Not only does getting the recommended 7-9 hours help you feel awake and refreshed in the morning, it also helps regulate your metabolism and improves your memory, focus, judgment, problem solving, and athletic performance.

New and terrifying research links not-enough-sleep (the 5-6 hours most Americans currently get) with weight gain, increased risk of cold/flu, diabetes, cancer, and ADHD-like symptoms. Additionally, not getting enough sleep results in poorer cognitive abilities (lack of focus, concentration, ability to remember what you’ve learned), poor judgment, and impaired driving on par with drunk driving. It’s also correlated with depression, anxiety, and other mental illness.

When I saw this New York Times post basically summing it all up (and providing links if you want to check out the research) I was ecstatic and all “That’s what I’ve been saying!” Then I read the comments.

“You assume it’s a choice, that people actively choose to get less sleep and, if they want to, can choose to get more. That may well be true of upper class people who can hire others to do their work for them – housework, tutoring, etc. As for me, a middle class shlub, well, I would LOVE to get more sleep. But I am a single mom. I have to get up at 5:30 am for my job. And I have to work or I will land in the street with my kids. ANd I have to stay up at least until 10:30 pm most nights to get this or that child hither and thither, help with homework, and son on. I cannot hire anyone to do any chore– lawnmowing, housecare, homework, driving, shopping, bill paying, college planning for kids, etc etc etc etc. Basically, I work from the moment I get up until the moment I sleep. I have no time to exercise either.”

And it hit me. The sleep deficit is a lot like the obesity epidemic; it is a systemic problem that cannot be solved by encouraging individuals to make healthier choices.

I work with college students who probably could get more sleep if they spent a couple fewer hours playing videogames.

Shit college students say.

Of course, some of my students work more than the recommended 10 hours per week and can’t choose to sleep more. But in general, I feel okay about trying to encourage them to prioritize sleep over partying or more time on Reddit because they can usually make changes without too much trouble. For the general adult population, however, this really isn’t the case.

The comments on the New York Times post read like a laundry list of reasons why Americans are not sleeping. Parents are kept up by new babies. Physicians-in-training are working 28-hour shifts. People who travel constantly for work (flight crews, journalists, musicians, etc.) are forced to keep irregular schedules in different time zones. Single parents are working full time jobs in addition to the “second shift” just to make ends meet.

But it isn’t just our jobs, families, and full schedules that are keeping us up. The world has changed. Energy drinks and caffeinated latte drinks are sold on every corner and and marketed either as health supplements or entertainment. We are constantly connected, if not tethered to, our phones, tablets, and the internet — whether it’s for work, entertainment, or connection. A recent study found that the light from backlit screens can disrupt sleep by suppressing melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate our circadian systems. But this is even bigger than a gadget issue.

Our circadian rhythm, which is how our body knows when to sleep and when to wake, is informed by both light and temperature. Darkness and cooler temperatures let our bodies know it’s nighttime, and therefore bedtime. So what happens to our circadian rhythm when we live in consistently temperature-controlled environments? And about that darkness thing? Yeah. We don’t really have that anymore. Just check out these NASA images of the world at night.

Captured in 1994

Light pollution projected growth in 2025

So basically our artificial environment is  really screwing with our circadian systems, and we wonder why no one can sleep? Some scientists are even concerned that light pollution is killing off wildlife.

Animals need sleep too.

It’s no wonder that the New York Times post, which encouraged readers to get more sleep and discuss the issue with their doctors, made some people angry. For so many of us, sleep is simply outside our realm of control. Before I’ve made the argument that our obesity problem should not be addressed through individual behavior change because it is a systemic problem that can really only be solved through systemic changes to our environments and our policies. When we try to treat obesity as if it were simply an individual problem, it manifests as shaming people for things beyond their control. When we consider that sleep and weight are inextricably linked, it’s not surprising that the same thing happens when we tell people they need more sleep.

