Well, Actually: The Mansplaining of Wellness

Wellness influencers are everywhere; our social media is littered with shiny haired, sparkly toothed, spray tanned gurus eager to sell us a 'better version' of ourselves. Wellness is just diet culture in organic recyclable wrapping, and my guest Virginia Sole-Smith, feminist author, has had ENOUGH already. Who is responsible for this epidemic of commercialised wellness? WELL, ACTUALLY, our cultural obsession was engineered by thin white men! That's right, back in the late 1990's a bunch of privileged white dudes created a whole new way of gaslighting women! No longer content with the simplistic demand for thinness, wellness culture has added extra layers of guilt - not only MUST we be thin, we must also care about the environment, never eat processed foods, recycle, and remain ZEN. It's exhausting, confusing, and we've had enough! Join us for an epic rant! Show Notes My guest is the fierce and fabulous Virginia Sole-Smith, journalist and author of “The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America”. Virginia is enormously cheesed off with privileged, thin white men who get off on telling us what to do with our bodies and how big/small we need to be. I found a brilliant article that Virginia had written entitled “Well, Actually...The thin white men who rebranded dieting as “wellness”” - and just HAD to talk to her more about this. There are a truckload of ‘mansplainers’ in the wellness space. And in her article, Virginia is tracing back the timeline of our current wellness saturation. Virginia points out that currently, wellness ‘influencers’ are often thin white women, and they cop a fair amount of criticism for their messaging - RIGHTLY SO - but when we look at where they’re getting this world view of wellness from, it does tend to go back to thin white men who really think they know how everybody should eat. Back in the 1980’s diet culture was heavily influenced by thin white men like Dr Atkins (Atkins Diet) and Dr Agatston who invented the South Beach Diet. We’ve had men telling us what to eat for decades! This trend dovetailed with women entering the workforce since the 1970’s. If we can keep women focused on our bodies, on trying to stay as small as possible, that saps a lot of energy when we could be out dominating the world. In the 1990’s Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth that dieting is the most potent sedative in women’s history, it keeps us focused in a really narrow way and not participating in the world. We can trace this trend of the Thin White Men back even further, back to Kellogg, to Banting, to these thin white men who dominated and create the narrative of deprivation for us to follow. Even Jenny Craig launched her business with her husband Sid who was really the driver of the business model, while she was ‘the face’. This often happens - a woman is the front of house but a man is powering everything. Guys often take credit for their thinness when in reality they’re born on 3rd base - they have bodies that are genetically programmed to be a smaller size. Others are programmed differently, theirs just happens to fit a cultural ideal. It’s not really through anything they did, it’s just biology & genetics that set them up this way. The ‘bootstrapping’ mentality - if you have success, that’s definitely down to you, but concepts like adversity, hardship, oppression - none of that really applies to the Thin White Men. In the mid 2000’s, Thin White Guys got more subtle, and more overtly political than their diet peddling forefathers In the 1990’s and even early 2000’s, we knew when a diet was a diet. But when Thin White Men like Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food) and Michael Bittman (Vegan Before 6) came along, they talked about food with an environmental and political agenda, this whole other mission of reducing meat consumption and embracing organic farming. Concepts like this - having a more sustainable food supply, or eating more plant based foods, - are fine, and useful ideas,