health/medicine

Liz B. sent in a screen shot and some commentary.  She did such a nice job explaining that I’m just going to let her do it:

I’m an undergraduate student at a Big Ten school, and today I was perusing the course tracking website that gives students access to their grades, their homework etc. One of the features is that you can change the “theme” of the site… I came across the “physiology and anatomy” theme…

What struck me was not that they had a physiological representation of both sexes, but by how gendered their stances are. The man stands straight, looking ahead, even weight distribution. The female form is almost classically passive, hands held behind her back, weight distribution uneven.

Close up:

Liz continues:

Its striking that these notions about gendered bodies are inserted into even seemingly scientifically oriented things. Its a fair assumption that the designers for the site intended this theme for those who are participating in an anatomically related major, people who are being (or should be) trained to view the body, sans socially constructed gender norms. Yet, here, we see a prime example of gender presentation used in a scientific context… [A]re our doctors and scientists being instilled with these kinds of images throughout their academic lives? If so, its no small wonder why there are doctors and scientists who lend credibility to gender norms by operating on them as if they are nature, or why many people view gender as so fatalistically natural.

More examples:

Jennifer sent in these two anatomy illustrations from a gym. “Surprisingly,” she said:

they had one for both men and women – you would think the two would be practically identical and you could get away with a generic figure.

Then I noticed that there was a big difference in how the two sexes were presented.  The male figure is standing straight up, lifting a heavy weight.  We see him in a simple front, side, and back view. The female figure, however, is posed in a flirtatious manner, and we see her only from the front and back.  Even when she doesn’t have skin or facial features, she’s still presenting her chest and butt and tossing her hair to the side.  She’s also shown lifting what appear to be very light hand weights.

It’s a problematic message: men go to the gym to become functional and stronger, women come to the gym to become sexually attractive but not TOO strong while they’re at it.

Here they are:

Liz Q. sent us a link to a CBS News video on urinary tract infections (via Jezebel) that included the following anatomical illustration:

Halley M. sent in this image from the Wikipedia entry under “human” and “anatomy.” It presents also presents the female in a decorative, as opposed to illustrative, pose (after the jump because NSFW):

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Our online host, Contexts magazine, is offering some free content, a selection of essays on aging, now through March 15th.  I borrowed the material below from the essay, “Facts and Fictions About an Aging America.”

The average American is aging… and fast.  Advances in public health — especially related to childbirth, infant mortality, and infectious disease — have led to longer lives.   “The result is that death has been permanently shifted from a phenomenon among the young to one of the old.”  This means that the age distribution in the U.S. has shifted from one shaped like a neat pyramid (in 1900), to one shaped kind of like a house (in 2000), to whatever shape that is they’re predicting in 2050:

The great news is that “active life span is increasing faster than total life span.”  That is, even though we live longer, we spend fewer of our years sick or disabled than ever before.  This is called (so you can impress your friends) the “compression of morbidity.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Christopher R. noticed that the sibling sites www.youngwomenshealth.org and www.youngmenshealthsite.org had nearly identical advice for being vegetarian or vegan, except for one small detail.  He writes:

Both pages are generally the same (pretty much word for word), except for the last section on convincing parents to let you be vegetarian. The female version includes the suggestion “read vegetarian cookbooks or nutritional information with your parents and offer to help with the shopping and cooking,” as well as an extra article titled “What are some healthy meals that I can prepare?” I guess the difference between male and female vegetarians is their ability to cook and shop.

Screen shot of the male version:

Screen shot of the female version:

Also, pink and blue!  Of course!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Martin M. pointed out some ironic happenings in Peru that illustrate the complexities of trying to deal with long-term stereotypes and prejudice. Back in November 2009, the Peruvian government officially apologized for discrimination against AfroPeruvians. So far so good–a step toward acknowledging that AfroPeruvians have suffered both economically and socially because of social attitudes and government policies.

But, of course, long-held stereotypes aren’t that easy to change. Peruvians of African descent have often been portrayed as backward, uncivilized, and possibly cannibalistic.

Just a few days after the government’s apology and declaration that poor treatment and negative stereotypes of this ethnic group needed to end, the newspaper El Comercio began advertising their new section on healthy eating with a TV commercial that draws on all the old stereotypes. The video is in Spanish, but I’m pretty sure you’ll get the gist of it, and I describe it below:

El comercio- Los canibales from Pao Ugaz on Vimeo.

What’s going on here? The mother is mad, not because her younger son ate someone, but because he ate someone who was too fat, and thus not good for them to eat. They need to eat less fattening people to improve their health. She warns him about his cholesterol. The caption says, “You eat healthy, you are healthy.”

According to Reportaje al Perú, the newspaper pulled the spot after receiving complaints and apologized for it.

As with any society with a history of widespread, blatantly racist stereotypes and discrimination, attempting to heal racial wounds will be a very long, painful, and difficult process. It’s one thing to officially apologize. It’s another to convince citizens that prejudice and discrimination are unacceptable and that everyone must play a part in ending them.

See also: El Correo ridicules Quechua speakers in government.

Katrin sent along links to visual portrayals of how much money goes, or could go, to various causes.  While sometimes it’s hard to comprehend what a billion, or 300 billion, dollars amounts to, these images give us perspective on just where our priorities lie.  The segments below are clipped from the visuals for the U.K. and the U.S. at Information is Beautiful.

The British example nicely illustrates how little social services like education, police, and welfare cost in the big scheme of things.

It also reveals how easy it would be to wave all of the African countries’ debt to Western countries. Just £128 spread out over the West.  Shoot, that’s the money for just a couple of corporate bailouts.