And, just like weight shaming can cause people to develop eating disorders or depression/self-esteem issues that lead to further weight gain, warning people about the health risks of sleep deficit can actually make the problem worse:

“As a law school graduate studying for the New York Bar and planning an impending move to NYC–without yet a job, praying to find one in public interest law–I lie awake every night, worrying.  But at least now I know all of the harmful things that are happening to me.”

“Constantly counting the number of hours of sleep I got each night hasn’t been good for my mental health either. It’s like counting calories. It made me obsessed. So I stopped.”

“One thing that would help me sleep is not being constantly told how awful it is not to get it.”

The Health Belief Model of behavior change tells us that if you scare people about a health issue without providing a clear solution for how they can prevent or treat it, they are not going to respond well. Telling folks the dangers of not getting enough sleep without providing realistic solutions will cause them to feel like it’s hopeless and shut down. This issue cannot be solved by telling people to try to get more sleep.

So how can we address the sleep deficit at the systematic level? In college health we have an advantage because we have a fair amount of control over the environment our students inhabit. We have the ability to provide a campus that encourages and supports healthy behavior. We can close down our libraries, gyms, labs, and campus centers at 10 pm. We can ban 8 am classes to let our students sleep in later. We can mandate quiet hours in our residence halls. We can ban Red Bull and 5 Hour Energy from promoting their goods on campus. It’s a little more complicated in the real world.

What could some of those systemic changes look like? Is it even possible to regulate light pollution in urban areas? How would we accomplish that? We could tax the crap out of energy drinks like we tax cigarettes. We could create similar disincentives for 24-hour service availability. For example, in Spain, most businesses are closed during siesta in the afternoon. People simply have to run errands another time, and they make it work. We could also place stricter regulations around the “full time” (read: eligible for benefits) work week, reducing it from the standard 4o-45 hours to something closer to 35. (Again, a lot of Europeans do it this way.)

But beyond regulation, true systemic change requires a culture shift. We need to foster a culture that doesn’t reward employees for putting in extra hours, or make anyone feel like they need to put in extra hours to keep their job. In industries where it’s possible, like in most office jobs, we need to institutionalize flex time and let workers telecommute in order to snooze that extra hour it would take to commute. We need to change the norm from one where we lie in bed with our phones checking email to one where that kind of behavior is uncommon. We could stop creating reasons for people to stay up late, like scheduling evening events earlier and no longer airing popular TV shows after 10 pm.

But this kind of societal change takes decades and requires tireless efforts from public health folks and other advocates. Perhaps the first step of that work is recognizing that the sleep deficit is bigger than you and your insomnia, her and her new baby, or him and his ridiculous work schedule. For those who can make the choice to sleep more, doing so will definitely improve their health. But the focus of public health messaging and health journalism should not be to scare or shame people who, for whatever reason, can’t get enough sleep.

TL;DR sleep zombie friends?

What I’m really trying to say is that the only way to really address the issue is to treat society’s sleep deficit as the gigantic, systemic, clusterfuck of a problem that it truly is.

Goodnight.

Sure it’s a little gross to watch someone snort a piece of latex up their nose and pull it out through their mouth. We can all agree that it’s one of those stupid things young people do, just like sticking cinnamint gum wrappers to your forehead until it burns, piercing your own ears with safety pins, or standing against a wall while a friend runs into your chest to make you pass out. In my opinion, these types of shenanigans are developmentally appropriate; for the most part, everyone survives and grows out of it and it’s no big deal. The problem with condom snorting is not that teenagers are snorting condoms, but that journalists are having a field day with this because they’re snorting condoms. Like, condoms for sex.

For example, Kat Stoeffel writes in New York Magazine’s The Cut (emphasis added):

Teenagers are snorting condoms up their noses and pulling them out of their mouths, on camera and on the Internet, according to a Huffington Post report that raises more questions than it answers. A YouTube search for “condom challenge” yields more than 200,000 results, most of them NSFW due to gross noises. Is this the “gateway sexual activity”? Or is this what happens when there’s no sex ed? Is it an elaborate ruse to buy and possess condoms? And is this better or worse than the condom’s intended purpose?

