I’ve been talking lots to journalists lately for some reason. Not sure if it’s the blog or if I’m coming to be known as someone who answers the phone and talks to reporters, but I’ve been in the news a few times recently.

First, there was the campus gym dress code story. See here. I also blogged about it, Sam changes her mind about gyms and dress codes.

And then a sports reporter for the New York Times called and asked me about Chris Bosh. See Chris Bosh’s Desire to Play Leaves Heat at an Ethical Crossroads.

So far so good. But I got stumped when a journalist working on a piece on New Year’s resolutions asked me for unorthodox advise I’d give to people just starting out.

Here’s the question: Please share three, perhaps-surprising/unorthodox things would you recommend women do to kick-start their fitness journey.

I did one does in these situations. I texted for outside help.

Here’s what Sarah had to say:

1. Use your imagination to seek fun. Think and research beyond the usual treadmill, aerobics, and yoga until you find a sport or activity that when you picture yourself doing it, you’re having a blast.

2. Don’t underestimate the importance of convenience. The effort you put into getting to a thing, whether it’s driving across town or choosing an outfit you’re willing to be seen in, is part of that activity. Choosing things that are easy to access for you will improve your chances of sticking with them long-term.

3. Community is important. Whether you find a place that has it, or build your own by working out with friends, doing things with people is way more fun!

What’s your answer? What unorthodox advice would you give to someone just starting out?

We’ve written before on the blog lamenting the lack of heads on fat people photos. See Why the “headless fatty” photo has got to go (and other headless images, too) and No more headless fatties, why not use images of active fat people complete with heads instead?

Now Queer Femme Mamma brings headless babies to our attention in her post about lunchbox politics  which is mostly about lunch policing and the fat shaming of kids, with a healthy side dish of class analysis. (Love the point about juice boxes. They’re cheap. They last. You can store them and use them for a long time.)

She writes, “This shit has got to stop. If schools want to encourage healthy eating, they can start a breakfast program or offer baskets of fruit and vegetables for kids who need them (our school does this). Encouraging physical activity and teaching about nutrition can be done without shaming parents and kids. So much of this is pure classicism.”

But back to the headless fat baby.

Here they are!

Here’s the link to the article on childhood obesity in Canada.  It talks about obese three and month olds.

My only experience here is as a parent and I was told not to worry about the weight of my babies–at that age they were just getting breast milk–and if anything, I was nervous about them gaining enough weight. Largely though it felt out of my control. Of the three kids they were very different sizes and weights at 3 months with nothing different on the menu.

Lots of friends chimed in and said the headless baby looked their now average sized kids as infants. I was kind of reassured by the chubbier of my kids. I felt like I didn’t have to worry if they were sick for a few weeks.

Anyway, as noted this is way outside my area of academic expertise. For a discussion of healthy baby weights, go read all the books. But, I do think it wouldn’t hurt to give the kid a head. I doubt babies in diapers are embarrassed by their size quite yet. Give them a few years. Sigh.

Here’s a Throwback Thursday about excuses. I’ve talked to a lot of people lately who have had that “hoping for rain” thing going on so they could skip a run or other outdoor activity. If I’m hoping for rain (as I was last night), then maybe I need to take a break (as I did last night even though it didn’t in fact rain in time). How about you? Do you feel like you “need an excuse” or do you give yourself permission to take a break when you need it?

This image came through my news feed from various sources, all praising it for the message of moderation. Coke isn’t evil, after all. The good life can include Coke.

Thinking of Sarah here, a big fan of the drive thru large Coke with extra ice.

Me, I wasn’t so quick to praise the labeling here. And it’s not because I think that Coke has no place in our lives. It’s a small place to be sure when it comes to my life. Last year, I was riding my bike at training camp in South Carolina. Day 1 nearly killed me. I was slower than everyone else and it seemed like I might not even make it back to camp. Chris pulled me aside and made me ride over to a gas station where he handed me a bottle of coke. Drink this!

I did and the sugar/caffeine combo so beloved of bike racers everywhere helped. I made it back to camp. I wasn’t even last on all the hills.

No, my worry is more about labeling food in terms of exercise. I’m not sure it helps. I’m not sure it’s right. And I’m not sure it’s always healthy to think of food in terms of how much exercise it will take to burn it off.

Here’s the “honest version” of the Coke anti-obesity ad.

But as hard hitting as it is, the ad quotes the American Heart Association’s recommendation that people drink no more than 450 calories a week from sugar sweetened beverages. That’s about 3 cans of Coke. So that’s not no soda or no pop.

