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At the bottom right of my computer screen, just out of my direct line of vision, lurks an animated scold: a cartoon giraffe named Rafi. He is the playful icon of an app called Posture Pal, which works in concert with a wearer’s AirPods to warn against slumping while sitting at a computer. So long as I keep my line of vision trained on this text, Rafi stays discreetly out of sight. The minute I rest my chin in my hand in concentration, however—let alone sneak a glance at the iPhone that lies tantalizingly close to my keyboard—a baleful Rafi pops up, eyes wide, mouth down-turned. Sit up straight!
Rafi is actually less intrusive than the animated animal featured in another posture-correction desktop app, Nekoze. This one employs a computer’s camera to determine whether the user is slouching or slumping. If she is, an icon of a cat’s face pops up on her menu bar, accompanied by a surprisingly realistic meow. It’s a peculiar choice for a posture admonition: surely a meow could make a user look down at her ankles for a creature that wants feeding or petting, rather than stiffen her spine, eyes front? Then again, nobody would voluntarily install an icon of an angry drill sergeant on a personal computer.
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The association of animals with posture correction goes beyond an accident of digital cuteness. As Beth Linker explains in her book “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” (Princeton), a long history of anxiety about the proximity between human and bestial nature has played out in this area of social science. Linker, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped by what she characterizes as a poor-posture epidemic: a widespread social contagion of slumping that could, it was feared, have deleterious effects not just upon individual health but also upon the body politic. Sitting up straight would help remedy all kinds of failings, physical and moral, and Linker traces the history of this concern: from the exchanges of nineteenth-century scientists, who first identified the possible ancestral causes of contemporary back pain, to the late-twentieth-century popularity of the Alexander Technique, Pilates, and hatha yoga. The epidemic’s expression may have evolved, but even today it has hardly abated: on Goop, the wellness emporium, you can buy a foam roller to combat sitting-induced constriction of the waist and a plastic dome on which to therapeutically rock your pelvis. Sultry TikTok-ers demonstrate how to strap oneself into a corset-like garment that pins back the shoulders, while buff YouTube influencers explain how to appear inches taller by unfurling a tech-bent spine.
Linker makes no claim, she says, about the “realness of the epidemic or the degree to which poor posture is debilitating.” She’s not saying that Rafi and the Nekoze cat are wrong to harry me, or that your lower back doesn’t hurt. Rather, she sees the “past and present worries concerning posture as part of an enduring concern about so-called ‘diseases of civilization’ ”—grounded in a mythology of human ancestry that posits the hunter-gatherer as an ideal from which we have fallen.
The origins of posture science date to the latter half of the nineteenth century, when archeologists and natural scientists were starting to theorize the evolutionary relationship between Homo sapiens and other primates. There was debate as to which came first: upright walking or higher cognition, with the dominant view being that the evolution of the human brain preceded the development of bipedalism. This theory centered a relatively sophisticated mind as the defining attribute of our species, and thus was consistent with ancient hierarchical taxonomies that placed man, with his ability to reason, apart from and above the beasts. Some scientists wondered whether certain physical problems, like flat feet or scoliosis, were, in effect, the price of braininess. Linker cites the observation of a professor of anatomy at the Art Institute of Chicago: “Man’s original sin consisted in his getting on his hind legs.”
Before long, there was a societal investment in the betterment of health through the improvement of posture. Among the most significant popularizers of posture science was Jessie Bancroft, who helped found the American Posture League in 1914. Linker offers a biographical sketch that sounds like the premise for an art-house historical drama: Bancroft was “a self-proclaimed invalid who grew up in a remote region of the upper Midwest,” where she came under the tutelage of one Anna Jenness-Miller, “an anti-corsetry reformer who held parlor classes on hygiene and recumbent exercises.” Like her mentor, Bancroft became a lecturer on health culture, eventually moving to New York City, where she served as the first assistant director of physical education in the public-school system. There, she introduced a standardized posture test that could be easily carried out by a teacher equipped with little more than a pole against which a student’s carriage might be compared. Students who failed the assessment—as much as sixty per cent of the public-school population—could be assigned corrective exercises.
