a workshop, I do have the book and it has helped my form a lot. And, look Mum! No injuries (touch wood).

3. Owning a road bike and using clipless pedals

Commuter bike, okay. But clipping in and riding out on the country roads? Never.  Well, okay, not never.

4. Training for an Olympic distance (or ANY distance) triathlon

Triathlon was even more remote from my realm of possibility than running.  That’s something athletes do.  Apparently, then, it’s either not something only athletes do, or I’m an athlete. Either way, I’ve completed two minis (okay, one became a duathlon but nevermind) and I’m now training for a sprint distance in the spring and an Olympic distance before my 50th birthday next September.  Like: I’m swimming, biking, and running.  Me.  Tracy I.

5. Hot yoga

A few years ago I participated in a student event on campus and as a gift of appreciation, the student group gave me a class-pass for the hot yoga studio just around the corner from my house.  I accepted it as graciously as I could, even though I had no intention of ever trying hot yoga. I had dedicated myself to my Iyengar practice and it was serving me well. No need to branch out. And anyway, there was no way I could bear doing yoga in a hot room.

Flash forward to about four years ago.  I still had the pass. Some small voice inside of me said, “Why not?”  So I went. It zapped me of energy for the rest of day. I went again.  I bought a one-year unlimited pass.

I didn’t get rid of my Iyengar practice, but I love, love my time in the hot yoga studio.

And that’s just about activity. I also never thought I’d be vegan, or an intuitive eater, or stop thinking about food all day.

Taking the risk to try things I thought I’d never do feels good!  I’m taking my “never say never” idea into my running. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have it in my head that I’ll never be a fast runner (or even faster than I am now). But maybe that’s not true either.

I’d love to hear your stories of things you’re doing that you never thought you’d do (good, positive things — no confessions, please).

[image: “Mariposa Low Profile,” by Greg Curnoe]

According to Kate Harding in Salon, sleep is the next big feminist issue.

From the reading I’ve done about women and sleep, I can see why. If you’re a woman you need more sleep than a man of the same age and chances are you’re getting less (that’s even more true if you share a bed with one of them) and chances are, you’re not happy about it.

Harding writes, “Americans are increasingly sleep-deprived, and the sleepiest people are, you guessed it, women. Single working women and working moms with young kids are especially drowsy: They tend to clock in an hour and a half shy of the roughly 7.5-hour minimum the human body needs to function happily and healthfully.” The negative effects of chronic sleep deprivation are well-documented, but that doesn’t inspire enough people to prioritize rest, and women often end up in a vicious cycle of sacrificing sleep in order to do extra work and make sure their domestic duties are fulfilled, causing all of the above to suffer.”

Read the rest of this sad story here

Women’s sleep deprivation is making the news and so too is our foul temper about it.

According to an article in the Telegraph women wake up grumpier than men because they need more sleep.

(Not me. I’m a cheerful morning person but I’m also a big fan of sleep. I will say I have two challenges, teenagers who stay up late and hate to get up in the morning and a partner who takes the very early train to the big city several days a week. Oh also, dogs.)

“Researchers studied the sleeping habits of 210 people and found that women who didn’t get enough sleep were ‘more hostile and angry’ in the mornings compared to men who got the same amount of time in bed.In a report out earlier this month, scientists at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, said that differences in hormones meant women needed more sleep than men.”

I’ve blogged before about equality in the home and women’s time for physical activity and it seems like we might be able to tell the same story about sleep. Indeed there are important connections between sleep and fitness which I’ve blogged about here.

A good part of the story is hormonal. That’s the best explanation both of why women need more sleep and why sleep can elude us.

“If you sleep beside a male partner, chances are good that you’ve marvelled at his ability to konk out as soon as his head hits the pillow while you lie awake watching the minutes blink by on your clock radio. You’re not alone in this particular battle of the sexes—a recent Stats Can study of Canadians’ sleep habits showed that 35 percent of women polled reported difficulty falling and staying asleep, compared to only 25 percent of men. Interestingly, the study also showed that women tend to sleep about an average of 11 minutes longer each night than their male counterparts do. Though these results may seem just as mind-boggling as your man’s ability to drift off during horror flicks, Helen Driver, a Kingston, Ont.-based sleep researcher and president of the Canadian Sleep Society, says the reason for these findings is twofold. “Women may need a little more sleep than men do,” she explains, “and we also experience more sleep problems, such as insomnia.””

Read the rest, Why men sleep better than women.

So part of the story is the standard division of labour in homes with opposite sex couples in which women do more, and men less. That’s how this blog post began. Part of the story is hormonal, see above. But another piece of the puzzle is that women may fare worse in the sleep department when we bunk down for the night with male partners.

“Studies have also found that in opposite-sex couples who share a bed, men are more likely to disturb their mates. That’s possibly because women’s circadian rhythm is about six minutes shorter than men’s. That means women are generally wired to fall asleep and wake up earlier than men, and ladies who try to go to bed at the same time as their male partners might be messing with their biological clocks.” Read the rest, All the sleepy ladies

And finally on the sleep front, our collective obsession with how much we’re getting versus how much we want and how much we need prompted Salon to ask Is sleep the new sex?