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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25854 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics

Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:

“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.

“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”

Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”

“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.

“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”

The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:

Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”

“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.

She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”

This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:

One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.

…

The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!

At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.

Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:

The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.

Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.

Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.

“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.

Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:

To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.

…

Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."

If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.

The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:

Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.

Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.

OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

Oh dear.

Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.

At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.

A sort of nitpick: they don't think that all people are subject to circumstances out of their control. I think they only think the people who are oppressed are subject to this.

For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems to attribute too much control to them, believing that these elite oppressors are coordinating things to take advantage of and oppress others. These elite are specifically the ones who are setting the beauty standards that the oppressed have to live up to, while also simultaneously getting rich off of people's obesity by selling cheap junk food and then marking up the prices of plus-size clothing, and purposely keeping medical expenses high, just cause.

I find this sort of model very infuriating, because there's a lack of acknowledgement that we're all people, and we're all just trying to live our lives. And there really is no logical rubric for who is oppressed or not, other than inclusion in specific categories (most of which almost everyone has at least one of), and therefore, there really is no logic to who is in control of theirs and others lives and who isn't.

For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems attribute too much control to them, believing that these elite oppressors are coordinating things to take advantage of and oppress others. These elite are specifically the ones who are setting the beauty standards that the oppressed have to live up to, while also simultaneously getting rich of of people's obesity by selling cheap junk food and then marking up the prices of plus-size clothing, and purposely keeping medical expenses high, just cause.

I do agree there's a quite a lot of hypo-/hyper-agency attributed to oppressed/oppressor classes of people, respectively, in the modern "progressive" worldview, but I also don't think there's much of a belief in this kind of coordination. A belief in this kind of coordination could be challenged and even destroyed by the lack of evidence of such coordination, and even more by the evidence of the lack of such coordination. Rather, "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" and other similar concepts are said to imbue these oppressors with attitudes that lead them to behaving as if they coordinate to oppress others without any of the actual coordination. The oppressors aren't meeting in a smokey room somewhere to discuss how to keep the oppressed people down, they're merely inheriting a legacy of oppression which reproduces the past oppression despite every individual in every situation behaving in ways that are completely egalitarian and non-oppressive at the individual level.

Where the hyper-agency comes in is that people who have been labeled as oppressors according to this worldview are deemed as having the responsibility to sacrifice in order to tear down this oppressive structure. While the those labeled as oppressed have only the responsibility to speak their truth and to yell at their oppressors until they go along with tearing down the structure. And if this doesn't work, then the oppressed have no responsibility to adapt their tactics to convince the oppressors; it's always the oppressors' responsibility to be convinced, no matter how unconvincing or abusive the arguments that come their way.

I do agree there's a quite a lot of hypo-/hyper-agency attributed to oppressed/oppressor classes of people, respectively, in the modern "progressive" worldview, but I also don't think there's much of a belief in this kind of coordination.

Yes, that's true. My framing of it is not a steelman, for sure. Though I do know some people who certainly act like they believe in the coordination, believe that there's a cabal of white men who are actively trying to keep others down, and they take our their anger on white men as such. I think that some groundling progressives may intellectually know some things, but have a lot of anger about their perceived injustices, and they end up having a hard time separating their angry feelings from their logical thoughts on the subject.

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