State of disunion.

Watched the State of the Union address last night, as I'm sure many of you did. It saddens me deeply that even Obama's long and eloquent section on the unprecedented importance of non-partisanship at this juncture in American life would be attacked, later, in a totally partisan manner: The Dems applauded it, the Republicans tore it to shreds. I guess none of them has much appreciation of irony.

We have to get past this notion of politics-as-Super Bowl, where you root for your team and I root for mine, and all that matters is which team wins, and thus there's no hope (nor even any real reason) for conciliation on either side. If we don't defeat that, it will defeat us.

Self-help is not a remodel; it's window-dressing.

Whenever I "do media," I'm always asked a variant of the same question: "Isn't there anything in self-help that has value?" This came up again a few weeks ago in connection with that Big Event to which I keep alluding.

What I invariably think of when I'm asked that question is something I heard perhaps a dozen years ago from Dr. Laura; it was then one of her signature phrases, and may still be, though I haven't listened to the good (non-)doctor in a long while...and in that regard I'm not very different from lots of Americans: Despite a recent ratings recovery, Schlessinger is now heard on fewer than half the 450 stations she boasted at her late-1990s peak, when she ran neck-and-neck with Limbaugh for talk-radio supremacy.

Anyway, here's the line:

Love is not an emotion; it's a behavior.

I suspect that she didn't invent the saying, and I'm really not that interested in who did (though I'm sure someone else will be). The point is, she brought the notion to the fore for me, and that first time I heard her speak it, it stopped me cold. I was driving on the beltway that circles Indianapolis, I-465, and I literally pulled off onto the shoulder to ponder the matter. Let's just say the thought had extreme relevance for me at the time.

Of course, Schlessinger didn't actually mean that love exists apart from the realm of feelings, per se. She meant that if you truly love someone, you show it in your actions. (I've alluded to this before on SHAMblog, with regard to the behavior of another guru, as it happens.) More importantly, she meant the converse: that it's absurd and hypocritical, if not downright repugnant, for a person to go around cooing I love you's all day unless the person is willing to walk the walk. Most often Dr. Laura would invoke the line as part of making a case for why a female caller stuck in a dead-end relationship should dump a man who, despite elaborate protestations of undying love, kept hurting her time and again.

But you know what? If that guidance originally struck me as a marvelous tool for thought clarification, it now strikes me as an equally marvelous example of the hollowness of self-help's pretty rhetoric—indeed, not unlike the empty I love you's themselves. Like so much of the wisdom that emanates from SHAMland, those eight words elicit oohs and aahs on first hearing—and, yes, may provoke some thought—but they're almost impossible to apply in the challenging settings where they're needed most. (In fairness to self-help, this is equally true of all of those time-honored proverbs about love, family, parenting and such that you get from Aunt Eloise, except that Aunt Eloise isn't going to charge you for them.) Ultimately the line was of no help to me in sorting out my personal travails, and even non-Dr. Laura found it inconvenient to apply that maxim (as well as others she liked to spout) consistently in her own life. For example, on her show and in her book, The 10 Commandments: The Significance of God's Laws in Everyday Life, Schlessinger also trumpeted the requirement to honor thy parents when they're older and can't care for themselves; it's vital, she wrote, that parents, "although they may not feel wanted by family or society, are still given their appropriate reward." Nevertheless she allowed herself to become so estranged from her own mother that she didn't know that 77-year-old Yolanda Schlessinger had died (and was decomposing in her condo) till some weeks after the fact...and then she issued a statement that was striking for its coldness in spots, among other things informing listeners that her Mom "died as she chose to live, alone and isolated." I guess that's how a daughter loves and honors her mother, when the daughter is Laura Schlessinger.

