The first thing you notice on the front page of Aftenposten Online is a big photo of three ships.

Hmmm, can’t be good, whatever it is. These look like military ships, and the headline says something about the US. What kind of trouble is the US causing now with their military power?

Then the headline: USA truer med å sende hjem nødhjelp (”USA threatens to send home emergency aid to Burma”)

Right. Here we go again, mean ol’ USA using any means necessary to get what they want, even if it means withholding emergency supplies meant to help the Burmese after the cyclone. Are they using their military to turn back the ships other countries have sent offering aid?

It turns out that US ships with fresh water and other emergency supplies have been waiting for over two weeks in international waters to be allowed into the country.

The Burmese government has repeatedly refused to let any foreign countries help their citizens. The military junta running Burma claims that it will accept aid, so long as that aid is offered “with no strings attached”.

This is a perfect example of the (thankfully rare) kind of bias Norwegian media has against the US. Jeez, Aftenposten, we do a good enough job making ourselves seem like asses to the rest of the world; at least give us some credit when we do the right thing!

…buying three books in Norway with free shipping costs 577 NOK (112 USD), while buying those exact same books in the US and having them shipped to Norway costs 305.89 NOK (60 USD).

(Bearing in mind that Norway doesn’t charge the 25% VAT on books.)

I just got my absentee ballot for the Pennsylvania Primary in the mail. I haven’t decided yet who I want to vote for. Who do you think is the best candidate? I’m especially interested in hearing what non-Americans think.

Salon’s advice columnist, Cary Tennis, recently published a letter from a woman debating whether or not to change her name to her husband’s when she got married. His suggestion was that she could of course do as she pleased, given that feminism has made it possible for women to make this choice, but that changing her name would be a betrayal of feminist principles.

The column provoked 242 posts in response before the thread was closed. I was disappointed in but not surprised at most of the responses. Many posters suggested that women should do whatever they please with regard to changing their names after marriage: keep her maiden name or change it to her husband’s if she wanted to, hyphenate, keep her maiden name and tack on her husband’s at the end, create a new name out of the two last names, etc. The vitriol came from the “feminists”, many of whom implied or outright said that women who take their husbands’ names are “doormats” and traitors to feminism.

One letter in particular, posted anonymously as “A Foreign Perspective”, really got my hackles up.

Taking your husband’s last name is a statement, whether you accept it or not. It is accepting that you are becoming his. This is why women are not allowed to keep their names in many countries outside the West. It matters. It’s not irrelevant.

…

…if you take his name, people will judge you. Do you want to know why? You call yourself a liberal feminist and then cling to archaic notions or traditionalism. You can’t have it both ways.

Lovely way to continue to subscribe to the status-quo while claiming to fight it. Attitudes like these are what give the patriarchy its power.

I can’t help but draw the parallel here to conservatives’ desire to constitutionally define marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman. Proponents of gay marriage wonder if conservatives see the institution of marriage as so weak as to not be able to withstand the perceived assault of gay people claiming the same right. You who claim that a woman cannot be a feminist and change her name to her husband’s after marriage: are you so insecure in your feminist ideals that you believe that my personal choice to change my name to my husband’s somehow threatens feminism itself? Feminism fought for the right of women to be able to keep their maiden names after marriage, therefore it’s my duty as a good feminist to keep mine? What kind of logic is that? How about this: feminism fought for the right of women to be able to abort unwanted fetuses, therefore as a good feminist, it’s my duty to have an abortion if I find myself with an unwanted pregnancy? I certainly see that kind of logic in Norway: feminism fought for the right of women to participate in the workplace and put their kids in pre-school when they turn one, so it’s therefore unfeminist to not work or to stay home to raise your own child. How, in this case, is the tyranny of that brand of feminism any less than the tyranny of the patriarchy? I thought feminists were fighting so that women would have choices, not so that women would have to live according to feminist precepts instead of patriarchal ones.

I’m a feminist because I believe that women should have the same choices as men should have, not because I believe that women should live their lives in the same way as the patriarchy decrees that men should live their lives. (And don’t believe for a minute that the patriarchy isn’t bad for men, too–how much respect does a stay-at-home dad get, or a guy who likes to wear hot pink?) There’s nothing progressive about requiring that one sex live by the same strictures forced upon the other sex. What’s progressive, what’s feminist, is working to make the world a place in which both men and women have the freedom to live their lives as they choose.

