DSCN8795 Daniel Callahan (Photo credit: Fondazione Giannino Bassetti)
A fellow blogger’s post this morning brought to my attention something that’s troubling and should bother everyone. (Yet, as you’ll see in at least one of the related articles I included at the end of this post, it does not.)
Bioethicist Daniel Callahan, senior research scholar and president emeritus at the Hastings Center, put out a report in which he advocated for the shaming of overweight and obese people as a way to combat obesity. It’s a fairly brief report. But I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
Here’s an excerpt from the section headlined with a somewhat euphemistic “varieties of social pressure” title:
But can there be social pressure that does not lead to outright discrimination—a kind of stigmatization lite? That will, I concede, be a diffcult line to walk, but it is worth a try. I would couch the social pressure in the following terms, fnding ways to induce people who are overweight or obese to put some uncomfortable questions to themselves:
- If you are overweight or obese, are you pleased with the way you look?
- Are you happy that your added weight has made many ordinary activities, such as walking up a long fight of stairs, harder?
- Would you prefer to lessen your risk of heart disease and diabetes?
- Are you aware that, once you gain a signifcant amount of weight, your chances of taking that weight back off and keeping it off are poor?
- Are you pleased when your obese children are called “fatty” or otherwise teased at school?
- Fair or not, do you know that many people look down upon those excessively overweight or obese, often in fact discriminating against them and making fun of them or calling them lazy and lacking in self-control?
That last question in effect aims to make people acutely aware of pervasive stigmatization, but then to invoke it as a danger to be avoided: don’t let this happen to you! If you don’t do something about yourself, that’s what you are in for. Many of the other questions invoke vanity as a value, or the good opinion of one’s neighbors, friends, or fellow employees, or the risk of illness. Use all of them together, carrots and sticks. That will not much help most of those who are already overweight or obese. But beyond marginal improvements, most of them are already lost.
Shaming people. That’s Callahan’s answer to the obesity epidemic weighing America down. Obesity is a genuine health problem. Nobody is arguing that. I’m overweight and pretty sure obese according to the doctor’s scale.
But shaming people is glorified bullying. The only difference is when you hear the word “bully,” you typically think of nasty, insensitive kids and teenagers picking a target and tormenting him or her constantly. How is Callahan’s method of “shaming” different? Adults do it. That’s the only difference.
There are three things we must note here.
First, Callahan has already written off those that are already overweight or obese. “Most of them are already lost,” he says. Yes, it is tougher to get down to a healthy weight, to change your eating habits not to mention exercise and, yes, it can be a struggle to just maintain a plateau at some point without starving yourself. But given that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put 35.7 of U.S. adults and nearly 17 percent of U.S. children in the obesity rubric, that just sounds like an awful lot of people to completely write off and scorn.
Which brings me to the second point: Callahan draws on his own experience as a former smoker, who while puffing on his cigarette felt constantly marginalized by government and society for doing so – from having to pay more and more for each carton of cigarettes to having to go outside for a drag. Smoking is not a necessity of life – you can get by without smoking, which as an addiction automatically makes it that much easier a habit to break. Compared to food, which we must consume to survive, which makes meal habits and food addiction so much harder to combat. A smoker can get by without smoking and eventually be free of the addiction; how do you stop eating? Perhaps that is why he writes off a third of America’s adults and nearly a fifth of kids. But by using his recovery from smoking as an example, he actually weakens his whole thesis because the two – smoking and eating – are not the same.
Finally, read through his report and you’ll note that he only makes a passing mention of any possible negative effects of stigmatization in the final paragraph of his report:
What I am suggesting—empowering the victims, not blaming them, and that individual responsibility is necessary—has its risks.
He doesn’t go into detail about a single one of these risks, and in fact takes the bite away from his own recognition of these risks by crafting the sentence with a euphemism. He’s rebranding ‘stigmatization’ and ‘social pressure’ by using nice words like ‘empowering the victim’ to take ‘individual responsibility’ and ensuring that he doesn’t want to ‘blame them.’
In doing so, Callahan trivializes these risks. They’re barely acknowledged and even when they are, they’re wrapped in doublespeak and given no further attention.
Callahan seems to live in a fantasy world where everyone who is shamed into behaving one way or another reacts the same way – by nodding with agreement, holding their head high and taking strides away from the alleged reason for the stigma.
But if that were the case, then we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic, because body-shaming is still pretty common all around. As Callahan himself notes, it’s not like obesity and poor health are celebrated and glorified in our culture – from entertainment and movies down to treatment on the job or at, say, the night club.
But beyond that, some people will react to this shaming and bullying by simply withdrawing into themselves and becoming antisocial. A person feeling shunned by not just general society but the people close to them who do nothing but point fingers can lead to further eating problems as food can become the only comfort. Or worse.
Another alternative can be a mixed-bag. Said person may indeed be spurred on to take steps to get healthy, eat better, exercise more and lose weight. But they may forever be chained to stigma and body issues and may never be comfortable with themselves ever again. How is that helpful?
I know how I react. I withdraw from the people who do this. That includes relatives and friends who are well-meaning but misguided into thinking their comments are matter-of-fact and that it’s okay for them to point out something I already know is true. (Come on, if anyone knows what I look or weigh like, it’s me. I live in this body, for God’s sakes!) Sometimes I am able to take it in stride but not always. It can be very hurtful.
This tactic has not only been tried time and time and time again, but it is simply not productive or constructive. It’s not helpful.
The Huffington Post’s article on this says it well:
“No amount of teasing, probing questions about what they wish they could do, or medications seem to help,” Dr. Tom Inge, a childhood obesity expert at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, told NBC News. “So if one is proposing to help them by more stigmatization, that would seem at once both antithetical and unethical.”
“For him to argue that we need more stigma, I don’t know what world he’s living in,” Deb Burgard, a California psychologist specializing in eating disorders, told NBC. “He must not have any contact with actual free-range fat people.”
I would have thought that a researcher and bioethicist esteemed and known enough to have his own damn Wikipedia page would have been able to come up with a more constructive strategy to tackle obesity; instead, his bullying approach is completely juvenile.
And shame can work both ways. People like Callahan may be well-meaning but they’re not helping anyone. They’re just causing hurt and pain without actually addressing the roots of the problems – and by conveniently ignoring or whitewashing the very real possibility of very negative side effects or outcomes of the fat-shaming strategy, they are just being destructive and deliberately nasty.
I’ll use the closing remarks from this same Huffington Post article to close this piece, as well:
“We know from communication research that when we highlight a health risk but fail to provide actionable steps people can take to prevent it, the response is often either denial or some other dysfunctional behavior,” Marsha Davis, a childhood obesity prevention researcher at the University of Georgia’s College of Public Health, told AboutFace. “We need to fight obesity, not obese people.”
