Sexual abuse of women and girls — a strange day

My day definitely had a theme, because I saw, heard, or read four different takes on it. The theme was sexual abuse of women and girls, starting with this column by Nicholas Kristof, progressing to the movie “Precious,” then listening to Eve Ensler talk about girls and the challenges they face, finally capping off my unusual day with another movie, “I Can Do Bad All by Myself.”  They all interacted in my mind, leading to the conclusion that it would help to have more discussion of this difficult topic.

Kristof, a New York Times columnist, often writes about abuse of women as it occurs in undeveloped countries; he may even be the go-to authority on the subject.

The movie “Precious” is nominated for best picture this year, and should be a strong contender.  Despite what you may have heard, “Precious” has an optimistic component and goes beyond simply being a horror story (photograph above is of the main character, Precious).

Eve Ensler began a discussion of what it means to be female with the wildly successful “Vagina Monologues,” and continues to champion the cause of openness and full discussion of women’s issues.

Finally, Tyler Perry adds humor to the mix, but nevertheless takes sexual abuse very seriously in “I Can Do Bad All by Myself.”  No academy award nominations for this one, but I liked it.

My hope for this brief post is that you check out some of these four examples, give the topic a lot of thought, and do what you can to make the world a kinder and better place.

Good grief?

Is there a right way to grieve the loss of a loved one? The answer, I believe, is NO, but some ways seem less healthy than others.  For example, grieving in isolation may deny a person much needed social support.  Also, rigidly expecting certain “stages” to occur, or time-lines to be followed, can lead to crippling disappointment and guilt feelings.  For a good update on this topic, see “Good Grief, is there a better way to be bereaved?” in The New Yorker (here).  Also, you may want to check out my earlier posting on this topic (here).

S – - t, the new four-letter word

Why, I wonder, is it still so hard to fix a meal or go to a restaurant and not overdose on salt? This New York Times article, for example, claims one pastrami sandwich (with only two pickles)  at Katz’s deli in NY City has 4,490 mg of sodium.  That’s  at least a two-day dose, going by the recommendation of the FDA that we consume a maximum of 2,300 mg per day, and only 1,500 if we’re at risk for hypertension (which is 69% of the U.S. adult population!).  A large take-out container of Manhattan clam chowder at the Oyster Bar weighed in at a scary 3,100 milligrams.

“Oh, that’s just alarmist thinking,” you say.  “Only some of us are salt-sensitive.”  Well, before you relax too much, read the latest on sodium health risks from the New England Journal of Medicine (here).

What can you learn from your life?

Five years ago I began writing down stories from my life. Actually, the process began earlier, when I tried to write the stories of my parents and grandparents (and even great-grandparents).  Newly retired from the full time practice of psychiatry, I had time to explore old photos, letters and records, and to interview surviving relatives.  I wrote about some of what I discovered and sent it to family members.

But, I realized the one person I knew the most about was myself, mostly in the form of jumbled half-memories.  So, I decided to write my life experience as an autobiographical story, and attempted to discern patterns and lessons for myself, and perhaps for my children and grandchildren.  The more I wrote, the more memories I recovered and, as I tried to put them in story form, the more sense they made.  I saw connections between events, people and feelings I hadn’t appreciated before.

Five years later, I have a 250 page book, with 18 chapters, covering 65 years.  And I have learned a lot.  For example:  I am a product of multiple generations of struggle to survive and thrive, including various traumatic events that affect me still; I suffer from some degree of survivor syndrome, with the attendant guilt and impulse to rescue others; my repeated attempts to rescue loved ones have generally failed, but my career helping others has provided some compensatory satisfaction and redemption; my love for, and attachment to, my wife, children, and grandchildren has been enhanced by the process of self-examination; I am beginning to learn what is most important and meaningful in life; I can celebrate my own courage in facing some formidable obstacles; I hope, now, I can draw on this courage as I face challenges ahead.

Why am I telling you this?  To suggest that you, too, may benefit from writing your life story, even if no one else ever reads it.  Don’t have a clue how to begin?  Here are some resources that have helped me (and there are many others):

An update on the history and current status of memoir as literature:  “But Enough About Me” in The New Yorker.

