Dietetic Capitalism

William E. Connolly

Author of Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy Under Trumpism (2017)

On a scintillating panel several years ago, Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig and Melissa Orlie promulgated the health and political virtues of the slow food movement at an American Political Science Convention. One rump group in the room would have none of it. Such a movement, they insisted, is inherently class based. It speaks only to the upper middle class and the rich who can afford such luxuries of time and expense.

The critics were right about a class dimension of this phenomenon, wrong to the extent they thought the situation does not require a radical class response. It is expensive today to enjoy slow, organic foods that enrich the microbial diversity of the gut, encourage brain health, and protect people on several health fronts. But that is because diet exploitation joins other modes of class/race exploitation in several capitalist societies. Dietetic Capitalism joins the stratification of work, consumption practices, retirement opportunities, housing possibilities, pollution, susceptibility to military duty, longevity, and sources of stress. It even helps to solidify them.

I grew up in a Midwest, working class family before fast food became pervasive and two bread winners were so dominant. We did eat too many potato chips and too much ice cream. We also loved hot dogs, but only as special treats. The working class had not yet succumbed to the fast food industry that now afflicts the health of so many in that class and elsewhere.  Additives of sugar and fat were less pervasive; livestock were less subjected to corn feeding and closed feeding pens, antibiotics were thus less needed; obesity was less common; and several other sicknesses were less frequent. It was an unhealthy diet, certainly, but still a step or two above a fast food diet. Whenever as a teen I was invited to my Italian girlfriend’s upscale house for dinner, olive oil, fish, tomato sauces, fresh garlic, red wine and good cuts of meat were on the menu. I spent evenings there often, for several good reasons.

The recent book by Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection (2016) gives the lie to critics of slow, healthy food diets. Mayer is not himself focused on the class composition of Dietetic Capitalism, but his review of recent revolutions in neuroscience do carry implications for that issue on every page.  The older neuroscience of the brain as a self-contained computer is on life support. More recent versions, which concentrate on intersections between multiple body, brain culture processes, are undergoing another revamping too. The new scientists often enough appreciate the reality of creative thinking and judgment.

The more we learn about the role of the dense neuronal system in the gut, its numerous imbrications with the gut microbiome, and the complex communications between both of them and brain regions in the head, the more the subtlety of relations between ingestion, digestion, microbial composition, neuronal systems, moods, thinking, and health come to the fore. One focus in the book is on the two way communications between the neuronal system in the gut, the vagus nerve, and  blood pathways for hormones of numerous sorts from the gut. Gut bacteria and the hormones they produce infiltrate moods, appetites, susceptibility to disease, brain health, and vulnerability to inflammation of the immune system. The food we eat and digest affects the quality of the microbiome; its specific composition then feeds back into the character of the food it seeks. The gut is a complex source of desires, feelings and prejudgments.

 

Here are just a few things Mayer says:

• "in recent years the gut-brain axis has taken center stage. This shift can be largely attributed to the exponential rise in knowledge and data about the bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses that live inside the gut..."(p. 14)
• benefits of microbiota for health: "Some of the best documented benefits include assistance in the digestion of food components our guts cannot handle by themselves, regulation of our bodies’ metabolism, processing and detoxifying dangerous chemicals,..regulation of the immune system, and prevention of invasion by dangerous pathogens." (p. 15)
• immunity and its inflammations. "In addition to the gut-brain communication channel involving the endocrine cells, there is another system involving our gut-based immune cells and the inflammatory molecules these immune cells produce., the so-called cytokines." (p. 62)
• the hidden mood/salience system: "most of the time the salience system operates below the level of conscious awareness. Trillions of sensory signals rise up from your gut every day and are processed in your brain’s salience network. They remain content to..percolate into your subconscious." (p. 173)
• transmission of the effects of bad diet to the next generation: "If the human genome.. is the  book of life, then a brain cell, a liver cell and a heart cell each reads different sections of the book. Epigenetic tags are the bookmarks..that tell a brain cell to read one passage of the book and a liver cell to read  another." (p. 120)
• "Epigenetics violated everything modern biologists had learned about inheritance." (p. 121)

