05th Jan 2010
News: Wake up, women: Sleep is a feminist issue
Interesting read. I’m definitely one who tries to fit everything in at the cost of sleep. -cat
Wake up, women: Sleep is a feminist issue
Depriving ourselves of needed rest is a lousy way to prove how
hardworking we are
By Kate Harding, Salon.com
Monday, Jan 4, 2010 12:05 EST
“If you ask us,” say Glamour editor Cindi Leive and Arianna
Huffington, “the next feminist issue is sleep.” Personally, I never
would have thought to ask those two what the next feminist issue is,
but they make a pretty good case. “Americans are increasingly
sleep-deprived, and the sleepiest people are, you guessed it, women.
Single working women and working moms with young kids are especially
drowsy: They tend to clock in an hour and a half shy of the roughly
7.5-hour minimum the human body needs to function happily and
healthfully.” The negative effects of chronic sleep deprivation are
well-documented, but that doesn’t inspire enough people to prioritize
rest, and women often end up in a vicious cycle of sacrificing sleep
in order to do extra work and make sure their domestic duties are
fulfilled, causing all of the above to suffer. “Work decisions,
relationship challenges, any life situation that requires you to know
your own mind — they all require the judgment, problem-solving and
creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled
best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are
enhanced by sleep.”
Huffington and Leive invite readers to join them in a one-month sleep
challenge that they’ll blog at the Huffington Post and Glamour’s Web
site, but feminist issues generally demand an examination of the
cultural forces behind them, not just a bunch of individual
commitments to change. If you ask me, not that you would, the key
problem is here: “In fact, many women do this on purpose, fueled by
the mistaken idea that getting enough sleep means you must be lazy or
less than passionate about your work and your life.” As “The Sleep
Doctor” Michael J. Berus says, “It is amazing to me that sleep
deprivation is both a method of torture in some countries and a badge
of honor all at the same time.”
As a critic of the weight loss industry, I’m not so amazed; the same
can be said of calorie restriction. The classic Minnesota Starvation
Experiment, which subjected 36 conscientious objectors during World
War II to “semistarvation,” found that healthy men subsisting on
around 1,800 calories a day — more than many commercial diet programs
allow today — suffered serious mental and physical consequences, just
as sleep-deprived people do. A 2005 review of the study in the Journal
of Nutrition noted:
As semistarvation progressed, the enthusiasm of the participants
waned; the men became increasingly irritable and inpatient with one
another and began to suffer the powerful physical effect of limited
food … The men reported decreased tolerance for cold temperatures,
and requested additional blankets even in the middle of summer. They
experienced dizziness, extreme tiredness, muscle soreness, hair loss,
reduced coordination, and ringing in their ears. Several were forced
to withdraw from their university classes because they simply didn’t
have the energy or motivation to attend and concentrate.
And those were the ones who made it all the way through the study.
“Two volunteers broke diet and were excused from the experiment; one
stopped at various shops for sundaes and malted milks and later stole
and ate several raw rutabagas and the other consumed huge amounts of
gum and admitted to eating scraps of food from garbage cans. Both also
suffered severe psychological distress during the semistarvation
period, resulting in brief stays in the psychiatric ward of the
university hospital.” So, six months on a number of calories
equivalent to or greater than some of the plans offered today by
companies like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers drove a couple of guys
to the psych ward, and left several others barely able to function. If
that’s not chilling enough for you, consider this footnote to one of
the 2005 torture memos, courtesy of the Bush Attorney General’s
Office: “[W]e note that widely available commercial weight-loss
programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for
sustain [sic] periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical
supervision. While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs
and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels
are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in
evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.” How
could it possibly be medically suspect — never mind torture — if
regular citizens are paying for it?
So basically, around this time of year, a whole lot of people resolve
to do the same thing to themselves that governments, including ours,
do to recalcitrant criminals. And a whole lot of those are women. And
hell yes, it’s seen as a “badge of honor”; one need only listen to an
average group of women sharing a meal to learn that those who draw
attention to dieting behavior (“I’ll just have a salad, dressing on
the side”) are lauded as good, virtuous, etc., while those who dare to
eat for fullness, let alone pleasure, will chastise themselves before
anyone else can (“I’m going to be bad and order dessert”). It’s
strikingly similar to how we talk about sleep — functioning on five
or six hours’ worth is seen as a heroic accomplishment, while getting
a full eight hours on the weekend is regarded as indulgent (“Sleep is
for the weak!”) — but the major difference between the two torture
techniques-cum-badges of honor is that those restricting calories
often claim to be doing so for health reasons, with the support of
much of the medical community, while sleep deprivation is widely
understood to be unhealthy. We praise ourselves and each other for
carrying on through exhaustion in spite of its health effects, but for
carrying on through semistarvation supposedly because of them.
The common denominator in terms of cultural approval, then, is that we
reward those who endure the deprivation of biological necessities,
regardless of any toll it takes. In other words, it’s straight-up
puritanical bullshit. Getting by on six hours of sleep or 1,200
calories a day aren’t moral triumphs any more than saving yourself
until marriage is — in fact, both can make you dopey, cranky,
listless and malleable. So the challenge should not only be to get to
bed at a reasonable hour, but to quit talking and thinking about a
chronic lack of sleep as though it’s evidence of a strong work ethic,
and about attending to our bodies’ needs as though it’s a mark of
indolence. As Huffington and Leive put it, “We’ve already broken glass
ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, business and the media –
just imagine what we can do when we’re fully awake.”
http://salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2010/01/04/sleep_challenge
Interesting read. I’m definitely one who tries to fit everything in at the cost of sleep. -cat
Wake up, women: Sleep is a feminist issue
Depriving ourselves of needed rest is a lousy way to prove how
hardworking we are
By Kate Harding, Salon.com
Monday, Jan 4, 2010 12:05 EST
“If you ask us,” say Glamour editor Cindi Leive and Arianna
Huffington, “the next feminist issue is sleep.” Personally, I never
would have thought to ask those two what the next feminist issue is,
but they make a pretty good case. “Americans are increasingly
sleep-deprived, and the sleepiest people are, you guessed it, women.
