Curb Your Enthusiasms

Moralists left and right want to control your carnal desires.

Radley Balko from the March 2006 issue

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It might at first appear odd to see a leftist critic lamenting the fact that we're less likely to pass judgment on one another's personal habits than we once were. But this tendency actually is fairly common, if sometimes subtle. In the fat panic, it isn't just the food industry that's demonized. It's overweight people themselves. In a 2001 Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, for example, journalist Greg Critser, an early, vocal, and prolific obesity doom-and-gloomer, wrote: "In an abundant and permissive world, gluttony has gotten a good name. It's time to restigmatize the once-sinful act of excessive eating." Tiger observes in his book that fat people are assumed to lack backbone. Paraphrasing critics (with whom he does not agree), he writes: "They are self-indulgent. They enjoy bad food and too much food too well...They bear the equivalent of the scarlet letter on their indecently curvaceous bellies."

Worst of all, Spurlock spreads myth and innuendo. In two particularly egregious passages, he bizarrely hints that McDonald's might use human remains in its food, although he keeps enough distance from the charge to maintain plausible deniability. In the first, he relays an anonymous post to his Web site in which someone claiming to be a former funeral home worker writes that the smell of the cremated human flesh from an obese man reminded him of the smell inside a McDonald's. In the second, Spurlock clumsily invokes the Charlton Heston movie Soylent Green--in which human remains are rendered into food--just before embarking on a rant about the contents of processed food.

Sometimes Spurlock forthrightly embraces falsehoods. Attacking the diet drink sweetener aspartame (a.k.a. NutraSweet), he writes, "There were far more troubling studies possibly linking aspartame to birth defects and brain tumors, one conducted by the [Food and Drug Administration] itself as early as 1981, but they were overlooked in the rush to get Nutra?Sweet approved and marketed."

This is an urban legend. It continues to get play on Web sites devoted to alternative medicine and conspiracy theories, but it has been refuted--even scoffed at--in the pages of Time and The Lancet, as well as by the FDA and by researchers at MIT. Spurlock need only have visited the popular urban legend site Snopes.com to see his aspartame fears deflated.

Don't Eat This Book is overflowing with similar rubbish. Spurlock publishes as fact countless accusations against the food industry that either have been debunked, are described without context, or were never backed by much evidence to begin with.

Spurlock's larger point is that fat will eventually be our undoing, either by putting us all in the hospital with cancer or heart disease or by bankrupting us with spiraling health care costs. But there's just not much evidence that our thickening waistlines portend doomsday. The bloody shirt that anti-fat warriors have been waving for a decade--a study claiming that obesity kills 400,000 Americans per year--was recently shown to be off by a factor of 15. New research actually suggests a modest health benefit from being mildly overweight. Although Spurlock dutifully recites obesity warrior talking points linking excess weight to cancer and heart disease, deaths from and incidence of both illnesses have been dramatically declining since the early 1990s--the very period during which America has been getting fatter.

At least Spurlock limits himself to one moral panic. In Porn Generation, Ben Shapiro juggles several, although his main beef seems to be with the trend toward sexual permissiveness and pop culture "indecency."

"I am a member of a lost generation," Shapiro writes. "We have lost our values. We have lost our faith. And we have lost ourselves....The 'live and let live' societal model is a recipe for societal disaster." He wrote his book, he continues, to "reexamine the true consequences of the oversexed society in which we live." He hits all the religious right's hot buttons, from sex education to "slut pop" to Internet porn to Abercrombie & Fitch. Rappers, Shapiro writes, "need to get over their obsession with their own genitalia...or there's no end to the damage this destructive culture can create." He posits that the famous Brittany Spears�Madonna kiss at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards precipitated a "wave of bisexual chic" and warns, "If one lesbian snogfest...can set off so much bisexual activity among young girls, what effect does constant promotion of promiscuity have on them?"