The microbiome begins to establish its specific composition in the mother’s womb, continues to do so dramatically for three years, collects “chemical tags” that propel some of these tendencies to the next generation, and is susceptible to further change by the quality of food ingested and stresses adults face. It can contribute to later bouts of depression, diabetes, Irritable Bowl Syndrome, obesity, Parkinson’s, Dementia, immune disorders, cancer, and probably Alzheimer’s when it is not composed in healthy ways. Our moods and cognitive powers partly flow from interchanges between numerous micro-agents moving back and forth between the brain in the head and the gut system, through both the vagus nerve and the blood system. Olfactory sensors on numerous intercommunicating organs play roles of importance as well. Note, too, how such processes do not have to be construed as blind determinants of thinking and judgment; they can be read as micro-agentic participants in thinking, mood and judgment.  A conversation between Mayer and Alfred North Whitehead could be very illuminating in this respect, since the latter construes such processes to be micro-agents.

Mayer, after probing new research into microbiome, brain and health relations, celebrates a Mediterranean diet high in plant foods, chicken and fish, olive oil, nuts, whole grains, tomatoes, and a daily dose of red wine. This brain and microbiome diet is equipped to help reduce stress and maybe even curtail temptations to listen to manipulative politicians who seek to exacerbate and exploit class and race based stresses. Mayer also emphasizes how several other dietary traditions can contribute to similar effects. It is fast food--highly processed, high salt and sugar content, red meat, soaked with antibiotics, swallowed with diet drinks, and starched with carcinogens--that forms the backbone of what I call Dietetic Capitalism. Diet drinks spawn a bacterial regime that promotes weight gain.

 

There is much more in this book of particular interest to those who pursue gut-brain health as they think, teach and write about the contemporary condition, including some further refinements of what a few critics call "affect theory".  But here we focus on an upshot not pursued in the book itself:  how the health, mood, stress, and inflammatory benefits and liabilities pondered in this little book are stratified by Dietetic Capitalism.  Working class people, if and when they have slipped away from ethnic culinary traditions, are pressed toward unhealthy diets by their income levels, stress levels, available stores and restaurants, engrained gut demands, and feelings of depression about the future looming before them. Upper middle class people can go to organic stores and enjoy excellent restaurants. Our immune systems are less apt to be compromised if we do so; our brain processes somewhat less apt to fall into Parkinson’s or Dementia; our stresses less often apt to drive us inexorably to comfort foods with spiral effects on health and attitudes; our sicknesses less often to pull us into the stress of medical bankruptcy. Fast food agribusiness, stores, and restaurants treat people and livestock ruthlessly as mere objects of profit, when they can get away with it, pumping as much surplus value out of them as possible.

Not everyone in privileged settings eats a healthy diet, of course.  Intelligence, judgment and forbearance are needed to pursue that course, even when the opportunity is there. Donald Trump, the billionaire, eats horrible food; it shows in everything he does, says and thinks. His diet was once an insistent, impulsive  choice, and it has now become an addiction. Perhaps a fecal transplant could help start a dietary transition. It would only be a first step, of course. My stool sample is available, if needed. But I am not willing to travel to Russia for the operation.

Do not talk about capitalism writ large without including Dietetic Capitalism as an insidious mode of class/race exploitation. Michelle Obama realized this. Drives to reduce class inequality must include demands to increase healthy microbiome opportunities for pregnant women, babies, children, adults and old people in every walk of life. Key words here are “opportunity” and “detailed knowledge”. Information about precisely how such tangled processes work on and in our bodies is critical. Such accounts show us when and where to expect an upsurge of gut pressure and how best to counter it. Generic information in this domain only convinces until it is time to eat.  This is precisely the juncture at which Mayer becomes most pertinent to the war against Dietetic Capitalism.