I'm sure that if you asked Schlessinger herself, she'd say that the necessity of showing one's love should not be interpreted as the obligation to simply bestow endless dollops of affection and caring on people who can't or won't reciprocate. And she's probably right. Which leaves us with the question: How do you know when and where to draw such lines? How do we know that the line you draw today, in some current situation, is equally applicable to the situation you'll encounter a month or a year from now? Is your line necessarily transferable/relevant to me? Where is the line between the virulent narcissism sold in "codependency workshops" and the legitimate psychological codependency that traps people in masochistic relationships?

The genius of successful living, emotionally and professionally, comes down to the management of life's gray areas, those (myriad) places where one timeless proverb runs up against another ("haste makes waste" vs. "never put off till tomorrow what you can do today"; "two heads are better than one" vs. "too many cooks spoil the broth"). Sadly, those areas of philosophical tension are never reducible to a pat formula that works in all cases for all people.

Ahead of his time (machine)?

Couldn't let the afternoon slide into obsolescence without making note of the "quote of the day," in the sidebar, from H.G. Wells:

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

This is a matter I've long struggled with, and though Wells has more of a political agenda (than a philosophical one) in mind, it's nice to know that someone of his stature preceded me in this line of inquiry. For pragmatic reasons it may be necessary to create distinctions between murder and war, between serial killing and capital punishment, but in a purer, more philosophical sense those distinctions do not exist. Once again, any such dichotomies fall into the realm of the bargains we make with our consciences in order to negotiate (and sustain) life. When it comes to matters of perceived self-defense, I defy you to prove there's an inherent difference between a nation invading a neighbor nation and an individual killing his neighbor up the block. There are just more people involved.

If life gives you corpses, make corpse-ade?

Cassandra Yorgey, who all along has seemed to have an inside track on the James Arthur Ray debacle, now reports that Ray is quietly shopping a book (!) on the sweat-lodge tragedy. If this is true—and once again, the if is key, as I haven't seen this news mentioned elsewhere—it would surely be a new low in terms of reprehensible money-making gambits by a SHAMland guru...and that's saying something.

As you probably have heard by now if you've been following this story, Hyperion postponed the release of Ray's next planned book on harmonic wealth in the wake of the Sedona tragedy.

The hope of the hypocrites. Or, Tiger, meet Jimmy.

I have a closing thought or two on the Tiger Woods scandal and the topic of infidelity in the overall...hence the title. After we get that out of the way, my plan is to take a bit of a hiatus during which I'll be reorganizing SHAMblog more tightly around the goal of "consumer utility." There will be fewer/shorter rants (like, say, this one), more news-you-can-use, different ongoing features in the righthand sidebar. I may be phasing some of these changes in gradually—in fact, I almost surely will—so even if you don't see too many actual posts going up in the next few days or weeks, you might consider checking in anyway just to see what changes in format/layout have materialized since the last time. Feedback is always welcome.

Why am I doing this? It's simple. The blog has grown incrementally through the years, and that's gratifying. Right now we have a dedicated core group of several hundred visitor-contributors as well as a rotating cast of an additional few hundred casual drop-ins. That readership may double for a time when self-help makes headlines (as happened recently in Sedona) or when your host publishes something that captures the public imagination (as happened with my recent writings on the "vanity tax" for the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere). Our reach, as regulars know, is global: One of the "funnest" things to me is opening up the map on my stat-tracker program and seeing a little flag signifying a first-time visit from some remote outpost in Finland or Indonesia.

And yet I'd be lying if I said that SHAMblog has ever truly fulfilled my founding vision of its becoming the "go-to" venue for all who are skeptical (or just curious) about latter-day self-help and related phenomena. We'll see if the contemplated changes, together with that Big News I keep hinting at, are able to put us over the top. I don't think I'm being immodest in proposing that the top is where these sorts of discussions deserve to take place, as they touch on every single aspect of the way life is lived in modern-day America.

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Getting back to Tiger: Some years ago in Indianapolis I met a guy through baseball who swore himself to absolute fidelity in his marriage. He was determined to be "a Christian husband." He said such things even among The Guys, which I thought courageous and unusual inasmuch as most men, including the genuinely committed ones, don't like to "sound gay" around other males—and a lot of men think it "sounds gay" to profess zero interest in women besides your partner-of-record. As if it's a betrayal of the species somehow.

