Meowzer had an interesting post today about how fat Americans are vs. what people say about how fat Europeans are. My comment is still in moderation, but here is what I wrote:

Hmmm….as an American expat living in Norway, I can vouch for the fact that Americans are way fatter than Norwegians…both statistically and anecdotally. When I get off the plane in the US after having been in Norway for a while, I’m always flabbergasted, so to speak, about how fat Americans are. You just don’t see fat people in Norway. I’m 5′10″, size 24-26, and it’s incredibly rare that I see anyone my size. There are many people who have a bit of extra padding on them, people who would register as “overweight” statistically, but that few would consider actually fat.

My personal experience is corroborated by the statistics. Norway has excellent online access to national statistics, and I was able to look up the most recent statistics about weight very easily (SSB’s statistics about lifestyle habits). Also check out Salon’s article about “Healthcare, American style”. Norway has 10% “obese” people, whereas the US has over a third percentage-wise (44% of Norwegians have a BMI above 25, about two-thirds percentage-wise for Americans). The US has about equal numbers of “obese” and “overweight” people, whereas Norway has over three times as many “overweight” people as “obese” people. “Obese” people, IMO, are the people who are visibly fat, whereas “overweight” people look mostly normal, to my eyes. This is what accounts for people’s (correct) perception that Americans are fatter (than Norwegians, at least!).

It seems to me that you’re beating a straw man in most of the first paragraph of your post. I’ve never heard anyone claim that there are no fat Europeans, or that all Europeans are extreme health nuts (smoking and boozing it up are a lot worse here, I’m pretty sure). Making this straw man argument, particularly when statistics and people’s perceptions tell them otherwise, is dangerous because it makes us look less credible, and thus more likely to be dismissed when we want to debunk statistics about how fat affects health.

I react strongly to arguments that Americans aren’t fatter (or aren’t less fit) than people in European countries because it so totally is at odds with my experience of living in Norway (and statistics). I do feel like a freak here, and it’s not surprising given how few people living here are as fat as I am. And I’m guessing there are fewer fat people living in the city, where I live, than in the boonies. And don’t even get me started on the fitness and health of Americans vs. Norwegians…

Aftenposten had a good editorial by Zakaria Saaliti about double-standards in the current debate about whether or not women in the police force should be allowed to wear the hijab. For those who don’t read Norwegian, the main points were:

1. Those against allowing police to wear the hijab claim that the hijab is a tool for repression. If Norwegian society forbids the hijab in the police force, then it’s Norwegian society, rather than Muslim men, that is repressing Muslim women.
2. Those against allowing police to wear the hijab claim that this could lead to violence. This is analogous to the argument that women who wear provocative clothing are responsible for any sexual harassment or violence they experience. Based on this argumentation, the caricatures of Mohammed that caused such an uproar in 2006 should never have been printed for fear of how Muslims would react.
3. Society looks to examples from other countries only when those examples support its views, in this case ignoring the examples set by Swedish, British, Australian, and American society. Women have likewise had the right to wear the hijab in the military in Norway for two decades with no negative results.
4. Norwegian society ostensibly wants its police force to mirror its population, yet excludes a large demographic by forbidding the use of the hijab by its police force. This is especially ridiculous given that the police have long had problems with recruiting immigrants, and female immigrants in particular.

Another paradoxical argument I’d personally like to illuminate is that the hijab will prevent women from performing the duties required of a police officer, for example potentially making it difficult for them to enter mosques. While it’s possible that this is the case, I’d say that the potential negatives are far outweighed by the potential positives, not the least of which is that Muslim women would feel much more comfortable asking a hijab-clad police officer for help than they would any other officer. Given that this is a group particularly at risk for violence, that’s a benefit society should be loath to dismiss.

They both look friendly to me, but if you were a muslima who had need of a police officer, who would you feel most comfortable dealing with?

