Horses are good company -- The Witcher

I felt just terrible this morning. Half-awake, I decided I better email my doctor about my sinus infection. So I got up and did that, and took a shower, and continued to feel awful. I decided to skip volunteering today, and once I made that decision I almost immediately felt better. I reminded myself of one of Jesse's sayings-- even disabled people get sick days.

I read "The Facts of Life," a graphic memoir by Paula Knight, and absolutely loved it. A very thoughtful, wide-ranging book about infertility.

Here is some interesting research:
Controlled temp changes inside ear can prevent migraines
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170706113144.htm

In June I had the privilege of attending SDS2014, the Society for Disability Studies conference in Minneapolis. SDS did a lot of things right concerning accessibility for people with disabilities. It did not appear that the organizers had put as much thought into economic accessibility. For instance, the venue was an expensive downtown hotel. The nearby restaurants were mostly sit-down restaurants. The convenience shop in the hotel had some bottled beverages and foods at airport prices. Lunch time meetings at the conference felt inaccessible to me, because I didn't know where to grab a sandwich or take out food at a place that I could afford to eat, and get back in time for the session. So I skipped the lunch time sessions; I need to eat according to a set schedule, as I'm sure many folks do. (Note that SDS' discussion of anti-harassment policies occurred during a lunch time session.)

Many academic conferences are similarly expensive, and do not seem to care about being affordable. The registration prices alone can be close to a thousand dollars. This is before hotel, travel, food, and any incidentals for conference participants. Presenters many want to get new clothes or travel gear, for instance. Many people attending academic conferences have their institutions pay for these expenses, or get grants or scholarships to cover them.

Check out two price listings for conferences, just as examples:
An epidemiology conference in Spain
Grace Hopper Women in Computing

I attended SDS as a community member rather than as an academic-- ie, not affiliated with an institution. A friend paid for the reg fee and hotel, and we carpooled there and brought some of our own snacks. SDS does have a sliding scale for their reg fees. Disability studies, unlike many other academic disciplines, values the role of community members and lay people because your lived experience counts. Your embodiment and activism count. You don't necessarily need classes, degrees, and publications to contribute. (I do have some independent-of-the-academy publications.)

My main convention and social event of the year is WisCon, a fan convention, which prioritizes affordability. Many of our affordability issues intersect with other social justice issues, such as disability access and emotional access.

For instance, WisCon provides late-night cab vouchers to get people home from the convention. I imagine the original intent of this service was safety: prevent drunk driving and the like, since alcohol flows fairly free at convention parties. But it also provides an affordable means for people to get home without having to pay for a cab or rely on bus schedules or friends, and means that some people can stay other places than downtown hotels, such as on the outskirts of town at their own or friends' houses or cheaper hotels. It provides independence-- the means to leave the convention when you want (also a safety feature). The cab service we use is a co-op and a union, allowing us to support a local business with shared values. And cabs can be reserved online, which is another accessibility feature.

All of these things intersect. Feeling like your finances are stretched and you can barely afford to be somewhere is stressful and adds to cognitive and emotional load. It means you can't be as present and contribute as fully as you might like. Worrying about affording a meal when you want to go out with friends or colleagues can be embarrassing.

So why are academic conferences so expensive? Not having organized one, or even gone to many, I really have no idea. Looking around on the internet, people say that the fee covers venue, food, and keynote speakers, etc. Probably professional conference organizers plan these things, and take their cut. But conferences can leverage their power as clients to negotiate better deals with hotels and convention centers. They can use university or public venues which are sometimes cheaper. First and foremost, they can simply think about how to lower costs and reduce the economic burden on their participants, instead of assuming everyone who comes is able to blithely afford it.

I do know that charging so much money functions as a gate-keeping mechanism to keep people out. It creates a space where the conference itself is an in-club for people who can afford to be there: a country club effect. The privileged rub elbows and make connections with each other.

This affects the quality of academics. Science, my field of employ, has a myriad of problems with diversity. These things are connected.

I said something tonight which seemed to surprise my friends, and now I feel the need to talk about it a little, so I'm laying it out here: I don't believe in the "obesity epidemic." I mean that I really don't believe it exists.

My essential reading for this is a 2005/2006 scientific article:

The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic? Paul Campos, et al. International Journal of Epidemiology.