But here's the thing. One day we're sitting around talking, waiting for our turns in the batting cage, and the discussion goes a bit deeper than it normally might. So I ask the guy if he ever feels even a pang of lust for another woman. "Oh, I feel plenty of lust," he replies. Pause.

Then he adds, without being prompted, "But I manage it by fantasizing. In my fantasies I can have any woman I want. And that way I'm still faithful to my wife."

And I immediately thought of Jimmy Carter.

Older readers may recall that it was former president Carter who famously confessed that, though he'd never actually stepped out on Rosalynn, he had "committed adultery in [his] heart" numerous times. Many political insiders felt that Carter did himself irreparable damage with those lines, spoken to Playboy in 1976, when America wasn't yet accustomed to politicians being caught with their flies down.* Notwithstanding the onrushing sexual revolution, marital fidelity was considered a sine qua non of political viability, especially for a man who sought national office.

We really need to assess statements like those by Carter and my ex-baseball buddy in their most literal sense. These men committed adultery in their hearts. That's a somewhat more poetic way of saying that they fantasized about committing adultery with their penises. You wonder: When exactly did Jimmy Carter and my baseball pal do this fantasizing? How far did they take it? To my mind, if you're fantasizing about a woman who doesn't happen to be the one who's currently in bed with you, and you take that fantasy to completion...congratulations...you have just committed actual adultery. Maybe it's not quite the same as going to Vegas and banging everything that moves. No matter. It's still a betrayal.

This isn't just warmed-over Catholic guilt talking, either. (Come on, you know me by now: Would you expect Catholic guilt from me?) Rather it's a matter of common sense and ethical fair play. By every moral and rational yardstick, a person who gets off on such imaginings is an adulterer. Your fantasies tacitly say to your partner, "I would've had sex with that person (instead of you, dear) if I could've done so without throwing our lives into chaos." Or even if we're charitable about it and leave off the last part, you're still saying, "I just find that person hotter than I find you." I suppose, like my baseball buddy, you could counter with something like this: My commitment to my partner is what holds me back from putting my fantasies into action. It's just not right to cheat, and I never want to hurt her. But let's get real: When you're thinking of someone else at the moment of orgasm, what does that say about your "commitment"?

And let's face it...if you're faithful-but-fantasizing primarily because Kim Kardashian won't return your calls and/or you're worried about losing your job in today's tough market, that's not exactly nobility in action.

It's also important to emphasize that the case I make here is a very different business from my longstanding advocacy of free thought, and my opposition to legal actions that are rooted in the endeavor to police thoughts and feelings. I believe that in just about every case, the "official" approach to adult sexuality should be as follows (and no pun intended): Hands off. This is from a man who once lost a very good job in part because he said he saw nothing wrong with employees having sex in their offices on their own time (e.g. during lunch) as long as they were reasonably quiet about it and didn't leave too much of a mess behind. (I thought it would be good for morale.) It's just that legality is not the same as morality or, in this case, hypocrisy.

Do I think people should be punished for what they think (regardless of what they think)? No. Not by any governmental agency. I think people are legally free to fantasize about whomever they want, at any time. They're legally free to fantasize about having sex with someone and then killing him or her. But do I think it's hypocrisy of the highest order when people congratulate themselves for their fidelity while fantasizing about others? Yes, I do.

You say you disagree? Then let me ask you this: How many of you confess your fantasies to your husband or wife? "Ohh, baby, let me tell you, I just had the most amazing orgasm thinking of the office-supply salesperson. Wow!"

Cheating is cheating, folks. Whether it occurs within the privacy of your head or in Suite 508 at the downtown Marriott.

* JFK had always been a special case. His many rumored (and later confirmed) indiscretions were considered "romantic," part of the whole Camelot mystique.

