Another Week Ends: Body Positivity Guilt, Middle-East Shibboleths, Steve Albini's Repentance, and the Freedom of the Present

1. Wow, this first one. Over at the Cut Samhita Mukhopadhyay asks “So Was Body Positivity ‘All a Big Lie’?” As a self-described feminist writer and committed proponent of body positivity, Mukhopadhyay doesn’t know what to make of the fact that she just spent a year taking the weight-loss drug Mounjaro — and is worried about regaining weight now that she’s off it. She traces the rise of body positivity more generally, wrestling with what the advent of these drugs means for those who’ve devoted years to “loving my body at any size.” For our purposes, what struck me was how the movement began as a way of extending love and dignity to obese people (grace) but appears to have morphed into a fear-inducing enforcer of proper attitudes (law). Or you might say, the pronouncement that you’re allowed to feel okay and even good about yourself at any weight became a law that you must, at all times, or else. But don’t take my word for it:

As the phrase [“body positivity”] spread in popularity, it broadened the idea of fat acceptance to include various body types, giving way to “healthy at any size.” More recently, body positivity has lived on through hashtags — such as #loveyourbody, #allbodiesarebeautiful, #effyourbeautystandards, #bopo, and #curvygirls — and body-positive influencers who have amassed large followings, taken on brand deals, and have seemingly disrupted everything from fashion to lingerie to swimwear.

Over the past few months, some of the conversations surrounding drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro have focused on the plus-size influencers who’ve elected to go on one of these drugs — and what they owe their followers when they decide to change their bodies. Model Gabriella Athena Halikas revealed to NBC News that when her doctor suggested she go on Ozempic to manage symptoms of PCOS, she was worried about disappointing her followers. In January, influencer Rosey Blair told her followers in an Instagram caption that she was “unashamed to say” she’d been on Mounjaro for a year after previously experiencing ire from “certain people in the Body Positive community.” The influencer Blair wrote on Instagram in March that she had been terrified to come forward about wanting to lose weight because of the blowback from her community. “The corner of body positivity that I was affiliated with was against intentional weight loss of any kind,” she wrote.

Body positivity fails if we use it as an excuse for conjuring up more tools to judge ourselves and hold each other to another set of untenable standards.

The perils of groupthink and purity culture are nothing new, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less discouraging when movements founded upon understanding and acceptance show themselves to be the opposite.

2. Zooming out from the mercilessness Mukhopadhyay describes, Leah Libresco Sargeant explores how it is that both sides of our public discourse right now feel not just aggrieved but threatened. She offered some sage insights on what she terms our “Mutual Endangerment Society” in Comment:

In a late 2023 poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, more than a third of Americans agreed with the statement “Because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” Republicans were more likely to agree (48 percent) than Democrats (29 percent), but neither proportion was small. In the same poll, majorities of Democrats (59 percent) and Republicans (90 percent) both said the country was going in the wrong direction. It’s pretty normal for the party out of power to feel that way, so it’s the despair of the Democrats that’s particularly notable.

But I think the two expectations of victory and defeat have something in common — they both look forward to a future where persuasion will be unnecessary. Either your enemies will be so marginalized that there’s no reason you have to cater to their foolishness, or they’ll be so dominant that reasoned discourse will be unequal to a situation that demands active, violent self-defence. In both cases, there’s the small relief that you no longer have to talk to those people.

A Christian point of view requires us to give up the desire to finally, finally be free of our obligations to our neighbour. The majority of us (at least so far) might be reluctant to pick up the rock ourselves as Cain did, but many of us would still react with relief when our neighbour is reduced rather than redeemed, and we can say we do not know where they are, nor do we care. The only way to be permanently severed from the people we hate or fear is for them or us to go to hell, and we are not permitted to pray for their destruction (or our own).

One might go so far to say that the Christian understanding of one’s neighbor is a bulwark against the kind of tribalism that undermines democracy, though I’ll leave such things to the political theorists out there. But I can’t imagine many people on the far ends of the political spectrum have much love for their enemies. The judgments of others come far more naturally than the risk of generosity.

3. Let’s stay with the hot button stuff for a moment longer. You don’t have to live in a university town to be aware of how the Israel/Palestine protests on our nation’s campuses have been heating up. But this past week here in Cville we witnessed the police clashing with students, and none of it was un-concerning. Like you, I’ve been scanning the net for something to help me wrap my brain around the many, many dynamics at play. Cue Zadie Smith and the remarkable essay she contributed to the New Yorker entitled “Shibboleth” on the role of words in the campus protests. It shed some light for yours truly, expounding a thoroughly #lowanthropology point of view that doesn’t sacrifice moral urgency or collapse into apathy or cynicism. It’s also, as you might imagine, extraordinarily well written:

There are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken (river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people — but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that … And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us — while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein — by my stating of a position — you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead … Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.