Single working women and working moms with young kids are especially
drowsy: They tend to clock in an hour and a half shy of the roughly
7.5-hour minimum the human body needs to function happily and
healthfully.” The negative effects of chronic sleep deprivation are
well-documented, but that doesn’t inspire enough people to prioritize
rest, and women often end up in a vicious cycle of sacrificing sleep
in order to do extra work and make sure their domestic duties are
fulfilled, causing all of the above to suffer. “Work decisions,
relationship challenges, any life situation that requires you to know
your own mind — they all require the judgment, problem-solving and
creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled
best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are
enhanced by sleep.”
Huffington and Leive invite readers to join them in a one-month sleep
challenge that they’ll blog at the Huffington Post and Glamour’s Web
site, but feminist issues generally demand an examination of the
cultural forces behind them, not just a bunch of individual
commitments to change. If you ask me, not that you would, the key
problem is here: “In fact, many women do this on purpose, fueled by
the mistaken idea that getting enough sleep means you must be lazy or
less than passionate about your work and your life.” As “The Sleep
Doctor” Michael J. Berus says, “It is amazing to me that sleep
deprivation is both a method of torture in some countries and a badge
of honor all at the same time.”
As a critic of the weight loss industry, I’m not so amazed; the same
can be said of calorie restriction. The classic Minnesota Starvation
Experiment, which subjected 36 conscientious objectors during World
War II to “semistarvation,” found that healthy men subsisting on
around 1,800 calories a day — more than many commercial diet programs
allow today — suffered serious mental and physical consequences, just
as sleep-deprived people do. A 2005 review of the study in the Journal
of Nutrition noted:
As semistarvation progressed, the enthusiasm of the participants
waned; the men became increasingly irritable and inpatient with one
another and began to suffer the powerful physical effect of limited
food … The men reported decreased tolerance for cold temperatures,
and requested additional blankets even in the middle of summer. They
experienced dizziness, extreme tiredness, muscle soreness, hair loss,
reduced coordination, and ringing in their ears. Several were forced
to withdraw from their university classes because they simply didn’t
have the energy or motivation to attend and concentrate.
And those were the ones who made it all the way through the study.
“Two volunteers broke diet and were excused from the experiment; one
stopped at various shops for sundaes and malted milks and later stole
and ate several raw rutabagas and the other consumed huge amounts of
gum and admitted to eating scraps of food from garbage cans. Both also
suffered severe psychological distress during the semistarvation
period, resulting in brief stays in the psychiatric ward of the
university hospital.” So, six months on a number of calories
equivalent to or greater than some of the plans offered today by
companies like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers drove a couple of guys
to the psych ward, and left several others barely able to function. If
that’s not chilling enough for you, consider this footnote to one of
the 2005 torture memos, courtesy of the Bush Attorney General’s
Office: “[W]e note that widely available commercial weight-loss
programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for
sustain [sic] periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical
supervision. While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs
and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels
are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in
evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.” How
could it possibly be medically suspect — never mind torture — if
regular citizens are paying for it?
So basically, around this time of year, a whole lot of people resolve
to do the same thing to themselves that governments, including ours,
do to recalcitrant criminals. And a whole lot of those are women. And
hell yes, it’s seen as a “badge of honor”; one need only listen to an
average group of women sharing a meal to learn that those who draw
attention to dieting behavior (“I’ll just have a salad, dressing on
the side”) are lauded as good, virtuous, etc., while those who dare to
eat for fullness, let alone pleasure, will chastise themselves before
anyone else can (“I’m going to be bad and order dessert”). It’s
strikingly similar to how we talk about sleep — functioning on five
or six hours’ worth is seen as a heroic accomplishment, while getting
a full eight hours on the weekend is regarded as indulgent (“Sleep is
for the weak!”) — but the major difference between the two torture
techniques-cum-badges of honor is that those restricting calories
often claim to be doing so for health reasons, with the support of
much of the medical community, while sleep deprivation is widely
understood to be unhealthy. We praise ourselves and each other for
carrying on through exhaustion in spite of its health effects, but for
carrying on through semistarvation supposedly because of them.
The common denominator in terms of cultural approval, then, is that we
reward those who endure the deprivation of biological necessities,
regardless of any toll it takes. In other words, it’s straight-up
puritanical bullshit. Getting by on six hours of sleep or 1,200
calories a day aren’t moral triumphs any more than saving yourself
until marriage is — in fact, both can make you dopey, cranky,
listless and malleable. So the challenge should not only be to get to
bed at a reasonable hour, but to quit talking and thinking about a
chronic lack of sleep as though it’s evidence of a strong work ethic,
and about attending to our bodies’ needs as though it’s a mark of
indolence. As Huffington and Leive put it, “We’ve already broken glass
ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, business and the media –
just imagine what we can do when we’re fully awake.”
http://salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2010/01/04/sleep_challenge