Selections follow, but I suggest reading it all. It is scientfic, but readable, and a fantastic article that states the claims the claims the medical/scientific communities have been making, and swiftly knocks them down. For example:

Claim #2: ‘Mortality rates increase with increasing degrees of overweight, as measured by BMI.’—WHO, 2003 (p. 61)2

This claim, central to arguments that higher than average body mass amount to a major public health problem, is at best weakly supported by the epidemiological literature. Except at true statistical extremes, high body mass is a very weak predictor of mortality, and may even be protective in older populations.


Claim #4: Significant long-term weight loss is a practical goal, and will improve health.

At present, this claim is almost completely unsupported by the epidemiological literature. It is a remarkable fact that the central premise of the current war on fat—that turning obese and overweight people into so-called ‘normal weight’ individuals will improve their health—remains an untested hypothesis. One main reason the hypothesis remains untested is because there is no method available to produce the result that would have to be produced—significant long-term weight loss, in statistically significant cohorts—in order to test the claim.

...

The authors also speculate on social and political factors contributing to this moral panic:

In particular, organizations like the International Obesity Task Force (which has authored many of the WHO reports on obesity) and the American Obesity Association (which has actively campaigned to have obesity officially designated as a ‘disease’) have been largely funded by pharmaceutical and weight-loss companies.

Moral panics are typical during times of rapid social change and involve an exaggeration or fabrication of risks, the use of disaster analogies, and the projection of societal anxieties onto a stigmatized group.47,48

Public opinion studies also show that negative attitudes towards the obese are highly correlated with negative attitudes towards minorities and the poor, such as the belief that all these groups are lazy and lack self-control and will power. This suggests that anxieties about racial integration and immigration may be an underlying cause of some of the concern over obesity.49–51

Previous work indicates that moral panics often displace broader anxieties about changing gender roles.49,53 While this hypothesis deserves further research, a recent advertisement that ran in a major American newspaper suggests that this may be at play in the obesity panic. This advertisement blames ‘30 years of feminist careerism’ for an epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes: ‘With most mothers working, too few adults and children eat balanced, nutritious, portion-controlled home-cooked meals.

However, other works suggest that some portion of the population's weight gain can be attributed to smoking cessation,56 which runs counter to the assumption that the country's weight gain is evidence of both moral laxity and a harbinger of declining overall health. [bolding mine]

Or, spirit of the staircase!

I participated today in a free screening for oral and throat cancers. It took 5 minutes and I was feeling uncharacteristically talkative to the people running it. For example I told the woman taking the forms: "You should have check boxes for male, female, and other." (I doubt she took me seriously.)

So after I finished having the screening (the doc looks in your mouth with a flashlight), I was talking a man who was passing out the flyers. He was a friendly middle-aged guy that was sort of easy to talk to. He told me the risk factors for these cancers are tobacco use, alcohol use, and HPV (human pappilloma viruses).

"Well," I said, "Hopefully that will go down because now there is a vaccine." (Gardasil.)

"Or, teens could just have regular sex!" he joked, and laughed. He was referring to the fact that oral sex, ie blow jobs, are a risk factor for HPV causing cancers of the mouth and throat.

"Well, that's not going to happen, they just need to get vaccinated!" I said at the time.

What I wished I had done is either gotten scarily calm, or scarily angry, and scared him into NEVER SAYING THAT AGAIN. It was totally inappropriate for a number of reasons.

1. "Regular sex" is a figment of the imagination that exists in a subset of straight people's minds, and is centered around penis-in-vagina hetero sex. It erases queer sex, oral sex, manual sex, kinky sex, etc etc etc.

2. His so-called "regular sex" still transmits HPV-- to women, who can then get cervical cancer.

3. There was more than a strong whiff of victim-blaming to what he said-- if people get cancer from HPV, it's their fault.

People are such assholes! This guy told me he used to be a study coordinator!

ETA I just occurred to me that this man could have been attempting to flirt with me by making a risque joke about blowjobs. Such a lesbian am I-- I was totally oblivious.

Not! Actually! Filtered! As mystickeeper says, "This shit is gonna get real." Well maybe.

