Hasta La Gadget!

By Ellie Herman

What caused your eating disorder? It’s a question that others ask but also one that I ask myself. The answer is not known with any degree of certainty, but I do know that in my desire to become a healthier eater, I wanted to have a stomach that I “was proud of,” and that sort of tummy was flat, thin, and toned. Few things bothered me more during recovery than the new feeling of my stomach touching the waistband of my pants.

Why was this the stomach I thought would result in pride? Because that is the stomach we are shown on today’s ideal bodies. Skim through a magazine, flip through TV commercials, walk through a department store (if it’s swim season — even better!). You’ll notice that the models exposing their mid-rifts are all displaying planes of muscle behind taught, (spray-)tanned, blemish-free skin. Oh! So that is the type of tummy healthy people should have. This was my disordered thought process, and it’s been one of the hardest thoughts for me to reconstruct in recovery.

There is a movement among our body image leaders to display, with pride, all bellies. A recent article by Bustle’s Hilary Phelan agrees. In doing this, we’ll be administering to ourselves the Mere Exposure Effect, and we’ll begin to feel all bellies are worthy of display. The Mere Exposure Effect is a psychological phenomena that states that the more we are exposed to something, the more inclined we are to like that thing. There are hundreds of easy examples to note here (did you like the taste of coffee the first time you sipped it?), but the one I’d like to reference is our exposure to bellies… or lack thereof. We are exposed only to one type of belly, and that leaves all others feeling inferior and vulnerable.

I have pondered for years why my belly became such a focus to me during recovery, and I do think the influence of seeing washboard abs was a contributing factor, but there is something about the stomach that can, pun intended, make one queasy. For me, the stomach is a place of change. It’s where I gain weight, often where I lose weight, where I pierced my navel, where I have a small freckle on the side, where I’ll first know if I’ve eaten something my body didn’t like, and where I feel eyes greet me too often. But, if you think about it, a belly is all of these things, yes, but it’s also where you were created.

Your umbilical cord connected you, your tummy, and your mother. Without that belly, you wouldn’t be here. Your stomach is the home of many vital organs. It takes in what you put in to your body, and it, magically, turns that food into usable energy. And, uniquely and importantly….. ALL STOMACHS DO THIS. Every tummy — the flabby, muscled, wide and thin, the freckled and tattooed, round and flat, bulging and sunken, and the pasty-pale ones – works hard to process food so that you can breathe, eat, and sleep. It can be a pillow for a loved one’s head, a shelf for something you’re carrying. It can expand and contract, bend and twist, and yet it holds you together.

Your stomach’s feats should be celebrated, not shamed. And therefore, the stomach should be displayed with, yes, I’ll say it, pride. It’s still a body part that I need to remind myself to love and appreciate through eating disorder recovery, just as we need to love all tummies to help our society learn to appreciate them.

For the tummy pride campaigns highlighted by Bustle, check out XO Jane’s The Real Belly Project, The Belly Project Blog, and The Shape of a Mother.

This was originally published on Proud2BMe.org.

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Ellie M. Herman grew up in Selinsgrove, a small town in central Pennsylvania that boasts about its cows and high school football records. At present, she is attending Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, and will graduate with a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies in the spring of 2015. She hopes to pursue a career in counseling psychology, perhaps after attending graduate school. Cars and sports are two of her other interests.

For more by Ellie:

The Thigh Gap

Picture Day

Are you struggling with an eating disorder or do you know someone who is? Call the National Eating Disorders Association’s toll-free helpline for support: (800)-931-2237.

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C. M. Rubin’s global education report

In February, I continued my conversations on global education with Lord Mayor of London Boris Johnson, Australia’s Geoff Masters (CEO of Australian Council for Educational Research) and Susan Mann (CEO of Education Services Australia). I learned further about how technology is entering the classroom and how this is helping to broaden cross-cultural perspectives in education. Some of my Top 12 Global Teacher Bloggers, however, were less interested in technology and thought that teaching students to be self-motivated learners was more important. I also learned about how school reform has been transforming Australia and why London has become such a crucial destination for American students!

Professor Geoff Masters talked about his new paper, “Is School Reform Working?” This question is incredibly important in Australia since they have been doing decreasingly well on the PISA test, year by year. Masters offered some insightful opinions on what makes a highly effective school: “They form partnerships to enhance student learning and wellbeing. This includes partnering with parents and families, and possibly with other education and training institutions, local businesses, or community organizations.” He also offered some insight into the process by which low achieving schools have turned around.

I had the chance to discuss some fabulous news with Lord Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Google research has revealed that London is the most searched for city by US students looking to study overseas. It is also the most popular city in the world for US students, with nearly 30,000 studying in the city each year, a total not matched outside North America. The proud mayor also shared information on his new “Leaders of the Future Program,” in which US students will have the opportunity to be mentored by some of the UK’s most influential business leaders.

One reason London is such an important destination is because of its cross-cultural edge and its continual endorsement of the arts. Johnson states, “Technological innovation is bringing everyone around the world closer together, so cross-cultural understanding becomes far more important. With students from over 200 countries, students in London are right at the forefront of this trend.”

Also from Australia, I talked with Susan Mann, the CEO of Education Services Australia, which is focused on technology and service support for the Australian education and training sectors. Susan led the initiative that began as the Learning Federation and continued in a number of iterations to produce digital content, distribution architecture and content development standards for all Australian schools. She talked with me about how technology has been further integrated into the daily life of schools, and explained how technology can open up the doors for “for global partnerships and collaboration to grow, increasing opportunities for greater understanding between cultures.”

