Kevin Don discusses the importance of gender neutrality in the show’s title and tackles unrealistic body standards in the fashion industry. Through a conversation with a student and research insights, he highlights the need for inclusivity, balance, and self-kindness during the holiday season.
Kevin Don discusses the importance of gender neutrality in the show’s title and tackles unrealistic body standards in the fashion industry. Through a conversation with a student and research insights, he highlights the need for inclusivity, balance, and self-kindness during the holiday season.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hello, Happy Christmas and welcome back to Get-Fit Guy. Thank you to the listeners that emailed in about their thoughts on the question of the title of the show. As I mentioned in that episode, I think that a gender neutral approach would be better. I did get an mail form one listener who said that it’s called get fit guy because I am a guy. I’d argue that this, in my perspective, could be an argument that demonstrates the position I am taking, which is that gender neutrality is important. Because that is assumptive, or as I would say using philosophical parlance: inductive. Now, whilst it is indeed the case that the pronouns I use are he and him, I have never discussed this on the show. So it’s a significant assumption that I, myself would want to be referred to as a ‘guy’. There is an ethical model in philosophy called utilitarianism. I’m not able to fully explain it here, it would take too long and be too nuanced. However, in a callback to my ‘geekiness’ it’s the position that Spock takes at the end of the movie ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’. Spock sacrifices himself to save the ship, telling Kirk “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”. Utilitarianism is where the morally right thing to do would be the thing that increases the net happiness or net good. If we apply this to the title of the show and write it out as deductive logic then we get an argument that looks like this:
- The morally right thing is that which increases happiness
More people could be unhappy with a gender specific title than would be unhappy with a show name change
Therefore, the morally right thing to do is to change the name
I remember when I was a kid, my grandparents used to use some really unacceptable language to refer to immigrants. It was a shock to hear because it was just wrong. I felt acceptable to them, because ‘in their day’ it was normal and accepted. But it’s no longer ‘their day’. If we want humanity to move forwards, I think we should show acceptance to all people. Part of this includes the recognition that humanity moves forwards and something that was ok 100 years ago, we now know to be wrong. Just because gender rights were not a thing when I was younger, doesn’t mean that they aren’t real issues. No doubt this will be a trigger for me receiving emails, but I would also be curious to see what anyone’s justification would be for intolerance and misunderstanding. Also, to preempt anyone that (as has been said in the past) that I am ‘overstepping’ my remit as a fitness show host…I can assure you that fitness is something that affects an organism as a whole. Therefore, if someone were to experience negative effects on the psychology because of societal misunderstandings and feeling they could not be themselves or that they were attacked for being themselves, then this would absolutely affect fitness.
Alright, so moving on from that, this week I was going to talk about an interesting conversation I had with an international student I met here at university. This conversation blew my mind and I thought that of course, if this kind of things affected one person, it will affect more people. So lets chat about it. Last week, I met an international student, she is studying here in Edinburgh and comes from China. I was eating my lunch (if anyone is curious about what I eat- 250g brown rice, 200g chicken thigh, some roasted broccoli, some kimchi and 10g of grass fed butter with some hot sauce for taste). This girl was eating double chocolate cookies for lunch. A few days later I saw her eating a giant bag of Dorito’s chips for lunch. So I decided to ask her about it.
She told me that while here at university, she needs to make some money and is working as a model. They told her that she was ‘too fat’ and to lose weight before getting more work. So she was on a diet. Now, as a coach, I can tell you this girl is NOT too fat, in fact, I would say that in the same way we know that on a weight to health spectrum, being too far on a heavy end is worse for health outcome, there are health concerns to being too far to the light end also. Anyway, I was curious about what kind of diet was focused on chocolate cookies and chips. She told me that she needs to only have a certain number of calories a day to lose weight and she finds this really hard, so to reward herself for doing it, she makes the small number of calories come from foods she enjoys. So, I can see, of course that we should definitely enjoy what we eat, that why I put some hot sauce, which I really enjoy on my chicken, rice and broccoli. I find it delicious, but it also has the right amount of carbs, protein and fats and plenty of micronutrients from the brown rice, the broccoli and the kimchi, which also contains probiotics and fibre. Double chocolate cookies, whilst delicious AND being something I also definitely eat, do not contain significant amounts of things that nourish our bodies over a period of time. Do I think we should not eat cookies, candy or chips? Nope, we definitely should because they taste great and give us pleasure. But that is not the same thing as my weekly diet being made up of low calories and those low calories exclusively coming from low nutrient foods.
I asked her if she had considered that perhaps if she were to have more nutrient dense foods, like complex carbs, fibrous veggies and low fat content meats, that she could probably eat significantly more food and avoid hunger Whilst still giving her body some nutrition. No, she said, because then it would be hard to eat only a little and it wouldn’t be fun. At least this way, its fun because I like cookies.
A study I read from Harvard Medical School reported that of the fashion models they surveyed, 62% had been pressured to lose weight. A 2008 study found that over 50% of fashion models had a BMI under 18. A person is considered underweight when BMI is under 18.5. To me, this is a big problem. Because it amplifies. Fashion companies are demanding models that have lower that ‘underweight’ BMI’s and then traducing photographs in campaigns of these models across the world. Then people like me go into stores and can’t fit into the clothes or just don’t look anything like the models when we wear them. This leads us to believe that out physiques are the ones that are wrong, because it’s not out physiques that are being held up in magazines and on cat walks. An example of how unusual it is to see a body type that is not underweight comes from my own experience. I went into the Nike store earlier this year and amongst the tiny mannequins, was a larger mannequin in Nike clothes. At first I was taken aback and perhaps even found it jarring. But I thought about this. Why am I shocked that I am seeing clothes on a mannequin that actually is a realistic representation of what most of society look like? It’s not that I think we shouldn’t have models that are representative of reality, it’s that my whole life, I have been conditioned to believe that models and mannequins represent how we should be, how we should look. So now, to see a normal representation seemed out of place. So, shout out to Nike and any other brands that are actually using models and mannequins that do represent the people that spend money on their products.
But, morally, I think we have that same utilitarian issue on what is morally right. I can’t get on board with the idea that presenting a large population with an image of a tiny, unnatural population and tell us that this is how we should look. It’s morally calculable that this is wrong. So, why does immorality continue to pervade marketing? That we are gaslit into thinking that how we look, how we live is wrong and that we need to consume new products to be more like this unrealistic version of humanity they present to us? I don’t know. But I am able to see that it’s wrong. I hope that, especially with this being Christmas, where in a couple of weeks, with New Year, we are all going to be hit with the guilt of having indulged over the holidays and sold on the solution being new products for a new year, that everyone will be able to see through the nonsense, see the immorality of that approach and be kind to themselves and others.
If you have any questions or would like to just say ‘hi’, please email me at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, the director of podcasts Brennan Goetschius and Davina Tomlin. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in your podcast app.