Seriously? Let me clear this up.

“Is this a gateway sexual activity?” No.

“Is this what happens when there’s no sex ed?” No. What happens is one out of two young people will get an STI by the age of 25 and most wont know they are infected.

“Is it an elaborate ruse to buy and possess condoms?” No. Teenagers have every right, if not every imperative, to buy and posses condoms. Just like teenagers should own helmets, wear sunscreen, and use seatbelts, they should possess and use condoms. If they want to snort a few up their nose, so be it.

“Is this better or worse than the condoms intended purpose?” ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  Teenagers have sex. Condoms should be used for sex. Teenagers should use condoms when they have sex. Snorting condoms is not going to keep teenagers from having sex. There’s nothing wrong with teenagers having protected sex. Condoms are used to have protected sex. It’s really awesome when teenagers use condoms to have protected sex. Do we need to go around one more time?

I’m not sure what the health risks are of condom snorting, but I imagine choking is a legitimate concern. Still, it’s a fairly innocuous pastime compared to the expansive list of dangerously stupid things teenagers have devised to occupy their time, like skateboarding off rooftops, playing with fireworks, giving themselves homemade tattoos, etc.

The media hand-wringing over condom snorting is reminiscent of that of the cinnamon challenge, but this time it will have the added bonus of panic since this time they’re snorting lubed latex that’s made for (hushed whisper) s-e-x. 

This is a case where kids will be kids, and adults need to grow up.

I liked this ad as a wellness educator and body image researcher, and as a former dieter and purchaser of SmartOnes Weight-Watchers-friendly frozen dinners, it made me laugh.

Yes, you heard right. I am a former dieter. At the end of 2012, after yet another frustrating year of failed attempts at dieting and weight loss, I made a serious decision. I decided to stop dieting, forever. I cancelled my Weight Watchers Online subscription for what will be the last and final time. It all started last year when I started researching body image and “fat talk” for my dissertation-equivalent Health Communication project. Conducting that research often and unintentionally became “mesearch,” forcing me to examine my own feelings and behaviors with the intensity of a laser beam. It was painful and I did not like what I found.

I learned that I was one of the 90% of students with body image concerns. I learned that body image disturbance, an umbrella term for body image dissatisfaction and distortion (believing you are bigger than you really are), is associated with depression and low self-esteem. I learned that I was one of the majority of women who engaged in “fat talk” — a term coined in 1994 to describe the specific way girls and women talk to each other about the size and shape of their bodies or diet and exercise regimens, typically in a negative or self-disparaging manner. “I’m so fat.” “You’re not fat! If you’re fat, what does that make me?”

After leaning that fat talk is associated with greater body image disturbance and thin-ideal internalization (the idea that skinny=pretty) and coming to understand the way it normalizes and reinforces body image concerns at the societal level, I started paying attention. It was staggering to realize how many of my conversations with other women were about dieting, exercise routines, the clothes we “could” or “couldn’t” wear, how much weight we wanted to lose, the reasons why we hadn’t been able to “commit” to our weight loss plans. I never realized how often I apologized for eating (“I’m sorry but I’m getting a big burrito tonight”) or made excuses for eating (“I ate like nothing all day today so I’m going to get fries”).

I started to learn more about dieting. I began to realize that all dieting is bad. Yes, ALL dieting is bad. Even if you really need to lose weight for medical reasons like heart disease or diabetes, dieting only helps in the short term. Dieting offers nothing that might help you stick to your diet. Dieting doesn’t help once you’ve reached your goal weight. Cleanses and fasts are even more stupid than diets. They’re like douching–completely unnecessary when you’re healthy, and potentially harmful when you’re not.