To work, such detailed knowledges also require intensive support of local and organic produce. The urban gardens springing up everywhere are promising signs. It will additionally, however, require intensive regulation of food additives, food information labels, livestock conditions, the use of feedstock antibiotics, carcinogens, and corporate TV food advertisements designed to exploit the gut. All these must be joined to real reductions in income inequality and tough working conditions to reshape the stress, gut, comfort food, inflammation, and health compromising dynamic now in play.

Dietetic Capitalism reveals a lot about the insidious character of other capitalist modes of exploitation. It slides into the gut, circulates through the blood stream, seeks vulnerable objects to exploit, spawns addictive practices, and encourages denialism. 

What’s in a Hashtag?: Terms for Tweeting in Alliance

Alyson Cole is a professor of Political Science, Women’s & Gender Studies, and American Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of The Cult of True Victimhood, and most recently, “Precarious Politics: Anzaldúa's Reparative Reworking.” Alyson co-edits philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism.

Sumru Atuk is a completing her doctorate -- “The Politics of Femicide: ‘Woman’ Making and Women Killing in Turkey,” supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation and AAUW -- in Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Sumru and Alyson are collaborating on an article about the promise and limits of #MeToo politics.

For those who remember Clarence Thomas’s hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee -- a televised drama that made “sexual harassment” a household word -- #MeToo felt, at first, like bad deja vu. Betty Friedan argued that women need to name sexism in order to overcome it, but the current digital protest publicizes a problem named long ago. Unlike those 1991 hearings, which focused in excruciating detail on two protagonists, Thomas and Anita Hill, #MeToo lays bare the appalling scale and frequency of women’s daily encounters with men who sexually harass and whose sexual harassment, in violation of the law, is often widely known and tolerated.

Is #MeToo the cresting of a new wave of feminism, a final reckoning with patriarchy? Or is it a perversion of the achievements of the women’s movement? Those who worry it is the latter see a McCarthyism in drag that demands the sacrifice of “good men” (Senator Al Franken and Congressman John Conyers, for example), while reviving Victorian sensibilities about female fragility; a regression into the “victim feminism” of the past when women rebuffed the joys of sex, renegotiated the terms of consent, and incited a sex panic. Critics want to retain a line between a sociable pat on the back and a threat, a disappointing date and an assault; they seek a more nuanced understanding of romantic overtures and a less nuanced understanding of sexual violation. For them, #MeToo’s trial by Twitter enacts a double infraction: criminalizing “locker room talk,” while trivializing rape.

Amidst all the celebration and consternation over #MeToo, one aspect has been overlooked: the sign under which this activism (however it might be characterized or assessed) is taking place. There have been other digital campaigns, such as #WhatWereYouWearing, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyWomenDontReport. But #MeToo is different. And this difference begins with the hashtag itself, rather than the celebrities who became its early public face. To truly appreciate the politics that #MeToo empowers, we need to understand the political grammar of the sign.

Naming the problem is only a first step, as the magnitude and tolerability of sexual violence demonstrate. Equally important is the language those challenging the problem employ to classify themselves. As Simone de Beauvoir instructed, women will remain the subjugated second sex until they learn to say “We” regarding their gender. Feminists have struggled to define what sort of social group “women” constitute, what feminist solidarity entails, and whether feminism can exist without presuming fundamental commonalities among individuals differently situated with respect to race, class, and nationality. #MeToo provides a generative alternative to articulate these collective claims without ignoring the disparate distribution of precarity and privilege among those assembled under the sign. It allows individuals to join together and recognize their “endless variety and monotonous similarity,” to borrow Gayle Rubin’s artful formulation of women’s manifold oppressions.

