Check-in: feeling checked-out. Kyla saw me on OKC & asked what it was, I said a dating site and she said "don't you think it's too soon?"
Matt "the one" msg'd me last night. We talked for almost 4hrs. He says I'm still his fantasy.. He also says he's staying in a loveless relationship out of loyalty & responsibility. He says he doesn't want to promise me anything because he can't give me what I deserve.
What do I want? What do I need? What do I deserve!?! Can Matt be it? Do I even have real memories after 8 years?
Who am I to me? Who am I at all? I know I want companionship. But at what cost to us? *sigh* why can't it be simple.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Addiction, not what you think! Read the article
This is a _must_ read, let me know what you think?
---
The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered and It Is Not What You Think
The new evidence will force us to change ourselves.
By Johann Hari / The Huffington Post
January 21, 2015
It is now 100 years since drugs were first banned, and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction, by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my book Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong. There is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.
If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.
I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels: From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her; from a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man; from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer; from a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected president of Uruguay and begin the last days of the war on drugs.
I had a personal reason to search for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind. What causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.
If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have said, "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next 20 people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for 20 days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day 21, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments which were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of 10 laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But in the 1970s, Vancouver psychology professor Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Alexander built Rat Park, a lush cage where the rats had colored balls and the best rat food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, would happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats had used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that at the same time as the Rat Park experiment there was a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers became addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified: they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact, some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers, according to the same study, simply stopped using. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so they didn't want the drug anymore.
Bruce Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you: It's your cage.
After the first phase of Rat Park, Alexander took the test further. He repeated the early experiments, where the rats were left alone and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for 57 days; if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked so you can't recover? Do the drugs take over? What happened is striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)
This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense—unless you take into account this new approach.
Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you get from your doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right—it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them—it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets, to meet their habits.
But here's the strange thing. It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street users into desperate addicts—and leaves medical patients unaffected.
If you still believe, as I used to, that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street addict is like a rat in the first cage: isolated and alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like a rat in the second cage: going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about "addiction" altogether and instead call it "bonding." A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me: you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.
But surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology.
Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism—cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy, and deadly, effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.
But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about the cause of addiction being chemical hooks is real, but it's only a minor part of a much bigger picture.
This has huge implications for the 100-year-old war on drugs. This massive war, which kills people from the plazas of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool, is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction— if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction—then this makes no sense.
Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. I visited a prison in Arizona, Tent City, where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages (the Hole) for weeks on end, to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human re-creation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. When those prisoners get out of prison, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record, guaranteeing they will be cut off even more.
There is an alternative. We can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts reconnect with the world and leave behind their addictions.
This isn't theoretical. It is happening. Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and take all the money they once spent on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them—to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step was to get them secure housing and subsidized jobs, so they had a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. In warm and welcoming clinics, addicts are taught how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma. One group of addicts was given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other and to society, and responsible for each other's care.
An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and intraveneous drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass—and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the 20th century was E.M. Forster's, "Only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live, constantly directing our gaze toward the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.
The writer George Monbiot has called this the "age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connection. The Internet offers only a parody of connection. Bruce Alexander, the creator of Rat Park, told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery; how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation.
But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds; it forces us to change our hearts.
Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like "Intervention": Tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But that will only deepen their addiction, and you may lose them all together. I came home determined to bind the addicts in my life closer to me than ever, to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't.
When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me that we should have been singing love songs to them all along.
---
The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered and It Is Not What You Think
The new evidence will force us to change ourselves.
By Johann Hari / The Huffington Post
January 21, 2015
It is now 100 years since drugs were first banned, and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction, by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my book Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong. There is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.
If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.
I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels: From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her; from a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man; from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer; from a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected president of Uruguay and begin the last days of the war on drugs.
I had a personal reason to search for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind. What causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.
If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have said, "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next 20 people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for 20 days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day 21, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments which were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of 10 laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But in the 1970s, Vancouver psychology professor Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Alexander built Rat Park, a lush cage where the rats had colored balls and the best rat food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, would happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats had used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that at the same time as the Rat Park experiment there was a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers became addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified: they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact, some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers, according to the same study, simply stopped using. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so they didn't want the drug anymore.
Bruce Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you: It's your cage.
After the first phase of Rat Park, Alexander took the test further. He repeated the early experiments, where the rats were left alone and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for 57 days; if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked so you can't recover? Do the drugs take over? What happened is striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)
This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense—unless you take into account this new approach.
Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you get from your doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right—it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them—it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets, to meet their habits.