An inspiring book about a way to conceptualize your life:  The Writer’s Journey

Two practical books on how to start your own memoir:

Your Life as Story

Writing Life Stories

Writing as a way of self-healing:  Writing as a Way of Healing

How to write funny stuff about your life:  What Are You Laughing At?

A website containing useful articles and tips about memoir writing (type “memoir” in the site’s search box):  Guide to Literary Agents Blog

Big blue creatures with no body fat

I liked the movie Avatar (in 3D); even saw it twice. It is an amazing technical and visual experience and very well cast. Some of the story elements, such as the paraplegic hero and the way the avatars and their human operators work, are really clever. I’d see it again.

However, the story does have a “cringe factor” and this column by Brooks sums it up well:

January 8, 2010

Op-Ed Columnist

NYTimes.com

The Messiah Complex

By DAVID BROOKS

Every age produces its own sort of fables, and our age seems to have produced The White Messiah fable.

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Avid moviegoers will remember “A Man Called Horse,” which began to establish the pattern, and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” More people will have seen “Dances With Wolves” or “The Last Samurai.”

Kids have been given their own pure versions of the fable, like “Pocahontas” and “FernGully.”

It’s a pretty serviceable formula. Once a director selects the White Messiah fable, he or she doesn’t have to waste time explaining the plot because everybody knows roughly what’s going to happen.

The formula also gives movies a little socially conscious allure. Audiences like it because it is so environmentally sensitive. Academy Award voters like it because it is so multiculturally aware. Critics like it because the formula inevitably involves the loincloth-clad good guys sticking it to the military-industrial complex.

Yet of all the directors who have used versions of the White Messiah formula over the years, no one has done so with as much exuberance as James Cameron in “Avatar.”

“Avatar” is a racial fantasy par excellence. The hero is a white former Marine who is adrift in his civilization. He ends up working with a giant corporation and flies through space to help plunder the environment of a pristine planet and displace its peace-loving natives.

The peace-loving natives — compiled from a mélange of Native American, African, Vietnamese, Iraqi and other cultural fragments — are like the peace-loving natives you’ve seen in a hundred other movies. They’re tall, muscular and admirably slender. They walk around nearly naked. They are phenomenal athletes and pretty good singers and dancers.

The white guy notices that the peace-loving natives are much cooler than the greedy corporate tools and the bloodthirsty U.S. military types he came over with. He goes to live with the natives, and, in short order, he’s the most awesome member of their tribe. He has sex with their hottest babe. He learns to jump through the jungle and ride horses. It turns out that he’s even got more guts and athletic prowess than they do. He flies the big red bird that no one in generations has been able to master.

Along the way, he has his consciousness raised. The peace-loving natives are at one with nature, and even have a fiber-optic cable sticking out of their bodies that they can plug into horses and trees, which is like Horse Whispering without the wireless technology. Because they are not corrupted by things like literacy, cellphones and blockbuster movies, they have deep and tranquil souls.

The natives help the white guy discover that he, too, has a deep and tranquil soul.

The natives have hot bodies and perfect ecological sensibilities, but they are natural creatures, not history-making ones. When the military-industrial complex comes in to strip mine their homes, they need a White Messiah to lead and inspire the defense.

Our hero leaps in, with the help of a pack of dinosaurs summoned by Mother Earth. As he and his fellow freedom fighters kill wave after wave of Marines or former Marines or whatever they are, he achieves the ultimate prize: He is accepted by the natives and can spend the rest of his life in their excellent culture.

Cameron’s handling of the White Messiah fable is not the reason “Avatar” is such a huge global hit. As John Podhoretz wrote in The Weekly Standard, “Cameron has simply used these familiar bromides as shorthand to give his special-effects spectacular some resonance.” The plotline gives global audiences a chance to see American troops get killed. It offers useful hooks on which McDonald’s and other corporations can hang their tie-in campaigns.

Still, would it be totally annoying to point out that the whole White Messiah fable, especially as Cameron applies it, is kind of offensive?

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains.