Hashtags are typically constructed by merging words, but conjoining ‘Me’ and ‘Too’ creates a potent new compound. ‘Me’ upholds individuality, while sidestepping the possessive ‘My,’ the reflexive ‘Myself,’ and the more frequent ‘I.’ In English, ‘Me’ rarely occurs alone in a sentence; it is more commonly used in conjunction with another subject pronoun, especially to establish a relationship. ‘Me’ thus anticipates others, a potential ‘Us.’ It issues an invitation that is not just solipsistic.

 The designation ‘Me’ certainly carries some cultural baggage, especially since Tom Wolfe’s scathing critique of the “Me Generation,” bemoaning a shift from the social activism that defined the 1960s to an atomized individualism, a problematic turning inward he observed in the 1970s. This is where the second term in the hashtag, ‘Too,’ becomes decisive by dislodging the ‘Me’ from Wolf’s tarring, and thereby helping to fulfill the promise already within the otherwise maligned ‘Me.’

‘Too’ signals more than one, a plurality prefigured by another (with whom the ‘Me’ expresses alliance) and invites more “Mes’ to join in. ‘Too’ also homophonically gestures to ‘Two’ and ‘To,’ a trebling of meaning that further destabilizes the singular personal pronoun and simultaneously evokes an imperative form -- the ‘To’ of whatever verb (still to be determined) might follow. Fused with ‘Me’, ‘Too’ creates a plural name that resonates with Luce Irigaray’s conception of a distinctly feminized “more than one.”

Expressed through a digital medium, individuals need not detail personal incidents or even what motivates them to retweet. (#MeToo is not the virtual version of Take Back the Night.) The mutual designation is not presumed beforehand; it is achieved. The achievement is indirect; a building of collectivity based not on shared experiences, but on experiential similarity discovered by speaking up with others, what Mlambo-Ngouko terms “accumulated experiences.” ‘Too’ amplifies the plurality of the multiple ‘Mes’, shifting the personal pronoun from “this happened to me” to an assertion of “count me in.”

 Opponents and proponents (such as those who soon declared #TimesUp) are eager to see the digital activism either dissolve or evolve into more conventional forms of politics. In their impatient call for “real” action, they neglect the important political work #MeToo already performs. #MeToo not only raises feminist consciousness, it also raises the possibility of political solidarity among individuals who may never be in one another’s shoes. The workplace harassment a Latina domestic worker endures is not interchangeable with what a Wall Street trader may face. Yet #MeToo created the context for the Campesina women to support Hollywood actresses. The sign invites such solidarities. It summons individuals to say, “Yes, that happened to me too. Not in the exactly same way, but I understand and will stand with you.”

The malleable and horizontal solidarity #MeToo nurtures is similar to what Judith Butler terms “thinking in alliance.” What we might categorize as “tweeting in alliance” requires only a mutual cause, not a shared identity or a common experience. #MeToo thus circumvents the tensions that plagued previous feminist formulations and practices, when different perspectives were ignored or disregarded and voices silenced in the effort to construct a unified account of “women.” There is no universal and ahistorical patriarchy, only the extraordinary resonance of #MeToo.

 Since this digital campaign began, individuals from around the world joined in tweeting #MeToo in different languages, chipping away at long established hierarchical divides between the so-called liberated women of the “West” and the oppressed women of the “Rest,” without adhering to some homogenized account of sexual violence. In China, emojis were used (#RiceBunny) to retain the powerful compound of ‘Me’ and ‘Too’, while defying censorship. When said aloud the words for “rice bunny” are pronounced “mi tu,” a homophone that cleverly evades detection, and emphasizes the importance of #MeToo as a sign.

Many suggest that #MeToo is a flash in the pan, or more precisely in cyberspace, or that it will provoke a backlash. But even beyond measures specific to Twitter, #MeToo has already had a remarkable impact, catalyzing the passage of new legislation in several states (Illinois, California, Oregon, Rhode Island, New York), and propelling the resignation of some egregious offenders. Catherine MacKinnon, the architect of sexual harassment law in the United States, credits #MeToo with achieving more in a matter of months than decades of courtroom challenges. As importantly, and more enduringly, the hashtag offers new terms to join feminists together in their fight against gender discrimination in all its forms.