So I used some of my few spoons this week to go to the Michael Pollan lecture on campus. I haven't gotten around to actually finishing any his books yet, but I seem to have absorbed a lot of his ideas through reading articles and seeing interviews, and maybe just the cultural zietgiest. I went with a bunch of friends. antarcticlust and I were whispering furiously and annoying the guy in front of us; yes-- I was being That Guy! Going to the Special Hell for talking in the Theater! Well, the hockey arena, in this case. Antarcticlust took notes. There were people there in t-shirts that said "In Defense of Farming", apparently as a protest, and we talked about that some. The t-shirts were the same color as the volunteer t-shirts, which we thought was Quite Interesting, since it seems to assume a defensive position--as in, they are trying to blend in and not be tossed out. But we also thought it was brave of them for coming and protesting, even if we thought it was misguided (see below).

Michael Pollan seems to like discourse, controversy, and arguing--he does not seem at all threatened by disagreement and does not seem to get ruffled. I kind of envy this trait-- it shows great security and patience and humor, I think, and also an equivocal mind that is willing to considering other points of view. He addressed the protesters and said he agreed with their slogan: "Eat food, be healthy, thank a farmer," or some such. He said he thinks farmers hold the key to 3 crises facing America: the health crisis, the energy crisis, and the environmental crisis. (At "environment," antarcticlust inhaled and mouthed "no".) Pollan is very pro-farmer in many ways-- what he is against is big agri-business. The most damning moment was when he said that the American food industry made over 800 billion dollars last year, and less than 10% of that went to farmers. A greater share went to people who make packaging for processed foods.

Pollan is an engaging and clear speaker. I liked a lot of what he had to say. He talked a lot about "the rise of nutritionism", how that benefits processed foods (and businesses) and how it contributes to moralistic eating. Since we can't sense nutrients, we must rely on experts to tell us how to eat. He compared this to a type of religion where if you can't sense God, you must rely on a priesthood to tell you God's will. Then there are "good nutrients" (calcium, fiber, beta-carotene), and "evil nutrients" (carbs, cholesterol, trans fats, saturated fat, etc), and we are looking for these instead of eating food. Also we are chasing after health (good or bad) with each meal, instead of eating for pleasure or community or other reasons.

He and many other people have gone after "high fructose corn syrup" because it's a marker for highly processed foods. But now savvy marketers have found a way around that: by advertising their products as having "real cane sugar". They are marketing their products by saying, Look! SUGAR! Which is bizarre.

He talked of many other things but that is what stands out for me.

On twitter @ThatKarenB said, "Was anyone protesting Pollan's attitudes towards fat people? AFAICT, that's more accurate than the "anti-farming" thing."

Which I think is a good point, and I am going to talk about that now.

I would say it's not Pollan's attitudes precisely, but that he is uncritically adopting the wider cultural attitude of fatness as a disease. Several times he said that the Western diet is responsible for "heart disease, Type II diabetes, and obesity."

I have been thinking and thinking about this, and I need to think about it some more, because it's complicated and it makes me uncomfortable. One thing that helps me is reading Kate Harding: Don't You Realize Fat is Unhealthy?

Also I think it's weird to pathologize a body type. Diseases are socially constructed; what is and is not a disease is not so easy to say. And I think it's weird to say that being fat is a disease. I think it's OK to say that some things associated with being fat are diseases, that being fat might make you more likely to have certain diseases, but even then you should remember that it is not a one-to-one situation and does not apply to everyone: it's only true at the population level, and association does not necessarily imply causation, either. It is more complicated than that!

It's a false equivalancy: people like to think that being fat means being unhealthy, automatically. They like to think that being thin (but not too thin!) means good health. Well guess what, that is not always the case either. It's more complicated!

I'm not sure if Pollan would even disagree with me on these things. It's just that I want there to be less hatred of fatness and bodies, and I think his agenda (which I think is a good one) and mine can coexist. I've also been thinking about intersectionality with disability, since there is this fundamental concept of not assuming that disabled people need or want to be fixed. ("But surely-- surely being disabled is bad? Wouldn't you be fixed if you could be? Wouldn't you be thin if you could be?") (Say it with me: it's more complicated!)

Just things I'm thinking about. I'm aware not everyone will agree with me here.

ETA: there are some great comments at LJ!