Saaliti concludes his editorial by stating that the signal Norwegian society sends to immigrants is that if we want to participate in Norwegian society, we have to look like Norwegians, think like Norwegians, and act like Norwegians–Norwegian society’s claim that it is pro-integration is in reality only lip service. Even though I primarily get a pass on these issues given that I don’t look so different from ethnic Norwegians and come from another Western country, I frequently experience the feeling that Norwegian society’s self-proclaimed goal of integration is merely dissemblance. I can’t imagine how infuriating it must be for hijabis, the very women who are informed by seemingly well-intentioned Norwegians that they are subjugated by Muslim men and Muslim society, to experience an analogous form of subjugation at the hands of their would-be liberators. I’m far from a moral relativist, but this kind of self-righteous paternalism perpetrated by Norwegian society towards groups they perceive to be less morally enlightened than themselves has got to stop.

Some Norwegian authors have signed a statement against allowing police to wear the hijab.

Fucking idiots! This really makes me mad. Norway is hardly the most equal land in the world if it refuses to allow women to wear a headscarf on the job. And this is so typical for what passes for equal rights in Norway–everyone must be the same in order to be allowed to have those equal rights. That attitude is, in fact, incredibly discriminatory. It’s discriminatory towards everyone who doesn’t easily fit into Norwegian society’s idea of what a person “should” be like–the very people who most need to have their right to equality protected by the law!

And I am so sick of people in one group (e.g. self-righteous ethnic Norwegians) telling the people of another group (e.g. Muslim women) what their actions and symbols mean (e.g. that the hijab is a symbol of subjugation). I am so sick of the unquestioned Norwegian attitude that their way is best, that assimilation is the only option for people who are different. If hijabis can do the damned job, then they should be allowed to do it!

This reminds me a lot of another issue that got my hackles up recently: some people want to git rid of homework because it supposedly reinforces differences among students (the comments there are particularly interesting). Some in Norwegian society are so afraid of the idea that people are different, and especially that some people can be better at something than others, that they want to prevent smart kids from excelling. (Of course, this attitude doesn’t apply to sports.) When will people learn that ideology removed from reality never leads to good things?

People are different, period. To deny that fact implies that you believe that people who are different are somehow less valuable as human beings. In reality, the fact that people are different is a wonderful, wonderful thing! We do everyone in a society a service if we celebrate those differences rather than suppress them.

Johannes og jeg så Max Manus på Ringen Kino i går kveld. Ringen Kino var ikke noe spesielt, men filmen kan jeg anbefale på det høyeste, særlig til andre innvandrerer. Den gir mye innsikt i norsk kultur and historie, men ikke i det minst er den en engasjerende og rørende film i seg selv. Ringen og Gimle Kino har dessuten filmen i en tekstet versjon–tekstet på norsk–noe som kan gjøre det mye lettere for folk som ikke har norsk som morsmål å få utbytte fra filmen, men jeg hadde ingen problemer med å forstå dialogen.

I kveld ser jeg Død Snø. Jeg regner med at det blir litt mindre intenst.

An interesting article in Aftenposten today: in light of the advertising industry’s powerful ability to influence body image, The Socialist Left Party of Norway wants to investigate whether it’s possible to alter advertisement laws to disallow advertisements pressuring people to conform to unrealistic beauty standards, and generally prohibit advertisement of cosmetic surgery and weight loss aids. They reason that while politicians shouldn’t be able to control the content of TV programs, they do have the ability to legislate the contents of advertisements. The article cites statistics that among 15-year-olds in Norway, 51% of girls and 20% of boys are dissatisfied with their bodies; 80% of the girls surveyed diet, and 10-20% have eating disorders.

As a side note, the difference in weight statistics between Norway and the US is interesting: The WHO reports that 43.4% of women and 54.8% of men in Norway are “overweight” (BMI 25 or higher), with 9.3% of women and 11.3% of men falling into the “obese” category (BMI 30 or higher), whereas in the US, 72.6% of women and 75.6% of men are “overweight” and 41.8% of women and 36.5% of men are “obese”. No wonder I feel like such a freak here!

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.