Bodies thin and sticklike and highly unsympathetic

I have been a little loath to write this because Freddie deBoer already has a huge beef with our blog for some reason (I’m mean to Jonathan Chait?), but…

Freddie deBoer recently wrote a post denouncing the less-hinged supporters of the proposed TPP, one of whom saw fit to compare Obama’s critics on this issue to the lynchers of Emmet Till. This was obviously an awful thing for Dem politico Allen Brauer to say, and most readers here probably regard both this and the TPP with unified disgust, putting us in agreement with deBoer. [UPDATED NOTE: since many people have found this post unclear (which is obviously my fault), I’m merely noting here that I entirely agree with FDB’s actual political point (and in all likelihood most of you do as well), and quoting the post written the other day to explain how I perceive it with suspicion because of his past remarks. It would be irrelevant and unfair to attack Freddie deBoer on the sole basis of a five-year-old dustup.] Allen Brauer fired back at his critics by high-mindedly calling them “dude-bros and manarchists” and saying he was wrecked after a “tsunami of white tears.” DeBoer correctly calls this bullshit:

Allan Brauer, I would argue, is today’s progressive internet in its purest form. He’s someone who’s learned all of the lessons of how we do things too well…. Do we still have the capacity, as a political and intellectual movement, to argue in a way that’s not entirely based on associating with race or gender in a totally vague, unaccountable, and reductive way?

Solid enough. But–

The stakes are much lower in our cultural writing, but the problem is largely the same: tired, rote arguments and magic words, treated as cutting rebuttals no matter how lazy and uninspired. You use magic words in your work, and no matter how good or bad it is, you’ll get credit for it. And if people criticize you, you just use the magic words against them, too.

UPDATE [which interrupts the post but needs to be above the fold]: as I mention below, I’ve said a metric f#$k-ton of dumb things in internet comments, especially years ago. So I feel a bit uneasy basing my complaint on a comment. If Freddie deBoer would like to say, “I made that comment on Tiger Beatdown when I was irritated and stung, but would retract it if I could,” I’m happy to edit the post to reflect this.
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While I’m on the subject of Honoré Daumier, let me just show a couple other items from the aforementioned whomping great volume. A pair of lithographs from the Caricatural Salon of 1840 (which I saved myself the trouble of scanning by finding here. Kind of interesting comparisons with some comics frames.)

Anyway, the first is “The Ascension of Christ. After the Original Painting By Brrdhkmann”:

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So Manspreading is a thing, hence a controversy. I don’t have a lot to add to this Jezebel post on the subject. Except I do! I did some important historical research by remembering that Honoré Daumier got there first with “The Omnibus”.

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“Midnight in the Garden of Good an Evil” is not a great movie but an OK one; certainly if you want to see a lot of purty pictures of Savannah it’s a good one. Kevin Spacey portrays, according to my grandmother Henrietta, the main character extremely convincingly–even going so far as to both have his mannerisms and resemble him somewhat, which she thought incredible for a picture of a dead man. There must have been video of him, obviously. There are a number of very unconvincing things about the book, mainly the idea that this white journalist from New York (IIRC) could insinuate himself into both white high society (second tier–but still) and black society in so short a time as to be both privy to all kind of secrets and taken by an…I don’t know voodoo I guess…practitioner on a midnight rowboat ride up in a marsh somewhere. (First-tier Savannah society is so insular you could only gain that kind of access by marrying someone, even though it’s true everyone loves to gossip. But getting invited to parties?) I say “voodoo I guess” because despite the fact that people totally do this thing, or practice this religion, or whatever, we don’t even really call it anything, so much do we not talk about it. No, that’s an exaggeration, we call it voodoo; there’s an island near my dad’s place in Bluffton called either Voodoo Island or Devil’s Elbow Island (or more cheerfully Potato Island, but I think the Crams pushed that and it never happened.) You can read a short story about it here, if you like. I had been thinking for a while people might like to read it, it’s from 2004, so quite a while ago. Yeah, voodoo, but not like in Florida where people have actual Santeria churches and storefronts and stuff; more like everyone is a devout Christian–but everyone–but still there are women who will do voodoo for you. As I say in the story, white people hire black people to put curses on other white people. And I’m not entirely sure how they find them, except that everyone knows who to ask? Everyone knows everything about everyone, is the answer to that. Well, no, there are information asymmetries: the black community as a whole knows more because maids know everything about their employers but not vice versa, and so on for a lot of other things.

Of course mine was unplanned. Which goes to show anyone can. Never say never!

Believe me, you don’t want the heartburn, the swollen ankles, the back ache and I swear to God if ___ just brushes my nipples again I’ll murder him.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

I never really wanted them myself.

You know, a friend of mine moved to a warmer country and within weeks. Have you ever thought of doing that?

You know, a friend of mine tried for ten years and then they gave up. And then it just happened like that. And they’ve had two more since.

You know, I have a good feeling that it’ll work out for you. I just know it.

If you could just relax a little, you know? Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

Have you thought of trying fertility treatment?

But you’ll be such brilliant parents. You just have to believe it and it’ll come good.

God I know exactly how you feel. We thought my first one was an ectopic until I had the scan.

God I know exactly how you feel. It took us nearly a year for the first. I was sure there was something wrong.

Have you thought about adoption? They’ll let anyone do it these days. Sorry. You know what I mean.

Well at least you have each other.

You’re so lucky. Lie-ins are a thing of the past for us. I haven’t been to the toilet on my own in three years.

Still, there’s always being a god-parent and uncle or aunt. Lucky kids. And you get to give them back when you’ve had enough.

Have you thought of volunteering?

Think of all the holidays you can take. Just the two of you.

