episodes

To understand body image in general I think it’s necessary to go back in history to ancient Mesopotamia, surprisingly the birthplace of medical texts and records. The earliest written prescriptions and prognoses that we know of came out of Sumer around 2000 BCE, and perhaps not surprisingly have an analog in modern dermatology. That is, Mesopotamian medicine focused on how the body appeared - specifically skin conditions. And the interesting thing here is that the cuneiform inscriptions detail what god is responsible for the ailment - Ishtar, god of love and war, Shamash the sun-god, Sin the moon-god and explains what act or sin the individual committed to cause the god to act on them. One example, “If from his head to his feet, he is full of red vesicles and his skin is yellow, he was gotten in bed with a woman, hand of Ishtar.” ‘Hand of’ implies that the patient has been touched by the hand of Ishtar, god of love and war. 

So, roughly 4000 years ago we have a sexually transmitted disease being attributed to sin and the wrath of a god.  

It makes sense that ancient civilizations would attribute physical appearance with overall health, medicine is not advanced, people are theorizing and using what they have to diagnose and treat illnesses - their eyes, primarily, and their beliefs about how the world works. Deformities or visible ailments carried a social and spiritual stigma - we know this for two reasons: first, this is what the cuneiform record says; second, because humans still do this. Humans are not great at separating health and superstition. In the earliest of civilizations, a healthy body implied a healthy soul and good looks implied good fortune. Things haven’t changed much. 

But what about the body itself? What was attractive to our ancestors? Well, things have flip-flopped for millennia. The oldest dated sculpture created by humans, The Venus of Willendorf, is approximately 30,000 years old. Discovered on the left bank of Austria’s Danube River in 1908, the Venus of Willendorf is about 4 inches tall, carved out of limestone, and features an exaggerated female form - large breasts, wide hips, and a protruding belly. We don’t know if this was the ideal form for women - it would certainly be difficult to get enough food 30,000 years ago to reach the proportions indicated on the sculpture, and the historical Western anthropological explanation was that this was some sort of goddess of fertility or religious artifact but more recent studies suggest it is actually more of a medical device, a representation of what a woman can expect her body to look like as she experiences pregnancy. That’s a whole thing that we don’t have time to talk about here. Moving on. 

Ancient Egyptian beauty standards were quite similar to our own today - you can see this in countless sculptures and paintings. Women were slender, breasts were small and round, men had wide chests and flat stomachs and for Egypt’s 3000 year history, this ideal didn’t really change. It’s important to note that mummies of older women have been found to have their breasts stuffed with wax or sawdust during embalming to make them fuller and perkier. 

The ancient Greeks were super weird. They were fixated on the male form more so than the female form. The ideal body type for women is what we would call soft - rounded buttocks, long, wavy hair, round/gentle face - Aphrodite notably had large round breasts and a pear-shaped body. Whereas gods were fuckin jacked. I think we’ve all seen enough Greek gods that we don’t need to harp on this, but we do have some interesting descriptions of the ideal human form from the Greeks themselves: Aristophanes, contemplating the perfect male body, cites “a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick” as key features. Tiny little Greek dicks represented self-control and good morals. Big dicks meant you were stupid. This actually hasn’t changed much, right? Well - this was something of a trope in the 1970s and 80s. Anyone recall Meat from Revenge of the Nerds? 

But the Greeks loved going to the gymnasium - the word literally translates to naked/nude - and that is how the men worked out. To get that bright skin that Aristophanes described, Greek men would spend hours a day at the gym or bath, scraping away sweat with strigils and rubbing their bodies in oil and wrestling. 

The Italian Renaissance sees a heavy focus on the perfect male ideal. Da Vinci was somewhat obsessed with the human body, performing dissections on human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and compiling hundreds of pages of drawings and writings on the subject of anatomy. Michelangelo’s David as well as the Sistine Chapel ceiling are perhaps the best examples we have of the Italian ideal of the male body. They’re all jacked. David, Adam, God - all true beefcakes. I would love to look like David. And God’s forearms - he’s been doing hammer curls. 

In Europe, beauty standards were more or less set by royalty - the Elizabethan era found pale women with bright eyes and red lips - like Queen Elizabeth - attractive. Men, on the other hand, did focus on musculature, but not upper body because that implied physical labor. Instead, the ideal Elizabethan man had strong thighs and calves. 

I think we get the idea - beauty standards have changed, but the human body hasn’t really. Bodies can look all types of ways and depending on when you’re born, you may wind up lucky enough to have a naturally occurring fashionable body or you may not. One thing is for certain - humans like to fuck and even if your body doesn’t match the ideal of your time, you can still get laid. That is, after all, the entire reason we focus on looks in general. It is one of the first things we notice about potential partners. For some, looks aren’t everything - they may be secondary or even tertiary. For others, looks may be the only thing - uh, that’s a red flag for me. But one thing is true, humans internalize their own body image no matter when or where they live - and before you say this is a first-world problem, it is not. The problem is that it is underreported in third-world and developing countries. There is a sharp distinction between what the human body can look like and what it should look like, and for millennia humans have compared their bodies to others’ to see how they fit into the ideal. 

Comparing bodies strikes me as an evolutionary feature, like our lizard brains need that information to determine if we fit in with our people. If we look the same we are more closely connected. It means we’re part of a community, accepted and whole. But the belief that bodies must look a certain way, that we’re all responsible for attaining some ideal form, that has to be manufactured. That is not a feature of the normal human experience - I think it’s an exploit. That is, I think the language and imagery we take in today is meant to take advantage of the more natural inclination to fit in with others, to be part of a community. It’s a fine line, but it’s one that advertising understands can be blurred, and that’s where we really begin. 

Hygiene was different in the early 1900s - now, America has always been ahead of Europe in terms of hygiene. One of the advantages of building a country from the ground up means that infrastructure is relatively easy to install, opposed to the existing cities and towns in Europe that had to be retrofitted with running water. In Europe, indoor plumbing didn’t become widespread until the turn of the 20th century, but in the United States, the Tremont Hotel in Boston was built with 8 water closets in 1829, and in 1833 Andrew Jackson had iron pipes installed in the White House basement to serve a bathing room in the East Wing. Americans became the global outlier in terms of bathing and running water - Americans had more access to running water and working sewers than the rest of the world, but bathing habits were mostly limited to regular cold baths, and soap wasn’t used regularly. Soap was mostly used for cleaning laundry. 

Because Americans were more accustomed to bathing and regular hygiene, it shouldn’t be a surprise that pharmaceutical and soap companies saw the bathroom as a potential market. Now, in Europe, bathing was seen as something of an eccentricity. While the popularity of public baths throughout Europe waxed and waned throughout the centuries, in the 19th century the most popular form of bath was a cold rinse - usually just the face and hands. Bathrooms didn’t really exist - you had chamberpots and wash basins in the bedrooms, but there were definitely no mirrors around the wash basin and many people bathed while clothed because being naked was unseemly. In Europe, the popularity of bathhouses was called into question, with many equating them with sexual escapades or with physical ailments. The European spa in the 19th century was more for the infirm. But not so in America. Americans bathed and Europeans didn’t, a stereotype that persists today. And it’s the bathroom where our fixation on body image starts. 

Three major ad campaigns changed the way we look at our bodies - they are the first examples of exploiting self-consciousness and the need to feel attractive in modern advertising.

1911 - Woodbury Soap - The first advertising campaigns to equate body image and sex was Woodbury Soap’s “Skin You Love to Touch,” penned by Helen Lansdowne Resor in 1911. Lansdowne is interesting in that she was very much a feminist in her time - she and her siblings were raised to be self-reliant by their mother, a librarian, insurance agent, and real estate agent. Lansdowne is an important figure in American advertising - she invented the national ad campaign and invented the celebrity testimonial. Lansdowne is pivotal to the role self-image plays in advertising. When Woodbury Soap left their previous advertising agency, the soap had been marketed as a pore clearing, blemish reducing cleanser. Lansdowne changed advertising completely when she stopped trying to sell soap based on its practical applications and instead focused on the previously unmentioned side-effects - inducing desire in a lover. 

Lansdowne Resor was also deeply involved in the New York suffrage movement. Following President Wilson's ratification of the 19th Amendment, she and her female employees marched in the consequent celebration parade.[3] During the Great Depression, as president of the Traveler's Aid Society, she helped provide shelter to homeless women and their families. Shortly after, during World War II, Lansdowne Resor and her creative team were responsible for the development and execution of a campaign entitled "Women must work to win the war," which resulted in three million women entering the workforce by 1943.[

1917 - Pepsodent - Another major change came in advertising when Claude Hopkins realized that repeat business or continued sales of products was based on habit, and that habits could be invented by suggestion. Hopkins’ groundbreaking advertising for Pepsodent toothpaste implored readers to “Just run your tongue across your teeth. You’ll feel a film—that’s what makes your teeth look ‘off color’ and invites decay.”

Another of Hopkins’ ads read, “Note how many pretty teeth are seen everywhere. Millions are using a new method of teeth cleansing. Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes the film!” 

Hopkins got fucking rich off the Pepsodent campaign, as did Pepsodent. And Hopkins attributed his success (over a million dollars) to a two-pronged strategy: first, find a simple and obvious cue - in his case, having readers feel their teeth, and second, clearly define the rewards. For regular toothbrushing the rewards - so Hopkins thought, was the promise of fresh breath and clean, healthy teeth. But. Pepsodent was manufactured with citric acid and mint oil, causing irritation and tingling in the gums, associating the physical feeling of brushing their teeth - the minty tingle - with the promise of healthy teeth. If customers didn’t use Pepsodent specifically, their mouths didn’t feel clean. Hopkins and Pepsodent created the habitual user.