'I love you...for ornamental reasons...' *

Today, boys and girls, we have another of my occasional guest columns, this time from a reader we'll call "Mike From Canada." Within the contours of Mike's reasoning you'll see a fleshed-out portrait of "vanity taxes" in action, and also get some sense of the ongoing male skepticism/suspicion and, yes, latent anger with respect to women (and their motives), sex, romance, materialism, and the little fandango we still must dance despite the supposed progress we've made in recent decades thanks to "frank talk between the sexes," offerings like Mars/Venus, and the myriad "relationships clinics" pitched by the gurus of SHAMland. In and of themselves these are not new phenomena, of course, but the fact of their continuing existence (as well as the author's obvious passion in discussing them) is, I think, a key point in its own right. This stuff won't go away.

To me, the saddest part is what Mike implies about sex itself: that basically it's still something we (men) want and women are trying to defend against or at least "make a good bargain for." This, almost 40 years after Erica Jong and her scandalously delicious "zipless fuck."

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I wanted to thank you for your article on vanity taxes and the SHAMblog follow-up "On diamond desire, Lexus love, and related social diseases." Both articles struck a real chord with me, mainly because of a particular woman I worked with for three years.

First, she was a status seeker of the worst sort: the kind of person your vanity-tax blogs were written for. She wanted to go to the 7-star hotel in Dubai for one night just for the bragging rights. She wanted to drink a $1500 bottle of wine in a restaurant "just for the experience." (When I pointed out she was unlikely to be able to tell it apart from, say, a $50 bottle, she insisted that the "total experience" would be worth it.) One day she actually came right out and told me that she "wanted the latest and greatest gadgets so people would be jealous."

She wasn't a bad person...just shallow when it came to possessions. Anyhow, you get the picture. But it was the discussion about women and jewelry that really got me thinking. It started with her waving a piece of jewelry under my nose one day and saying with a smirk: "You guys don't get it. Husbands who buy nice things like this for their wives get nice rewards." Naturally this irked the hell out of me. I replied, "So you're telling me that basically you're all prostitutes, and if we buy you shiny things you'll spread your legs?"

That started some serious stammering and back-pedaling. "That's not what I'm saying." "You're putting words in my mouth." "You're bringing it down to the lowest common denominator." I kept asking her to explain what she really meant. A sample attempt on her part: The jewelry is not direct payment for sex, per se, but "it makes the woman feel good about herself" and thus she is "more likely to be in the mood." Oh, I get it now.

It must have caused some serious cognitive dissonance because she kept bringing it up over the next few weeks, finally culminating in her telling me that she had discussed it with her (woman) friend and they agreed that not only was I wrong, but I was missing out on the concept of "ROMANCE." She wrote it just that way, too: block letters on the white-board in my cubicle.

Anyhow, she never did properly explain her concept of "romance" to my satisfaction, but the whole incident got me thinking, especially since I still hear variations of the sex-in-exchange-for-[fill in the blank] approach at work. Working among university-educated women, we men still get questioned, "Have you complimented your wife lately?" or "When was the last time you bought your wife flowers?" The boss recently bragged that he has flowers delivered to his wife on a random day every week. Silly me, with the rise of feminism I thought men and women were equal and to be treated as such, not that women's egos were so fragile that they required a steady stream of flattery and trinkets just to get through life.

Seems to me that the female concept of "romance" is generally a one-way street: a man flattering her, a man doing her favors, a man buying her something. Women are not expected to be "romantic." I grant you that there's an evolutionary link to it. In the distant past, a woman would want a man to show that he was a good provider and could take care of her. Hence, little favors and gifts bought a man a chance to mate: an attractive return on one's investment for sure. But what I find patently unfair is that in modern times, many women expect to be treated as complete equals in the workplace yet quickly revert to old-fashioned "romance" once you step outside work.

Which is it, ladies: equality or not?