"Entirely Consensual"? Stormy Daniels’ #MeToo moment

Bonnie Honig

Brown University 

Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair

“A guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story,’” Stormy Daniels told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes Sunday night. It was 2011 and she was in a parking lot. Her baby daughter was in the car seat and she was on her way to the gym. The man then “leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’” The threat worked: Daniels was “rattled.”

The scene is straight out of one of those movies where nothing good happens to women in parking lots and the words “It’d be a shame if …” are downright terrifying. It is quite credible that such a threat would stay with a person and shape their decisions for a long time to come.
 Five years later, when Daniels signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and then some statements denying she had ever had sex with Trump, there was no explicit threat of physical violence, but Daniels was again intimidated. “The exact sentence used was, ‘They can make your life hell in many different ways,’” she told Cooper.
 Regarding these two experiences, Daniels is willing to say she was afraid and felt she had no choice. Why then does she offer such a different account of the events that took place in the room in Lake Tahoe in 2006, where, by her own account, she felt pressured to have sex with Trump and also felt she had no choice?

 It was her own fault, she says: “I realized exactly what I'd gotten myself into. And I was like, "Ugh, here we go." (LAUGH) And I just felt like maybe-- (LAUGH) it was sort of-- I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone's room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, "well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this."”

The bad thing was sex with Trump. The voice in her head that told her she deserved it? That was her #MeToo moment.

She had gone to have dinner with a wealthy, powerful man, hoping to get ahead. She was not attracted to him. When she went to the bathroom, he moved from the dining table to the bedroom. When she returned, she found him “perched” on the bed. His body language was clear. She even imitated it during the interview, miming with her body the open torso of male expectation.

Anderson Cooper: Did you view it as “this is a potential opportunity. I'm gonna see where it goes?"

Stormy Daniels: I thought of it as a business deal.

  Trump had lured Daniels with Weinstein-style promises. At dinner, she says, he said: "Got an idea, honeybunch. Would you ever consider going on and-- and being a contestant?" On Celebrity Apprentice, he meant. “And I laughed and-- and said, "NBC's never gonna let, you know, an adult film star be on.” On the contrary, he reassured her: "That's why I want you. You're gonna shock a lotta people, you're smart and they won't know what to expect.’" He knew what he expected, though.

Anderson Cooper: And you had sex with him.
 
Stormy Daniels: Yes.

She says she didn’t want to; but she did it of her own volition, she insists. Thus, Daniels rejects the #MeToo label. She does not want to be a victim. She was not raped, she says, and she does not want to undo the valid claims of the women she calls the “true victims” - women in the #MeToo movement who were raped or coerced. Her concern for the other women is laudable. But it misses the point: the offenses against women charted by #MeToo range from outright sexual violence to coercion to pressure to quid pro quo.

Did Daniels comply because she worried about what might happen if she didn’t? Did she not want to risk making a scene? Or losing out on a job she wanted, that he had said she was right for? Many women will recognize the #MeToo calculation. It is easier to relent to the known than to refuse and court the unknown: his anger, his disappointment, perhaps his vengeance. Women who make those calculations also seek to own their choices, constrained as they are, so that they will not be seen as “victims.” Nobody wants to be a victim.

 A Washington Post article about Daniels puts her in the context of powerful women in the adult film industry. Daniels is impressive, unblinking in the media spotlight, and self-possessed. But that doesn’t mean she could— until now — totally burn the standard script of misogyny, nor does it mean she had the power fully to rewrite her role in it. The #MeToo movement calls attention to the scripts that are foisted upon us while we nonetheless assume we are responsible for them: the ones that oblige and then silence women, while falsely promising all sorts of opportunities or rewards.