1919 - Odorono - In 1912, Copywriter James Young got a job at J. Walter Thompson Company thanks to some help from his childhood friend Helen Lansdowne, who happened to be dating Stanley Resor, the Vice President and General Manager of the J. Walter Thompson Company. One of the first clients Young was paired with was Edna Murphey, who was trying to sell her new antiperspirant, Odorono. Odorono started off rocky - men liked to smell musky and women didn’t talk about body odor, so the product was not popular and pharmacies regularly shipped back cases of unsold product to Murphey. But the product saw success during the particularly hot 1912 Atlantic City Expo - expo-goers were hot and sweaty and Odorono - after just one application - stopped sweat for up to 3 days. The original formula contained aluminum chloride suspended in an acid solution, making it bright red. It was irritating to sensitive skin and would eat through cotton and silk fabrics. But the success at the Expo sent Murphey looking for a new advertising agency. 

At first, Young’s strategy at J. Walter Thompson revolved around medicinal uses for antiperspirant. Murphey’s antiperspirant was actually invented by her father, a surgeon, who used the product on his hands to prevent sweating during surgery. So, the ad agency focused on excessive sweating as a medical ailment in need of a remedy. This worked for several years, annual sales picked up and Odorono became a recognized brand, but sales began to slouch. People weren’t really convinced that they needed deodorant. After all, Americans bathed regularly and they wore a lot of perfume. They also tended to wear thick cotton pads under their arms to absorb sweat throughout the day. 

In 1919, searching for bigger and better sales, Young took an extreme approach. Instead of beating around the bush, Young’s new campaign told women that if they smelled bad, no man would have them and women- and men - would gossip about them behind their back. 

His advertisement in a 1919 edition of the Ladies Home Journal “Within the Curve of a Woman’s arm. A frank discussion of a subject too often avoided. A woman’s arm! Poets have sung of it, great artists have painted its beauty. It should be the daintiest, sweetest thing in the world. And yet, unfortunately, it isn’t always.”

Other Odorono ads were even more blunt, with headlines such as “Beautiful but Dumb - She Has Never Learned the First Rule of Lasting Charm - A Long Lasting Deodorant” and “If You Long for Romance, don’t let your dress offend with Armhole Odor”

All of these ad campaigns were major successes, and at their core they gave vital information to ad agencies - consumers responded to desire, the desire to be touched in the case of Woodbury Soap (and the expectation that a person be pleasant to touch), consumer habits were enforceable through suggestion - in the case of Pepsodent, literally imploring readers to feel their teeth right now - and consumers responded to fear, for Odorono, the fear of being an outcast, the subject of gossip, of being single and unloved. Without prospects. 

I don’t need to make the case that modern advertising is just a roided up version of these earlier ad campaigns. Cigarette companies employed the same strategy to popularize habitual use of cigarettes. And if you are alive, you interact with about 500 advertisements a day on average. Logos, billboards, posters, algorithm-targeted content for bullshit like VShred and Beef Organ Supplements. I don’t need to discuss the entire history of modern advertising. But it is important to understand where and how it all started, because nothing has changed in the foundational formula of advertising - desire, habit, fear. 

A 1996 poll by international ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi found that ads made women fear being unattractive or old. A study of Stanford undergraduate and graduate students found that 68% of women felt worse about their appearance after looking through women’s magazines. Other frightening figures - 75% of women of average weight believe they are overweight, and 90% of women overestimate their body size. 80% of ten year old girls have tried dieting, and at any given point in time in the United States, 50% of women are on some sort of diet. 

A 1999 study published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that out of over 500 school-aged girls, 69% reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of the perfect body shape, and 47% reported wanting to lose weight because of magazine pictures Further, there was a positive association between the frequency of reading women’s magazines and girls acting on feelings of not being the right size or shape, including the initiation of exercise and diet. 

So, this isn’t paranoia. Magazines and targeted advertising - they aren’t scapegoats for some other deeper problem, they are the deeper problem. And there are a lot of studies to back up that claim. A 2019 study published in the journal Tropical Medicine and International Health conducted on nearly 700 girls and women in rural Burkina Faso aged 12-20 found that the more exposure young women had to media in general - television, radio, internet, and magazine - resulted in increased body dissatisfaction that may lead to eating disorders. 

And that’s kind of interesting because there is an often-cited report - when the island of Fiji was introduced to television in 1995, there was a study done by Dr. Anne Becker in 2002 that found that Fijian girls’ attitudes about their weight had changed since the introduction of television, suggesting that exposure to television led to eating disorders or negative body image - something that online cranks have tried to discredit due to sample size and other methodologies, but Becker’s research did pave the way for more research into the subject and - cranks be damned - turns out the hypothesis is supported by all the research. Exposure to mass media can be linked to negative self-image. 

That’s all well and good for girls and women - and, hey, devil’s advocate here, other studies and surveys have found that media targeting women and girls focus more on weight and appearance than media consumed by men, so we can see conscious ad campaigns featuring many different female bodies, a new embrace of what women actually look like, we can view that as a real problem that has faced a reckoning in popular culture and advertising. No longer are plus-sized women the comic relief in movies and television. They’re now showrunners. This is a positive trend - it’s an uphill battle, but it’s trending in a good way.

What about men? I think the stereotypical argument for male body standards - I mean, I don’t know about you but I grew up with hand-me-down GI Joe and He-Man action figures. He-Man is ripped. Unattainable body type. Seems I’ve heard this argument from the Men’s Rights camp, right? Like, women aren’t the only ones facing unrealistic body image - boys grew up with Stretch Armstrong and WWF wrestlers on steroids and action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone - and it really seems like if you have any male character in a show and they’re going to appear shirtless they better have a perfectly sculpted torso or they better be out of this world obese so we can laugh at them. I mean, those are perfectly valid claims - those are unrealistic standards. But straight men and gay men do not process media in the same way - something that is no secret to the advertising industry. Corporations do not want to separate their straight and gay male customers - gay men typically have more disposable income - but do not want to alienate straight customers by associating their products with homosexuality. This is called the “Marketer’s Dilemma,” where you want to sell and advertise to the LGBT community without losing business from straight consumers. 

The LGBT community has an estimated buying power of over $450-billion - the highest buying power of any minority community - corporations want that money and it’s the job of advertisers to get it for them. Studies conducted by ad agencies found that all media consumers - gay and straight - respond positively to heterosexual relationships depicted in advertising when those ads include implicit gay imagery - rainbows, freedom rings (which I hadn’t even heard of), pink triangles, and even references to “family” and “pride.” The inclusion of implicit gay symbols works on an even deeper level - when a corporation hints at their alliance with the LGBT community, it can feel like an inside joke that straight people aren’t privy to. 

But that hyper-awareness may be innate - a small study conducted with an equal number of gay and straight male subjects found that gay men were more susceptible to media influence than straight men, that media had a higher influence on eating and body image, and influenced their beliefs regarding the importance of physical attractiveness. Gay men scored higher on drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and body image related anxiety than straight men, and had a higher rate of eating disorders than straight men. And this isn’t a new thing.

We’ve talked about the ancient ideal male form, but in the 1950s and 60s I think we can find some modern context. Now, the history of the United States is rife with prudish men who for some reason or another didn’t like pornography and basically anything other than caucasian heteronormative relationships - you have the 1873 Comstock act that prohibited the distribution of obscene materials (and later advertisements for birth control), you had the Hays Code from 1930-1968, a guideline for film distributors that basically said we won’t distribute any movies with homosexuality or interracial relationships, the Comics Code Authority in 1954 was a voluntary standard set forth (and technically still exists) to prevent obscene comic books from being produced and sold to children. So, gay porn, while it existed, was not readily available for any young man who wished to find it. But, what you could find - in abundance - was bodybuilding magazines. Bodybuilding as a sport has a pretty dark past, so I’m going to skip over all of it. Suffice to say, bodybuilding was popular in the early 1900s for the same reasons it’s popular today, it’s cool to be strong, it’s fun to be active, and when you see someone hyper-jacked on steroids shilling for protein powders and dietary supplements, you think to yourself, “I could look just like that,” and then you spend your money. If you want to get rich, get super buff and sell supplements. 

And in the 1950s and 1960s when censorship in favor of cultivating a society of wholesome values was in full swing, gay men reached for bodybuilding magazines like Tomorrow’s Man and Physique Pictorial - these were essentially magazines for gay men without being explicitly for gay men - they included art and photographs from gay icons like Tom of Finland, Etienee, George Quaintance - but also advertised themselves as traditional bodybuilding or health and fitness magazines to fly under the radar, while some advertised as artist reference materials. 

Now, if you were to look at an issue of Physique Pictorial today, there would be no doubt that this is a gay magazine. And there was no doubt about it when it debuted in 1945. Bob Mizer, the founder of Physique Pictorial, had his house raided by postal service investigators searching for obscene materials, and was subsequently sentenced to 6 months on a prison farm for taking nude photos of a 17 year old boy. The men featured in Physique Pictorial are not grotesquely muscular, but they are fit, they do have bulging muscles, they are young and handsome and posed in suggestive ways. 

Regardless, the imagery that gay men had access to - and compare themselves to - were hyper-masculine and muscular physiques through either photography or, like Tom of Finland, hand-drawn representations. While pleasant and dare I say exciting to look at, these magazines also turned the perception of homosexual men on its head. Some interesting research in the 1960s and 1970s studying stereotypes of gay men found the US public held both positive and negative views of gay men - from being sexually abnormal, perverted, mentally ill, effeminate, and lonely, to sensitive, individualistic, intelligent, honest, imaginative, and neat. 

But these weren’t just casual social perceptions of gay men. Gay men and women were vilified by the US government during the McCarthy hearings - in their search for communists, they included homosexuals as being vulnerable to blackmail. A 1950 senate investigation helmed by Clyde Hoey concluded “It is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons” and noted that all intelligence agencies “are in complete agreement that sex perverts in Government constitute security risks.” Leading to thousands of job applications denied, military discharges, and firings of homosexuals from government jobs. 

So, Clyde Hoey, the man in charge of the senate investigation, is a real asshole. The son of a former confederate states officer, Hoey was a segregationist and in a speech given to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, declared “N---s are not entitled to civil rights and will never get them. There were no n---s on the Mayflower.” Real piece of shit. 