Bancroft and her posture peers were influenced by progressive-education advocates, including G. Stanley Hall, William James, and John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of play and outdoor activity for children, but did not recommend militaristic drills and synchronized calisthenics, which were associated with Old World European conformity rather than American individualism. On the other hand, the embrace of individualism held its own postural perils. Among the bugbears of early posture advocates was the “débutante slouch,” a fashionable stance associated with less restrictive garments in which the hips jut forward and the shoulders stoop. This way of standing was seen as an embodiment of high-class decadence. (In “The Great Gatsby,” the first thing Nick Carraway notices about Jordan Baker is her failure to slouch—she has “an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet”—though her posture is the only thing upright about her; she is also “incurably dishonest.”) The dissemination of the débutante slouch through displays in department stores and drawings in mail-order catalogues—both recent innovations that brought mass-produced fashion within reach of the middle class—amounted to a kind of social contagion in which “the fashionable slouch threatened to become a commodity in itself, a cost-free way to climb the social ladder.”
In America at the turn of the twentieth century, anxieties about posture inevitably collided with anxieties not just about class but also about race. Stooping was associated with poverty and with manual, industrialized labor—the conditions of working-class immigrants from European countries who, in their physical debasement, were positioned well below the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment. Linker argues that, in this environment, “posture served as a marker of social status similar to skin color.” At the same time, populations that had been colonized and enslaved were held up as posture paradigms for the élite to emulate: the American Posture League rewarded successful students with congratulatory pins that featured an image of an extremely upright Lenape man. The head-carrying customs associated with African women were also adopted as training exercises for white girls of privilege, although Linker notes that Bancroft and her peers recommended that young ladies learn to balance not baskets and basins, which signified functionality, but piles of flat, slippery books, markers of their own access to leisure and education. For Black Americans, posture was even more fraught: despite the admiration granted to the posture of African women bearing loads atop their heads, community leaders like Dr. Algernon Jackson, who helped establish the National Negro Health Movement, criticized those Black youth who “too often slump along, stoop-shouldered and walk with a careless, lazy sort of dragging gait.” If slouching among privileged white Americans could indicate an enviable carelessness, it was seen as proof of indolence when adopted by the disadvantaged.
This being America, posture panic was swiftly commercialized, with a range of products marketed to appeal to the eighty per cent of the population whose carriage had been deemed inadequate by posture surveys. The footwear industry drafted orthopedic surgeons to consult on the design of shoes that would lessen foot and back pain without the stigma of corrective footwear: one brand, Trupedic, advertised itself as “a real anatomical shoe without the freak-show look.” The indefatigable Jessie Bancroft trained her sights on children’s clothing, endorsing a company that created a “Right-Posture” jacket, whose trim cut across the upper shoulders gave its schoolboy wearer little choice but to throw his shoulders back like Jordan Baker. Bancroft’s American Posture League endorsed girdles and corsets for women; similar garments were also adopted by men, who, by the early nineteen-fifties, were purchasing abdominal “bracers” by the millions.
It was in this era that what eventually proved to be the most contentious form of posture policing reached its height, when students entering college were required to submit to mandatory posture examinations, including the taking of nude or semi-nude photographs. For decades, incoming students had been evaluated for conditions such as scoliosis by means of a medical exam, which came to incorporate photography to create a visual record. Linker writes that for many male students, particularly those who had military training, undressing for the camera was no biggie. For female students, it was often a more disquieting undertaking. Sylvia Plath, who endured it in 1950, drew upon the experience in “The Bell Jar,” whose protagonist, Esther Greenwood, discovers that undressing for her boyfriend is as uncomfortably exposing as “knowing . . . that a picture of you stark naked, both full view and side view, is going into the college gym files.” The practice of taking posture photographs was gradually abandoned by colleges, thanks in part to the rise of the women’s movement, which gave coeds a new language with which to express their discomfort. It might have been largely forgotten were it not for a 1995 article in the Times Magazine, which raised the alarming possibility that there still existed stashes of nude photographs of famous former students of the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, such as George H. W. Bush, Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, and Hillary Clinton. Many of the photographs in question were taken and held not by the institutions themselves but by the mid-century psychologist William Herbert Sheldon. Sheldon was best known for his later discredited theories of somatotypes, whereby he attributed personality characteristics to individuals based on whether their build was ectomorphic, endomorphic, or mesomorphic.
