Things You Can Do
Take a thoughtful yet slightly goofy dive into ethics with your professor, Peter Owens, to discover some... things you can do.
Things You Can Do
TYCD: Extra Credit - Teeth, Normality, Gender
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Enjoy this first crack at a new little mini episode format called "Extra Credit," where I dive a little deeper into some of the things in a recent episode that didn't make the cut for the full podcast.
01:45 | The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940 by Julian B. Carter. Pg. 1
07:35 | Carter, pg. 42. I accidentally wrote this as "Barbarians aren't anxious" when I was giving the script to Mady, but the actual quote is "Barbarians are not nervous." I apologize for the mix-up! But I think the quote still conveys Carter's original meaning.
Sometimes there are things that I have to cut from my long episodes that in a perfect world I'd love to include, but they're just too dense, or maybe they make the episode too long, or they require a set of quite technical terms or concepts to explain. Since I want to make my podcast something that any reasonable person can listen to, I try to keep the jargon to a minimum, but sometimes I have some parts that feel really crucial to me and that I just love talking about. That's why I'm trying out a new mini episode format called Extracred. One thing about my episode about the ethics of teeth that I felt like I didn't do a great job of explaining was the connection of the Coronet videos in the beginning to the overall topic. I tried to make subtle the relationship between cleanliness and respectability, like the kinds of habits encouraged in those videos, and the kinds of things that we're encouraged to associate with poor dental health, like moral deficiency, social undesirability, lack of education or intelligence. But I realized after I published it that I could have made that more overt without harming the overall flow and message of the episode. So in this episode of Extra Credit, I want to unpack that a little bit more. And I want to do that through two ideas. First, the idea of what Julian B. Carter calls normality, which is related to our conversation about norms, and second, the relationship between teeth and gender expectations in media. So let's begin by talking about a very special man and woman named Norman and Norma.
SPEAKER_00Her body was straight and strong. Her arms were relaxed at her sides, and she looked directly ahead with the level, proud gaze of a heroic statuary. Her stance proclaimed her right to a prominent place in a portrait of the American people, cast in plaster and on display in the Cleveland Health Museum. The portrait was a flattering one. Norma was young, healthy, and unashamed, and she was as normal as the combined forces of science and art could make her. That is, her curves and planes were three-dimensional renderings of the statistical norm or average American woman of 18 to 20 years of age. Norma was an emblem of the national body, modern-era sexed female.
SPEAKER_01This is how Julian B. Carter introduces us to Norma and her counterpart Norman, the average American boy and girl. Two terracotta statues that represented what the statistical average of all American young men and women would look like. Now, since this is a podcast and there's not really a way to show you them unless you check out the show notes, you'll have to trust me that these are the most leave it to beaver looking white-bred American Caucasians you've ever seen. But they're also kind of like athletic looking, like they're lean and tall and nicely proportioned. They honestly kind of look like Barbie and Kendalls. Now, there's nothing wrong with looking like this. I mean, have you seen me? Maybe if you don't know me outside of this podcast, you haven't. But spoiler alert though, I look like the whitest Midwestern dad. Cargo shorts, new balance sneakers, graphic tees with puns on them. My family can testify that when I'm about to take my kids to school, I absolutely have rubbed my hands together and said, You guys ready to rock and roll? Guilty as charged. So the weird thing about Norma and Norman isn't that they look like white people. It's that they were presented as, hey, here's what normal people look like. And well, we don't even have to talk about race to understand why this might be really hurtful or confusing to some people. What about folks with limb differences or who are in a wheelchair? What about people with birthmarks or scars? What about fat folks or really skinny folks? What about elderly people? Now, I think someone could reasonably say, oh Peter, this is just a little creative exercise. They're not saying that this is what people should look like. And that's fair. But also, well, that is kind of what they were saying. Carter says that the statues were meant to represent this modern triumph of society where the best advances in nutrition and public health and education have allowed the human race, wink wink, white west, to become this scion of salutary success. I want to reiterate that there's no evil counsel doing these things, shaking cigars and cackling maniacally. There are many generations of people doing things that seemed pretty normal and average to them, but that in a lot of ways left out a lot of people. We said that norms turn into pernicious stereotypes when your experience shrinks to the point where you can't imagine that something outside the norm could really happen. And in many ways, this norma norman image of what a healthy person is has really affected us even into the 21st century. I want you to try to imagine a healthy person. Go ahead. If you're not driving or operating heavy machinery, close your eyes and picture what comes to mind when you think of the words healthy person. What did you see? Maybe it was an athlete, or a model with a slender body, or someone with perfectly done makeup and hair and a brilliant white smile. Maybe it was someone in yoga pants or running shoes. These are images that we're bombarded with all the time, every day. They're not necessarily bad. I love watching sports. It's amazing watching LeBron James, a guy who is older than me, do unbelievable feats of athleticism. But isn't it weird that the first thing that comes to mind is probably a pretty narrow conception of good health? There's nothing wrong with strength or rippling muscles or six-packs, but also good health can look like being calm and in control of your emotions in the midst of circumstances of turmoil. It can look like choosing to eat when you don't feel like it because you know your body needs calories to keep from crashing. It can look like making yourself sit and rest when you feel pressure to be up and about and being productive. It can look like finally having access to the right mobility device that you need so that you can more easily walk your dog or go outside and enjoy time with your family. Those Coronet videos are attempting to provide a sort of public service by teaching kids and young folks about the ways that they can become a productive and pleasant member of society. But they subtly demonstrated an idea of health and cleanliness and being a good person that applied to a really narrow set of society, the white, able-bodied, heterosexual nuclear family. You can probably guess that there aren't many folks in these videos that use a wheelchair or come from a blended family or who are immigrants or non-white. And that's because, well, these stereotypes limit the imagination of what it means to be a good citizen. Carter's book explores the ways that Norman and Norma are emblematic of the way that racism and other forms of prejudice can hide in plain sight when they're packaged not as frothing bigots or uneducated hate mongers, but just as normal folks. She calls this field of study normality studies, in order to highlight how calling something normal can quietly imply that anything that isn't normal is deficient or impure. I think one of the most fascinating things she talks about is in the chapter about nervous disorders and other ways of talking about mental health.