Also in the 1950s and 60s, the FBI kept records of known homosexuals and their associates, and the Postal Service kept track of addresses where materials pertaining to homosexuality were mailed. Gay bars were shut down and raided all the fucking time, cities swept parks and beaches to clear them of homosexuals, and the 1952 DSM classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. 

So, it isn’t just that the most common stereotypes of gay men were bad, gay men were seen as being defective or weak and lesser than. The result is decades of harassment by the federal government, police, and municipalities. There were numerous protests in the 50s and 60s - The Pepper Hill Club in Baltimore in 1955, the Black Nite Brawl in Milwaukee in 1961, even the US’s first gay pride parade in Los Angeles in 1966 was an activist event protesting the exclusion of homosexuals from the armed forces. But there are literally dozens of protests during these two decades, ultimately culminating in the Stonewall Riots in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Essentially a police raid gone horribly wrong, on June 28 1969, New York police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, the raid turned violent and lasted until July 3 - resulting in over a thousand protesters and rioters turning up before it subsided. The cops were overwhelmed at first, having to retreat until they could get backup. The Stonewall Riots sparked massive public support, advocacy, and activism - and where you didn’t drum up support, you at least drummed up awareness - the public acknowledgement of gays and lesbians as citizens who weren’t being treated as full citizens. A year later, June 28, 1970, the first Gay Pride Marches kicked off in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Gay Pride!

So, before Stonewall, the beefcake magazines of the 1950s and 60s depicted muscular men with mustaches, men in uniform, this sort of hyper-masculine aesthetic that, to me, outdoes the manliness of the stereotypical straight male. I mean, some of the models and artwork make these men look menacing, intimidating, and authoritative. The complete opposite of public perception and common stereotypes of the time. 

Now, look, to my thinking - and this may be something wrong with my psyche - to me there is nothing manlier than two dudes fucking. When you consider research data that suggest men are more likely than women to commit physical acts of violence in general, and are more likely to target other men, the fact that the tendency toward violence is always under the surface makes the concept of gay sex somewhat dangerous. And real men love danger and violence. A dude fucking another dude - absolute power move. Two male cops fucking each other? What could be more dangerous than that?

Before we move on to the aesthetic of the 70s and 80s, I want to bring up a concept that we’re going to come back to - and that is the idea of camp - 

[Ashe explain]

So, some gay men do not like camp, and while anecdotally gay men may pass it off as cliche or outdated or simply unattractive, some contemporary research suggests an aversion to camp is more related to how one wants to be perceived - that is, they may be resentful of more effeminate gay men because they themselves had to overcome that part of themselves, or they felt they could never express it. There is another correlation with masculine ideology itself, that is some gay men simply find masculinity more useful and superior to femininity. 

We’re now almost 80 years away from the first issue of Physique Pictorial, and I think with a contemporary lens we can look at the birth of the beefcake magazines as a sort of personal and sexual rejection of the stigma and stereotypes against gay men. Gay men were still men, after all, and I think the artwork of icons like Mizer and Tom of Finland really captures this internalized identity that gay men struggled with - how can you be a man if you like other men? Well, according to the beefcake magazines, how could you not be a man if you looked like those beefy models? There’s also the fetishism of authority in Tom of Finland’s work that I won’t get into, but I do think it’s worth noting that a lot of this comes across as a silent nod to gay men who defy stereotypes and who may pass as straight. Like any buff cop in uniform or any biker in a leather jacket - they may look rough and menacing, but they could be one of us. 

Now, onto the 70s and 80s. The best example - time capsule if you will - of gay fashion and style probably comes from Hal Fischer, whose 1977 photo-text exhibition, Gay Semiotics, literally explains everything you need to know about being gay in the 1970s - from handkerchiefs in the back pocket to handlebar mustaches and earrings, Fischer provides an amazing reference point for what gay men looked like in real time. Fischer focused on portraying gay archetypes in a fashion that is more akin to textbook figures than spreads you would find in a magazine. 

Fischer’s work is a bit tongue in cheek, for example, Street Fashion: Forties Trash, features a bearded man with coiffed hair in a sleeveless undershirt with a silk scarf, high-waisted gray flannel slacks, and tennis shoes. He is slim and muscular but not scrawny with an even tan. 

The Basic Gay Sports thick seventies hair with a slight part, a heavy mustache, a zippered sweatshirt over a tucked in flannel. He’s wearing a pair of Chuck Taylors and a bracelet on his left wrist. He is slim, not particularly muscular but not weak looking. He just looks like a dude.

And then one of my favorites, Street Fashion: Leather. This man is wearing leather chaps over Levi’s, a leather jacket with a cockring on one of the epaulets, black boots, and a bolo tie over a bare, hairy chest. He - honest to God, he looks like one of my straight uncles. He also kind of looks like Stephen King from the same era. Thick hair, thick beard, but you can tell he’s kind of a buff build - like not a bulky chest or very big arms, but he very much fills out the leather.

One common thread with Fischer’s exhibition is the models - they are all trim to slim - only a couple of examples of men with low body fat percentage, but all the rest seem to have a very deliberate physique - their jeans contour to their bodies, outlining their legs and asses. They almost seem to be wearing clothes themselves as accessories - and their clothes make them as attractive as possible. But these men in the 1970s, they also tend to look to be playing certain roles. Some men look older than they are, some younger. But most tend to look age appropriate. They’re working with what they’ve got. That’s my take.

And they all look so happy.

Oh, but the good times don’t last.

In 1981, doctors in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco began seeing a trend among their gay male patients, treating more and more men with clusters of Kaposi Sarcoma - these are the characteristic reddish purple lesions that form on the skin of HIV patients - and cases of pneumocystis pneumonias - which is a type of pneumonia caused by a yeast-like fungus that are commonly found in the lungs of healthy people but will opportunistically attack when one’s immune system is compromised. This, of course, was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic - which saw, if we were to say that the LGBT community had made progress through the 60s and 70s, a resurgence of stigmatization, mass hysteria, marginalization, and targeted acts of violence against gays. I cannot possibly go into enough detail about the AIDS epidemic in this episode - for one, it is very complex, and two, it goes way off topic. But we’re talking about body image, so how does AIDS affect the gay man’s ideal body image in the 1980s? Well, the 1980s were the age of the bodybuilder - absolute units of testosterone. Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Carl Weathers, Schwarzenegger, Stallone - all of them most perfectly sculpted. But we even see a shift in professional wrestling thanks to the introduction of steroids. Wrestlers in the 70s were large muscular guys - look at Andre the Giant - but they weren’t rippling with muscles. Wrestling in the 1980s gave rise to massive muscle men like Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, Mr. Perfect, and Bret Hart. 

I’ll quote from Graeme Kane’s 2009 paper from Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review

“The rise of the image of the gym-obsessed low-fat gay man identified in research was a response to the effeminate, thin and youth obsessed gay man, who Harvey and Robinson (2003) speculated ""looked lean, underweight and ill that emerged during the HIV/ AIDS epidemic in the early 1980's. The stigma of HIV/ AIDS may have pushed gay as well as heterosexual men to obsess about their body image and obtain a muscular physique"”

Now, some research supports the HIV theory of the super fit, super muscular ideal, and some seeks to not give HIV that much credit. But I think here is where we’re going to split from peer-reviewed publications and research and veer more into a real-world exploration of the gay male body. 

[Ashe] So, can you settle the academic vs. real-world quibble about the muscular physiques of the 1980s? Was that look intentionally pursued to shed the stigma of HIV/AIDS? 

It seems like we’ve gone full circle from the 1980s, and actually we just keep doing circles. Muscular and hypermasculine models in the 50s, muscular and hypermasculine physiques in the 1980s to demonstrate good health, and muscular and hypermasculine imagery in the 2020s. I mean, going back to the Greeks and Egyptians, we’re sort of shifting between bulky and muscular to lean and fit. 

Things changed again in the 1990s, when the bulky bodybuilder no longer appealed to a new generation of young adults. Opting instead for low body fat and lean muscle, the most iconic representation of the 1990s ideal body type is Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I don’t even need to describe it. We all know what that looks like. 

The body shape we’re seeing now is something of a hybrid between Stallone and Brad Pitt. Lean torsos, large but not overdone legs, and large pectorals. But if you go to the gym, you may have noticed there are quite a few guys who seemingly have a totally different goal in mind. Younger gay men today are back on the roids - a population of men who have higher instances of eating disorders and body dysmorphia disorder, and who are more likely to internalize the idealized imagery of men in the media. And to that end, I don’t know jack shit. 

https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2020/january/16th-century-workout/

“Medicine, Surgery, and Public Health in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 19: 28–46. (Reprinted from Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. Vol. 3, edited by Jack M. Sasson, pp. 1911–24. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995.)

https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/as27.pdf

Minen Francesca. 2020Ancient Mesopotamian views on human skin and body: a cultural–historical analysis of dermatological data from cuneiform sourcesNotes Rec.74119–130

Weber, G.W., Lukeneder, A., Harzhauser, M. et al. The microstructure and the origin of the Venus from Willendorf. Sci Rep 12, 2926 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06799-z

https://www.thenotsoinnocentsabroad.com/blog/fashion-and-beauty-in-ancient-egypt#:~:text=Ancient%20Egyptian%20women%20strived%20to,Some%20things%20never%20change.

https://idealmalebodyitalian.art.blog/#:~:text=This%20is%20shown%20in%20his,male%20in%20the%20Renaissance%20time.

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https://web.archive.org/web/20150720211011/http://adage.com/article/adage-encyclopedia/resor-helen-lansdowne-1886-1964/98850/

https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS04_Panel1_Paper17.pdf

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Madon, S. What do people believe about gay males? A study of stereotype content and strength. Sex Roles 37, 663–685 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02936334

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Ok, But Is It Racist

It’s [date] and the answer is yes, it is probably racist. 

[Intro]

Today is a great episode. I’m joined by a man I’ve been friends with for nearly 5 years. 

[pass to Kenny]

You’ll know Kenny from the podcast Sleepy Robinson as well as Who’s Cool? Kenny’s Cool. Every episode is just Kenny showing up and high fiving people. 

