Shapely Prose

Jessica’s superbusy and didn’t get a chance to post this on Feministing yesterday, so I wanted to share something else I wrote from the SisterSong conference:

Wow. Dr. Joycelyn Elders is so fucking cool.

For the young’uns around here, in 1993, she became the first African-American and second woman U.S. Surgeon General. After she publicly (at a UN conference on AIDS) stated that masturbation “is a part of human sexuality” and “perhaps should be taught” (as, you know, a healthy alternative to the kinds of sex that transmit disease and cause pregnancy — go figure) the wingnuts went so insane that Clinton asked for her resignation.

She’s 74 years old now, and as she puts it, “I’m not agin’, I’m sagin’.” I don’t even know where to begin covering everything she just said as today’s keynote speaker.

How ’bout a few — or several — quotes of the day?

“We’re sexual beings from the time we’re born until we die, and we need to make sure we understand our sexuality and realize that sex is about more than procreation.”

“If men went through menopause, we’d know everything about it, but we still don’t even know if we should be taking hormones.”

“I want every child that’s born in the world to be planned and wanted.”

“People tell me girls want to have babies so they can get a welfare check — have you ever known anybody to get rich on a welfare check?”

“If you say children wouldn’t know anything about masturbation on their own, you’ve never changed a little boy’s diaper.”

“If you can’t control your reproduction, you can’t control your life.”

On why we should be focused on promoting contraception: “I never knew a woman who needed an abortion who wasn’t already pregnant. Let’s get real.”

On people who say condoms aren’t 100% reliable: “Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.”

On politicians who promote abstinence-only education: “They are boycotting common sense.”

And, finally (on fighting for justice): “It’s like dancing with a bear. When you’re dancing with a bear, you can’t get tired and sit down. You have to wait for the bear to get tired.”

She got a standing ovation, twice.

However, since I’m posting this here now, I’ll add that Elders really (albeit only briefly) disappointed me toward the end. Throughout her speech, she spoke movingly about how poor children and children of color are at risk in myriad ways, and I was with her right up until she listed obesity as a danger! to! our! children!

That’s a toughie; poor people and some people of color are more likely to be fat than middle class or wealthy people, and white or Asian people. It’s absolutely worth looking into the reasons for that. The problem is, at this point, we still really have no idea what the reasons might be. Everything from the cost of fresh fruit to the stress of living in poverty has been thrown out there as a possible explanation, but no one’s established causation.

And until someone does, I’m putting my money on genes. I noticed in The Obesity Myth, when Paul Campos talks about studies showing that people in the “overweight” and even “obese” BMI categories are just as healthy as (if not healthier than), people in the “healthy” weight category, he mentions at least one study that shows that’s even more true for African-Americans — i.e., African-Americans can remain healthy at even higher BMIs (well into the “obese” range) than white people. (He didn’t report on studies of non-black or white populations in this context, if there are any.) Campos doesn’t make this connection explicitly, but it seems to me that if a group of people is predisposed toward higher weights and predisposed toward being perfectly healthy at higher weights, um, maybe they’re just supposed to have higher weights? Maybe the “obesity crisis” is even bullshittier when we’re talking about black kids than white kids? And the same might very well be true of Latinos, if anybody studied them? You think?

But that still doesn’t completely explain the strong correlation between poverty and fatness, which might very well be a matter of poor nutrition, stress, and/or a whole bunch of other things. And I would very much like to see poor nutrition among poor kids addressed seriously– I’d just like to see it framed in terms of nutrition, rather than weight. Every kid deserves access to good food; there are certainly lots of kids in this country who don’t have that access; and they are disproportionately children of color. I’m right with Elders there. Problem is, if every kid did have access to plenty of fresh, nutritious food — and safe spaces to exercise, the whole nine yards — many of them would still be fat. And the fat kids would still almost certainly be disproportionately children of color.

Still, although I’ve gone on at length here, that was really only a minor quibble. Overall, Elders was frickin’ AMAZING. I was only 19 and not all that politically engaged when she got shitcanned as Surgeon General, and I was outraged when I heard about it, but I didn’t bother learning anything else about her at the time. I had no idea how astonishingly smart she was, how much she’d accomplished (I mean, aside from becoming Surgeon General at all), or that she speaks like the best kind of preacher — with passion, conviction, and (as you see above) loads of brilliant one-liners that anyone can understand and repeat. I didn’t realize what a loss it really was to have her removed from a position of national prominence. Now, having seen her speak, I realize it was huge.