But here's the strange thing. It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street users into desperate addicts—and leaves medical patients unaffected.
If you still believe, as I used to, that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street addict is like a rat in the first cage: isolated and alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like a rat in the second cage: going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about "addiction" altogether and instead call it "bonding." A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me: you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.
But surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology.
Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism—cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy, and deadly, effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.
But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about the cause of addiction being chemical hooks is real, but it's only a minor part of a much bigger picture.
This has huge implications for the 100-year-old war on drugs. This massive war, which kills people from the plazas of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool, is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction— if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction—then this makes no sense.
Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. I visited a prison in Arizona, Tent City, where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages (the Hole) for weeks on end, to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human re-creation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. When those prisoners get out of prison, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record, guaranteeing they will be cut off even more.
There is an alternative. We can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts reconnect with the world and leave behind their addictions.
This isn't theoretical. It is happening. Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and take all the money they once spent on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them—to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step was to get them secure housing and subsidized jobs, so they had a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. In warm and welcoming clinics, addicts are taught how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma. One group of addicts was given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other and to society, and responsible for each other's care.
An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and intraveneous drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass—and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the 20th century was E.M. Forster's, "Only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live, constantly directing our gaze toward the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.
The writer George Monbiot has called this the "age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connection. The Internet offers only a parody of connection. Bruce Alexander, the creator of Rat Park, told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery; how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation.
But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds; it forces us to change our hearts.
Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like "Intervention": Tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But that will only deepen their addiction, and you may lose them all together. I came home determined to bind the addicts in my life closer to me than ever, to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't.
When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me that we should have been singing love songs to them all along.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Being fat on the internet...
I couldn't've said it better myself, so I won't try! If you care about who I am, you'll read this:
---
---
A
few weeks ago, online dating website OkCupid announced that paying
users on the site could now “search” their matches by the answers they
gave to the site’s user-generated match questions. These questions are
as varied as “Have you ever had sex with a person within the first hour
of meeting them?” and “Do you like the taste of beer” and “Do you often
find yourself wanting to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” There
is a lot of random shit people on OkCupid want to know about the people
they might one-day marry/fuck/kill. (Or, you know, have an awkward date with and then never speak to again).
I’ve
been waiting for OKC to allow users to search by match question answers
for a long, long time. I used to spend hours manually scrolling through
each potential match’s questions until I found out how they answered
one question in particular. It goes like this:
Q: If one of your potential matches were overweight, would that be a dealbreaker?
A:
-Yes, even if they were slightly overweight.
-Yes, but only if they were obese.
-No.
-No, in fact I prefer overweight people.
As
a fat woman, it is basically imperative to me that any of my potential
matches answer “No” to this question if I’m going to seriously consider
meeting them IRL. What’s the fucking point, otherwise? (Warning: heartbreak and rejection ahead.)
Almost
as soon as OKC announced the change in search options, people on the
interwebz began to consider what the change meant in relation to
questions on OKC that address racial preferences in dating. Rehashing older discussions about online dating and race, Slate.com’s Reihan Salam penned a piece titled “Is it Racist to Date Only people of Your Own Race? Yes.” He concludes the piece,
To be sure, dating is about more than the sharing of bread, and OkCupid users who express strong racial preferences may well be doing the world a favor by being open and honest about their wants. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask those who do express such preferences, and those who live them in practice, to reflect on them, and on how there might be more to fighting racism than voting ‘the right way.’
I
agree with Salam’s assessment that fighting racism, and other forms of
oppression and discrimination, isn’t just about formal manifestations of
equality like voting, but is also about our hearts, minds, and even
what we do with our genitals. Far from being innocuous and purely
personal “preferences,” who we date, love, live with, befriend, and fuck
is extremely meaningful for how we organize social power, hierarchy,
and affiliation. (This isn’t Rocket Science, folks.)
And
that is part of why discussions about dating are so convoluted; desire
and attraction cut to the heart of deeper, subterranean social meanings,
ones we’re not fully aware of or able to negotiate freely and
rationally. Who we desire to be, and to love, isn’t just a matter of
individualist private choice in the way that the ideology of American
free-market political liberalism leads us to believe. As much as online
dating can feel like online shopping, neither activity is devoid of
political meaning. Both activities are about creating human
relationships situated within larger sociopolitical and economic systems
that are beyond our control as mere individuals.
