Slouching Towards Glen Ellen

It’s Andy here. Ann is in OurLittleCorner. Do I hear her singing? Is she trying to pump her fist?

It all started when I accompanied my brother and his granddaughter on a tour of a nearby university.   While the prospective students and their parents (and grandparents) were being schlepped around the campus by an enthusiastic, backward-walking student tour guide, my brother took a video of the group. He sent me a copy a few days later.

When I opened the video I immediately picked out my grandniece but it took a while for me to realize that the older man slouching along behind the group was me.  It was a jolting experience to see what I must look like to others. As I watched the video I involuntarily pulled back my shoulders and tucked in my chin.  Nobody wants to be seen as a slouch, especially an old slouch.

I’ve known since I was a kid that poor posture is not acceptable. Sitting up straight at the dinner table was right up there with finishing my spinach or taking at least one bite of that dreaded boiled cabbage on my plate.  And putting my elbows on the table was certainly going too far.  I don’t know how many times I heard this refrain:

Andy, Andy strong and able,
Keep your elbows off the table.
This is not a horse’s stable
But a proper dining table.

Having that refrain thrown at me was small potatoes compared to what I experienced in Army OCS (Officer Candidate School) where the position of attention is the military gold standard of “correct” posture.  Not properly coming to attention at the appropriate time could cost an unbelievable number of pushups. For the civilians reading this I’m including some instructions for achieving this lofty posture-perfect state of “plumb-line verticality.”

POSITION OF ATTENTION (ArmyStudyGuide.com)

• Bring the heels together sharply on line, with the toes pointing out equally, forming an angle of 45 degrees. Rest the weight of the body evenly on the heels and balls of both feet. Keep the legs straight without locking the knees. Hold the body erect with the hips level, chest lifted and arched, and the shoulders square.
• Keep the head erect and face straight to the front with the chin drawn in so that alignment of the head and neck is vertical.
• Let the arms hang straight without stiffness. Curl the fingers so that the tips of the thumbs are alongside and touching the first joint of the forefingers. Keep the thumbs straight along the seams of the trouser leg with the first joint of the fingers touching the trousers.
• Remain silent and do not move unless otherwise directed.
  

Despite my self-criticism for slouching, I’ve never given much thought to why my posture is of such concern to me. I guess I always had assumed that was the way things were supposed to be. Then, I came across a NY Times interview with the Beth Linker, author of a recent book entitled Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America. After reading the article (and discovering that Linker is a historian and sociologist) I decided to get her book; I’m glad I did.

Linker argues that although posture as a matter of etiquette has been around at least since the Enlightenment, it was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, that made poor posture “a scientific and medical obsession.” Darwin concluded that human evolution involved the development of bipedalism and then brain development. Linker says that this idea was controversial because “convention taught that higher intellect distinguished humans from nonhuman animals, and now it appeared that only a mere physical difference, located in the spine and feet, separated humankind from the apes.”

Hence, slouching became associated with what was considered to be slipping back to a less highly-evolved state. In 1914 a group of prominent professionals established the American Posture League which promoted “posture exams” in the military, the workplace, and schools. “Posture correction” via “race betterment projects” was aimed mostly at white Anglo-Saxon men (but also included middle-class women and some Black people).  One widely-circulated finding from these so-called posture exams was published in 1917 by the Harvard Crimson where it was reported that a majority of Harvard students were posture challenged. This “finding” stimulated a surge of interest in solving this vexing “problem” with the future political and economic leaders of our nation.

Linker explains how thousands of students attending elite universities between 1940’s and the 1960’s were required to be photographed nude in the name of “scientific” posture research (which was based on now-discredited theories of eugenics). In 1995 Ron Rosenbaum, who was one of the thousands of students photographed nude, published a story in the NY Times Magazine about this practice and revealed that troves of these photos, many of students who had become quite well-known public figures (such as Hillary Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Meryl Streep, Bob Woodward and Diane Sawyer) were still squirreled away at the Library of Congress and in various university storerooms. Needless to say, once the story went to press there was a scramble to destroy the photos.

While all of this posture business is fascinating to say the least, what I found of most interest was Linker’s suggestion that the supposed causal relationship between posture and physical (and moral) well being is, to a large extent, “fake news.” She states in her interview:

All of this has me rethinking my knee-jerk reaction to that slouching older man tagging along behind the campus tour group. Perhaps rather than being appalled by my slouchy demeanor, I should get used to the fact that indeed I am getting older and that a little slouching here and there is acceptable and doesn’t necessarily define me as a “slouch.” Nor does my slouching signal that my evolutionary standing amongst my fellow Homo sapiens is slipping. However, because I know that we tend to see ourselves by how we imagine others see us, and because it is unlikely that many of those “others” have read Kindler’s book, I will continue to try to resist the temptation to slouch – at least in public.