SPEAKER_00Barbarians aren't anxious.
SPEAKER_01She says, trying to encapsulate the way that who gets to have certain mental illnesses is often regulated by race, class, and gender. It's a brilliant read, and one of the books that I credit with inspiring my dissertation work. I'll leave a link in the show notes. Speaking of gender, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the other bit that I felt like I glossed over in the full episode, and that is the issue of teeth and gender. I think that bad teeth can stereotype both men and women equally, but not in quite the same way. I think that whereas bad teeth on a man tend to imply either deficient or suspicious moral character, like my examples of Austin Powers and Calvin Candy, bad teeth on a woman often indicate something different. There's this scene in the 2003 martial arts western Shanghai Nights, where Owen Wilson's character, gunslinging outlaw Roy O'Bannon, travels with his companion, Chon Wong, to London. Roy gets out of a carriage and he's looking at the hustle and bustle of London, and he's momentarily distracted by an attractive woman. He turns back and flashes her a grin, tipping his cap, but when she smiles, her teeth are dirty, decaying, and jumbled. The technical dentistry term for teeth that aren't in the right place, quote unquote, is malocclusion. Roy is horrified and turns around, continuing on his way, slightly shaken by the experience of nearly having been tricked into wooing such an obviously unattractive woman. The joke rests on several assumptions, at least one of which may be a bit dated at this point. First, there's been a long-running cultural joke in the United States that British folk have bad teeth. I'm not really sure where this came from. I am sure there's a good answer. But the joke rests in part on that. Roy hasn't been to London, so he hasn't seen an otherwise pretty woman with bad teeth. But second, the bit relies on a misogynistic trope that men can be tricked into pursuing women that appear worthy of their affections, but are actually deficient in some way. The movie communicates this by waiting to reveal that, oof, she seems pretty but actually has really bad teeth. Good thing she smiled and helped old Roy O'Bannon dodge another bullet. So the ways that bad teeth are used to communicate and insinuate deviation from the norm are applied in different ways depending on gender. A lot of this has to do with the ways that misogynistic ideas influence what it means for someone to be a good romantic partner, a fit mother, an attractive or sexy person. And the implication is that even if you otherwise appear like a good romantic option, a bad smile can cancel all that out. The message to women is better have perfect teeth or men won't pursue you. The message to men is don't let a woman trick you into chaining you to her unless she checks all the boxes. I find this to be pretty gross, and I find it even more frustrating that I know that my social conditioning has made it so that I often unconsciously believe these ideas. One of the hardest parts about practicing ethics, whether you're an ethics student, an ethics professor, or just an average person trying to be more thoughtful about the world, is trying to cross that barrier between knowing and feeling. There are so many things that we can know in our minds, like my broken teeth don't make me any less lovable or smart, but it can butt up against the idea that we feel, which is, I hate the way I look and I don't want anyone to look at me. But I think there's hope for those of us who struggle with this feeling. Part of it is just the nature of growing and changing and learning. We are beings that live in space, but also time. And it turns out that time is a lot less malleable than space. My teeth can fall out and get put back in a lot more easily than I can rewire my thoughts and feelings to reflect confidence in myself, regardless of my mouth hardware. But this is why a certain school of ethics is a lot more persuasive to me than others. I consider myself what is called a virtue ethicist. Not because I think I'm more virtuous than someone who studies deontology or utilitarianism, but because it's based in the idea that in order to do virtuous things, we have to practice becoming virtuous people first. I'm preparing a multi-part series coming up in a few months about virtue ethics, so I look forward to unpacking that more soon. Until then, thanks for tuning in to this little episode of Extra Credit. Be sure to check the show notes for references and citations, and thanks to my wonderful and talented friend, Maddie Moy, for her voice talents on this episode. See you next time.