The Onion Shows 'Not Eating' to be Ineffective
If you loved Joy Nash's Fat Rant II and the now apparently defunct *very sad face* Health Institute for Nutrition, you will love this article over at The Onion debating the pros and cons of abstinence-only lunch programs.
Here are some gems:
"There's no evidence to suggest that instructing teens not to chew, swallow, or even think about food is actually going to stop them from eating," Sebelius told reporters. "Let's face it: Kids are already eating. And not only during lunchtime. They're eating after school, at the mall, in their parents' basements. Pretending like it's not happening isn't going to make it go away."
"After all, they're teenagers," Sebelius continued. "Eating is practically the only thing on their minds."
An interesting commentary on how making natural things taboo (like sex and eating) only fosters obsession. Not to mention how urges for food and sex are conflated and treated as sinful.
Also, the key to not getting fat:
"I'm never ever going to eat, because eating is wrong, and I'm worth more than a chicken sandwich with asparagus and rice pilaf," Woodbridge seventh-grader Tracey Holmes said. "I heard Jennifer Hines eats all the time, like 50 times a day. I heard she eats all her ice cream upside-down, though, so she doesn't get fat. That's how it works."
Thanks to GiniLiz for this!
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Posted by withoutscene on July 28, 2009
I'm queasy about BFB's linking to this piece from The Onion. For one thing, it's The Onion. I don't know of another publication that regularly contains such nasty, dehumanizing pieces about fat people. Consider this recent item. I know The Onion is very funny sometimes, but when it comes to fat people, their idea of funny involves an unusual amount of viciousness.
For another thing, I'm not sure most people reading this piece will recognize anything in it that's genuinely helpful to the FA position. Once it has acknowledged the simple truth that children have to eat, it recycles the usual prejudices about fat people: they could lose weight if they'd just skip dessert and lay off the Cheez-Its. It seems to suggest that kids should learn to watch their calories and that, if they don't, Type II diabetes will soar.
I understand your criticism of The Onion and share it. At the same time, I thought it was a funny/clever/telling piece and didn't get from it that they were just re-hashing stereotypes about fat people, though I acknowledge that an element of that is present in the comments about moderation and such.
In my opinion the NYT publishes a lot of stuff that's harmful and offensive to fat people, but that doesn't mean I'd never post anything that came out of NYT if I felt it had an FA hilt. Same goes for the CDC. They are doing some terrible, terrible things right now (and have in the past), but if we completely discarded everything that came out of the CDC we wouldn't have Katherine Flegal. Just my two cents.
Yeah, Chondros, I was so terribly disturbed by that article -- it was such an emphatic dehumanization of the fat.
Ahhhh, Heath Institute for Nutrition, how I did love thee. Alexandra Erin has an immaculately accurate talent for shooting down a ludicrous ideology. T.H.I.N. didn't bludgeon the utter stupidity of the EpiPanic to death. No, from across the room, it nailed obesity epidemic rhetoric to the wall and let it hang there squirming for a while. I sure do miss her, hope she's doing all right.
As for The Onion, their schtick is equal opportunity offensiveness. Nobodies safe. Everybody catches grief. Frankly, I find that far easier to deal with than somebody denying my experience, telling me I'm living in denial, and then trying to convince me that they don't hate fat people. Their only denigrating me for my own good. With the Onion, I know they don't like me. How? Well, in the tradition of Mad Magazine and National Lampoon, The Onion doesn't like ANYBODY.
This Article? Meh. I know what they were trying to do here. Take the word sex out of the ridiculous national teen abstinence-from-sex initiative, replace it with food or eating food and. . . . Look at how silly it sounds NOW! I don't even think they were actively GOING for a fat acceptance angle. Just trying to take the piss out of the Just Don't Do It movements pathetically tinny thunder when they -Oops!- backed into a Fat Acceptance meme. Not very clever, marginally amusing, and really not all that relevant these days. Mainly I found it interesting as an inadvertent F/A - Sex Ed intersection and that's about it.
T.H.I.N.? Now that was, DAMN, funny.
Learn how to logic- Lesson #5
Correlation is NOT causation.
Obesity does not CAUSE diabetes, heart attack, high blood pressure, or instantaneous death. It MAY contribute in concert with other factors
I used to work in adolescent health/sex education, so between that and my fat stuff, this article just tickled me. Indeed, the problem is being anti-body and anti-pleasure and it reaches far beyond just food or sex. As for "I'm worth more than a chicken sandwich with asparagus and rice pilaf"? *cringes* Actually all-too-familiar a sentiment.
The Onion is one of those things I genuinely can't quite make up my mind about. On the one hand they can be really quite vicious on occasion toward fat people, but then as Bilt4Cmfrt points out they seem to take the Family Guy / South Park approach to satire - absolutely no-one and nothing is safe from their poison pen and moreover, you're never quite sure how much of what's being said is meant with tongue firmly in cheek. I don't personally agree with comedy that involves ridiculing others, but I'm never entirely sure that's actually what they're doing, especially as they've been equally quick to ridicule not only the proponents of the obesity hysteria but other moral panics and pseudo-epidemics as well.
"The reward for conformity is that everybody likes you except yourself" - Rita Mae Brown