The
links between a conservative political agenda and a notion of
apolitical personal blame and responsibility is particularly salient
when it comes to body size. As the report “Weighty Concerns” by Samantha Kwan and Mary Nell Trautner notes,
In Western cultures with an ideology of individualism, this belief that we can control our destiny, including our bodies, is deeply ingrained. Sizeist attitudes are particularly embedded in individualistic cultures such as the U.S. Work by social psychologist Bernard Weiner and his colleagues shows that fat stigmatization is more likely when individuals assign individual responsibility and blame to fat people, and Christian Crandall and his colleagues’ research further shows that fatism correlates with belief in a just world, the Protestant work ethic, and conservative political ideology (56).
Being
fat is, in this frame of thought, an undeniable visible marker of an
individual’s failure to live up to the demands of Western political
ideologies of personal responsibility and self-empowerment.
While
we all have both explicit and hidden (even to ourselves) preferences
about who we date, the insistence that those preferences are merely
personal, entirely apolitical, or that they are, somehow, our God-given right,
belongs to the same genre of ideology as other salient conservative
political myths that attempt to decontextualize individuals from their
social surroundings; myths like the welfare queen and the pro-choicer
who just loves murdering babies. To say that dating “preferences” lack
political meaning, that they cannot be harmful because the intent of the
individuals expressing the preference is not to cause harm entirely
misses the point, which is that systems of oppression are systems and ones that replicate themselves through us.
That is, we “inherit” these “preferences” and it is our job, if we are
committed to progressive social change, to “work” on those inheritances
so that our desires, and consequent “choices” align with the social
world we want to pass on to others in the future. (Be the change, y’all. BE the change.)
Still,
Salam is right to point out in his article that people who are
explicitly and openly discriminatory in their dating preferences may be
doing the rest of us a favor by letting us know. I was really pleased
when OKC announced the change in search options, in part, because I do
want to check to see if my potential matches have publicly expressed
dating preferences such as “I strongly prefer to date only people of my
own race.” Overt, public racists like that have, quite simply, #gottogo.
People who think that expressing a racial “preference” for their match
is just a matter of personal choice are extremely unlikely to be a good
match for me.
To be honest, people who have high match percentages with me generally fit a certain profile: they like to read a lot;
they’re politically leftist; they either went to college or are in
college now; they probably like art, coffee, cooking, wine, or whiskey.
They might write poetry or paint. They’re mostly young-ish,
urban-dwelling, hipster-y types. Many of them are queer/of
color/feminist. And they almost never overtly express
racist/sexist/classist/homophobic sentiments in how they answer their
match questions. And that’s rad for me.
But
ask them the question about “obesity” and it’s fucking no holds barred.
Time and time again, I’ll be excited about some Proust-reading feminist
bisexual carpenter or some effeminate philosophy graduate student
barista only to have my hopes dashed on the rocks of overt and unabashed
sizeism. No fatties. As in, I won’t even consider dating someone who has a BMI of 30 or greater (the technical definitions of obese and dealbreaker).
The same people who are seemingly able to make the political connections (or at least try to make them, who want to
make them) between desire, power, and race/class/sexuality/gender
unabashedly refuse to do so when it comes to body size. And I never fail
to feel surprised and disappointed about this. It doesn’t matter how
many times it happens, it defies my expectations.
By
marking “No” to the question “If one of your potential matches were
overweight, would that be a dealbreaker?” you are not saying “I love all
fat people and want to fuck/marry all of them.” You’re just saying,
“I’d consider going on a date with one single individual ‘obese’ person
sometime in my life before I die. It isn’t out of the question that I
might find a fat person interesting/sexy/romantically viable at some
point, someday.” And, from what we know about how fluid human sexuality actually is, this seems like a pretty reasonable assumption that this will, indeed, happen, like, at least once.
But, admitting
that you’re into a fattie, well, that’s not something most people want
to do, because admitting that fact is incredibly stigmatizing. You
might, like, get fat by association, or something. Your social prestige
will plummet like tech stocks in 2000. Especially if you’re a dude.
I
first learned this in the fourth grade when I asked out my first crush,
Jake, on Valentine’s Day. Jake and I had been talking on the phone
everyday after school for several months, doing things like playing our favorite songs for one another. He, like, GOT fourth
grade me, or whatever. When I finally worked up the courage to ask him
to be my boyfriend, officially, publicly, he told me he’d call me back
with his decision. Jake called me back after a few minutes to tell me
that he had consulted with his older brother, showing him my yearbook
photo, and that his older brother had advised him against us going out,
officially, publicly. It was a lesson on gender, desire, and social
status for both of us. And, while the ins-and-outs of negotiating gender, desire, and social status in dating have become more nuanced as I’ve aged, in a lot of ways it feels like nothing has really changed.