* It's a play on a song title that many of you may not be familiar with, but I couldn't resist.

A portrait of hypocrisy in black and white.

Apologies in advance to those who sometimes chide me for straying too far from my self-help roots, but I must say I've about had it with this whole "race thing," awakened anew by quotes attributed to Senate majority leader Harry Reid in this season's blockbuster political tell-all, Game Change. If you haven't yet heard (and frankly I don't know how you would've avoided hearing), Reid was caught in an unguarded moment during Campaign 2008 musing about Barack Obama's electability; he characterized the future president as a "light-skinned" black man with "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." The senator admits the remarks and has apologized for them. Obama says he accepts Reid's apology for the observations, which the president dismisses as "inartful" but "not mean-spirited." Also in recent days we have defrocked Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, otherwise known as The Walking Gaffe Machine, drawing fire for claiming that he's "blacker" than Obama. That was Blago's inartful way of alleging that he faced many circumstances growing up that were more financially and socially challenging than what Obama himself faced.

For my part, I think it's time to do one of two things. Either forget about race as a concept—from this day forward, as I've argued before, there is no such thing—or apply the concept and everything it entails in an unflinching, no-holds barred manner. Pick one approach. Or pick the other. But this nonsense of trying to do both—invoking race when it's advantageous or politically correct to do so but acting as if race doesn't or shouldn't matter at other times—just isn't getting it done.

Let's examine the Harry Reid remarks for their accuracy, shall we? So: Is Barack Obama light-skinned, or not? I think he is light-skinned. Is he a Negro*? Actually, no, he is not. He is mixed-race, half-white (which, come to think of it, may account for the light skin). And let's not forget that this whole discussion took place in the context of electability; Reid was not in any way passing judgment on Obama or speaking of him in a patronizing manner. He was simply commenting on political realities, on whether America was "ready" for a black president and, in that regard, whether Obama might make a more viable candidate than someone who looks like Sonny Liston (shown) and/or speaks like Flavor Flave.

Secondly, are we really supposed to pretend that there's no such thing as "a black dialect"? If so, then somebody better tell, among other people, Will Smith; the (black) actor has long crusaded for young blacks to drop the familiar "ghetto-speak" and learn how to converse in proper English. Bill Cosby has done likewise. Somebody better also tell black filmmakers like John Singleton, Spike Lee and Tyler Perry; the main characters in their films almost universally speak in the down-home fashion that Reid no doubt had in mind when he made his offhand remarks. (In fact, if and when a character appears in such movies who sounds like Obama, he's usually being played for laughs.) Is anyone going to propose—with a straight face—that you can't generally tell when you're talking to a black person on the phone (just as, I suppose, black people can't tell when they're talking to a white person)? As for the "unless he wants to" part, look, I supported and voted for the guy, but anyone who says that Obama didn't fall into certain cultural cadences when in front of a black audience that were somewhat different from those he employed in talking to white audiences is living on another planet. Hate to tell you, folks, but I think I would know from his voice that Barack Obama himself is black, had I never seen him. Hell, I could make a phone call right now to at least three of New York's five boroughs and probably tell you, with 96% accuracy, whether the person on the other end of the line is Italian!

Incidentally, the attempt to legitimize stereotypically black speech patterns (thereby, in part, enabling black kids to speak and write in a familiar way without being penalized for it in school) was the whole rationale behind the Ebonics movement, was it not? So why all the fuss when Harry Reid says it?

Then we have Blago spewing mea culpas for his remark about being "blacker" than Obama. Was it really so long ago that iconic (black) novelist Toni Morrison, writing in The New Yorker, dubbed Bill Clinton the "first black president" in tribute to his humble beginnings, empathy for the poor and overall appeal to black America? Besides, are we somehow implying that no white man could ever have it as "black" in life as a black man? I suggest that anyone who feels that way take a little drive into Appalachia, or certain ultra-rural precincts of Mississippi where, believe it or not, some very, very poor people live who actually happen to be white.