What do you think? Helpful or not helpful? 

Also, is there room for Coke in the good life? Why/ why not? Discuss among yourselves. (It’s the start of the university year. I’m big on discussing among yourselves.)

Saturday I turned 52. I’ve been working without a day off since the day after Labor Day, and Saturday was no exception. I was at the Ontario Universities Fair in Toronto, a “trade-show” style event where over one hundred thousand people — high school students and their parents — come through the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to find out about Ontario universities.

So I woke up in Toronto on Saturday ready to work my second day of the fair and went for an early morning run so I could start the day off well. And not just the day, the upcoming year.

When Sam and I started this blog back in 2012, we had just embarked on our Fittest by 50 Challenge. Through that challenge, in the lead up to our 50th birthdays, running became an important part of my life. So it made sense to me that even though I would be on my feet for about 8 hours a day, three days in a row, a great way to clear my head and start my birthday shift would be with a run through downtown Toronto. And I’m glad I did.

I’ve not had a lot of time to take stock, which is something I like to do when birthdays roll around because it gives me a sense of what’s changed and what’s ahead. But here are my plans for the upcoming year.

• I’m trying to make some decisions about my future on the bike. You may not know this if you’re not a regular reader, but I’ve got a bit of a phobia about training on the road. So that’s held me back for the past couple of seasons of triathlon. In 2015, I cancelled two Olympic distance events. This past summer I didn’t even bother to sign up. I sold my road bike to Sarah. But I still have my TT bike. In the short term, my winter bike goal is to do two spin classes a week at the Y.
• I’ve signed up for the Key West Half Marathon on January 15, 2017, along with Rebecca and Anita.  I’m considering a training clinic, either for a half marathon or for the Around the Bay clinic (not sure if I wish to do the 30K on March 26, 2017). We’ll see.
• I got one of the precious spots in Gabbi’s triathlon swim training group at the Y on Tuesday and Friday mornings. That starts up on October 4th and I’m totally committed to making it out for that on a regular basis because there are 30 people on the waiting list and I would hate to sit on a space that I’m not using.
• Clearly I’m swim-bike-run training if I stick with all of these plans, and that would set me up well for a triathlon season next summer. I’ll very likely to Kincardine again and need to think about what else.
• Another thing on my agenda this year is gaining more self-compassion. To that end, I’ve started reading The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher K. Germer. At different times in my life I’ve had a regular meditation practice. But that’s fallen to the side lately and I want to get it back. And I also want to loosen up my schedule so that I’m not dashing from one thing to another all day long, every day. Being kinder to myself is going to be a major part of my upcoming year.
• Finally, Sam and I have our Fit Is a Feminist Issue book coming out in the Fall of 2017. It’s a long time from now but we would (of course) love for the book to be a success. So doing what I can to get the book into the hands of as many readers as possible is another thing on my to-do list for the next year.

What do you think about when your birthdays come around? What are your plans for the year to come?

AUTHOR’s NOTE: This blog entry includes image captions that are rich image descriptions to convey the most relevant content to readers who don’t perceive the same content in the images as does the author, for whatever reason. As they do contain content, I recommend reading them where you might otherwise skip captions.

Feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky has written that femininity is a disciplinary regime that not only subjects women to the judgment of the male gaze but also, in a modernization of patriarchal power, causes them to internalize those judgments and recast them on both other women and upon themselves whenever they turn their mind’s eye upon their own bodies and behaviors.  Masculinity also functions in this way, preventing men from being their full selves and penalizing them for deviating from gender norms. However, as Marilyn Frye has observed, men who restrict themselves in order to conform to gender norms gain social power (taking up more space, dominating discussions, exerting power, etc.) by doing so while women lose social power (becoming smaller, giving way in discourse, attaching themselves to those in power, etc.). In this blog entry, I am going to take these ideas about the power of gender norms, which includes food behaviors, and apply them to a bit of internet culture that has come across my radar recently in the form of a meme.

CAPTION: The image shows a screenshot of a discussion forum in which a user says “the social acceptability of bacon culture vs. the hatred of pumpkin spice culture” and “this is an example of misogyny. because male interests are always cool and female interests are always shameful.”

Now, it is certainly possible that the simple fact that many women like bacon and many men like pumpkin spice is a counterexample for this argument. However, almost none of the images and text I have found in internet culture associate bacon with femininity and pumpkin spice lattes with masculinity, while many do the reverse.  I believe there is something to this claim however simple it’s presentation here.  It is not simply who has the interests. Rather, it is that the interests pertain to food. And food is highly gendered. Indeed, the positive valence of bacon in internet culture, combined with the negative valence of pumpkin spice in internet culture, indicates that something else is likely at work.