The U.S. example reveals how costly (just) the Iraq war has been.  All of our spending pales in comparison to that expenditure., with the exception of what we have spent bailing out the U.S. economy.

It also reveals that the U.S.’s regular defense budget is almot enough to feed and educate every child on earth for five years, and/or about the same as the revenues of Walmart and Nintendo combined.

If we diverted the money spent on porn, we could save the Amazon… almost five times over.  For that matter, if we gave our yoga money to the Amazon, that would just about do it.

Bill Gates could have paid for the Beijing Olympics and had money left over.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in an interactive breakdown of the US Budget for 2011.  In the figures below, the sizes of the squares represent the proportion of the budget, but the colors refer to changes from 2010 (dark and light pink = less funding, dark and light green = more).  These figures will give you an idea, but the graphic is interactive and there’s lots more to learn at the site.

See also our posts on how many starving children could be fed by celebrity’s engagement rings and where U.S. tax dollars go.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Nicolé L.-G. sent along a story on Jezebel about a new policy that Whole Foods is offering to its employees.  Whole Foods has heretofore offered a 20% discount to all employees but, from now on, employees who are willing to undergo surveillance of a selection of body measures (blood pressure, cholesterol tests, and BMI calculations) and refrain from nicotine use, can try to qualify for better discounts:

Whole Foods specifies that you are only allowed the discount that correlates with your “worst” measure.  So, even if you’re a non-smoker with 110/70 blood pressure and <150 or LDL <80 cholesterol, if you have a BMI of 30 or higher, you’re stuck at the “Bronze” level.

As has been discussed on this blog, and excellently at Shapely Prose, BMI does not translate directly into “health.”  But Nicolé did a great job offering some additional analysis of this policy.  She wrote:

…according to the popular media’s perception of weight management, eating healthy (whole) foods is one of the best ways to achieve health, so why make it easier (cheaper) for already “healthy” people to continue eating healthy and make it harder (more expensive) for “unhealthy” people to eat better quality food? I wonder how the employees with a healthy (thin) appearance would have felt if the increased discount was given to those with bad cholesterol, higher BMI’s and high blood pressure?!

Then there’s the idea that your employer will now be keeping track of your health information! It supports the idea that our bodies and weight (across genders) are being relegated to the role of either a commodity or liability for a company; useful for aiding or damaging the bottom-line. The way [CEO John] Mackay speaks of the collection of the “bio-marker” data as being cheap or expensive denotes a sense of ownership that the company then has over our physical autonomy that no company has a right to.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

American school children learn all about the U.S. gold rush in the Western part of the country. Goldmining was a speculative, but potentially highly rewarding endeavor and attracted, almost exclusively, adult men. But the entrepreneurship of gold mining (though not mining as wage work) is long gone in the U.S.  Still, gold is in high demand:  “The price of gold, which stood at $271 an ounce on September 10, 2001, hit $1,023 in March 2008, and it may surpass that threshold again” (source).  Who are the gold entrepreneurs today?  Where?  Under what economic conditions do they work?  And with what environmental impact?

I found hints to answers in a recent Boston.com slide show and a National Geographic article (thanks to Allison for her tip in the comments).  While there is still some gold mining in the U.S., there is gold mining, also, in developing countries and all kinds of people participate:

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), there are between 10 million and 15 million so-called artisanal miners around the world, from Mongolia to Brazil. Employing crude methods that have hardly changed in centuries, they produce about 25 percent of the world’s gold and support a total of 100 million people…

Environmentally, gold is especially destructive.  The ratio of gold to earth moved is larger than in any other mining endeavor.

It makes me rethink whether I really want to buy gold (because, you know, I do that constantly, darling, constantly).  In fact, jewelry accounts for two-thirds of the demand.  In the comments, HP reminds me:

Gold (along with even more problematic metals) is found in pretty much all consumer electronics. It’s in your computer, your cellphone, your .mp3 player, your TV/stereo, etc. You’re buying gold all the time already, whether you know it or not.

UPDATE! A reader, Heather Leila, linked to a picture she took of gold prospecting in Suriname (at her own blog).  She writes:

The gold mines aren’t what you are thinking. They aren’t underground, you don’t carry a pick axe and a helmet. The garimpos are where the miners have dammed a creek and created large mud pits. The mud is pumped through a long pipe lined with mercury. The mercury attaches itself to the specks of gold and gets filtered out as the mud is poured into a different pit. The mercury is then burned off, while the gold remains. This is how it was explained to me. From the plane, they are exposed patches of yellow earth dotting the endless forest.

See also our posts on post-oil boom life and gorgeous photos of resource extraction by Edward Burtynsky.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Anna sent us links to this 1967 British health awareness film, “A Cruel Kindness,” about children and obesity:

I was really struck by how little mention fresh fruits and vegetables get in the discussion of a balanced diet at the end of the first segment (about 3:45)–you just need a little of them to get the vitamins you need. Today, of course, much more emphasis would be placed on them, and fats would get much less.

Anna points out that the fault for childhood obesity is placed squarely on mothers, either for overindulging their children out of love or being too busy or lazy to get their kids enough exercise and healthy meals.

And oh, poor Valerie! She’s from a broken home. Destined to be handicapped for life, a social outcast who will grow up to be like Mrs. Brown, abandoned by her husband.

Of course, while our attitudes toward foods have changed to focus on more fruits and vegetables and fewer fats, other elements of the film would fit in with anti-obesity campaigns today with a little updating. We still often focus on individualistic causes of obesity over structural ones (what types of foods governments subsidize, for instance), implicitly blame mothers for not taking the time to cook wholesome meals at home, and treat fatness as a social death sentence. We usually try to sound nicer when doing it, though.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.