Eating tortured sick contaminated animals

If you eat meat (or dairy products), there is a lot you can do to minimize the damage to yourself, your family, the planet and the animal. A new book on this subject (Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer) has gotten a lot of attention, and I have included some key links below.

Despite some controversy, there is widespread agreement that meat produced by factory farms causes a lot of problems, such as astounding energy inefficiency, vast amounts of toxic waste, production of antibiotic-resistant microbes that pose a threat to us, severe pollution, and shocking cruelty and suffering of animals on a massive scale.

And, there is growing evidence that red meat (especially beef, also pork) is unhealthy (see The Real Cost of Red Meat: does it boost your risk of cancer, heart disease, & diabetes?).

What can we do about it? The best answer is simple: Cut back on meat consumption, especially red meat. Even a small decrease will help. And, if you decide to include meat in your diet, at least try to buy meat (and dairy) raised on sustainable non-factory farms. Yes, it will cost more, but you can offset the increase in cost by just eating less meat. Go for quality over quantity.

Here are very interesting and helpful resources to check out:

• Food choices.
• Movie.
• NPR interview with Jonathan Safran Foer.
• New Yorker article.
• Excerpt from Eating Animals.
• Additional resources.
• Lessmeatatarianism and flexitarianism.

In closing, here is a quote from Jonathan Safran Foer:

Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” and orders it. The other says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/09/091109crbo_books_kolbert#ixzz0XQ7IpY0d

Lose weight with your iPhone

If you own an iPhone (or iPod Touch), this simple program will help you maintain or lose weight, if that is your goal. Even if you don’t own one of these devices, the basic approach of this program may give you some good ideas. David Pogue of the New York Times writes:

Lose It! This beautifully designed weight-loss app has an astounding number of followers, if the outpouring of enthusiasm on Twitter is any indication. You tap to record everything you eat. It’s actually kind of fun, because the program contains every food item you can imagine, including brand-name packaged food and restaurant-chain menus. For each one, the app lists the complete nutritional information.

You also indicate what exercise you get each day, using a similarly complete list of activities. Finally, you tap in your weight each day. Probably because the app focuses you so well on staying true to your goals, its fans say it truly works. (Free)

You may read the New York Times article here. And you can download the app and read more about it here.

The computing “cloud” – an update

One year ago I posted on my transition from using a Palm handheld to using a Blackberry Curve (here) — this is a follow-up. This will be a very short post, but the main point is that I am happy with the transition. “Cloud computing” remains somewhat controversial, but has been widely accepted as inevitable. I love it.

Now, when I want to save a tidbit of information (such as medical information, travel plans, online purchases, chapters of my book, etc etc) all I do is post the tidbit in “the cloud” and it is saved for me. The best part about this is it is available to me on my iMac, my PC laptop, or any other computer I happen to have in front of me, including my smart-phone (although I would need to get a newer model to get full functionality).

What I want to share with you now is that the most amazing software for saving these tidbits in the cloud is a free program called Evernote. Check out their site for more information (here). I am in no way associated with that company, except as a customer (I upgraded to the premium version which is not free).

By the way, I have not posted lately because I am writing another book (more about that much later).

Ending overeating

A very important new book (The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler) accurately describes major factors contributing to the obesity epidemic: cleverly formulated manufactured food designed to seduce us into overeating, addictive ingredients (salt, sugar and fat) which act like nicotine in cigarettes to keep us coming back for more, a profit driven system of marketing and government subsidies which works against our best interests, and the loss of boundaries limiting when and how much we eat. It is indeed frightening to think that a 2-year-old’s appetite “knows” to shut down when enough calories have been consumed, but by the time that child is four (in our culture) there is often a loss of that self-control mechanism.

Kessler’s solutions include re-training our minds to devalue unhealthy processed foods loaded with the Big Three (salt, sugar, fat); reforming our policies and practices which encourage this vicious cycle; and doing much more to educate people as to what they are consuming (such as requiring nutritional information in restaurants).