The brown people on the East-side are causing problems again: the city districts that have the most immigrants are also the city districts that receive the most kontantstøtte.

Kontantstøtte is the money the government gives to parents if they don’t have their kid enrolled in a public preschool. Some people think families should lose kontantstøtte for their other kids if they have a four-year-old who doesn’t know Norwegian; some people think the entire program should be dismantled because “so many” immigrants’ kids end up starting school without knowing Norwegian. I figured that when people were complaining that these kids didn’t know Norwegian when they started school, they were talking about 6-year-olds (until recently, 7-year-olds). So I understood the concern about integration and the motivation to do something about it, although I most definitely wouldn’t agree that denying families this money would be the answer. But then I found out that kontantstøtte is only given to parents of children who are between one and three years of age. So people in this society seriously believe that after mothers’ one year of paid maternity leave is up, they should turn their babies, their one year old babies, over to the state to raise while they, the mothers, go back to work. WTF?!? Why have kids at all? Just to create more workers, I guess.

The general attitude here is that we need to liberate these immigrant women and their families, that we need to teach them that the proper way to live is to kick your kid out of the house and into pre-school ASAP so the women can get back to work. That there is no value in raising your own kids or being a homemaker, that wanting to do so is incomprehensible at best and generally not worthy of respect, and that no sensible woman would make such a choice…and therefore that those women who do stay home with their kids are actively forced to do so by their families or at the very least brainwashed by their patriarchal cultures. That families who don’t follow the Norwegian pattern in life are ignorant, and if we just enlighten them, they’ll eventually come over to the Norwegian way of thinking.

This is an extremely common form of hubris here: I’ve seen it recently in articles about health and “friluftsliv” lately:

Vi har sett at gapet mellom øst og vest ikke har jevnet seg ut i takt med det økte fokus på ernæring. Noe av forklaringen kan være at ernæringsinformasjon fra myndighetene ikke når fram til enkelte grupper og at de dermed bare blir påvirket av sitt sosiale miljø, sier Øye.

“We’ve seen that the gap between the east and west sides of town hasn’t closed as expected given the increased focus on nutrition. Part of the reason might be that information about nutrition from the government doesn’t reach some demographics and that they are influenced by their social milieu as a result.”

So it’s because us East-siders (shorthand for blue-collar people and foreigners) are ignorant that we’re not as obsessed with health as the West-siders. It can’t be that eating healthily is more difficult for poorer people, that people who have to work many hours to get by don’t have the time or energy to eat in accordance with the government’s recommendations. It can’t be that status isn’t tied to thinness amongst the working-class in the same way it is amongst the rich. It can’t be that we know what the government thinks is healthy, but we just don’t care. No, we’re just stupid.

For selv om noen nordmenn er født med ski på bena og fjellsekk på ryggen og tilsynelatende alltid er på farten til en topp eller isbre du knapt har hørt om, er det nok av oss som trenger både dytt i rumpa og gode tips og råd før vi kommer oss ut på tur.

“Even though some Norwegians are born with skis on their feet and backpacks on their backs, and seem to be always on the way to the top of a glacier you’ve probably never heard of, there are some of us that need both a kick in the ass and good tips and advice before we get out and hike.”

So it’s not the case that some people are outdoorsy and some aren’t; it’s the case that we’re all supposed to be outdoorsy, but some of us need a kick in our surely-fat asses to get us off the couch and into the mountains and forests where we belong.

Can you tell that I’ve had some nasty run-ins with these attitudes before? This sort of thing is by far one of my least favorite things about this country.

