[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by XXtwindad

Au contraire, mon frere. I did read the whole article. Not that I necessarily had to. The crux of the author’s argument is contained in the first response to the interviewer:

“Nice to meet you.”

“Your posture looks pretty good. And it doesn’t matter — that’s the whole point of my book. It’s fake news.”

The question isn’t of blame, but whether or not good posture matters. And it definitely does. One article of many: https://www.wellnessforthebody.com/p...om-home-slouch

If your daily routine has you looking like the people in the pictures, you have to make some corrections.

The quote above is just the first question of the interview, but the answer to the second question gives better context for the reset of the interview. The 1st and 2nd questions:

Nice to meet you.

Your posture looks pretty good. And it doesn’t matter — that’s the whole point of my book. It’s fake news.

Our obsession with great posture is fake news? I’m off the hook!

Concern for posture, as a matter of etiquette, has been around since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, but poor posture did not become a scientific and medical obsession until after the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. He posited that humans evolved through natural selection, and that the first thing to develop was bipedalism; in other words, standing upright preceded brain development.

In other words, the author's interest isn't poor posture itself, their interest is with the obsession with poor posture.


Even more illuminating is the book description from the publisher, particularly the last sentence:

Princeton University Press: Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America

Beth Linker

The strange and surprising history of the so-called epidemic of bad posture in modern America—from eugenics and posture pageants to today’s promoters of “paleo posture”.

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century’s worth of nude “posture” photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America’s largely forgotten posture panic—a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences. Tracing the rise and fall of this socially manufactured epidemic, Slouch also tells how this period continues to feed today’s widespread anxieties about posture.

In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement and fears of disability gave slouching a new scientific relevance. Bad posture came to be seen as an individual health threat, an affront to conventional race hierarchies, and a sign of American decline. What followed were massive efforts to measure, track, and prevent slouching and, later, back pain—campaigns that reached schools, workplaces, and beyond, from the creation of the American Posture League to posture pageants. The popularity of posture-enhancing products, such as girdles and lumbar supports, exploded, as did new fitness programs focused on postural muscles, such as Pilates and modern yoga. By 1970, student protests largely brought an end to school posture exams and photos, but many efforts to fight bad posture continued, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

A compelling history that mixes seriousness and humor, Slouch is a unique and provocative account of the unexpected origins of our largely unquestioned ideas about bad posture.