By the time the Times article was published, Sheldon was dead, and his theories, which were found to have been shot through with racial stereotyping, were buried. Many thousands of his photographs of Ivy League students remained in the National Anthropological Archives, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and, as the article observed, the danger of their ever being released, or even the mere fact of their existence, conferred “on some of the most overprivileged people in the world the one status distinction it seemed they’d forever be denied—victim.” The scandal prompted the archivists to shred thousands of Sheldon’s images that had been held in the institution’s own secure storerooms, in order to placate exactly the kind of high-status individuals who are used to getting their way. The result was the destruction of a large-scale historical record that might have been of incalculable use to current and future researchers. (Linker cites as a parallel the Framingham Heart Study, which has been recording the cardiovascular health of residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948.) As it turned out, the hasty bonfire of the nudities did not, in fact, consume all the images retained in the Sheldon archive, providing Linker’s story with a nasty sting in the tail: Sheldon had also made photographs at institutions such as the Oregon State Prison and the New York State Hospitals system, and those images, according to Linker, are still listed in the catalogue as intact.
Linker draws attention to an academic research project that was carried out in the nineteen-seventies. Gretchen Dieck, then a doctoral student at Yale, set out to use postural images taken at Smith College, cross-referenced with present-day self-reports by alumnae, to see whether the presence of spinal curvature in a teen-age girl predicted back pain in later life. Although, in Linker’s telling, Dieck went to scrupulous lengths to protect the subjects’ anonymity, former Smith students were distressed to discover that the school still held the photographs, and it was ultimately obliged to destroy them. Before it did, though, Dieck was able to determine that, contrary to the decades-long drumbeat of the posture-correction establishment, a diagnosis of poor posture in youth didn’t correlate strongly with future back pain; even scoliosis, which at the time was aggressively treated with metal braces, and sometimes with steel-rod implants, played a “relatively unimportant role in the development of spinal pain in the adult years.” The findings brought into question all the allegedly predictive surveillance of posture, not to mention all the devices and treatments sold to Americans with the promise of averting future pain.
Linker is scathing about the way in which additional research to confirm or develop such findings has been foreclosed by the photographs’ destruction. The result, she worries, is that the dubious narrative that slouching is bad for you has hardened even further into conventional wisdom, stigmatizing bodies that may be less than perfectly upright but are nonetheless pain-free, in “a type of therapeutic reasoning that essentially makes the risk of disease or disability acquisition a disease state itself.”
Today, the descendants of Jessie Bancroft are figures like Esther Gokhale, a Bay Area acupuncturist and the creator of the Gokhale Method, who teaches “primal posture” courses to tech executives and whose recommendations are consonant with other fitness trends, such as barefoot running and “paleo” eating, that romanticize an ancestral past as a remedy for the ills of the present. The compulsory mass surveillance that ended when universities ceased the practice of posture photography has been replaced by voluntary individual surveillance, with the likes of Rafi the giraffe and the Nekoze cat monitoring a user’s vulnerability to “tech neck,” a newly named complaint brought on by excessive use of the kind of devices profitably developed by those paleo-eating, barefoot-running, yoga-practicing executives. Meanwhile, Linker reports, paleoanthropologists quietly working in places other than TikTok have begun to revise the popular idea that our ancient ancestors did not get aches and pains in their backs. Analysis of fossilized spines has revealed degenerative changes suggesting that “the first upright hominids to roam the earth likely experienced back pain, or would have been predisposed to such a condition if they had lived long enough.” Slouching, far from being a disease of civilization, then, seems to be something we’ve been prone to for as long as we have stood on our own two feet. ♦