On the front page of Aftenposten’s online edition today is an article about Hamna preschool in Frogner, Oslo, where sugar is forbidden. Yes, forbidden. The following foods are not allowed to be brought from home or served in the preschool:

• cake
• rolls
• yoghurt
• dairy desserts
• rice porridge
• chocolate sandwich spread
• jam
• peanut butter
• sweetened cereal
• juice
• juice drinks
• cocoa

Prim and brown goat cheese, traditional Norwegian sandwich toppings, are no longer served in the preschool, but they are allowed to be brought from home. Sugar-free variants of yoghurt and jam aren’t allowed either, because it’s not easily possible to tell whether or not the foods in question are actually sugar-free. In Norway, cocoa and blackcurrant toddy are traditionally served during breaks when hiking, but this, too, is forbidden in Hamna preschool. The kids are instead served caffiene-free fruit tea–with no sugar added, of course. Sometimes they’re allowed to have warm milk with honey.

When this sugar-hysteria first came to Norway, I was troubled when I saw how it was affecting the traditional, and extremely healthy and well-balanced, Norwegian food traditions. So many of the forbidden items on the list–rolls, rice porridge, jam, juice, cocoa, and brown goat cheese–are important components of that traditional food culture. And forbidding yoghurt and peanut butter? Things have really gone too far.

Aftenposten consulted some actual scientists about this development, and they, what with degrees in nutrition and all, had some sensible things to say.

- Jeg synes faktisk det både er misvisende og useriøst å operere med et slikt begrep. Det er ganske ekstremt, og det er noe jeg ikke er enig i. Sukker er ikke gift, og det er praktisk umulig å få til en helt sukkerfri barnehage, sier Svein Olav Kolset, professor i ernæringsmedisin ved Universitetet i Oslo til Aftenposten.no. [emphasis in original text]

Svein Olav Kolset, a professer of medical nutrition at the University of Oslo, thinks that “it’s both misleading and irresponsible to operate under this kind of concept. It’s quite extreme, and something I’m not in agreement with. Sugar is not poison, and it’s in practice impossible to create an entirely sugar-free preschool” [emphasis mine].

He continues:

- Jeg skjønner ikke den pedagogiske tankegangen her. Det går ikke an å melde seg ut av resten av matsamfunnet på den måten. Maten i barnehagene bør reflektere et normalt kosthold, og sukker er en naturlig del av den maten et menneske får i seg. Barnehagene bør forholde seg til de generelle kostholdsanbefalingene, sier han.

“I don’t understand the pedagogical mindset here. It’s not possible to check out of the rest of society’s food culture in this way. The food provided in preschools should reflect a normal diet, and sugar is a natural part of the food a person eats. Preschools should operate under general nutritional recommendations”.

Amen, Stein Olav. Hamna is not a private preschool, which means that it receives state funding, and therefore the city government’s implicit approval of its operating principles. It’s irresponsible behavior for a governmental institution to support a nutritional philosophy that is so extreme.

Nutririonist Line Kristin Johnson at the Center for Obesity at the Southeastern Norway Regional Health Authority, who has 19 years of experience in the field, is concerned that this sugar-hysteria results in the prohibition of foods containing important nutrients:

- Det er for eksempel sukker i de fleste yoghurter, men det er også både kalsium, proteiner og B-vitaminer. Dette er ting barn trenger når de vokser opp, sier Johnson, som som har jobbet som ernæringsfysiolog i 19 år.

As an example, she says that although most yoghurts contain sugar, they also contain calcium, protein, and B-vitamins–nutrients children need to grow.

I know that adults are trying to do right by children when they enforce such draconian nutritional rules on their kids. I understand that there’s little we can do about the way individual parents raise their children. Individual parents have generally not got the resources to consult nutritionists about the best way to feed their kids. Given the health care crisis in the US, many parents there won’t even be able to get nutritional advice from their pediatricians…advice that might not be terribly trustworthy, anyway, since most doctors have virtually no education whatsoever in the subject of nutrition.

Governmentally-funded preschools, do, however, have the resources to help them make decisions about how to run their programs. When preschool employees view their preschools’ nutritional policies as carte blanche to evangelize a non-nutritionist-approved meal program, the need for professional guidance in choosing these policies becomes even more evident. “Vi vil gi barna kunnskap om at sukker ikke er sunt for kroppen eller tennene”, says Eva Sollie, administrative assistant at Hamna preschool. “We want to give children the knowledge that sugar isn’t healthy for the body or the teeth“, she says.

I know that if I had a kid, I’d certainly want the meals it received at preschool to be planned by an administrative assistant. I mean, she probably reads “Hjemmet” and everything right?