On the prevalence of pornography, Shapiro writes, "We've been told there's nothing wrong with homosexuality or premarital sex--so what's so bad about checking out a few dirty pictures? Or visiting the local strip club?" His reply: "Hugh Hefner would agree. Ted Bundy wouldn't. Neither would his victims."

Like Spurlock's predictions, Shapiro's grim forecast of where our sex-saturated society is headed doesn't have much basis in fact. The evidence of a link between porn and sex crimes is scant. Sex crime rates in Europe, for example, have remained stagnant or declined since the onset of the porn age. Japan is notorious for its widely accessible, particularly violent varieties of pornography, yet its rape rate (2.4 per 100,000 people) is far lower than that of the U.S. (32 per 100,000). The U.S. rate has dropped by about 25 percent since the early 1990s, when porn first became widely available over the Internet. This happened even as the stigma against rape victims has eased, making the crime more likely to be reported.

There's also little evidence to support Shapiro's broader thesis, that the sexualization of pop culture and acceptance of other lifestyles is "reshaping society" in "vastly destructive ways." In 2004 the conservative magazine City Journal cataloged trends in behavior and beliefs among Americans in their 30s and younger. Multiple polls, it revealed, show that young people today are more conservative than their parents when it comes to issues of personal morality. Teen sex, teen pregnancy, and teen abortions have all dropped dramatically since the early 1990s, and all are at their lowest rates since the mid-1970s. Drinking and pot smoking among teenagers are also on the decline, as is violent crime.

All of these trends have been taking place since the early 1990s--the same period in which American culture was allegedly getting trashier. According to City Journal, the same age group tends to be more tolerant of homosexuality, less judgmental of single parents, and actively engaged in the music, movies, television, and Internet that Shapiro finds so corrupting.

Where Spurlock employs myth and innuendo to push his panic, Shapiro is more inclined to use "folk devils," a term sociologist Cohen coined to describe our penchant for singling out villains as the embodiment of a purported threat. Shapiro trots out such tired family-values pariahs as Marilyn Manson, Madonna, Eminem, and Sex and the City. (It's fun to read him recounting lurid lyrics and bawdy conversations from the HBO show, if only because it's easy to imagine him breaking a sweat as he wrote them.) Occasionally, Shapiro offers an isolated news story or personal anecdote in an attempt to link one of his folk devils to an actual crime. But he's never able to convincingly cite any widespread harm.

Shapiro doesn't have nearly as much pop culture cache as Spurlock: He's a rock star on the College Republican circuit but is largely unknown outside of it. Still, with the GOP in power, the panic he's pushing is more likely to resonate with policy makers. Many in Congress, for example, want the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to extend its power to regulate "indecency" to cable television and satellite radio. Leaders from both parties are looking to slap new regulations on explicit music and video games. And Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently told his army of U.S. attorneys that prosecuting pornography--not terrorism or organized crime--would be the Justice Department's top priority while he's in office.

Spurlock's and Shapiro's books don't merely share a weakness for moral panic; the panics themselves are closely linked. The late cultural critic David Shaw suggested in his 1994 book The Pleasure Police that restraint from sexual pleasure and restraint from culinary pleasure have the same Victorian roots. The Victorians, Shaw argues, taught that "bodily pleasure, whether taken between the lips or between the legs, was to be avoided at all costs." In the 1859 guide to Victorian living Self-Help--literally the self-help book of its day--author Samuel Smiles cautioned that "man should arm himself against the temptation of low indulgences," which Smiles defined as "defiling his body by sensuality." That meant not only lust but hunger. Shaw quotes the social historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, who explains that Victorian women were taught not only to be prudish toward sex but to "distance themselves from eating....To be hungry, in any sense, was a social faux pas." Shaw's thesis comes to mind when the Center for Science in the Public Interest issues warnings about "food porn," in which it singles out the grub--low-carb cheesecake, for example--that it considers too decadent and tempting for decent people.