I have come to believe that dieting is unhealthy. Slowly but surely, I came round to the philosophy behind Health At Every Size. Believe me, it took a while.

I am overweight but not horribly so. I have been this way for most of my life. I have wanted to lose weight ever since I was 10 years old. That’s a long time to want something. So, making the decision to stop dieting and pursue health rather than weight loss is nothing short of worldview-shattering. A complete about face. A completely new paradigm positioned 180 degrees from my former belief system.

This kind of conversion doesn’t happen easily or quickly. I’ve sat and mulled and struggled with these feelings and developing beliefs for a year or two now. Even today I’m still often shocked by how radical they sound to my own ears. Deciding to stop dieting has been one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done, and I’ve just barely gotten started.

I created a plan for myself. Instead of dieting, I would:

1. Get active for the right reasons. Find and embrace the pleasure in physical activity. Exercise because it feels good or to meet goals other than weight loss (do 30 push ups, hike that mountain, etc.).
2. Learn to cook and eat take-out and prepared food less often
3. Practice mindful eating, listen to my hunger signals, etc
4. Practice good sleep hygiene (lack of sleep affects the hormones that regulate your appetite and feelings of satisfaction after eating, not to mention the myriad other physical and mental effects)
5. Cut out “fat talk” entirely; if others around me are doing it I will not participate or change the subject

Truthfully, I started on number five about a year before I made the rest of my plan to stop dieting. Cutting out fat talk turned out be easier than I thought. At first it felt awkward and I didn’t know how how to act or react when friends and coworkers launched into the usual self-put downs and mutual reassurance tango. It turns out that simply not participating or changing the subject works pretty darn well. In a couple of instances, I talked with some close friends about it and my decision to stop. They were receptive and overtime less and less fat talk creeped into our conversations. Overall, I think I am happier for it. Now when I hear fat talk I’m struck by how annoying and insipid it is, and grateful that it’s no longer a part of my social repertoire  It’s been harder, of course, to silence the fat talk that goes on inside my own head, but hey. One step at a time.

This January, I  started the rest of the plan. The first week of diet-free living felt amazing. It was FREEDOM. I felt great to eat something “normal” (non-diet food) and even better to allow myself to NOT feel guilty afterwards. The elation didn’t last long, though, as my insecurities and doubts bounced back with a vengeance. They’re still with me today, louder than ever:

I doubt that I will be able to make any real measurable changes in my weight or my health without dieting. I doubt I will be able to stick to my 5 point plan. I doubt I will be able to be happy if I stay at my current weight, even if I’m super healthy and fit.

I doubt everything regularly, but I’m so committed to building sustainable, healthy habits that will last for the rest of my life that I can’t give up.

It turns out that quitting dieting is the easiest part of making this lifestyle change. A harder part is actually developing and maintaining my new, healthier, lifestyle and the hardest part of all is silencing the doubts and insecurities that make me want to give up or give in to the seeming futility of it all.

I appreciate the message behind Healthy Choice’s latest ad campaign: “Don’t diet. Live Healthy.” I believe it to be a healing message for both individuals and our sick culture. Of course, if it were easy to “live healthy” in America today we wouldn’t have turned to dieting in the first place. And as great as Healthy Choice products are (that is, marginally better than SmartOnes and other diet food), frozen dinners are not the answer.

Sure, DELiA*S wasn’t the only publication out there with images of thin teenage girl models. But I never had Seventeen or Cosmo magazines, so largely and for the most part, the DELiA*s catalog was the only collection of images of skinny girls I could take up to my room and stare at for hours, alone, wishing I was thin. That was my DELiA*s ritual — a deep, dark secret known only to me, my teenage self, and I. Until now, anyway.

Once a month or so, I’d spot the DELiA*s catalog in the pile of mail on the counter, grab it, and go up to my bedroom. I’d pour over each page, looking not at the clothes but the girls. I took in every detail, every airbrushed line. (Of course, at the time I didn’t realize they were airbrushed.) I even cut out a few of my favorites — girls with hair, outfits, and bodies I wanted — and pasted them into my journal.

