Word: glassner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...perfect physique. Professor Barsky's book, Worried Sick: Our Troubled Quest for Wellness (Little, Brown; 266 pages; $17.95), charges that Americans "don't live exuberantly but apprehensively, as if our bodies are dormant adversaries, programmed for betrayal at any moment." Another broadside comes from University of Connecticut Sociologist Barry Glassner in Bodies: Why We Look the Way We Do (And How We Feel About It) (Putnam; 288 pages; $19.95). Glassner takes America to task for creating a culture in which people are perpetually dissatisfied with the way they look and miserable about the way they feel. "All our efforts...
Both Barsky and Glassner are quick to point out that they do not deride the value of healthy living, only the obsessive quality that now surrounds staying fat-free and well. "Because health has become synonymous with overall well- being, it has become an end in itself, a paramount aim of life," writes Barsky. In fact, keeping fit has become "quasi-religious" for some Americans, says Boston University Sociologist Peter Berger. With evangelistic fervor, Body-Building Impresario Jack La Lanne, 73, whose name adorns 60 health clubs on the East and West coasts, declares, "When you quit exercising...
What these acolytes are really seeking is moral purity, says Glassner. Proper eating and exercise, he writes, have become "moral acts." Such is the paranoia about staying well that, in his view, Americans have reverted to "some of the least appealing beliefs found in so-called primitive societies." Illness, for example, is viewed not as a natural process but the result of immoral action. Explains Glassner: "We suspect the illness was the person's own fault: he or she should have exercised or eaten properly...
...Glassner argues that Americans have become so fixated on their bodies because they feel they have little control of the world around them. They are constantly bombarded by news reports of carcinogens and pesticides in food, of asbestos fibers falling from ceilings, of pollutants in their tap water. "The body has always been a medium for expressing attitudes toward the world," says Jonathan Moreno, a medical ethicist at George Washington University, and today's obsession with healthy bodies is no different. "If our bodies are perfectible, then the world itself should also be," he says. "People who exercise want...
...Glassner also believes Americans "must find other, more realistic options" to this "tyranny of perfection." He does, however, see some hope in the notion that people are beginning to discover that what they once thought of as the ideal body isn't quite so ideal after all. Instead, "it stands not only for beauty and health," he says, "but also for false hopes and prejudices." Moreover, he notes, "that knowledge may be disheartening at first, but it also frees us -- to exercise and eat in ways that match our own needs rather than the dictates of the latest...