Consider the following series of images which illustrate these valences and some of their content.

CAPTION: There are 4 memes in a 2×2 grid.  One shows actor and action movie star Liam Neeson looking very serious with the text “If you try to pass off turkey bacon as real bacon one more time I WILL FIND YOU AND KILL YOU.”  A second shows celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey yelling at an Asian woman in the kitchen and saying “This bacon is so undercooked it’s trying to pull me over for speeding.” A third shows a picture of rapper Xzibit smiling and laughing with the text “You dawg I heard you like bacon. So I put bacon on your bacon so you can eat bacon with your bacon.”  The fourth and final image shows the Dos Equis beer brand’s spokesman (The Most Interesting Man In The World) with the text “I don’t always eat bacon. But when I do, I put extra bacon on my bacon.”

Note how the visual and textual content is masculine: not only are men overwhelmingly pictured, but many are aggressive, as in the Liam Neeson image in which he delivers a bacon-related threat while maintaining a stoic face, and the image of a celebrity chef yelling at kitchen staff for improperly preparing bacon. Note also that the Neeson meme specifically not only lauds bacon from pigs, but demeans the lower salt, lower fat bacon made from turkeys. I doubt it is a coincidence that lower salt and lower fat turkey bacon has a connotation of being better for dieting, and dieting in turn has a feminine connotation. Consider the experiments conducted by Luke Zhu and his colleagues on priming—how culture imprints concepts in our minds—and food.  Zhu’s team asked 93 adults to consider the following foods and say whether they were masculine or feminine: baked chicken vs. fried chicken, baked potatoes vs. French fries, light potato chips versus regular potato chips, and baked fish versus fried fish.  People tended to see healthier options as feminine and unhealthier ones as masculine.

The images above also involve excessive consumption, itself a kind of unhealthy risk-taking: would you like bacon on your bacon? Xzibit is ready to offer you some and the Most Interesting Man In The World always has extra!  Compare this with the classic image of women eating small salads alone with apparently great joy.

CAPTION: This image, a screen shot of Google search results for the term “women eating salad”, shows many women eating small bowls of salad smiling and laughing, alone, while they move food towards their mouths, but never actually chewing. Most appear to be white, though there is one who may be racialized as Asian. None would be deemed black, and few could be racialized latina on appearance alone.

Both aggression and excessive consumption are traits associated with what RW Connell calls hegemonic masculinity. This form of masculinity is the one that is dominant in a given culture, and generally promotes the dominant social position of men while subordinating the social position of even gender-conforming women and of other people with subordinate or non-conforming gender identities. In US culture, it tends to be characterized by violence/aggression, emotional restraint except with respect to anger displays, dominance displays, risk-taking, and competitiveness.  All of this helps to make sense of why eating fatty, salty meat in large quantities lines up with hegemonic masculinity quite so well.  As writer Juliana Roth has said,

Embedded into our very cultural fabric is a connection between meat and the stereotypical masculine realms of American life: sports, weight lifting, bar culture, cars, running a family. Imagine the Super Bowl without buffalo wings, or watching March Madness over salads instead of burgers and beer.

Now consider the scrutiny that women fall under when they eat in public, where women’s eating is too often seen as shameful.  Indeed, the constant notion that one’s behavior, like one’s body, is subject to the gaze of others—and the internalization of this gaze—is classic Bartky-style disciplinary regime. Such regimes are meant to control, not to benefit the one who is disciplined.

As I have written elsewhere: “There is some pretty good evidence that dieting and food surveillance do indeed result in disordered eating and in unhealthful weight-control behaviors.  Emphasis on food control and shaming as a means of meeting social expectations has serious pitfalls…”  With this in mind, let us return to the subject of the original comment that sparked this reflection, and consider how pumpkin spice latte consumption is often—not always, but illuminatingly frequently—framed.  Consider the following illustrative memes, how they interpolate the consumer of pumpkin spice latte as female, and what attitudes or behaviors or dress or other characteristics are associated with that consumer.

