A coworker passed this essay along to me today and I thought it was incredibly interesting and worth sharing, given my views on both sex and nutrition. It’s an extremely long essay, so I forgive you if you don’t read the whole thing, but it does bring up a couple of interesting things that I had not thought about until reading it.

The essay is about how we place normative judgments on food and sex, and specifically how these normative judgments are often in opposition with each other, in addition to having essentially flipped over the last 50 or so years for a large group of people. So to summarize:

-          In the 50s, people were generally very laissez-faire about food, pretty much saying that people could eat whatever they wanted

-          In the 50s, people were generally very judgmental with regards to sexual activity

-          Today, people are generally very judgmental with regards to diet, particularly with the popularity of veganism

-          Today, people are generally very laissez-faire about sex, as long as you’re not causing physical or emotional damage to anyone

-          Today, people who tend to be more judgmental with regard to diet also tend to be more laissez-faire with regard to sex

I definitely fall into the category of someone who is very laissez-faire about sex but at the same time relatively judgmental about food, as would someone like Dream or Gary Taubes or Drew Baye. This is hypocritical in a lot of ways now that I think about it, and probably something I should work on. The thing is, I’ve had some serious medical problems over the course of my life, all of which were likely associated with the fact that I ate a diet very high in refined carbohydrate. I don’t really eat any of those things anymore, since I now know better, but pretty much everyone else I know does, even people who are extremely health conscious. There is a lot of really horrible information out there with regards to both nutrition and exercise, and so armed with the knowledge that I now have, it’s very hard for me to sit on the sidelines and watch people make these mistakes to their peril.

The article goes on to talk about how people justify their nutritional judgmentalism with scientific research, but tend to ignore the scientific research on the negative impacts of sexual freedom. I would argue that this is in fact justified, but this article definitely did get the wheels turning.

Judging individuals is something that I try to avoid as much as possible, whether it’s about sex or diet or anything else. If someone does something that makes them happy and doesn’t harm anyone else, more power to them. My issue is more with the AHA and the WHO and the FDA who are recommending diets to people that are extremely bad for them. It is these recommendations that are fucking up people’s lives. People who try to be health conscious, and live a diminished quality of life as a result, yet don’t get the effects that they are looking for. Much of these policies also place blame on people by attacking one’s will power and value as a human being, when in the face of not knowing any better it’s really not their fault.

This model of judgmentalism doesn’t extend to sex. When it comes down to it, adults are responsible for their own happiness. Happiness is about managing expectations and working on one’s own sense of identity and sense of self. Sexual promiscuity doesn’t in and of itself cause unhappiness. There may be some correlation between marriage and health, happiness, emotional stability of children etc, but there is no causation there. There are plenty of people who grew up in divorced households or live a sexually promiscuous existence and are very happy and healthy.

Juxtapose this with nutrition, where there is a ridiculous amount of evidence to suggest that carbohydrates and legumes CAUSE cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and pretty much every other modern disease out there. Given that educated opinion, which given the overwhelming evidence in favor of this view is borderline fact, it’s an easy argument to make that the externalities associated with diet far outweigh the externalities of sexual promiscuity and should be subject to far more scrutiny as a result. I feel like I had a lot more to say about this article, but I’ve sort of run out of steam on it, so I’d love to hear what you guys think on the subject of judgmentalism with regards to sex and nutrition and the way in which attitudes toward these things have essentially reversed themselves.

Tags: Add new tag, Diet, Gary Taubes, Health, Heart disease, Nutrition

Posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 6:17 pm