4. I’ve adorned this weekender with nothing but videos of music ~~produced~~ recorded by Steve Albini, who died this week of a heart attack at age 61. His passing has provoked more public mourning and reflection than one might expect from a guy who never fronted a household-name rock band. He was best known as the producer of Nirvana’s legendary In Utero album. For music-obsessed children of the 90s like yours truly, though, Albini was a whole lot more than that: basically the final boss of Artistic Integrity for a generation anxious about “selling out.” He was Principled-with-a-capital-P and wasn’t afraid to let you know where and who was falling short. I can’t think of a more esteemed (feared?) Lawgiver of 90s (creative) Purity. I wrote about it a little in my book A Mess of Help, which I thought I’d reprint here:

We who considered ourselves the diehard Nirvana fans adopted In Utero as an identity marker when it first came out. You could judge someone’s cred by whether or not they ‘got it’. The truer the fan, the more caustic their favorite track. I’m embarrassed to admit that I once claimed “Milk It” was my favorite. (Note: “Milk It” is no one’s favorite.) The record was consciously set up to weed out the ‘wrong’ kind of fans, i.e., those who merely liked the songs but didn’t grasp the full essence of the band, aesthetic, political, or otherwise. To convince the band to go into the studio with him, Albini composed something of a manifesto:

‘I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence … Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm … Some people in my position would expect an increase in business after being associated with your band. I, however, already have more work than I can handle, and frankly, the kind of people such superficialities will attract are not people I want to work with.’

Geeeez. The purity of purpose behind the whole thing seems pretty at odds with Cobain’s sarcasm, but this was the 90s, and superficiality — a synonym for commercialism — was taken very seriously, an unforgivable sin if ever there was one.”

So you can understand why I was so touched to read Jeremy Gordon’s obit in the Atlantic, “Steve Albini Was Proof You Can Change.” Apparently Albini had not only mellowed, but become almost repentant of the judgmentalism of his youth. I never in a million years thought I’d use the word “grace” in conjunction with Steve Albini, but it popped into mind when I read the final line below:

Over the years, he’d become infamous for saying a tremendous number of insulting things about other people, including bands he’d worked with. (“Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings,” he once wrote about the Pixies.)

In recent years, Albini had begun to soften some of his adversarial instincts, at least in public. He still got worked up about bands he hated (especially Steely Dan) — but he had explicitly apologized for the numerous offensive things he’d said throughout his life, which included using racial slurs and denigrating women. In the past, Albini had always claimed that his offensiveness was attached to some underlying principle, no matter how arbitrary it seemed to others, but he’d since become suspicious of the people who reveled in offensiveness for its own sake. … If someone with his cutting reputation could be this reflective, then perhaps nobody else had an excuse for staying rude.

Earlier in his career, he had been more insistent about how a record should sound, and had freely offered his opinions in the studio. Over time, he sloughed off this tendency and became more comfortable with recording musicians as they were and as they wanted to be.

5. In Humor, the Hard Times made me chuckle with the acceleration-y “Quick Reminder That If Your New Song Doesn’t Outperform Your Last One, Then It’s Garbage And You’re Trending Towards Irrelevancy.” Sub out Song for Book (or Sermon, or Conference, or Blogpost), and let’s just say it’s much less funny. Elsewhere, Reductress gave us “Woman Makes Most of Beautiful Day by Bringing Her Work Laptop Outside” and McSweeney’s produced a bonafide classic with “Days of the Week, Redefined for Parents.” But my personal favorite — and listeners to the Brothers Zahl podcast (Season 3 out in June!) will know why — is the Onion’s “Youngest Brother’s Reputation Among Family Still Just The One Who Threw Scissors At Mom“:

“Regardless of anything Denny may have said or done since, to us he’ll always be the kid who, out of nowhere, just hurled a sharp object at my mother’s head,” said sister Kaitlyn McKee, recalling the 1997 incident in which Dennis, now a successful attorney who is married and raising two kids of his own, grabbed a pair of safety scissors, threw them as hard as he could, and hit their mother, Deborah McKee, in the face.

6. Finally, on the tech front, Freddie deBoer wields his significant critical powers at “The Modern Curse of Overoptimization,” inspiring a worthy follow-up on Alan Noble’s substack, “Overoptimization as the Natural Consequence of Technique.” Thankfully, the blowback to Apple’s new ad suggests that more and more people share their skepticism about the flattening of all things for the sake of efficiency. But my favorite musing on technology this week comes from Kelsi Klembara over on 1517, “Forever Elsewhere,” in which she fesses up to the two-to-three screen experience we call ‘watching tv’ these days — and what it might mean from a theological and devotional standpoint. I dare say her conclusion (and the amazing Bayer quote!) speaks to Zadie’s subject as well:

The more I’ve thought about it, the more the phrase “We are forever elsewhere” seems like the perfect phrase to not only describe our increasingly digital age but also the perfect phrase for the innate condition of the human heart that has been with us since the garden.

The phrase describes what I feel when I find myself browsing the home listings on real estate apps for houses, I do not need nor can afford. It has popped into my head as I play with my children, only to reach for my phone and say, “Just one second, let me respond,” with my head bowed. It captures our modern obsession with our pursuits of progress that continue to be just out of our reach. It might as well be a tagline for all the times people throughout history have promised that ascent to some hidden meaning or knowledge about the universe was all we needed to overcome our humanity. It’s a phrase that captures the very essence of human discontent in the here and now.

We struggle with the pull to be “forever elsewhere” because until Jesus returns, being here will always come with discomfort, pain, struggle, the effects of sin, and sin itself. Our hearts and the devil deceive us into believing that accessing elsewhere, fleeing the present, is the only thing that will save us from being here. We are lost sheep — constantly wandering off into the past and the future, determined with the former that we can’t escape the past or we can remake it or with the latter, that progress is just around the corner. But while the devil works to keep us enslaved to our guilt or anxiety, our good Shepherd returns us again and again to his goodness which is ours right now, in the present.

“Christians are human beings who live in the present because they have been delivered from the guilt of the past and the fear of the future. In the end they themselves are not responsible for the past or for the future: they are therefore now, in the present, free and ‘without care’ (1 Cor. 7:3if),” says theologian Oswald Bayer.