 We need not call her a victim, nor a survivor, in order to see that the power that had earlier that evening allowed Daniels to playfully spank this man out of his self-regard was momentary and had in any case been granted to her as a noblesse oblige. In patriarchy, women with spunk are allowed to spank men who enjoy the temporary release from having to be powerful ALL the time. For the men, it is just role-play. The women are sometimes left rattled.

 Does it matter that Daniels was in that hotel room hoping to advance her career? Yes, it matters, but not in a way that leads to her undoing. How many men have had dinner with potential employers -- seeking professional advancement -- without fear of such extortion?
  Daniels says she KNEW Trump wasn’t going to deliver on his promises. She was way too savvy to fall for that, she says. But she lets her hope show for a second and anyone moved by #MeToo should be moved by this too. Trump later called to say he “’just wanted to give [her] a quick update, we had a meeting, it went great… [and] they're totally into the idea." He was suggesting she would get her shot on his show. Her response, she says, “was like ‘mhmm,’” and she adds: “that part I never believed.” But when Anderson Cooper asks: “Did you still get the sense that he was kind of dangling it in front of you…To keep you interested, to keep you coming back?” Daniels replies: “Of course, of course. I mean, I'm not blind. But at the same time, maybe it'll work out, you know?”
 Her cynical knowingness (“I mean, I'm not blind”), which makes her NOT a victim, does not quite extinguish the still faintly hopeful optimism (“maybe it'll work out, you know?”) that makes her if not a victim then perhaps a casualty of the misogyny we all live with. If she thought she deserved what she was getting that night, it was not simply because she had made the bad call to go for dinner “to someone's room alone.” It is surely because she allowed herself to go to that dinner hopeful; hopeful that she could get into a more respectable and better-paid line of work, out of pornography and into the Celebrity Apprentice (that 50 shades of upward mobility that can make quite a difference). The offense was not that Daniels went to a powerful man’s hotel room. It was that she did so because she did not want to accept her place in the world, because she hoped for more. And rather than her abusing his desire, he abused hers as he used the illusion of consent to maneuver her onto a casting couch for a role that did not exist and never would.

  When Daniels says “I was not a victim. I've never said I was a victim,” she may be thinking of her second meeting with Trump. A year later she was in a similar position, this time in Trump’s Beverly Hill Hotel bungalow, and she flipped the script: when Trump approached her for sex, 4 hours after she arrived, she said: "Well, before, you know, can we talk about what's the development?" And he was like, "I'm almost there. I'll have an answer for you next week." And I was like, "Okay, cool. Well-- I guess call me next week." And I just took my purse and left.” Fool me once, shame on you…as the saying goes. Fool me twice? Nah. 
   Alyssa Rosenberg rightly notes in the Washington Post that “as a cultural milestone, the most radical thing Cooper did was refuse to treat [Daniels] as if she was irresponsible or immoral, or as if she were less than credible simply because of what she does for a living.” He did not shame her or suggest her job – which is legal – made her less credible.

But he did miss one big opportunity when asking her about that first meeting with Trump in Tahoe:

Anderson Cooper: And you had sex with him.
Stormy Daniels: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: You were 27, he was 60. Were you physically attracted to him?
Stormy Daniels: No.
Anderson Cooper: Not at all?
Stormy Daniels: No.
Anderson Cooper: Did you want to have sex with him?
Stormy Daniels: No. But I didn't-- I didn't say no. I'm not a victim, I'm not--
Anderson Cooper: It was entirely consensual.
Stormy Daniels: Oh, yes, yes.

“It was entirely consensual” is a sentence that bears little connection to the event described. And Daniels’ “Oh, yes, yes” is a clue that should not be overlooked: it literally doubles down on her insistence she is not a victim, while sounding the trite refrain of faked orgasms heard round the world.

 *First Published at Politics/Letters