I agree with all this, but take issue with some of the concepts Kessler promotes. My main complaint is he oversimplifies the issue of food containing salt, sugar and fat by using an addiction model. Too much of these ingredients is indeed unhealthy, but a simple addiction model will not work.

Another problem is his use of the term “real food” (see NPR interview) which is a vague concept, at best. Many seemingly real foods contain salt, sugar and fat (either naturally, or because of the way they are produced), and not all “manufactured” foods are bad (e.g., some fish farmed in a sustainable way are better for us than some “wild-caught” fish). I can buy a chicken that has been doctored with added salt and fat, or I can buy one (usually smaller and more expensive) which has been grown almost organically. To the average consumer, both seem “real.” Also, I can buy “sea salt” and “unrefined real sugar” and think I am getting something healthier than standard table salt and corn syrup, but the bottom line (sodium and calories) may be exactly the same.

Finally, he promotes a black vs. white dichotomy between a disease-like state we cannot directly control (“conditioned hypereating”) and old fashioned willpower, telling us “it is not our fault” that we overeat. Fault, per se, may not be the issue; rather, we should learn ways to increase our resistance to external cues and marketing, educate ourselves about nutrition and portion size, and practice coping skills to enhance self-regulation. I have written about this at length elsewhere.

Learning self-control and delay of gratification

A now classic psychology experiment from the late 1960s demonstrated that four-year-old children who were able to delay the gratification of eating a marshmallow became more successful in later years than children who could not exercise as much self-control. In an update of the research on this topic, Jonah Lehrer (writing in The New Yorker recently) quotes the original researcher and many others discussing how we learn to control our brains when it comes to resisting temptation and applying ourselves to a task (such as controlling what we eat or exercising more).

The marshmallow researcher, Walter Mischel, says, “Once you realize that willpower is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

Teaching children (and adults) simple ways to master their thoughts and behavior (through “strategic allocation of attention”) may be a crucial ingredient in increasing success in many activities.  For example, the children who were successful in resisting the marshmallow temptation

distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

Mischel and other researchers are very interested in studying the people who have become “high-delaying adults” (exercising self-control) even though, as children, they failed the marshmallow test.

Some researchers (e.g., John Jonides at University of Michigan, and others) are focusing on the exact locations and functions in the brain associated with self-control and delay of gratification:

Yale University researchers found that delaying gratification involves an area of the brain, the anterior prefrontal cortex, that is known to be involved in abstract problem-solving and keeping track of goals.  … The brain scan findings from 103 subjects suggest that delaying gratification involves the ability to imagine a future event clearly, said Jeremy Gray, a Yale psychology professor and coauthor of the study in the September [2008] edition of the journal Psychological Science. You need “a sort of ‘far-sightedness,’ to put it in a single word,” he said. [reference]

Mischel, the original marshmallow researcher, adds:

The key to delaying gratification may lie in the ability to “cool the hot stimulus,” he said in a telephone interview.

Over and over, research is showing that the trick is to shift activity from “hot,” more primitive areas deep in the brain to “cool,” more rational areas mainly in the higher centers of the brain, he said.

There are many ways to cool a hot stimulus, said Mischel, who is president of the Association for Psychological Science. Say you are determined to resist the chocolate cake at a restaurant. You must distract yourself from the waiter’s dessert tray. You can also focus on long-term consequences and make them “hot” – by vividly imagining your future tummy and hip bulges – or think of the cake in the cooler abstract, as a thing that will make you fat and clog your arteries.

In the marshmallow test, he said, “the same child who can’t wait a minute if they’re thinking about how yummy and chewy the marshmallow is can wait for 20 minutes if they’re thinking of the marshmallow as being puffy like a cotton ball or like a cloud floating in the sky.” [reference]

A large-scale study is now underway, involving hundreds of schoolchildren in Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York City, to see if self-control skills can be taught.

More resources:

• watch a brief video of the marshmallow test;
• listen to a Public Radio discussion of the New Yorker article (45 min.);
• check out sayyestono.org, an organization devoted to increasing self-discipline in children;
• read the article in The New Yorker and this Boston Globe article.
• in one recent study, obese women were found to have less ability to delay gratification than obese men and normal-weight people.