My friend went to some clinic and it worked for her. I’ll get the name of it. I’m sure it will work for you.

You’re always hearing of people it worked out for in the end. I’m sure it’ll be the same for you.

Well you know, what with over-population and everything.

Look at the state of them. Are you still sure you want any?

At least you‘ll never have to go through childbirth.

You know I really believe you’ll get there in the end. You just have to stay positive. I know you can.

And here’s the one response that doesn’t cut down to the bone, whatever the situation or experience of the friend / acquaintance / or heavily pregnant lady at the parking permit office who wouldn’t take no for an answer (yes, just this morning):

“I’m so sorry.”

I see lots of stories made up of handwringing over the “obesity paradox”, normally presented as saying that even though obesity is a risk factor for all kinds of diseases, obese people appear to have lower mortality than others. A typical finding is the one reported here

being overweight or slightly obese was linked to about a 6 percent lower risk of dying, compared to people considered “normal weight. Being severely obese, however, was still tied to an almost 30 percent higher risk of death.

People are tying themselves in knots over this, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is any paradox to be explained. The obvious reading of the data is that the Body Mass Index.[^1] ranges used for the various categories (20-25 Normal, 25-30 Overweight etc) were set a bit too low when they were originally estimated, or rather, guessed. From my quick look at the data, if you bumped the ranges up by a couple of points, the paradox would disappear. People at the bottom of the current normal range, who tend to have high mortality, would be classed as underweight, while those currently classed as slightly overweight would be reclassified as normal, and so on.

Am I missing something?

[^1]: This point is logically separate from the general problems of the BMI, regarding muscle mass and so on.

Man does not live by long Hayek posts alone!

Take this TLS piece on Frankenstein (via Andrew Sullivan). I love this stuff. I haven’t read the books being reviewed, but differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein are a hobbyhorse of mine. It started with my interest in the history of sf, and the interesting way in which Shelley invented the genre, then un-invented it by rewriting the book to be less sf. Funny sort of backtrack. But that’s far from being the weirdest thing about the book. [click to continue…]

I’m reading a book on Mannerism [amazon] and stumbled on a pair of amusing quotes. The first, from Alberti’s On Painting (1435) really ought to be some kind of epigraph for The Hawkeye Initiative. (What? You didn’t know about it. Go ahead and waste a few happy minutes there. It’s hilarious. Now you’re back. Good!)

As I was saying, here’s Alberti, warning us that, even though good istoria painting should exhibit variety and seem alive with motion, you shouldn’t go all Escher Girl boobs + butt Full-Monty-and-then-some:

There are those who express too animated movements, making the chest and the small of the back visible at once in the same figure, an impossible and inappropriate thing; they think themselves deserving of praise because they hear that those images seem alive that violently move each member; and for this reason they make figures that seem to be fencers and actors, with none of the dignity of painting, whence not only are they without grace and sweetness, but even more they show the ingegno of the artist to be too fervent and furious [troppo fervente et furioso].

On the other hand, here’s a quote from Pietro Aretino, praising Vasari’s cartoon of “The Fall of Manna In The Desert”:

The naked man who bends down to show both sides of his body by virtue of its qualities of graceful power and powerful ease draws the eyes like a magnet, and mine were held until so dazzled that they had to turn elsewhere.

There’s no accounting for taste. [click to continue…]

Like many of us, I’m engaged in a constant struggle to maintain a healthy weight and fitness level, and being an economist, I naturally like to think about this in quantitative terms (I’m not alone in this).

The basic equation is simple[1]: Energy used – energy consumed = fat burnt. But to make sense of this equation, we need units, and that raises the immediate questions:

Calories or kilojoules? and
How much do I have to burn to lose 1kg of fat?

The short answers are: Calories and 9000 Cal[2]

More over the fold

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Another follow-up to the last two posts about body images and beauty ideals. [click to continue…]

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a couple months back, I found this gallery of classic images of Venus – downsized courtesy of Anna Utopia Giordano and Photoshop. (The gallery was down for a while, so I didn’t post about it at the time. But now I see it’s up again.) Coates also linked to this post by Bob Duggan, responding to the Photoshopped images. I disagree with almost everything Duggan says. The grotesque results do not in any way shape or form show that there is anything grotesque about the thin, modern beauty standards the artist means to critique (I assume this is the intent.) It’s like trying to prove that moustaches are funny by drawing moustaches on famous paintings. You could also perform the exercise in reverse. Take some reasonably iconic superthin female image and give it the Titian treatment – or the full Rubens – and I’m sure the results would be incongruous and funny. It wouldn’t prove hips and stomachs are themselves inherently hilarious.

Which is not to deny that the superthin standard is grotesque, in a technical sense: it’s extreme and unrealistic to the point of caricature. Duh. But it seems to me that what is objectionable here, if anything, is not the extremity but the standardization. It’s also quite puzzling. Why is beauty culture (per the specs of the fashion industry) such a stable, monolithic body-type monoculture? Feel free to pipe up about how you like ’em with more meat on the bone, so you must be a feminist! (So do I!) But that’s not really what I’m asking. People – men and women – in fact find a wide variety of female body-types attractive. Fashion is all about variety and the new. It seems natural enough to me that the fashion world should gravitate to extremes, and that power-law-type distributions should tend to apply. But fashion is way more than 80-20 in favor of a very particular flavor of thinness. (Or am I wrong?) And thin has been in for a long time. Setting aside whether/to what degree this is to be condemned and/or something done about it, why is it this way? In your expert opinion.

Why don’t we get more change and multi-polarity in ‘ideal’ body-types from the fashion world?

Is it just that fashion designers like to draw nine-heads tall stick figures. And it all flows from that?