Finally, on last night's Larry King Show (guest-hosted by Soledad O'Brien), several black commentators lamented the fact that you see black commentators on TV only when issues like this come up. We'll know we've made true progress, they argued as one, when we also see black commentators called on to analyze healthcare policy, and defense, and ecological issues, etc. I agree that this situation exists...but excuse me for asking, Whose fault is that? You can't entirely hang this one on White America. For two generations now, black activists and social critics have been single-issue voices who ostensibly cared only about securing additional social benefits for blacks and minorities. These leaders and role models, for the most part, have defined themselves by race. Even today, when was the last time you heard Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton call a press conference to issue a strong statement that didn't have specific reference to the so-called black experience?

In our collective pursuit of the promised land of true equality, it would help mightily if black commentators begin to see themselves as more well-rounded people, and stopped evaluating every issue based on one criterion: how it affects blacks.

* I grant you, the word is archaic and has connotations that some may find off-putting. I don't think that's the point.

The Bachelor: where the roses don't smell as sweet.

UPDATE, Wednesday, January 13: And now we have Pavelka whining to People about how "this is the first time I've been cheated on...."

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If you own a TV set, you know by now that this season's eponymousy star of The Bachelor, hunky pilot Jake Pavelka, and the execs behind the show have their shorts all bunched up because one of Jake's prospective fiancees, sexy Rozyln Papa, apparently had a fling with one of the show's producers while filming was underway. To quote Entertainment Tonight's Kevin Frazier, "the betrayal hit [Jake] hard." He was "hurt."

Let me get this straight: In a show in which...

(1) a man gets to cavort with 25 carefully picked young women, all of whom
(2) will fawn over him and compete zealously for him, and many of whom
(3) will eventually profess to love him (just as he will profess to have various levels of feeling for them), and a few of whom
(4) will even go on "overnights" with him as he narrows his options late in the series (because, after all, a guy's gotta test-drive the best cars on the lot before he makes his final decision)...

...we are supposed to think it's a serious impropriety and, some of the coverage would imply, a major moral transgression for one of the women to have an unscripted moment with one member of the show's staff? (And your host shall now segue into his usual, mind-numbing series of rhetorical questions.) Not only that, but we're supposed to take the show's title character seriously when he says he's hurt by the fact that he now has just 24 adoring and totally loyal lovelies to pick from instead of the original 25? Or that he feels betrayed because one of the women had the audacity to give another man her body before he had a chance to give her some stupid rose? I think maybe our boy Jake needs to sit down with Elizabeth Edwards and learn a bit more about the meaning of "betrayal."

Yeah, I know all about reality TV; some of you may recall our late-2008 flap over Momma's Boys and Megan Albertus. Even so, how do grown-up women watch this show and not barf constantly? OK, so it's just "entertainment," but what's the message here? I don't care how hot Jake is, how can mothers even consider having the show on while their young daughters are in the room? (And where is Gloria Allred when you really need her?)

Speaking of Gloria Allred, the producer was fired. Now, I'm guessing that all males attached to the show are required to sign a no-sampling agreement—to paraphrase a former boss of mine, "Thou shalt not put thy rod in thy staff." No matter. I still think the guy may have a claim of some sort for wrongful termination. Stay tuned. Or on second thought, don't bother.

Now where did I put that damn rod again?

Here's a provocative little story that has gotten almost no play in American broadcast media, at least that I've seen, since it surfaced over the weekend. The tenor of the story—and its inherent shock-to-the-system nature—is best captured by this unflinching (though perhaps mildly ironic) headline from, of all places, the Tehran Times (which isn't a bad "paper," in my experience): "A Smacked Child is a Successful Child."

Chew on that for a while. Somewhere Dr. Spock just lost his heavenly lunch.