CAPTION: These four images are common internet memes about pumpkin spice latte consumption. The first image shows Ryan Gosling, whose “hey, girl…” has amusingly been adopted for feminist Ryan Gosling memes. This, however, is not perhaps so feminist. Over Ryan Gosling’s image, stoic-faced in a plain white t-shirt with his arm muscles showing, are the words “Hey girl, I got you a pumpkin spice latte, let’s stay home and talk about our favorite parts of fall.”  In the second image, a background of an autumn tree has upon it the words “If you look in the mirror and say ‘pumpkin spice latte’ three times, a white suburban girl in yoga pants will appear and tell you everything she loves about fall.”  In the third image, there is only an orange background and the words “I spilled my Pumpkin Spice Latte, and now a bunch of ants are making brunch plans and doing yoga.”  In the fourth image, we have a version of the “first world problems” meme type which always uses the same image of a white woman crying; the overlying text says “I want a pumpkin spice latte. But Starbucks doesn’t sell them until September.”  In the final image, a Tampax box is pictured with an orange stripe across it, orange wrappers seen through the transparent portion of the box, and the words “pumpkin spice” across the orange stripe.

As we can see, all four of these portrayals of pumpkin spice are heavily gendered—is there anything more gendered than feminine hygiene products? They also tend to conceive of the pumpkin spice latte not just as female, but as a “girl” rather than a woman, thus implying immaturity.

However, the above images are also raced and classed: “white suburban girl” in “yoga pants”, and the implicit “first world problems” nature of the fact that these beverages cannot be consumed at Starbucks until September.  This complicates matters somewhat. I would be interested to hear the reader’s thoughts on the role of race and class, as well as gender, in social judgments on food.  I am sure we can think of types of food or ways of consuming food that are raced, classed, and gendered.  One of the most distressing stereotypes of black southern folks is the “fried chicken and watermelon” allusion, which is also associated with inarticulate, lazy, easily frightened, useless buffoons. This racialized food imagery has been used in the media by some people to re-center President Obama’s and Michelle Obama’s blackness (search “Obama” in the previous link) and was used by a private girls’ school in Northern California to incorporate Black History Month into lunch time with a lunch of these items and cornbread.

But for the moment, let’s leave what I believe to be the clear fact that pumpkin spice latte is a food that is raced, gendered, and classed.  Let’s look at some of the demeaning responses to pumpkin spice latte consumption.

CAPTION: There are four images. The first image is a modified cell from a Batman and Robin comic book. It shows a costumed Batman slapping Robin across the face as though to snap him out of some delusional state. Robin is saying “Pumpkin Spice Latte, Pumpkin Spice Cookies, Pumpkin Spice…” and Batman, while hitting him, is saying “PUMPKINS ARE FOR CARVING!” in much bigger text as though yelling. In the second image, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey is seen leaning forward, bent at the waist, face fully forward, yelling “PUMPKING SPICE?!? The only ‘flavor’ I want in my coffee is whisky!”  In the third image, a deliberately stereotypically dorky looking man is smiling and laughing in self-mockery.  The words overlayed on the image say “I like pumpkin spice. F*ck me, right?” In the final image, we see a light-skinned woman with long dark hair, smiling with her chin resting on her hand. The superimposed words say “If liking pumpkin spice lattes & wearing uggs makes me a basic white girl, than [sic] please, just call me Becky.” This latter is a reference to a line from a Beyonce song in which the narrator tells her lover that if he is going to treat her badly he can just call “Becky with the good hair,” whereas Urban Dictionary defines a “basic girl” as “your run of the mill white girl that has no identity of her own… like a cracker-jack house in a middle class neighborhood.”

Like the bacon responses to turkey bacon, these demeaning responses to consumption of pumpkin spice latte are masculinized, aggressive and sometimes even violent, in one case valuing alcohol consumption over flavoring in a clear kind of risk-taking, and even in one case self-directed (for failing to meet masculinity norms). Note the reoccurrence of a certain celebrity chef who seems to crop up in masculine food memes. Disliking pumpkin spice latte is strongly associated with masculine ways of expressing dislike, as in these popular memes. And like the images of pumpkin spice latte consumption more generally, they are not only gendered but also classed (Uggs) and raced (“basic white girl”; “call me Becky”).

I’ve tried to show how gender, class, and race are working in reinforcing ways to frame our thinking about pumpkin spice latte consumption, but I think that bacon is framed almost exclusively in terms of gender.  Agree or disagree with respect to my claims about these particular foods, it is clear that there is some loaded rhetoric here, carrying a heavy cargo of gendered fetishization and scorn. And even when bacon and pumpkin spice lattes are long gone, some foods will continue to carry such cargo.

Now, I am off to eat bacon with my hands and drink me a pumpkin spice latte while wearing trousers and a good bra.