So suppose you do lose that weight …

I mentioned recently that I had been given a prescription for medicine that has for many a welcome side-effect: weight loss. One of the interesting things about experiencing the loss is that you can be left with your obviously untenable old beliefs, along with some scary beliefs in something like magic that become more visible. I think that if I mentioned them all, I might sketch a picture of myself that I’d soon regret putting on the web. So I’ll mention a few, and invite others to join in with their own examples, if they want.

One I knew about, but I saw again how clearly false it is. This is the belief that if I just lost five pounds, I’d be happy. According to quite a few women at the central APA, this is a very common belief, and all of us with it know it is false. There I was, two weeks and five pounds after I started, not feeling any happier at all.

I have wondered if we do really believe that. Perhaps we believe instead that our body shape is really bad, and any loss would be good. But I don’t really think so. I think we tend to believe the false version. That seems to leave us in the paradoxical position of admitting a belief of the form “I believe that P though it is not true.” In fact, the belief may not be as paradoxical as it seems. It may be that we have mistakenly thought of our minds on the model of the revisable essay, with assertions that are eventually integrated into a consistent whole. But in fact, our minds might be more like an old sewing basket, with bits of fabric saved though they are probably useless. (What do you think?)

Then there are the magical beliefs, as I think of them. At least there are out of touch with the way the world actually works. One might be, “after a weekend in New Orleans, I will have gained the whole 15 pounds back.” Or even, it could happen that the weight comes back some night when I’m asleep.

The thing that is remarkable about these magical beliefs it that they probably don’t exist inert in some hidden recess of the mind. They are probably tied in with some behavior and some other beliefs. But it is hard to see how believing that one’s body is so vulnerable to mysterious workings of a magical world would be a very good thing. They may in fact mount up to a not very rational tendency to blame oneself. Clearly, if these changes can happen just out of the blue, one should try to figure out how to avoid them, perhaps by being especially good and forgoing desert. Or whatever.

Another big category of magical beliefs for me concerns clothes. But I’m going to stop now and see if anyone else wants to add some examples.

What is wrong with feminism?

There have been two posts so far on the PBS program, Women Making American; see here and here. It is not as problematic as I originally feared; that is, it isn’t just about fairly recent white US female media personalities. Still, a program that attempts to follow even the limited history of the feminist movement from Friedan forward is going to be short on critical analysis.

Nonetheless, there were two topics that often get at least a mention on this blog about which we’ve not had much explicit to say. So when the program took them up, I listened very carefully. The program’s style of interviewing one or a few women meant that in some cases we were just getting one person’s opinion. Still, though the content on two topics was very minimal, I thought it might be interesting to get reactions from those of you who come here.

Topic One: why don’t young (white, middle-class) women want to describe themselves as feminists?
One answer: because feminism is associated with the more extreme forms it took in the 70’s and 80’s. Women today are not so anti-male, etc, as these parts of radical feminism.

Topic two: Why doesn’t the feminist movement attract more women of color?
One answer: because it typically leaves out class; women of color see the problems in terms of race, gender and class.

I think it would be a mistake to think along the lines of “it can’t be this simple,” because in fact these are not simple problems. But what do you think?