Now, it's important to establish that the subject study makes this claim only for children age 6 and under. The results for those spanked after age 6 were mixed. And when the "smacking" continues into the teenage years, the overall success prognosis was very poor. Still, the tabulated results of the study of some 2600 participants clearly suggest that kids spanked at an early age are far more likely to excel in school, do volunteer work, and so forth and so on.

I know what some of you are thinking: Hold on here, what exactly do they mean by "success"? Are we just talking about outward trappings? Following orders, doing what's expected of you in some numb, robotic way? Or are we talking about being happy and well-adjusted? Can you really call it "success," after all, if this kind of stern treatment molds a young adult who does all the right things but harbors so much inner rage and self-loathing that he or she can't enjoy any of that superlative achievement?

Sorry...the study's author, psychologist Marjorie Gunnoe, is way ahead of you. She didn't merely consider objective measures like college attendance and volunteerism. To quote the first linked news account above, Gunnoe also assessed a participant's "optimism about the future, antisocial behavior, violence and bouts of depression." Those who'd been spanked as young children measured significantly higher on all positive emotional scales.

As many of the news stories about this controversial study observe, parenting historically was rooted in the biblical admonition of "spare the rod, spoil the child." It was assumed that kids needed correction, even regular corporal punishment, in order to be molded into pliant, right-thinking adults. Fast-forward to Benjamin Spock. The Spock ethic, enunciated in his landmark book, Baby and Child Care*, unfolded as a wholesale reproach to classic theories of parental authority; it produced slogans like "kids are people too" and ultimately gave rise to the school of thought that, for better or worse, has been labeled "permissive parenting." It's no coincidence that Spock's stock really took off during the same rough time period, the late 1950s and early '60s, as the self-esteem movement. Both were founded on a "just make nice and everything will get better" conception of social interaction that sounded plausible enough on its face: Who likes to be hit or berated by others? Why, that's just plain commons sense; it's intuitive. But as FSU's Roy Baumeister has argued persuasively in the case of self-esteem, intuitive doesn't necessarily = correct.

So much of the self-help movement is rooted in "core principles" that have never been tested in any meaningful way. We just assume them to be true because they "sound right."

There are some red flags here. For one thing, Gunnoe teaches at Calvin College, which remains at least philosophically beholden to Calvinism, which takes a dim view of man's essential nature and promotes a commensurately austere approach to ethical behavior, self-denial, etc. Gunnoe herself appears to be as active in the realm of Christian faith as she is in the realm of psychology. Secondly, it is hard to tell from the material I've read just how far into adulthood Gunnoe tracked her 2600 study participants. (I may give her a call later, if I get a chance.) This is important because, as suggested above, it would be nice to know whether all those spanked, successful 6-year-olds who go to college and get good jobs and volunteer in the community and find wonderful mates later suffer some horrific midlife breakdown due to the repressed demons within.

Still, it's food for thought.

Interestingly, I couldn't help remarking at the fact that British law permits the spanking of children as long as you don't leave visible bruises. Talk about psychic gymnastics and philosophical compromise!

* originally the Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946).

Waste size. Redux.

Taking my cue from the networks, which of course develop a major case of rerun fever during the holidays, I've decided to kick off 2010 with a "best of..." from this same day three years ago. It's no less pertinent now than it was then.

January '07. God...have I really been at this that long? Yes, and much longer. We grow old, we grow old, I have let my blog go cold. (Apologies to Prufrock.)

By the way, I'm republishing this with the original comments intact, so some of you may be interested to see what you said back then.

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It's that time of year again. And you know precisely what time that is, too, don't you? Because just as sunrise follows sunset, and the paparazzi follow Britney, and Charlie Sheen follows—well, let's leave it there—holiday season is followed by…weight loss season!

