I’ve been hearing a lot of “Real
this”, “Real that” recently and it never seems to be particularly helpful. The
one that seems the worst is “Real Food” which is loaded with patronising
judgement. In this fantastic article, Philippa Willitts discusses the effects of disability, poverty
and other intersecting oppressions on a person’s ability to eat well:
"There is also the counter-intuitive but ruthless fact that things cost more when you are poor, whether that is metered household fuel, less ability to take advantage of “3 for the price of 2” special offers, and more expensive bank and credit services. On top of this, food prices, “have risen by 30.5% in the last five years; this is double the rate of inflation, and two and a half times the rate of increases in the National Minimum Wage.”
...
It is evident that the problem with “unhealthy” food is inherently structural within a discriminatory society. It is not a coincidence that so many more poor people, disabled people, and people of colour eat less balanced diets with more packaged food and less fresh produce, and it is not that these people are all careless and feckless and don’t care what they put in their bodies. This is a wider issue of structural inequality that cannot be addressed on an individual level. It is not just a matter of “personal responsibility”.
...
Michelle Allison, in a blog post about “real food”, wrote, “If food is keeping someone, somewhere alive, then it is real enough”47, and understanding this, along with the truly intersectional nature of oppression, unfairness and discrimination in society, is the only way to even begin to address the real structures that enable such inequality and disparity to thrive."
So, with Philippa having done a much better job than I would have
taking on “Real Food”, here are my loosely connected thoughts on the other “Real somethings” I've come across:
"Real Men don't cry”:
When a man does cry, the knowledge that he has passed into the realm of the imaginary adds fuel to the fire. Of all the things to make people ashamed of, being sad seems particularly cruel. Let’s make the sad man more sad. Nice.
"Real Men don't hit women”:
The real man campaign is part of the extremely important fight by Women’s Aid to end violence against women (and is even doing it's bit to take on "real men don't cry"). But I wonder if this othering of men who abuse women causes people to deny the abuse that takes place right in front of them. In the same way that rapists are considered to be "other men" hiding in dark alleys when in fact 90% of rapes in the UK are committed by men who already know the victim. According to Women’s Aid, 1 in 4 women experience domestic violence over their lifetimes. The majority of perpetrators are men. Real men.
"Real Women have curves”:
This began as a resistance to a certain photoshopped thin ideal but soon became just another way women are made to feel bad about their bodies. It was quickly adopted by Dove in order to sell women their own struggle, just as Kellogs have with their "shut down fat talk advert". I have already written on this disingenuous advertising, and how capitalism takes women's anger or distress, sugar-coats it, and sells it back to us in shiny new packaging.
“Real numbers”:
The set of real numbers includes all the numbers from minus infinity to plus infinity. That’s all the rational numbers which consist of integers (-437, 24, 3 etc) and fractions (1/2, -17/6, 3/4849849 etc) as well as all the irrational numbers that cannot be written as a fraction (√2, π etc). There are SO MANY real numbers that they are uncountable! The real numbers do not include imaginary numbers which multiply with themselves to give a negative number. The thing is imaginary numbers do exist, and while we wouldn’t use them to count things, they have all sorts of other uses. So perhaps the use of “Real” and “Imaginary” to describe these numbers wasn’t so clever after all!