New research results are out that suggest that vitamin D reduces cancer risk. I found out about this study because it was on the first page of Aftenposten.no: Solvitamin mot kreft.

It’s funny to read the Norwegian spin on the article. Dr. Johan Moan, the Norwegian researcher who analyzed these results for their relevance to the Norwegian population, says that if Norwegians spent twice as much time in the sun as they do now, the number of people dying from skin cancer would increase from 200 to 500 each year, but that the total number of deaths from cancer could possibly be reduced many times over. He suggests that if Norwegians would lay out in the sun regularly, while avoiding getting sunburned, the population might reap the benefits of increased vitamin D levels while avoiding the downsides of sun exposure. According to Moan, it’s actually medically irresponsible to recommend that people stay out of the sun, but he goes on to say that humans only need to be in the sun around “en tidel av en halvtime” in order to make enough of this vitamin—that’s three minutes a day! Somehow I cannot imagine that Norwegians get only 1.5 minutes of sun exposure on average per day–not in the summer, at least.

It’s fun to read the comments to the Norwegian article. Norwegians have absolutely no “solvett”—sense about how to behave in the sun. What with the dark winters, when summer comes around they just want to sit around in the sun the whole time. It’s considered crazy, bordering on immoral, if you don’t want to sit out in the sun. These people actually still lay out! They have the skin to show for it, too: Norway actually has the third-highest rate of skin cancer in the world, and very many people here have skin that looks like well-tanned and broken-in leather. There is absolutely no awareness of the fact that any color you get from sunning yourself is actually skin damage. The idea of getting a base tan as protection against sun exposure is common. Nobody here uses sunscreen—most are afraid that it causes cancer, and they consider SPF 10 to be high-factor protection. I’m quite sure that people are going to hear the “lay out in the sun twice as much” part of the message while tuning out the “three minutes daily” part of the article.

Yesterday the temperature here in Oslo got well over 90° F (32°C) and the sun was shining like holy hell. I had to be out of the house all day since the floor was being lacquered, and I couldn’t find anyplace to be that had AC. I had to go to the ceramics lab at 3 in the afternoon. Nobody was there, so the place had been closed up tight all day, and the kiln was on. Walking into the workshop there felt like walking into the kiln itself. My clay felt like the flesh of someone with a fever. There is no ventilation in the workshop, other than the little you can get from propping the front door open. I actually started getting the symptoms of heat stroke, and had to go sit outside in the shade and drink another half-liter water. When I was cleaning up the place before going home, I noticed that a small amount of water in a pitcher I’d left out on the table was warm to my touch—it felt like bathwater. So it had to have been well over 100°F (38°C) in there.

The floor sanders had kicked me out on Wednesday, too, so I took the dog with me to Johannes’s parents’ house. Being a bulldog, she did not tolerate the hot weather well. When she would collapse and need to take a little break from walking to sit down, people would stop and ask me if I had water for her. Duh! She didn’t calm down until I took her to the fountain outside Oslo S. She hadn’t been in that fountain before, but something tells me it’s going to become a favorite.

Norwegians love this weather. They were out in droves in the park after I left the ceramics lab yesterday. The air over the park was a blue haze of grill and pot smoke.

As for me, I missed the weather of a week ago, when it was 46°F (8°C) and rainy!

Aftenposten is finally getting the message out that fedme er ikke så farlig som antatt…det er verre at vi sitter så mye stille. The newspaper has generally stayed with the status-quo when it comes to coverage of “the obesity epidemic”, providing statistics about how many children are fat, how many adults are fat, which communities in Norway are the fattest, etc. You’ll still read those statistics in the article, but I think this is the first time I’ve read anything at all about the modern research being done on the subject of fat and wellness. Interestingly, the article is based on the reasarch of Glenn Gaesser, the darling of the fat acceptance movement and the author of “Big Fat Lies”. Some quotes from the article:

Fedmeproblemet er overdrevet. Det som gjør det usunt å være overvektig er ikke vekten i seg selv, men inaktivitet. Inaktivitet er mye farligere enn overvekt.