The details might be different, but being a fat girl who (sometimes)
dates dudes is a lot like being stuck in the fourth grade, forever. (Total bummmmmer.)
What’s
fascinating, though, is that I sometimes receive messages from people
expressing interest in me and when I look for the answer to the
“obesity” question they have said they won’t date an obese person. This
puzzles me a little, but I have a feeling I know what is probably
happening. They don’t fucking see me as obese. Obese is bad, but they
think I’m cool/sexy/interesting, so I can’t possibly be that.
This
dynamic was recently driven home for me when I foolishly searched for
the answer to this question as I was Internet stalking a real life
friend/crush/hottie. He too had marked, “Yes, but only if they were
obese.” I contacted him to tell him I had a hard time understanding how
we could be friends and/or political allies given his answer to the
question despite the many other ways we were clearly friends and political allies around issues of race/gender/sexuality/class. (I know, I know. Why bother? Glutton for punishment.)
His response? (WAIT FOR IT….)
“I don’t think of you as obese.”
Can you feel the harsh, hot sands of oppression brushing over you? As the fat girl dating monologue on Louie recently addressed, the fucking worst thing you can tell a fat girl is that she isn’t fat. Just don’t. PleasefortheloveofYahweh.
“I don’t think of you as fat/of color/gay/disabled/a woman” is one of the oldest fucking tricks in the book of false universalisms,
right? The logic is this: X form of difference is treated as something
bad/abnormal/undesirable/gross in society. I don’t think of you as
bad/abnormal/undesirable/gross, therefore I do not think of you as X. X
remains squarely unchallenged as a stigmatized/minoritized identity and
the power hierarchy replicates itself, but you get a free pass as an
individual (which is supposed to make you feel special and good). Difference is erased and assimilated back into the idealized norm of white/straight/male, etc.
In
this particular case, the use of the term “obese” causes some real
trouble. There is simply no way to make the term “obese” sound like it
isn’t the worst fucking thing on earth in
our contemporary cultural climate because it is a medicalized term
meant to signify abnormality, disease, and unhealthiness. We see “obese”
people as immoral, unhealthy, lazy, gross because that is part of the
built-in definition of the word. Who would want
to date someone who is all of those icky things? You could basically
re-write the answer “Yes, but only if they were obese” to read “Yes, but
only if they were abnormal, diseased, unhealthy, lazy, gross, and
immoral.” You can’t really blame people for clicking that answer when
you put it like that, can you? (Well, yes, I can, but I expect people to be less fucking idiotic. This is the root of all my disappointments in life, I’m aware.)
As my friend/crush/hottie explained to me, he thinks of “obese” as a health determination,
but he doesn’t think of me as unhealthy. But the thing is, I’m still
fucking obese. “Morbidly” so by BMI measures. And I have no interest in
pretending that I’m not, even though I also consider myself to be
reasonably ethical, healthy, ambitious, and appealing. And that’s what I
told my friend before I abruptly ended our conversation to go to the
gym. (Ohhhh, the irony. Sort of.)
What
makes the question about obesity as a dealbreaker such a good barometer
for my potential matches is that it’s a really good measure of whether a
match GETS IT, or predictably,
disappointingly, boringly doesn’t. By “it,” I mean roughly whether they
get how the personal and political are intertwined when it comes to
love/dating/sex and bodies/body size, whether they want to get it,
whether they’re even trying.
Besides all the obvious political connections to be made concerning the overlap of sizeism and other systems of oppression, like racism, colonialism, and classism,
on the more “personal” level, I want to know they “get it” because I
need to know that anyone I’m going to be involved with is going to come
to bat for me as a fat person. Are they prepared to “come out” as fat girl lover/fucker? Are they prepared to deal with street harassment if we go out in public together? Are they willing to fend off the idea that they’re settling for me? If they’re a dude, in particular, is their masculinity fucking secure enough to handle this jelly and all its social significance? Will they help me navigate a social world in which my body opens me up to unique forms of both fetishization and objectification and sexual violence and abuse? Can they handle the criticism they might receive from their friends, their parents, and society as a whole?
I,
frankly, have no time to waste on dating people who aren’t down to
rumble with me around this issue on the daily, because this shit is part
of my daily reality. And, that’s what people do when they care for each
other: they show up, they speak up, they fight for you. They stand by you.
Sadly, it seems, there are a lot of people who just can’t hang, not
because they couldn’t, in theory, but because they don’t even want to
try. They “prefer” not to.