Those

So, Kenny and I have been working together these past 5 or so years and whenever we get together, our conversations go long. I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation last less than half an hour. 

And work together - Kenny - we work for two different companies or organizations, we’re in different types of roles, but we are both in construction and we work at the same physical address. 

We’re also on a weird brain wavelength - we always seem to be pulling the same ideas and topics from the ether - from aliens to exercise to family stuff, we just kind of seem to be aligned. 

So, Kenny, I’m going to share the moment we - I think - we became a lot closer. And that was when Covid was raging in 2020 - this was May or June - and there were nationwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and Trump was - Kenny - thoughts on how Trump handled all that? 

Yeah, it was not good. 

So, at the time I was teaching a construction safety class and Kenny came in to renew his construction badge and when everyone left, it was me and Kenny, and I just asked you - I think I just asked you how you were doing. And that really - I don’t want to speak for you, but it seemed like that struck something. And we talked, and you have a teenage son - I have a daughter - and you told me about the talk that you, a black father, had to give to your black son about dealing with police. 

[details?]

That - as a father that hit hard. Like, I think you and I have like this similar maybe old-fashioned or maybe just corny view of fatherhood as being like the dad who imparts life advice. I - it really resonated with me how much that hurt you to pass that sort of legacy wisdom down to yet another generation of young black men. 

[thoughts? How does that talk go?]

So, this episode - you know - we have had a lot of conversations covering a lot of topics - and we do talk about race a lot - at least I think I bring it up a lot - and that’s kind of where we’re going to start. Because I’m white and I think about race a lot. I’m a straight white guy in the south and I think a lot about race. So, whenever a straight white guy says they’re color blind and don’t think about race - I’m just gonna say, that is a cover for the absolute hurricane of thoughts about race that’s just constantly swirling around in our heads. Color blind - I mean, that’s just bullshit. 

But - so - okay - Like, hey, I’m your white friend Joe, and every time he has a question or thought about race he comes to you. Okay, but is it racist?

[discussion]

Another thing we’ve talked about, and I don’t think I’ve done a good job relaying it to other people - is the impact of slavery and the focus on systemic racism. The way - how I describe your take is - and please correct me where I get it wrong because I feel like I’ve way oversimplified it - is that yes obviously we have racist structures, yes slavery was impactful, but that does not inform or really impact how you move through the world. Like, it seems like what you expressed is a focus on the here and now. Now, white people, yeah it’s our duty to understand how modern society has been shaped by deep-rooted racism pre- and post- civil war, so yeah that’s on us to process the world and examine these structures. 

Please make that sound better. 

[discuss]

Yeah that is basically a much more intelligent way to say it. And - I - I gotta say. From the outside looking in, that seems like a really - I don’t want to say empowering, that’s not the exact word - it’s - you know what it is - that’s just a fucking boss move. And that’s one of the qualities I really love and respect about you the most. Like, to go back to the talk you had with your son - that’s haunting. In the last 3 or so years I don’t think I’ve gone more than a couple of days and not thought about it. Like, I have a few thoughts and memories on repeat in my head, and I always think about you and your sons - the talk. It has seriously altered the way I think about police interactions in general. And you know, my brother is a cop - and you know when you’re related to a cop you like dread the day that a cop shows up to your house to tell you your brother was killed. Or a call from a family member. And that fear has shifted significantly. Like my fear now is that he’s going to make the wrong decision in the field and that another family is going to get the news that their family member was killed by my brother - and to think that the only thing that may keep someone alive is whether or not someone had the talk with them. And whether my brother took away all the right lessons from our childhood. I don’t know, that was a rant, but above all I want your boys to be safe. 

Shifting gears - I want to tell you a story.

[Willa’s n-word pass story]

So, I mean that’s bad, right? That’s wrong, okay, but is it racist? 

[discuss]

I want to talk about Donald Trump next, because - when I think of true heroes of anti-racism, he is at the top of the list. I think - well, I think Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung really paints the perfect picture: “Trump doesn’t have a racist bone in his body and anyone saying otherwise is a racist and a bigot themselves. He garnered record-breaking votes from ethnic minority voters in 2020 and it will be even bigger in 2024.”

Now, first, like all things Trump, this isn’t true. Like, not by a long shot. Trump got 8% of the black vote in 2016 and 12% in 2020 - that’s a 50% increase, which given the events of 2020 is just a mind-blowing, I mean - I don’t understand that, but that’s not the point - Nixon got 15% of the black vote in 1968, 13% in ‘72, Gerald Ford got 17% in 1976, Reagan 14% in 1980, and Bob Dole got 12% in 1996. 

Latino and Asians, also not true. Trump got 29% of the Latino vote in 206, 31% in 2020 - compare that to Reagan’s 37% in 1980 and 34% in ‘84, and George W.’s 35% in 2000 and 44% in ‘04. 

And, probably my favorite - Trump’s performance with Asians is the 3rd worst ever performance by a Republican candidate. Trump’s numbers are 32% in 2020 and 29% in 2016 - those are high - but Bush senior actually won out entirely with Asian voters in 1992 with 55% of the vote. 

His numbers - those are the numbers of a loser. I like winners.

So knowing that Trump isn’t wildly popular with minorities, I wonder what makes him such a loser.

Now - Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis - she’s the one who brought charges against Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, this is from the perfect call with GA secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump asked him to, you know, find the votes so that Trump would win Georgia. Willis also, and I think this is important, also brought RICO (racketeering, organized crime), weapons, and drug charges against the rapper Young Thug, who has been denied bail 4 times and is still in jail. I don’t know enough about this case to have an opinion one way or another on Young Thug’s situation - but it should at least be noted that Willis has not showed an ounce of slack in handling the Young Thug case. Like, you know, she’s not treating him with kid gloves just because they’re both black. 

In response to Willis’ case against Trump, Trump - can you guess if he was happy about this? He was not. Trump went on several rants about Willis, calling her a “rabid partisan,” and ran an ad suggesting that Willis and Young Thug had some kind of intimate or personal relationship. Trump then sent out an email after the indictment was filed that basically was just another rant against Willis - he called Willis’ family “steeped in hate” because Willis’ father was a member of the Black Panthers and because Fani’s name is Swahili and and she is proud of it. A totally perfectly hinged response. 

He has called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg a “Soros backed animal” (anti-semitic and racist) as well a degenerate psychopath who hates the USA. Trump also called New York Attorney General Letitia James, “Racist A.G. Letitia ‘Peekaboo’ James.” 

In response to the nickname ‘Peekaboo,’ again Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung says, “anyone who thinks peek-a-boo is a racist phrase is obviously sick in the head” and that they should not be taken seriously as people. 

Trump also likes to call Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, his nickname for her is “Coco Chow” or alternately, just calling her “Mitch’s china-loving wife.”

This also - you remember the Birther thing with Obama - how Obama released his birth certificate because Trump was just hounding on him not being a real American and not a legitimate president - that goes into his whole schtick on brown people, calling African countries “shitholes”, telling Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Ayanna Pressley - all American born US representatives and brown women - to go back to their original countries - while at the same time just seemingly unable to let any words of condemnation of white people touch his lips - you remember the Proud Boys stand back and stand by comment. 

Trump and his handlers just claim this is like him being edgy or not-PC or, you know, we’re all just blowing it out of proportion, and his supporters - you know, mostly old white people - they’re like, oh he’s old school and that’s just how we talk and that’s fine. Then they’re like no you’re racist - which is my favorite comeback of all time. Like, hey you said this racist thing and they’re like nuh-uh, you are. 

He has also - I don’t know if you’ve heard this - he’s started calling - you know he’s accusing all these people of rigging the election - you know, mostly brown people - and he’s started calling them ‘riggers.’ Have you heard this? 

I mean, he certainly doesn’t have a great track record here. Okay, but is it racist?

[discuss]

There’s also this kind of residue of racism that is left over after Trump’s presidency. Like, things hit wrong since he left office. The thing that gets me - it’s weird - so in 2020 it seemed like my black friends and colleagues started using black skin tone thumbs up emoji. But then shortly after that, certain white colleagues started using white skin tone thumbs up emojis. And I gotta say, black skin tone - pretty universal, regular use among black people I know. But the white thumbs up - only a specific few white people are using white skin emojis. That hits wrong. It feels like - okay so the black skin tone is for like representation, right? Well, using the white skin tone, that’s also representation when you don’t really need it? Like the white skin emojis I’m not digging, they’re low-key racist. It feels similar to the Nazi salute. 

[discuss]

I was trying to think of other mundane things that give off like secret racist vibes and there’s like a surprisingly long list for me - and these are - I mean this is like the residual racism I’m talking about, things that are now tainted with the stink of racism since Trump was in and then left office. 

Lifted trucks - not just any lifted truck, though. And not the carolina squat trucks, either. The ones that hit as racist are like - they’re going to have some kind of sticker on the back window, and it is going to be either the birth and death date of a loved one or it is going to feel vaguely threatening. Like, a silhouette of a rifle or some kind of weird quote like “warning professional redneck” or “silly boys trucks are for girls” and like it’s automatic racism if it’s a deer and an american flag or if it’s one of those graphics that covers the entire rear window. 

Any version of black lives matter - like all lives matter, redneck lives matter, hunter’s lives matter - all obviously racist. And I’ve gotta add - after Trump the thin-blue-line and Punisher logos now just scream police brutality. Like that guy is gonna stand by and watch if you get a boot on your neck. That guy thinks it’s okay to murder protesters and random people on the street. 

Another thing that’s giving racism is white people with cable or satellite subscriptions. No one needs cable in general, but if you’re white with cable or satellite you’re watching Fox News. I feel like Trump completely ruined cable and satellite. 

So that’s a little bit of it. What we got with Trump was these constant dog whistles that spoke to racists, but we really need to explain what that means. A dog whistle is something that only racist supporters hear. Like how when you blow a dog whistle only dogs can hear that frequency. So, you might be Trump, making a speech that sounds innocent enough, but you’ve peppered your language with specific phrases or words that speak to a certain part of the population. And this language was very obvious when the 2020 protests were going on - labeling them riots, for one, talking about law and order, protesting “the right way”, down to demonizing the victims of police violence - George Floyd had drugs in his system or whatever and Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend Kenny Walker mistook the police for intruders and shot at them and white people were like “well he shouldn’t have done that.” 