I would strip to my underwear and look at myself in a full length mirror, strategically covering the parts of my body that weren’t “right” — the love handles, the belly, etc., and imagine myself without them. I used to fantasize about a magic knife that could simply slice off the extra that didn’t belong. I would visualize slicing, slicing, slicing, in long, fluid motions — literally carving my body into the shape I thought it should have been — the shape of the girls in the DELiA*s catalog.

Sick, right? Describing this behavior is weird and when I write it down, it sounds completely pathological. It’s horrifying to remember this part of my past. But if I were a betting woman, I’d bet that a lot of my peers were doing similar things.

I’ve come a long way since then, of course. Despite my perpetual and (unfortunately) NORMAL struggle with body image, I managed to develop a healthy self-confidence about the way I look. There are a lot of things I’ve always loved, and some that I’ve learned to love, about my body. And my feminist awakening, graduate research on body image, and introduction to Health At Every Size certainly made a huge difference in how I feel about my own body image journey.

So yes. I didn’t share this embarrassing secret so that people would pity me, nor did I share it to brag about how far I’ve come since then. I share this embarrassing secret because the Buzzfeed article about the DELiA*s catalog made me realize how glaringly absent my experience was from this ever-so-nostalgic account of what the DELiA*s catalog meant to girls who came of age in the 90s.

I can’t help but imagine how different my experience would have been if DELiA*s models exhibited the varied and beautiful range of body diversity in our world. What if some of those teen models looked like me? (What if the clothes they were selling actually fit me?)

I just read an amazing piece on XOJane about Lena Dunham’s audacity in showing her own, “imperfect,” body on screen — and how much people seem to really hate the fact that she’s doing it. It says:

For all our talk about wanting to see more so-called “real women” in the media we consume — a problematic category itself, as all women are “real,” no matter how near or far they might be to the female beauty ideal — we are awfully quick to condemn a woman who is showing us reality in a very plainspoken, unvarnished way.

The aghast controversy evoked by Dunham’s nudity shows us just how much of this “real women” talk is lip service, and how very far we have to go before we can socially deal with the fact that different bodies exist. Truth is, we’d all probably be a lot less neurotic about our own bodies if we could get used to seeing and accepting the natural variety in other people’s — without shame, and giving no fucks.

So maybe I, too, would look back with loving nostalgia on the DELiA*s catalog if it showcased a cohort of teen models who reflected the wide and diverse reality of what girls look like, and if those girls modeled not only quirky 90s fashion, but also how to not give any fucks about what other people think about their bodies.

Now, that would be a catalog to reminisce about.

Never before has Nice Guy Syndrome been so clearly illustrated.

Not long after that, I got a spike in hits recently from a not-so-feminist-friendly forum and as you might imagine, the comments coming in have been … unkind. One pointed me to a blog called “A Voice for Men.” Up for a good hate read, I clicked. This is what I saw on the site’s masthead.

Yep. Clear as day, right next to the words “compassion for boys and men” is an ad promising revenge on bitches with the graphic image of a bloody knife. So much for compassion. (This is also an example of their fine work.)

Men’s Rights Activism (MRA) is not a legitimate movement advocating for boys and men, but a vehicle for misogyny, violence, and hate. Even the Good Men Project, which has recently come under fire for their icky rape apologism, agrees that Men’s Rights is bullshit. David Futrelle wrote: “the more I delved into the movement online, the more convinced I became that, for most of those involved in it, the movement isn’t really about the issues at all—rather, it’s an excuse to vent male rage and spew misogyny online. To borrow a phrase from computer programmers: misogyny isn’t a bug in the Men’s Rights Movement; it’s a feature.”