Flere undersøkelser viser at overvektige kan være like sunne som normalvektige, bare de er i god form…

En stor undersøkelse fra det amerikanske folkehelseinstituttet konkluderte med at personer som har noen kilo for mye, har mindre risiko for å dø tidlig enn de som er tynne, og at dødeligheten blant folk med fedme er langt lavere enn tidligere antatt.

Veier du noen kilo for mye, men er aktiv og har et sunt kosthold, så er situasjonen bra…

…i takt med at nordmenn er blitt tyngre de siste par tiårene, har folkehelsen også blitt betydelig forbedret. Gjennomsnittlig levealder har økt, dødeligheten av hjerte- og karsykdommer har sunket kraftig, kolesterolet har gått ned og det samme har blodtrykket, noe som gjør at stadig færre dør av hjerneslag.

Ekstremt få klarer å slanke seg uten å gå opp i vekt igjen. Gjentatte endringer i kroppsvekt er svært usunt, og det øker faren for en rekke sykdommer. All forskning viser at vekten er svært vanskelig å kontrollere, men både kostvaner og fysisk trening er lett å styre. Derfor bør man fokusere på det hvis man ønsker å være sunn…

I’m thrilled to see this message finally getting out in Norway, and in Aftenposten, no less.This article was published late Friday night on Aftenposten.no, which means it’ll probably be gone from the front page before many people have a chance to read it. I wonder if it’ll show up in the print edition.

Wow.

The first point I want to make is about the subject of the post, obviously. I think a lot of people, especially here in Norway, don’t really understand how deeply fat hatred runs in the US. If you haven’t been exposed to this kind of vitriol before, it’s hard to understand where my interest in fat acceptance comes from. I know it’s different here in Norway, but regardless, any time I step outside my house I expect that there is some percentage of people who feel about me like the guy in who wrote that list feels about fat people. It seems like it’s impossible to underestimate the amount of rabid hate directed towards fat people in my culture.

The second post I want to make is about the comments. Given this is a discussion about hate directed towards a group of people, someone mentioned racism. Then, since Fatshionista is so incredibly fucking PC, a bunch of members of the discrimination-comparison police squad came charging out from lurkdom to “educate” the poor soul who had the hubris to make the comparison. Here’s my favorite quote:

If I said that the discrimination faced by blacks and the discrimination faced by gays was WITHOUTADOUBT different and incomparable, would you ask me why or would you tell me I was wrong?

I think you should ask. I think you should open yourself up to the possibility of learning something new today.

Two things about this quote are typical of the way anti-racism activists act in discussions about race. First, the “WITHOUTADOUBT” part. There is no room for debate. What they believe is the Truth, it is Right, period. Second, should you disagree with them on any point (and it’s worth noting that the people being attacked by this kind of anti-racist activist are seldom bigots–they’re almost always anti-racist themselves), you are in need of being educated. Education preferably takes place by a fellow white person, as any “POC” involved in the discussion is tired of “educating” white folks. And for the “educator”, a condescending attitude is de rigeur. We whiteys need to understand that we’ll never be able to understand.

OK, I get that. I actually agree with pretty much every single tenet of anti-racism activists’ platform. The only tenet I disagree with is that black people get the last word, and their perception of any given situation is right. That’s the “WITHOUTADOUBT” part. And condescension I just despise. That’s a terrible way of trying to get someone else to see things your way–they lose face if they admit you might have a point. These attitudes turn people away from a very important cause.

Most importantly (and this was the point I originally intended to make when I set out to write this post), people learn by analogy. Telling someone they cannot compare two things, and telling them they also will never understand, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. First, how can I expect to understand even a little about your experience if I’m not allowed to compare it to my own? Comparison doesn’t mean you have to equate the two things being compared. Comparison allows you to see both the similarities and the differences. Comparison helps you see that you won’t be able to fully understand the other person’s experiences…but then, no one can ever fully understand another person’s experiences. Duh! And comparison does not have to result in a ranking of the things being compared. Finally, telling me I’ll never be able to understand doesn’t exactly motivate me to try to understand. No, telling me I’ll never understand inspires animosity. How is any of this conducive to accomplishing anti-racism activists’ goals?

I find it so frustrating to see advocates for causes I believe in shoot themselves in the foot.