I don’t mean to focus on 2020 and Trump and all that, but in a sense I feel like we have to because we didn’t get anything positive out of it, apparently. 

So we just had this ruling back in June regarding affirmative action, essentially saying affirmative action is unconstitutional. And from that we’ve had kind of a landslide or mudslide of - I’ll just call it overtly racist rhetoric - and I’m going to classify it under one simple word: woke. 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called Florida the place “where woke goes to die.” And if you focus on language - that’s what I’m really interested in here - then wokeness really becomes a code word not just for blackness, but for otherness in general. Under this label of wokeness or being woke, the enemy is diversity itself. We see this in both drag show bans as well as the banning of teaching black history - which of course the conservative mouthpieces will tell you of course they aren’t banning black history, they’re just banning the bad version of black history - the part where white people weren’t the good guys. We’re gonna go back to just teaching kids about George Washington Carver and Oprah Winfrey - the good time gang of US black history. 

And I’m not comparing drag shows to black history. The point here is that DeSantis and the new racist right doesn’t have to be exclusively racist. They can hate everything and everyone who is not straight white and christian as long as they just call it woke.

[discuss]

Kenny - how do you feel about cowboys? Are they racist? 

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the phrase “American Cowboy”?

This has to do with gentrification. Can you name any black cowboys? 

Prior to emancipation, historians estimate that black slaves made up something like 25% of American Cowboys. Now, because historians are estimating, I have to think there’s a margin of error there. Like, historians have a lot of tools to analyze obscure data and make conclusions or assumptions, but with Westward expansion there was, in my opinion, too much going on too quickly to have a decent historical record on this particular topic. This is all speculation by myself, I have no idea if this is true. Maybe there was a census on just black cowboys, but I doubt it. My speculation is the real number is higher, because Texas was pretty sparsely populated at this time - the mid-1800s - and like a lot of places where slavery was legal, an overwhelming percentage of the population was enslaved black folk. 30% of the Texas population was black in 1860. After emancipation you had tens of thousands of freed blacks heading west from 1865-1900. And you wind up with a lot of all-black towns in the new west - Mobile and Randolph Arizona, Allensworth California, but the states with the most all-black towns are Oklahoma (15) and Texas (19) - Boley, Oklahoma was the largest all-black town in Oklahoma with a max population of 4,200. The stories of most of these towns are actually pretty sad - freed slaves fled West after emancipation because, you know, racism, and as they settled in the west and the western territories became states they become subject to federal law, like the segregationist Jim Crow laws, which really - segregation really emboldened white people. I feel like we were already pretty bold, with the colonization and all, but emancipation without true freedom, that’s a level of fucked up only American Whites could create. 

I’m still talking about cowboys. Some of the earliest films were westerns - Kidnapping by Indians was an 1899 film filmed in England, The Great Train Robbery, also British, was filmed in 1903. You had Western Stars like Broncho Billy Anderson, Tom Mix, and William Hart all making films in the 1910s and 1920s. These were all silent films, right, up until 1927-28 you didn’t have sound - and after this period, 1928, when films now had sound - Western movies really fell out of favor. They still made a lot of them, but they were like throwaway films - small studios made them, they were like campy or pulpy, they were more or less the same film over and over. 

But. Kenny. Cowboys. 

In 1922, a white filmmaker by the name of Richard Norman made his way to Boley, Oklahoma with a very particular or niche interest in mind: making all-black films for all-black audiences. Now, Norman’s first foray into filmmaking was more as like a traveler and a carnival guy - he would take film and a camera and a projector and travel to cities around the country and he would make local films with local talent and then show the films in the community - this was like a whole novelty thing, imagine a guy showing up with a camcorder to make home movies and then charging you like $1 to watch it. Sure, why not?

So, in his travels and around this time, Norman lives in Chicago, this would be the late 1910s, and makes friends with a bunch of artist and actor types, many of them black. Norman becomes acquainted with Oscar Micheaux - Micheaux is very interesting, but he’s not a cowboy. Micheaux is the son of a slave, born in Illinois, he moves to Chicago and starts some businesses but ultimately becomes the first black independent filmmaker. The godfather of black film. 

And Richard Norman is in Chicago at the time, befriends Micheaux, and Norman learns that - get this - black people like movies with black actors, and there were a lot of black actors who couldn’t get work in mainstream movies. But Norman has also traveled a lot, so he uses this kind of carnival schtick he’s got going on to make his first movie, The Green Eyed Monster, in 1919. Again, all-black cast for an all-black audience. The first version kind of sucked. Norman made a race film that was supposed to be a drama but it was full of like comedic stereotypes and showed it to a black audience like “hey guys, how about this!?” and they were like “well, we like the parts where black folk do well but maybe stop with the stereotypes and racism?”  I love the balls on this guy. So, he edits it, re-releases it in 1920 as a strict drama, and it’s a hit. Norman - did I mention this guy is white? Yeah, Richard Norman is a white guy making black films - The Green Eyed Monster is such a hit that George Johnson, the black founder of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company - who was a competing filmmaker with Johnson - called it “the most sensational negro film made.” 

Norman’s next two films, Kenny, are westerns. But not just any westerns. Black Westerns featuring black cowboys. The Bull Dogger came out in 1921 and The Crimson Skull came out in 1922 - The Crimson Skull is like this bandits and hero kind of movie, but the Bull Dogger features black professional rodeo cowboy Bill Pickett - who was born in Jenks Branch, Texas, an all-black community of about 400 acres in central Texas. Pickett was born in a free black town in 1870, 5 years after the emancipation proclamation in a town founded by freed slaves and his occupation was just straight up cowboy. 

But he wasn’t just a cowboy. Do you know what a bulldogger does? Bulldogging is that rodeo thing where you grab a bull by the horns and wrestle it to the ground. The phrase, grab the bull by the horns, that’s bulldogging. Fucking Bill Pickett invents bulldogging. Now, Pickett’s invention - the way he did it - is not really done anymore because it is fucking deadly. Pickett would gallop his horse alongside a stray bull, leap from the horse to the bull and hold onto the horns, and then bite the bull’s lip and fall backwards, pulling the bull to the ground. So, Bill Pickett has this sort of showman’s skill to him and he joins the same 101 Ranch Wild West Show that featured Buffalo Bill, but because of segregationist laws he wasn’t allowed in some of the venues where he performed so he would just lie and say he was Comanche. And - because white people are dumb - this worked. 

Not Everyone can be a Bill Pickett, right? Sometimes, you’re gonna grow up in an all-black community in the 1870s and you won’t become a famous cowboy. But you know what? This also doesn’t just happen. Right? There has to be a culture, especially in an all-black community, of horsemanship, cowboying, and all that. And I think what happens between Norman the filmmaker and Bill Pickett and the rise of the silent race-films, you actually have stories that resonate with black communities because they are real. So, what I’m getting at here, Kenny, is that white cowboys are racist as hell. Because that type of character is grossly overrepresented in film and literature and popular culture. 

Cowboys? Racist. White-washed at least. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/11/09/no-trump-didnt-win-the-largest-share-of-non-white-voters-of-any-republican-in-60-years/?sh=5755c29b4a09

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1992

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trumps-attacks-on-prosecutors-echo-long-history-of-racist-language

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/a-famous-black-cowboy-and-nashvilles-march-of-progress/article_1c4267bc-bb0f-5914-8549-2a611e610937.html

Life in Plastic, It’s Fantastic

Mitch McConnell appears to be suffering a series of mini-strokes while aides insist he’s fine, just fine, and should definitely still be in a position of power and decision making for an entire nation. Trump had a mugshot taken. Ron DeSantis is flailing in the public spotlight as he tries to convince people he is a human who could become president. And student loan payments are about to resume after three years of learning that not paying them had no negative impacts on the economy. None. Nothing happened.

But that’s all beside the point because today we’re seriously talking about garbage. Just garbage. 

This episode is all about the horrors of recycling and why you shouldn’t do it. Or, rather, why it’s not your individual responsibility to save the planet through recycling. Or, rather, why your efforts have absolutely no impact on the planet. 

Now, for the record, if you can recycle metal and glass and paper, you absolutely should. They are infinitely reusable and it’s just good practice. But we’re talking about other stuff. Like plastic. Boy, humans sure fucked up with plastic. Almost like we should have just left all that oil in the ground. 

Anyway, this is Unfuck the Poor. 

[Intro]

Maybe I was a bit too extreme in my intro. There are some good, justifiable uses of plastic. Medical supplies come to mind. That’s - uh - well that’s all I got. I’m sure there are others, but you and I, the general public, we never should have been given the forever curse of plastic. 

Plastic begins life as a natural product - this is a very important part of plastic propaganda. Everything synthetic on this planet - nearly everything - begins with a natural product. The refinement and isolation of compounds in a natural product, then catalyzed with other natural materials to create a new, artificial product. In our case, plastic.

You can make plastic out of lots of things - cellulose, coal, natural gas, salt, crude oil, seaweed apparently. 

I cannot explain polymerization to you. That’s chemistry. But that is how plastic is made. You start with a monomer as the primary ingredient - a monomer is just a small building block that when combined with another ingredient forms very long chains. So, a monomer like ethylene or propylene is combined with a petroleum byproduct called Naphtha and that’s when plastic begins life. 

When you hear about oil and gas pipelines, you probably think of oil to make fuel for cars and gas to heat our homes. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. 

To get ethylene and propylene, you have to refine natural gas. To get Naphtha, you have to refine crude oil. So that’s where the natural part of plastics ends. You break apart two crude resources by distillation, dehydration, or a bunch of other complex processes to get the building blocks of plastic. 

Now Naphtha may contain Benzene, which is a carcinogen. Ethylene is a known carcinogen. And propylene is a probable carcinogen. 