"A new you now!" is the blaring message of the January issue, every January issue, of just about every major consumer magazine, as publications tap the spirit of their readers' New Year's resolutions. In women's magazines the theme is apt to remain on the cover in some token manner every month, then reappear in big-splash format around March or April, in time for the annual bathing-suit purchase. But make no mistake, this is no longer an exclusively female province. The mid-90s ascendancy of such magazines as Men's Health and Men's Fitness has prompted other, more traditional men's magazines, like Esquire and even Playboy, to run increasing amounts of diet- and fitness-related content, thus legitimizing weight-consciousness as a front-of-the-mind concern for a growing number of American males. Accordingly, the diet and fitness industries raked in over $46 billion in 2004; revenues are projected to top $60 billion by 2008. [ED NOTE: They did, and then some.] But even those lofty numbers understate the dimensions of the enterprise, omitting as they do the low-level entrepreneurship of self-styled fitness trainers, nutrition and diet counselors, and practitioners of other latter-day "specialties" that require no little or no credentialing.

The grim irony is that as the movement swells, so too does the collective American waistline; as the movement touts its latest waist-slimming godsends in progressively bolder language, America grows ever fatter and more out of shape—alarmingly so since 1991, by every meaningful barometer (clinical obesity, overall incidence of weight-related illness, children's ability to meet minimal fitness standards, and the like). Almost seven out of 10 of us weigh more than we should. An astonishing 26 percent of American adults meet the formal criteria for obesity.

Complicating matters—this will come as no shock to those who've been reading SHAMblog all along—is an ever-hopeful consumer base that refuses to believe what it simply doesn't want to hear; a consumer base that's been conditioned (and now conditions itself) to expect instant results from painless programs; a consumer base that's all too willing to make a Faustian bargain, accepting some modest level of short-term success in exchange for colossal long-term failure, including likely health risks. The diet industry plays off this culturally embedded naivete. It’s a vicious cycle, with no end in sight.

The bottom line is an ever-widening gulf between promises and results. The magnitude of the waste—the portion of that $46 billion that goes for nothing—probably can't be measured with surgical accuracy, but almost surely is beyond comprehension. (Don't worry; we'll back this up as we go.)

The interest in effective weight loss is pervasive. One-third of adult America was on a diet last year: Of 217 million Americans over age 18, roughly 71 million attempted weight-loss regimens of one kind or another. (For women as a class, that figure runs as high as 95 percent, if a survey by magazine colossus Conde Nast can be believed.) In a 2005 poll of those who've signed up for organized programs (Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc.), 37 percent said they'd tried two or more such plans; 22 percent had tried at least three. Consumer demand for the next weight-loss breakthrough is such that "revolutionary products" that lack any scientific foundation (and may well be unsafe) typically generate millions in ill-gotten revenues before the government steps in.

Mostly, however, the government opts out. As is so often true of regulatory impotence, the reasons can be traced to the cozy, strange-bedfellows ties between politicians and the diet industry's heaviest hitters. It can even be argued that Washington underwrites the fraud being perpetrated on an unsuspecting public: Established federal practices give makers of drugs and so-called "nutraceuticals"* a significant role in the regulatory process. And in one of the most outrageous abuses of power, for more than a decade the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has been implicitly (sometimes explicitly) vouching for "natural" and "alternative" regimens that (falsely) claim to promote weight loss and offer myriad other health benefits. In the end, for all the bureaucratic posturing and even the occasional piece of major regulatory legislation, the diet world remains as wide-open a realm as exists anywhere in American consumer society.

The need to lose weight is clearly there. So is the desire (though, it bears repeating, too many people have wholly unrealistic expectations of the level of commitment required). Mostly it's the viable plan that's missing.

We'll be taking a closer look at the diet/fitness industry in the days ahead. I hope you'll forward a link to this blog to people you know who've expressed a recent determination "to lose, you know, a few pounds..." You may save them from a lot of frustration, heartache and wasted money. And—who knows?—you might even help them help themselves.

Wow. Imagine that: turning to SHAMblog for something that might actually help. Who'd-a-thunk?

* which, for the record, do not really exist. As Quackwatch's Dr. Stephen Barrett once told me, "Something is either a pharmaceutical or it's not. There's no in-between."