Instead of advocating or protesting or doing anything really to better the lives of boys and men, MRAs just like to bash women and feminists in particular. And when I use the term “bash” I mean it both figuratively (complaining about them on the internet) and literally (advocating for violence against women, often supposedly “in jest”). And handy for them, MRAs’ misogyny is supported and reinforced by dominant cultural beliefs about women being manipulative, back-stabbing sluts.

Like everyone else, I’ve also spent a lot of time this week reading and reflecting on the horrific tragedy at Newtown’s Sandy Hook elementary school. I came across a great Examiner piece by William Hamby on school shootings and white, male privilege that introduced me to the concept of “aggrieved entitlement.”

Aggrieved entitlement is a term used to explain the psychology behind mass shooters, which have all been white males. It is perhaps best defined by Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel (2010) in their article, Suicide by mass murder: Masculinity, aggrieved entitlement, and rampage school shootings:

These perpetrators were not just misguided ‘kids’, or ‘youth’ or ‘troubled teens’ – they’re boys. They are a group of boys, deeply aggrieved by a system that they may feel is cruel or demeaning. Feeling aggrieved, wronged by the world – these are typical adolescent feelings, common to many boys and girls. What transforms the aggrieved into mass murders is also a sense of entitlement, a sense of using violence against others, making others hurt as you, yourself, might hurt. Aggrieved entitlement inspires revenge against those who have wronged you; it is the compensation for humiliation. Humiliation is emasculation: humiliate someone and you take away his manhood. For many men, humiliation must be avenged, or you cease to be a man. Aggrieved entitlement is a gendered emotion, a fusion of that humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitlement to get it back. And its gender is masculine.

Aggrieved entitlement is the thread connecting Nice Guys™, MRAs, and mass shooters. I spent a couple hours yesterday drawing webs, diagrams, and graphs trying to figure this all out. I wanted to see if I could diagram the different expressions and mutations of aggrieved entitlement in relation to variables like aggression, perceived threat of emasculation, introversion, extroversion, isolation, etc. I wasn’t able to come up with a model that made sense to represent this whole mess, but I did come up with a hypothesis.

MRAs and mass shooters probably started out as Nice Guys™. 

Now, I realize I can’t prove this hypothesis. I also don’t want to be misunderstood — I am not saying that all Nice Guys™ are future murderers or bigots. I just believe that they have the potential to be, depending on their circumstances and the influence of certain variables.

For example, an aggrieved and entitled Nice Guy™ who experiences rejection and the perceived threat of emasculation who is an extrovert may seek connection and community on the internet, and may one day become an MRA. An aggrieved and entitled Nice Guy™ who experiences rejection and the perceived threat of emasculation who is an introvert, on the other hand, may bottle up his anger and frustration. If you factor in aggression and the desire for revenge, that Nice Guy™ could be positioned to become an Adam Lanza or Seung-Hui Cho.

Of course, an aggrieved and entitled Nice Guy™ could become a lot of things. He could become an abusive partner, a rapist, the next radio host calling Sandra Fluke a “slut,” or the next right-wing Republican congressman trying to legislate birth control. But just as likely, an aggrieved and entitled Nice Guy™ could grow out of it. He could get educated and learn to understand the problems with this way of thinking and go on to become a perfectly healthy, well-adjusted, non-misogynist man and partner.

So, how do we make that happen? What can we do to help Nice Guys™ climb their way out of that aggrieved entitlement rabbit hole?

In a perfectly timed Cracked article, 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, David Wong gives some straight talk advice to Nice Guys™:

“I read several dozen stories a year from miserable, lonely guys who insist that women won’t come near them despite the fact that they are just the nicest guys in the world.”

It’s a good start, but we need to do more than explain that being nice isn’t enough to get girls.

We need to teach boys how to be friends with women. We need to teach them that friendship and kindness are standard elements of being a decent human being, not precious commodities to be rewarded or paid for in sex. We need to teach boys that rejection is a normal part of life, and to stop lashing out at All Women Ever when they feel hurt. We need to teach boys that violence doesn’t make them any more of a “man,” and that revenge is never the answer.

