I was talking with some colleagues about the present fight over same-sex marriage, when someone in the group commented,
I think it’s silly. All this fighting over a word.
Now I have every reason to believe that this individual believes in civil rights— for women, for lesbians and gays, for transgender people, for people of color. And yet she thought both sides of the debate were silly for fighting over the word marriage. I found her naïveté troubling in no small part because her chosen profession was the study and teaching of literature and language.
My colleagues’ infelicitous remark rests on the fallacy that marriage is merely a word, an arbitrary symbol that just happens to refer to the union between a man and woman. Such thinking leads many seemingly well-intentioned people to wrongly suppose that civil union is just as good as marriage— as if one could easily substitute one term for another. But when it comes to marriage, a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet.
The word marriage does not merely name or represent a social contract; it enacts that contract, shaping how we live and how we think, how we organize our households and how we pay our taxes. It constructs and maintains a whole host of social, economic, and political conditions and institutions, and grants a whole host of civil rights— from the most public to the most personal. Marriage doesn’t describe a reality; it creates one.
The same is true of civil unions; the only problem is, civil unions construct a set of “separate but equal” institutions and conditions, a shadow world that parallels marriage but never attains the full protection, security, and equality that marriage grants. History has taught us the discrimination inherent in separate but equal. And it is no coincidence that the same rhetoric used against the emancipation of slaves in the 1850s and interracial marriage in 1960s (the rhetoric of states’ rights and Biblical verse) is now being used against same-sex marriage today. For all the important and real differences between oppression based on race and that based on sexual orientation, the rhetoric of bigotry has a frightening continuity.
But if rhetoric oppresses, it also frees. In a recent post on Male Pattern Fitness, our favorite fitness crush Andrew Heffernan speaks eloquently about his rhetorical relations:
Rhetoric has become a nasty word of late, but my Dad’s car had a bumper sticker on it that said “Support Your Local Rhetorician!” when I was growing up. I’m a Shakespeare junkie. My mother’s a published author several times over. My sister writes for the bloody New York Times Magazine, for Pete’s sake. I’m all about rhetoric.
Heffernan understands the power of words, especially when it comes to exercise and nutrition. Ever notice that fitness magazines recycle the same information issue after issue. That is because, according to Heffernan,
Exercise is exercise, folks, and good eating is good eating. Boy howdy, we love to parse the details, but it’s actually a fairly simple formula, and you’re either implementing that formula or you’re not. What gets us going— what starts a fad, a trend, a craze, a revolution— is context. The messenger. The rhetoric.
Remember the political pundits who dismissed Obama’s eloquence as empty rhetoric? Heffernan reminds us that rhetoric is never empty. The words we use shape the world around us. Obama’s historic election is testament to that.
And just as words shape our world, so they shape our bodies. In Heffernan’s words, “what good coaches (and good fitness writers and DVD makers and cobblers and wheelwrights) offer us is not more facts but more strategies. More ways to make the simple and widely-known facts work for us.”
More than dumbbells and Swiss balls, words are our best exercise equipment. Whether we are a nature-boy Training Barefoot or “a pudgy unicorn ambling east on Santa Monica Blvd. near La Brea,” whether we are sharing More Marvelous Mantras or “curses uttered in the dying moments of a race,” we at Blog Further have sought to exercise rhetoric, to add to the number of rhetorical apparatuses and strategies for thinking about health and fitness. With each post, we hope to redefine, to reframe our relation to exercise, a project of accretion in our attempt to include new experiences, new abilities, new strategies. Thank you for taking part in that redefinition!
Allen Durgin is the editor of Blog Further. He urges his readers to support marriage equality.
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November 24th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Amen, fellow-fitness rhetoricians! Keep fighting the good fight! –Andrew H.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
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