So right off the bat we’re doing great - we’re taking crude substances and breaking them down into cancer-causing ingredients that we then combine to make an artificial material that can take between 20 and 500 years to decompose. And we make a shit load of it. 

Plastic Oceans Dot Org estimates the annual production of plastic is as high as 380 million tons. That’s per year. Every year. Half of that is single use plastic - it goes from a retailer to your home and then you throw it away. Over 10 million tons of plastic is dumped into our oceans every year where it just kind of floats and swirls and drifts to far away lands that we never think of. And while it floats and swirls the sun bakes it and breaks it down - but doesn’t decompose it. The plastic in the ocean breaks apart into tiny bits of plastic less than 5mm in size that we call microplastics. About the size of a grain of sand. 

Surely, you’ve heard of microplastics. In 2015 the US banned the use of microbeads - tiny plastic beads used in healthcare and beauty products - but that didn’t solve much. The plastic in the ocean is constantly offloading particulate. 

Filter feeders like oysters get their sustenance by sucking in water and filtering out the edible bits, and these filter feeders consume lots of microplastics. Oysters actually just poop out the plastic - but other species, like the sea cucumber, apparently prefer eating plastic to their natural diet. That’s not great, because sea cucumbers aren’t getting nutrients from the plastic. Just plastic. So they die. 

Larger animals go after larger debris. Birds, marine mammals, and turtles are more likely to regularly go after the large bits of plastic, which can block their digestive systems or tear them all up from the inside, make them feel full and less likely to eat real food, and can fuck up their immune and reproductive systems. 

And it isn’t just some animals. Like, all 7 species of sea turtles have been found with plastic in their digestive systems. Think about that time your dog ate that bag of mushrooms and had the worst trip of her life and then had to get an x-ray to find out why she was puking and panting all the time, only to discover a large ziploc baggie blocking her intestines. Well, that’s marine life. Just, all the time choking on plastic. 

If you don’t give a shit about sea creatures, that’s fine. We don’t eat sea turtles so who cares if they choke on Kroger sacks? Let em die. I’m just saying, that 10 million tons of plastic that goes into the ocean every year has to go somewhere, and one of those places is the stomachs of animals that get their sustenance from the ocean. 

The other place the plastic goes is their own sovereign nations known as garbage patches. You might be familiar with the Great Pacific Garbage patch - a swirling patch of plastic and its particulates that churns in the North Pacific covering an area of 1.3 million square miles. That’s roughly the size of India. Fucking India. A country with a population of 1.4 fucking billion people. 

That’s how goddamn big the ocean is, y’all, and there are 6 fucking garbage patches in our oceans. Plastic in the ocean is picked up by ocean currents and either winds up in a huge swirling island of its own design or traverses the seas and lands on shores far away. A bottle dropped in the ocean off the coast of China would be carried eastward across the Pacific to a spot a few hundred miles off the west coast of the United States. 

A plastic bottle dropped into the ocean on the east coast, say, New York, would travel east to Europe, concentrating in the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea. Much of the plastic coming from the eastern seaboard actually just winds up floating in the middle of the Atlantic. 

It’s a different story in India, which is one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters. 15,000 tons of plastic trash are generated in India every fucking day, and when it enters the water around Mumbai, it just kind of stays in the Indian Ocean, swirling its way to Madagascar or east to the Bay of Bengal, which is one of the most heavily polluted Bays on Earth. 

Professor Erik can Sebille is the physical oceanographer behind the website PLASTIC ADRIFT DOT ORG. He is a professor at Utrecht University where his niche interest in in ocean currents and how ocean water circulates the globe. So he knows where this shit goes and the website at plastic adrift dot org, run also by David Fuchs and Jack Murray, gives a detailed look at how we are literally drowning in trash and wrecking our seas. It’s depressing and quite impressive all at once.

Okay back to the Bay of Bengal. A 2017 photo-essay for The Guardian - Plastic Pollution blights Bay of Bengal - in pictures - Jaques de Lannoy captures in excruciating detail the sheer madness of the plastic problem. His photo essay begins with a look at the backwaters of the Chunnabar river in Puducherry, it is actually a pristine photo - dark clouds overhead reflect on an inlet with driftwood scattered around a muddy shore, all of lined with a thick forest of leaning palm trees. It looks like the Bay of Bengal should look. It might not be the typical picture of coastal beauty, but it is relatively untouched by erosion and pollution. It hints at what we lose when our reckless need for more and more goes unchecked, clogging our world with trash most of us only use once. 

This photo is drastically different from the next, taken at a seawall in Puducherry, it is absolutely covered in trash. It looks like Manchester Tennessee after Bonnaroo hauls ass out of there. Amid the trash, a woman sets out fish to dry. 

Even where trash is contained to a dump, you can’t contain it. Contaminated water carrying chemicals, microplastics, and sewage seep out of dumps and ultimately leech into the Bay of Bengal. Trash piles up in mangroves where fish spawn and mature before ultimately going out to sea. 

To combat this, Chennai banned the use of thin plastic bags, which is certainly something, but really it’s nothing. 

Here’s a fun experiment - go to Google and then ask the internet god about plastic pollution. This is super fun because lord Google will tell you, the individual, how you can help end plastic pollution. At least that’s the majority of hits. Buried in those results is something actually important, the ambitious goal set by the United Nations in Paris this year, 2023, of phasing out plastic waste entirely by 2040, though no concrete resolution has been set. That’s important because the United Nations identified the true source of and solution to the plastic problem: the corporations that actually make and sell the shit. Not you and I, the ones swimming in it. 

Corporations have been producing plastic since the 1950s, to date something like 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have made it onto this earth. I didn’t make 8.3 billion tons of plastic. You certainly didn’t. 

Plastic is a half-a-trillion-dollar industry, and is expected to reach a market cap of 880-billion by 2030, a full 10 years before we’re supposed to do without plastic on this planet completely. Exxonmobil is the largest plastic manufacturing corporation in the world, followed by LG Chem (yes, the electronics giant LG has a plastics division), French Corporation TotalEnergies, China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation round out the top five largest producers of plastic. 

And I have news for you. These corporations are very aware that fossil fuels face a reckoning as more and more electric vehicles hit the streets. They are heavily invested in refining crude oil and natural gas, and gasoline is but one of many products you can get out of oil. The plan, you might guess, is to just push out more plastic as fossil fuel demand wanes. 

In April of 2020, Ed Brzytwa, director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council sent a letter to the Office of the United States Trade Office recommending action be taken on the plastic front in Kenya - Kenya has some of the world’s strictest plastic bans - something that really pisses off plastic manufacturers. In that letter, dated April 28, explains to the trade representatives office that Kenya’s developing infrastructure “can support an expansion of chemicals trade not just between the United States and Kenya, but throughout East Africa and the continent.” To make Kenya the mecca of plastic on the African continent, “We anticipate that Kenya could serve in the future as a hub for supplying U.S.-made chemicals and plastics to other markets in Africa through this trade agreement.” Of course, like with all US trade agreements, there were conditions, specifically to prevent Kenya from implementing laws or policies that would restrict plastic usage and manufacturing, and would require Kenya to trade plastic waste. That is to say, force them to suck up the world’s waste plastic while at the same time supplying the world with more waste plastic. You know, cradle to grave. That’s big chemical getting on the eco chain. 

Now, Kenya’s plastic bag ban is very strict. You could face jail time for using plastic bags, and the Kenyan government extended the ban in 2020 to include plastic bottles and straws. Kenya really, really doesn’t want to be flooded with plastic, which the American Chemistry Council sees as little more than an obstruction to their inalienable right to profit. 

And they have a lot of obstructions. A United Nations report on the legal implications of single-use plastics found that 127 out of 192 UN member nations had enacted some form of legislation to regulate plastic bags and other items - including taxes on the manufacture of plastic bags, extended manufacturer responsibility for waste plastic, and bans on specific products, materials, and how much is produced. 

To combat this, Big Plastic has pledged $1.5 billion through the Alliance to End Plastic Waste - an organization created and joined by nearly ever global manufacturer of plastic or petroleum and natural gas refiners, including Shell, Dow, Exxon Mobil, Proctor and Gamble, BASF, Mitsubishi Chemical, and PepsiCo. 

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste website is slick. Every project they embark upon is a grand success, and they have chosen as their CEO the former UN environmental director, Jacob Duer. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste does not focus on phasing out plastics - the only way to actually end plastic waste - instead, their focus is on funding and developing new technologies to reclaim or recycle waste plastic. For example, BASF boasts a new process, ChemCycling, which essentially breaks down undesirable waste plastic by feeding it into a pyrolysis furnace and turning it into oil, that oil is then fed into new plastic stock and a brand new plastic material is formed. So, The Alliance to End Waste Plastic’s big idea is to do what they were supposed to do 50 years ago, actually recycle fucking plastic. Something they actually have not been doing. 

Again, The Alliance’s goal is not to phase out plastics - which, again, is the only way to eliminate plastic waste - but to create even more plastic. 

So, question. Is BASF sending their scientists out into the field to collect all this waste plastic in order to recycle it? No! Who is doing the actual work of gathering and sorting mountains of plastic trash? Why, none other than the global poor whose communities are drowning in trash. 

Back to Kenya. So, in 2017 China announced it would stop importing 24 different kinds of solid waste from other countries. China has, since 1992, imported 106 million tons of trash, and the import ban went into effect on January 1, 2018, virtually killing the trash import business by cutting imports by 99%. 

American media companies claimed the ban was an environmental catastrophe, essentially ending the practice of plastic recycling altogether. After all, if we can’t dump our trash in other countries, how can we save the world? 

The answer goes back to Kenya and developing countries like Kenya, where poor people are very poor and will therefore take nearly any job they can get. But with a country like Kenya, which has strict laws against single use plastics and is therefore not willing to just flood their country with trash, offloading China’s rejected trash is not so easy. 