The past few weeks have been full of finger-pointing and solution-hunting. Gun control, mental health, and school security are all important things to talk about in light of what happened at Sandy Hook. However, the issue is larger than Sandy Hook and larger than mass shootings.

This issue at hand is the complex web of sexism, misogyny, and violence that spawns from aggrieved entitlement. In my opinion, the best place to start this deeply important work is consciousness raising with those young, marginalized, and misguided kids who identify themselves to us as “Nice Guys.”

While Nice Guys of OKCupid is a great tool to help explain Nice Guy Syndrome and raise awareness of the problem, it’s also a vehicle to further shame and humiliate kids who already feel marginalized and rejected. It’s not going to help them, and they need help. This is the real challenge. How do we reach out to them? How do we get through to them?

We need to start thinking of solutions; the potential cost of ignoring or further humiliating Nice Guys™ is far too scary to ignore.

Get Yours

When someone treats you badly, erase them from your phone. DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.

They just don’t like you and that’s okay. I know it sucks but that’s why you erase them from your phone to symbolize erasing their negative energy from your life.

You are a strong beautiful woman. Your emotions are not controlled by people who aren’t worth your time.

YOU ARE A WARRIOR PRINCESS AND YOU TAKE NO PRISONERS.

After a dark time where the boy I loved most crushed me, I adopted the motto GET YOURS and from that point on every decision I made was about me and getting what I needed and wanted and it revolutionized my dating life.

And I have relayed this tale to you because I love you and want you to get yours.

GET YOURS.

You’re fucking worth it.

You appropriate
feminism only to
get an audience.

Your opinion is
valid I guess but why must
you thrust it at me.

You had an idea.
According to you it’s much
better than our work.

Privilege means never
thinking about when to speak
only how loudly.

But seriously, I love it. The first couple classes were tough since I was still learning the ropes, teaching myself everything I needed to know about alcohol, and hammering out the kinks in the curriculum I inherited. The next month was still somewhat fraught as I tried new things that flopped and continued to tweak and adjust the lesson plan. I learned a lot of things, like for example, that students don’t readily believe statistics that challenge their assumptions and that older students have a much, much bigger attitude about going to a mandated alcohol education class than younger students. (And that 20 year old boys are SO MUCH BIGGER than 18 year old boys. The difference is unreal, people.) 

Anyways.

Tonight I taught a really great, mixed-age group of guys (remember, I teach at a school that’s 85% male) and I finally feel like I’ve got this on lock. I love teaching this class. 

As you might expect, a lot of the class focuses on the effects of alcohol on the body and talking about standard drinks and Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) levels and the signs and symptoms of alcohol poisoning, etc., but I begin each class by giving a brief talk about the history of alcohol and the culture of drinking.

I explain that ever since Ancient Egypt, alcohol has been a part of the human experience. I say that alcohol has always been understood to have benefits when used in moderation, and consequences when used in excess. I talk about the nutritional, medicinal, and ritualistic uses of alcohol in the history of human civilization. And then I talk about our modern culture of college binge drinking and how we got here from there.

As a part of this discussion I talk about the impact of alcohol advertising and movies like Animal House (1978) and Old School (2004) and Project X (2011). And here is where it gets good because here is where, even when I’m not particularly trying, we get to talk about drinking and gender.

First I show the class this ad for Coors: 

I ask what messages they think this ad is sending. What is this ad trying to say? I ask them to focus on the “credit card roulette” part, and we end up talking about risk-taking, recklessness, impulse control, and competition and how that relates to masculinity. Then we focus on the “guys night out” part, and I ask them to think about all the different things that are marketed as “guy things,” like sports, man caves, grilling, etc., and ask what percentage of those things involve drinking beer.

“Like, all of them,” a student says.

“Why do you think that is?”