For more information

C. M. Rubin

(Photograph of Strand Campus King’s College London is courtesy of John Wildgoose)

Join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (U.S.), Dr. Leon Botstein (U.S.), Professor Clay Christensen (U.S.), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (U.S.), Dr. MadhavChavan (India), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (U.S.), Professor Andy Hargreaves (U.S.), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (U.S.), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Honourable Jeff Johnson (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. EijaKauppinen (Finland), State Secretary TapioKosunen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Lord Ken Macdonald (UK), Professor Geoff Masters (Australia), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Pak Tee Ng (Singapore), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (U.S.), Richard Wilson Riley (U.S.), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor PasiSahlberg (Finland), Professor Manabu Sato (Japan), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (U.S.), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (U.S.), Yves Theze (LyceeFrancais U.S.), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (U.S.), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today.
The Global Search for Education Community Page

C. M. Rubin is the author of two widely read online series for which she received a 2011 Upton Sinclair award, “The Global Search for Education” and “How Will We Read?” She is also the author of three bestselling books, including The Real Alice in Wonderland, is the publisher of CMRubinWorld, and is a Disruptor Foundation Fellow.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress next week has led to much talk of a rift between the Israeli prime minister and the US president, and even between their two countries. Tuesday, national security adviser Susan E. Rice said the growing partisanship regarding Israel is “destructive of the fabric of the relationship.”

Citing protocol of not meeting foreign leaders too close to an election, President Obama will shun his Israeli counterpart in Washington, and Vice President Joe Biden will stay away from the joint session of Congress when Netanyahu appears.

The dispute has taken on rancorous partisan tones with over two dozen Democratic lawmakers vowing to boycott the speech. They charge that Netanyahu’s goal is to undermine the president’s diplomacy with Iran, and that Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited the Israeli leader to defy and humiliate the White House.

Yet all those objecting to the speech, whether in the United States, or Netanyahu’s rivals at home where he faces an election next month, protest that their concern is to guarantee US-Israeli relations on whose strength the very future of Israel is said to hang.

But what all this sound and fury misses is that for the Palestinians there is no meaningful Obama-Netanyahu rift. Indeed US-Israeli relations have never been stronger, nor more damaging to the prospects for peace and justice and for the very survival of the Palestinian people.

Just look at the recent record. Last December, the Palestinian Authority put forward a tepid resolution in the UN Security Council that did little more than repeat long-standing US policy on the outlines of a two-state solution. Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power marshaled all her resources to defeat it.

She claimed that the resolution was “deeply imbalanced” and took “no account of Israel’s legitimate security concerns.”

The next day, after disappointed Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas signed the treaty acceding to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Obama’s State Department declared itself “deeply troubled,” accusing Palestinians of an “escalatory step” that “badly damages the atmosphere with the very people with whom they ultimately need to make peace.”

Power said the Palestinian move “really poses a profound threat to Israel.”

These words are perverse. Israel’s 51-day long attack on Gaza that left more than 2,200 people dead didn’t “damage the atmosphere” as far as the Obama administration was concerned, but any Palestinian effort to use international bodies in pursuit of justice and accountability is tantamount to an act of war.

I challenge Ms. Power to go and repeat her words to any of the 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza still living in the damp and freezing rubble of their homes, to the surviving parents of more than 500 children killed in the Israeli attack, or to the thousands who will live with lifelong injuries.

Neither the ambassador nor her president has commented on the findings of Amnesty International, which said that Israel “brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes, displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused.”

Few Palestinians will forget that when Israeli fire was raining down on them, the Obama administration authorized the transfer of grenades and mortar rounds to resupply the Israeli army.

Last summer’s war was something even Hamas leaders tried to avoid. After it began, armed Palestinian groups declared that their goal was a ceasefire accompanied by a lifting of the eight-year siege that has devastated Gaza’s economy and isolated its 1.8 million people from the rest of humanity.

Since the war, promises that the siege would be lifted have been broken. Billions pledged in reconstruction aid have failed to materialize. As a result, cash-strapped UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, has suspended repairs on Gaza homes.

Israel’s view tends to be unquestioningly echoed by US officials and media: that Palestinians are at fault for the repeated surges of violence.

Yet even senior Israeli leaders and officers have often acknowledged that Palestinian armed groups, especially Hamas, have meticulously stuck to ceasefire agreements, as they are doing currently.

Despite this, the US put no pressure on Israel to end the years-long blockade.

As a result, the lesson Palestinians have repeatedly learned is that whether they fight or stay quiet, Israel will be allowed to do as it pleases. It can besiege and slaughter them in Gaza, seize and colonize their land in the West Bank, deprive them of their most fundamental rights, and Obama will have Israel’s back.

Just because Obama, Netanyahu and their partisan followers may be peeved at each other does not change the basic dynamic of full US support for Israel’s occupation of millions of Palestinians, the continuation of which guarantees ongoing suffering with regional repercussions.

Sure enough, despite the supposed rift, the US is proceeding with the sale of more of the most advanced F-35 fighter jets to Israel.

That’s why Palestinians do not see any substantive Obama-Netanyahu rift on life and death matters for them. But there urgently needs to be one.

It is long past time for the American people and their representatives to challenge Israel on its seemingly permanent subjugation of the Palestinians.

Ali Abunimah is author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine (2014) and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.

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