That’s where the Alliance to End Waste Plastic comes into its own. The $1.5 billion pledge to develop technologies and infrastructure for recycling plastic is actually an investment in offshoring garbage. Back to that April 2020 letter between the American Chemistry Council and the US Trade Office. Kenya’s economy, like many other developing countries, struggled at the height of the Covid pandemic, and the promise of infrastructure investment and the jobs that come with it is very enticing to poor countries. So, chemical companies want to build fancy new plastic recycling centers in Kenya which will provide hundreds of jobs, but the catch is that Kenya must also import US plastic waste to the tune of 500 million tons per year. And Kenya is starting from Zero. Head of Greenpeace Africa, Frederick Njehu, says, “Kenya has absolutely no recycling capacity, let alone storage capacity for millions of tonnes of waste, and only 7% of this waste can be recycled. The rest will end up in landfills. This is a huge threat to marine life, rivers, soils, not to mention the toxic fumes that will be released.”

But that doesn’t matter. Located smack in the middle of Nairobi, Kenya, Dandora Landfill covers 30 acres and receives 2000 tons of trash a day. An estimated 10,000 Kenyans pick through the landfill every day in search of salvageable items to sell or eat. These waste-pickers, you might imagine, are among the poorest of Kenya’s poor. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste sees investing in a new plastic recycling center as a boon to these 10,000 waste pickers - they will be able to pick and sell even more garbage now that their state of the art facility can process nearly all types of plastic! 

The waste facility hired 500 sorters at the new facility, and understanding that the waste is a health hazard, are provided with smocks, boots, and regular health check ups. 

Built in 1975 and declared at maximum capacity in 1996, the dumping of trash continues relentlessly, and health implication are a bit more complicated than what can be solved by boots and check ups. Lead and Mercury contamination are huge issues at the Dandora landfill, which is essentially an unregulated dump. Anything and everything can be dumped there, industrial waste, medical waste, electronics. Soil samples taken from the waste dump have measured mercury levels at 46.7 ppm, far exceeding the WHO’s acceptable exposure level of 2 ppm, while lead in the soil measured at 13,500 ppm. Mercury is a major cancer catalyst that can also impact reproductive health in men, leading to infertility or subfertility - while lead increases the the possibility of miscarriage, stillbirth, and birth defects. 

But health effects aren’t localized to just the waste pickers - Dandora dump, like most dumps, burns off excess methane but doesn’t catch it all. Methane gas is deadly, combine that with dioxins produced when inorganic compounds are burned as well as fumes from incineration, and the citizens around the Dandora landfill have been suffering from respiratory illness, skin and soft tissue irritation, and even death for decades as a result of Dandora’s inadequate facilities. 

The Alliance’s infrastructure project - again, by their measures a success - doesn’t even put a dent in Dandora’s over-capacity problem. In six months of operating their new recycling facility, a whopping 1,000 tons of waste plastic had been sorted through. And just remember, the daily inflow of trash at Dandora is 2,000 tons. So, yeah, total success there. Just over a quarter of a percent of the total trash accumulated in 6 months was processed through the new recycling center, but the Alliance to End Waste Plastic has proclaimed that Kenya is ready to take the next step forward in absorbing 500 million tons of waste a year. Why, in a year they’ll be able to employ another 200 trash sorters! Mission accomplished!

Now, when China was taking in America’s waste plastic, the American public believed that sorting their plastic into the little blue bins and watching them get hauled off in the big green garbage trucks or loaded into gigantic dumpster was a major step in saving the planet. In reality, China was just burying or burning the plastic because it couldn’t be recycled. For one thing - one very small thing - Americans believe that everything is someone else’s problem. Most Americans, if they recycle, don’t clean their plastic containers before tossing them, and again, most Americans believe that if it’s plastic, you can just toss it all in the same bin and the magic of recycling will just make it work, no need to sort it out. The reality is that unsorted and uncleaned plastic contaminates the whole works, plastic film and most packaging just corrupts an entire load of otherwise recyclable plastic, and there aren’t enough super poor on earth to sort through the colossal volume of garbage we produce. So, China was like, fuck this, we aren’t making any money recycling your garbage, so fuck you send it somewhere else. 

The backlash against China’s import ban inevitably came back to the consumer. Plastic manufacturers looked at the recycling habits of American consumers and determined they were to blame, which is actually how we got into this mess in the first place.

By now it should not be a secret, or a surprise, that petrochemical companies subsidized most municipal plastic recycling programs in response to growing public concerns about the longevity and potential toxicity of plastic trash. As far back as 1973, plastics manufacturers were conferring amongst themselves that recycling plastic was expensive and infeasible, “there is no recovery from obsolete products” and that plastic recycling “can never be made viable on an economic basis.”

So they did the responsible thing and lied to the public. They subsidized municipal recycling centers, arranged haul-offs and transportation, and ran aggressive ad campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s that both extolled the safety of plastic as well as the civic duty and individual responsibility to make sure that we, the consumer, recycle their plastics, going so far as to create a feel good recycling logo with plastic grades printed on them so that sorting plastic felt like a significant thing that made an impact. Long story short, less than 10% of all plastic ever produced in the history of humankind has been recycled. The rest has been buried in landfills, burned, or dumped in the oceans. And we have produced over 8.3 billion metric tons of it. That means there is 7.4 billion metric tons of plastic - or its toxic burnoff dioxins - still sitting on this planet. 

For an exquisite expose in the falsehoods of recycling, I really can’t recommend the PBS Frontline and NPR joint project, Plastic Wars, both a documentary and an in-depth reporting piece both available for free online. Just really eye-opening stuff.

So, where does that leave us? Admittedly, not in a great place. 

Sure, you can stop buying products with single use plastic if that makes you feel better, but the truth is that we produce a shitload of plastic every day and that plastic gets trucked to stores and put on shelves whether you buy it or not. Not buying those items will at least keep them out of landfills. But the onus is not on you, reader, to save the world. The onus is now and always has been on the manufacturers of plastics and the refiners of oil and natural gas. The problem is them - always has been and always will be. And you can be guaranteed that as long as plastic remains a mass-produced material, industry’s solution to it will be to throw more chemicals and cheap labor at it, as well as offloading it to poor or developing countries enticed by the promise of a few shitty jobs. 

What do we do? I have no fucking idea. I’m the bearer of bad news here. All I can say is avoid plastic if you can, and if you do wind up with it in your house, please for the love of god don’t recycle it. Yes, it feels icky to put it in the trash can with everything else, but it won’t be recycled if you send it along in the green or blue bin. And, here’s a pro-tip for you, always crush your bottles as much as possible or at least don’t put the caps or lids back on them - they won’t compact in the landfill if they have air in them. At the very least, keeping plastic trash in local landfills keeps it out of the waterways and shores and landfills of the poorest nations on the planet. American landfills, believe it or not, are pretty technologically advanced, so we can at least fill our garbage piles to the max with the depressing but reassuring knowledge that the trash will stay there. 

But, the story of America’s garbage infrastructure is a story for another time. Please stop trying to recycle plastic, at the very least continue recycling cardboard, paper, and glass. And for the love of god don’t dump motor oil or chemicals or paint outside. All that shit actually gets recycled. And don’t litter. Jesus Christ. Just don’t recycle plastic. 

Sources: 

http://www.oceansplasticleanup.com/Plastics/PetroChemicals/Naphta_Petroleum_Chemicals.htm

https://www.bpf.co.uk/plastipedia/how-is-plastic-made.aspx

https://www.aiche.org/resources/publications/cep/2015/september/making-plastics-monomer-polymer

https://plasticseurope.org/plastics-explained/how-plastics-are-made/#:~:text=Plastics%20are%20made%20from%20natural,%2C%20of%20course%2C%20crude%20oil.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6906442/#:~:text=Ethylene%20oxide%20(EtO)%20is%20a,as%20a%20known%20human%20carcinogen.

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/PHS/PHS.aspx?phsid=37&toxid=14#:~:text=The%20Department%20of%20Health%20and,harmful%20to%20the%20reproductive%20organs.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-09/documents/propylene-oxide.pdf

https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/exhibit/in-images-plastic-forever

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/microplastics.html#:~:text=Most%20plastics%20in%20the%20ocean,through%20waterways%20into%20the%20ocean.

https://blog.marinedebris.noaa.gov/microplastics-dinner-story-about-picky-eaters

https://blog.marinedebris.noaa.gov/bite-size-plastic-how-marine-wildlife-snack-our-trash

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/29/if-you-drop-plastic-in-the-ocean-where-does-it-end-up

https://beef2live.com/story-ranking-countries-area-sq-miles-acres-0-211002#:~:text=Russia%20accounts%20for%20roughly%203.4,%2C%20India%2C%20Argentina%20%26%20Kazakhstan.

http://plasticadrift.org/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2017/mar/02/plastic-pollution-blights-bay-of-bengal-in-pictures

https://www.undp.org/blog/step-towards-ending-plastic-pollution-2040

https://www.yahoo.com/now/15-largest-plastic-manufacturing-companies-190544623.html

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-largest-plastic-manufacturing-companies-in-the-world-1107812/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-plastic-oil-recycling/special-report-the-recycling-myth-big-oils-solution-for-plastic-waste-littered-with-failure-idUSKBN2EZ1EF

Legal Limits on Single-Use Plastics and Microplastics: A Global Review of National Laws and Regulations United Nations Environment Programme

https://endplasticwaste.org/en/membership’

https://www.basf.com/global/en/who-we-are/sustainability/we-drive-sustainable-solutions/circular-economy/mass-balance-approach/chemcycling.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2019/2/3/life-in-a-kenyan-rubbish-dump-illness-poverty-afflict-community

https://www.africanews.com/2022/08/13/waste-pickers-at-kenyan-dump-face-cancer-and-infertility//

https://nevadanano.com/methane-gas-poisoning-and-exposure/

https://recyclenation.com/2012/09/kenya-chronically-overflowing-dandora-dump/

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/?

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/822597631/plastic-wars-three-takeaways-from-the-fight-over-the-future-of-plastics

Fun plastic facts:

Percentage Paradox - low levels of recycling with low levels of waste compared to significantly higher levels of waste with moderate increases in recycling - less recyclable waste in landfills in the 1970s compared to today.