“Well, guys like to drink beer,” another adds.

“Why?”

“It’s fun,” says one student.

“Women like to drink wine and stuff,” adds another.

“They do?”

“Yeah, they prefer wine or like fancy drinks.”

“Why? Is there a something in the female hormones or chromosomes that makes women like wine more than beer?”

“No…”

“Why are advertising companies trying to sell beer as something that’s for guys?”

“To sell more beer.”

“Is there any particular reason why we think that watching sports and drinking beer go together?”

“Well, it’s fun. It’s just part of it.”

“And which came first, the chicken or the advertising?”

Then I show them the following ads for Barcardi.

“So, what message are these ads trying to tell us about drinking?”

“That it turns you into someone else.”

“That it makes you sexy.”

“It gets you laid.”

“Who is the audience for these ads?” (There is debate about the first ad and whether it’s targeted at men or women.)

“Do women wear a lot of clothing in alcohol ads?”

“No..”

“In movies like Old School and Project X, when do you see female characters on screen?”

Etc., and so on.

Being an old-fashioned tech school that’s 85% men, my campus is average or below average when it comes to gender awareness. It might also be below average in awareness regarding media literacy and critical analysis. So these conversations are pretty huge, and even though they barely scratch the surface of the complexities of what there is to understand about gender, they are an important, eye-opening, first step.

As a follow-up to the alcohol class, I assign each student a reflection paper. I ask them to  write about a few things they learned that they found particularly interesting or surprising. A lot of them mention tidbits from our discussion of gender in drinking culture, and that just warms the shit of my little, feminist heart.

There have been moments in my new job where I felt disappointed that certain gender-related topics were outside the scope of my position. I am a health educator not a gender educator after all. Still, I am learning and evolving and infusing gender into other discussions in ways that are relevant and meaningful. I’m also upping the ante by serving on the Diversity Committee and helping plan programming around gender and other great things like race and religion.

My tiny revolution is brewing, and hopefully soon it’ll grow to a simmer. How many licks does it take to turn a bunch of conservative engineers into feminists? I’m not sure, but I’m certainly up for the challenge.

In my new role, I teach classes and workshops, coach students in individual sessions, design and run education campaigns and behavior change interventions, plan events and programming, collect and analyze student data, and advise a student group of peer health educators. My new world revolves around alcohol and drugs, sexual health, stress management, sleep, nutrition, fitness, eating disorders, mental health, and wellness.

I absolutely love, love, love my new job. And what’s more, it’s prompting me to think about a lot of new things and considerations. For example.

My role as role model

• So, like, can I never mention drinking in a tweet ever again?
• Must I now avoid bars where there might be undergrads?
• If I choose to get drunk, does that make me a hypocrite?
• Will people be watching my personal health/eating habits more closely?
• Does it reflect poorly on my authority/credibility as a health educator/expert if I am overweight?

Serving a population that is 85% male and 15% female

• How do I make sure to dedicate enough resources to women’s health topics when women are such a minority?
• Opportunities for sexual assault prevention aimed at a male audience (bystander education)
• Making sure that sex ed/sexual assault/body image/eating disorder programming reflects feminist perspective
• What men’s health issues do I need to learn more about?

Education vs. social marketing

• Social marketing has traditionally not been used at this college; in what cases is it worth pushing for change?
• How much time/effort/money do I dedicate to educational initiatives when I believe behavior change interventions would be more effective?
• How much time/effort/money do I dedicate to the complicated process of designing behavior change interventions?
• When is it worth designing original materials vs. using materials already available?

Health vs. Wellness

• What’s the difference?

Pretty great stuff, right?

I look forward to exploring the intricate details and delicate dilemmas involved in college health education with you at Talkin’ Reckless. In addition to my usual gender- and health-related ranting.

You can read more about the trip at GrrrlTrek.wordpress.com!

Grrrltrek 2012 from Leah Bee on Vimeo.