Credit cards are the single biggest plastic polluter on the planet. They are the catalyst for overconsumption. The irony is that Greenpeace announced its own Visa credit card in 1997 in conjunction with Manchester bank, touting a biodegradable plastic called biopol. 

https://ohhcean.com/

The world’s first dildo made from ocean bound plastic.

“From plastic waste to pleasure waves.”

OBP-02 - G-spot Vibrator

Shower your G-spot with attention thanks to this G-spot vibrator that boasts a luxurious ocean shade and 7 vigorous vibrations. With its light-weight ocean-bound plastic core and velvety smooth silicone cover, it fits perfectly in the palm of your hand.

——

https://advancedplastiform.com/the-history-of-plastics-one/#:~:text=The%20First%20Man%2DMade%20Plastic%20%E2%80%93%20Parkesine%20and%20Celluloid&text=As%20an%20affordable%20substitute%20for,combs%2C%20and%20handles%20for%20cutlery.

In 1856, the first patent was granted to Alexander Parkes for his material called parkesine, the first man-made plastic. Parkesine was cellulose that had been treated with nitric acid to create pyroxillin which was then dissolved in alcohol.

Now, the first plastics actually had a somewhat noble - albeit unintentional - environmental impact. Parkesine was clear and hard and durable and made an affordable replacement for ivory - which meant that you could get the look of ivory without murdering elephants. Now - that sounds great, but rich people don’t do affordable so really fake ivory just helped the petit bourgeoisie look wealthy - buttons, combs, handles could mimic the look of expensive ivory at a fraction of the price. Were any elephants saved with the introduction of plastic combs? Probably not.

You also have the invention of celluloid in 1869-70 Enter inventor John Wesley Hyatt who blended camphor with nitrocellulose and produced a hard, moldable substance he dubbed "celluloid." Celluloid, you might recognize, is also the same material used in filmmaking and animation. 

So, the patent comes along, people use the material in new and exciting ways, some of them take off, others don’t. By 1888, Louis Le Prince would use celluloid film in the very first live action film recording - a 2-second masterpiece called Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed in Leeds. It’s just some Victorian lads and ladies in a garden doing some weird pirouette or March. 2 seconds is not enough time to build drama. 

https://filmstro.com/blog/what-is-celluloid-film-exploring-the-history-and-the-present#:~:text=digitally%2Dproduced%20films.-,The%20First%20Celluloid%20Film,Louis%20Le%20Prince%20filmed%20it.

BAKELITE

In 1907, Leo Baekeland, a Belgian-American chemist, developed a 100 percent synthetic material called polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, a thermoset material formed by the reaction of phenol and formaldehyde. It was patented as Bakelite in 1909 and was a game changer due to its heat resistant properties, electrical nonconductivity, and ability to be shaped into almost anything but was hard and durable once cooled.

Bakelite was used for everything from radio and telephone casings, kitchenware, clocks, jewelry, toys, and even firearms and was incredibly popular all the way through World War II. Newer plastics invented in the 1930s that were easier and more affordable to produce superseded Bakelite-type plastics by the late 1940s.

But, if you are an into antiques - maybe even vaguely so - you’ll recognize Bakelite as the more desirable plastic. Plastic is most definitely not antique, unless you’re talking about pre-war plastic. And Bakelite products are super expensive for what they are - a set of brown Bakelite horse brooches - a set is two - will set you back $200. Boring Bakelite bracelets will sell for $100 all day every day, more ornate, delicate, or rare pieces will fetch in the thousands of dollars - chunk bracelets, necklaces, radios. 

That takes us up to WWII, so after the war you have a world in chaos trying to rebuild itself, traditional materials like wood and metal have been scarce - rationed for the war effort - and plastic technology has advanced during the war because of that scarcity. We have a public ready to recover from a decade of austerity measures, industrial capacity that allows for plastic production at scale, and better knowledge of plastics in general. From 1939 to 1945 the output of plastic would nearly quadruple, from 100,000 tons to 365,000 tons, and from then on we have had an exponential output. 

https://jewelrybubble.com/search?q=bakelite&options%5Bprefix%5D=last

https://enl.co.uk/war-on-plastics-how-world-war-ii-changed-the-plastics-industry/#:~:text=The%20Post%20War%20Legacy,to%20365%2C000%20tonnes%20in%201945.

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Sex dolls

This fun plastic fact surprised me. Really surprised me. From the first patent for plastic in 1856, it took nearly half a century before men found a way to make a fuckable plastic object. 

The first sex dolls to use plastics most likely emerged around the beginning of the 20th Century - Sarah Valverde - a psychologist who also happens to study the use of sex dolls - came across a Parisian advertisement as far back as 1902 describing a “custom made doll” made from vulcanized rubber and a combination of plastics. We actually know that sex dolls are older than this because a French novel, Le Femme Endormie by an author under the pseudonym Madame B creates a beautiful portrait of an artificial woman - 

“A kindly soul had invented the dildo for women deprived of male contact; for the pleasures of our brave Captain Pamphile [an adventure hero from Alexandre Dumas], someone had brought forth the rubber woman; for our hero, a deft craftsman, an artist, would invent a miraculous Phrynée [a famously beautiful Greek courtesan] he would be able to manipulate at will – she would always be compliant and silent, no matter how lewd the act he chose to perform.

https://siliconelovers.com/blogs/realistic-sex-dolls-news/a-brief-history-of-sex-dolls

Corey can you explain the Comstock Law? 

1873 - Illegal to advertise or send by mail anything of a sexual nature. “obscene, lewd or lascivious,” “immoral,” or “indecent” - 

I actually covered the Comstock law in some previous episodes on abortion, essentially there was this large push from the American Medical Association to prevent the spread of birth control by midwives, white male doctors wanted to corner the market on sex stuff, including dildoes for the treatment of hysteria - the emergence of the personal dildo as opposed to the medical dildo was also a point of contention amongst doctors. 

There is also a fascinating historical hoax theory that the Nazis invented the first blow up doll to combat an outbreak of Syphilis among Nazi soldiers in France - it was indeed a fake report, but I think it’s noteworthy that the story involves Himmler suggesting to Hitler that they create “gynoids” made of artificial flesh like materials to distribute to Nazi soldiers. Again, totally false, didn’t happen, but because of this claim historians actually went to work chronicling the history of sex dolls and it was concluded that there was no evidence for inflatable sex dolls prior to the 1950s. You wouldn’t see advertisements for blow up dolls in the United States until the repeal of the Comstock Law in 1972. 

http://www.sexualhistorytour.com/history-of-the-sex-doll-the-era-of-plastic/

https://www.historydefined.net/was-hitler-responsible-for-the-first-inflatable-doll/

———

The most common killer of animals is plastic litter, notably impacting marine animals. Each year more than 100,000 dolphins, fish, whales, and turtles drown after becoming entangled or eating plastic.

And plastic is pervasive - A June 2022 educational article for children on waste plastic by National Geographic reported that a plastic bag - a humble plastic bag - was found 36,000 feet underwater in the Mariana trench. 

A 2021 Paper by the European Geosciences Union reveals that microplastics have made their way south to Antarctica, with microplastics showing up in snow samples on Ross Island, Scott Base as well as near the McMurdo Research Station. 

Plastic is also showing up in terrestrial Antarctic animals - A new study by researchers in Italy and Ireland found traces of contamination inside the gut of the Springtail, a small invertebrate less than 1mm in length that lives in the Antarctic soil.

https://www.guilfordcountync.gov/Home/Components/News/News/2362/#:~:text=The%20most%20common%20killer%20of,becoming%20 entangled%20or%20eating%20plastic.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/plastic-bag-found-bottom-worlds-deepest-ocean-trench/

https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/16/2127/2022/#:~:text=This%20study%20confirms%20the%20presence,the%20most%20common%20polymer%20found.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/06/23/world/microplastics-gut-isolated-animal-antarctic-scn-scli-intl/index.html

——-

https://www.fastcompany.com/90583252/coca-cola-pepsico-and-nestle-lead-the-10-worst-plastic-polluters-of-2020

1. Coca-Cola

2. PepsiCo

3. Nestlé

4. Unilever

5. Mondelez International

6. Mars

7. P&G

8. Phillip Morris International

9. Colgate-Palmolive

10. Perfetti van Melle

—-

1953-1962 C1 Corvette

1978-1981 BMW M1

1985-86 Ford RS 200

1975-77 Ferrari 308 GTB

1973-78 Lancia Stratos

https://www.goodwood.com/grr/road/news/2020/9/fourteen-cars-you-didnt-know-were-plastic/

——

You may have heard of the claim that superworms - these are the larvae of the darkling beetle - can consume and break down Styrofoam. That sounds super promising until you actually read about the experiment. Essentially, the superworms eat the styrofoam, poop it out, then eat their poop. The plastic breaks down but it doesn’t become not plastic, and it isn’t nutritious. It’s just plastic. So, the superworm promise not so promising. It’s just plastic poop. Have you seen the human centipede? 

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/superworms-can-eat-and-digest-plastic?amp

——

A promising future for plastics - algae may hold the key for both plastic degradation and production. A 2020 paper in the journal Environmental Science and Ecotechnology identified multiple species of algae that can effectively break down low-density polyethylene plastics - LDPE - bottles, plastic wrap, packaging materials, juice and milk cartons, six pack rings, playground slides - including blue and green algaes as well as navicula pupula. BPA - Bisphenol A - a hazardous type of plastic used widely in drinking bottles - was found to be successfully broken down by the bacteria Aeromonus hydrophilia and the microalgae Chlorella vulgaris. In all, over 90 micro-organisms and fungi have been identified that can metabolize and break down plastics into their short chain polymers through hydrolysis. But even this - even this might not be so great. Because eventually the biodegradation leaves you with CO2 as a byproduct. No matter what you do with plastic, it’s bad for the environment.  

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666498420300570#:~:text=Microalgae%20contribute%20to%20the%20biodegradation,chemical%20bonds%20of%20plastic%20polymers.