This is not an essay I ever wanted to write. In fact, I’ve been actively avoiding
writing this essay for weeks and passively avoiding writing it for
years. There is nothing more unappealing than being a bitter fat girl in
our culture; this is made abundantly clear to me every time a
well-meaning friend tells me to be “more confident” or to “lower my
standards” or when people explain to me that there is nothing different
about my experience of love/dating/sex than a thin person’s. This shit
is hard for everyone, they reason. And they’re right: it is hard for everyone, just not in the same ways and not with the same social meanings.
It’s been made even more clear that I shouldn’t be writing this essay by the way that fat girls are silently pitied or cruelly mocked as the butt of the joke
in popular media, but never, ever get to tell the truth about our own
experiences in way that feels complicated, nuanced, and authentic to us.
And
it is made clear by the way that talking about fat, and being fat,
especially on the Internet, opens one up to some of the most harsh and
degrading backlash imaginable. It’s made clear by the way I can never
read the comments section on any article about fat or fatness without
feeling like I want to die. It was for this reason that my mother
expressed fear when I told her I was writing this essay; could I handle
the responses I would get? she worried. Well, Mom, I’m afraid, too.
Ultimately, that’s why I had to
write this essay, the one I didn’t want to write, the one I’ve been
avoiding; the cost of not writing it, of letting other people narrate my
experience for me using words and storylines that feel alien and
alienating, became too great.
I’m
a bitter fat girl. And I have good reason to be. Fuck me, date me, love
me, anyway. Prove to me you’ve got what it takes. Show up for me, show
up for the struggle.
Lisa C. Knisely Published on . All rights reserved by the author.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Why I can’t be an advocate.
I have a wealth of experiences, a gift for language and insight, and an engaging speaking mannerism.
I am a woman described by professionals in the industry as someone who “must be listened to."
I am a force to be reckoned with when prompted with questions regarding change and identifying the gap in services offered.
But along with that, I am a single mother, on disability, hardly making financial ends meet and not making a single dream for myself a reality.
Speaking at a National conference on homelessness solutions and prevention was a wonderful experience. I was treated like a VIP — because I was one of the ones with the knowledge that service providers were thirsty for… however, it didn’t get _me_ anywhere.
I know that people on the ground, those with the new coined term of “lived experience”, need to have a voice — they need to have a seat at the round-table discussions, because they are the ones who KNOW what is needed. I know this, and it seems that policy makers are possibly coming around to understand this.
But it _takes_ from me, and doesn’t GIVE to me in any fashion. I might get a meal or an experience out of it, I could possibly add it to my resume… but to what effect?
It is taxing and triggering to relive and re-share my story over and over again, so that others can understand _why_ these changes are so important.
But I don’t get a special title. I don’t have a career out of it. I can’t ever actually _better_ myself by this advocacy.
I have dreams, aspirations and goals in my life that I can’t take steps towards when I am so extremely tired after all this advocacy work.
I was at a story-telling workshop today. I loved every moment of it. It made me want to get back involved with some of the advocacy work I was doing before, but recently gave up. Only it won’t get me and my life and my daughter any further ahead than we are now.
Maybe it could make a difference to the policy, to the bottom line — maybe it could affect change that would matter to LOTS of other people — maybe it is in the act of selflessness that true change happens.
Maybe. But all of that maybe-ing doesn’t keep food on the table and a smile on my face.
I need to work on me and my goals, not the society around me and it’s goals.
I don’t believe that to be the full truth — I think society needs to be taken care of first, so that we might ALL work on our own goals … but I’ve been killing myself for two and a half years with it, and I can’t right now.
2015 is the year of ME. 2015 is the year of fulfilled goals!
I am a woman described by professionals in the industry as someone who “must be listened to."
I am a force to be reckoned with when prompted with questions regarding change and identifying the gap in services offered.
But along with that, I am a single mother, on disability, hardly making financial ends meet and not making a single dream for myself a reality.
Speaking at a National conference on homelessness solutions and prevention was a wonderful experience. I was treated like a VIP — because I was one of the ones with the knowledge that service providers were thirsty for… however, it didn’t get _me_ anywhere.
I know that people on the ground, those with the new coined term of “lived experience”, need to have a voice — they need to have a seat at the round-table discussions, because they are the ones who KNOW what is needed. I know this, and it seems that policy makers are possibly coming around to understand this.
But it _takes_ from me, and doesn’t GIVE to me in any fashion. I might get a meal or an experience out of it, I could possibly add it to my resume… but to what effect?
It is taxing and triggering to relive and re-share my story over and over again, so that others can understand _why_ these changes are so important.
But I don’t get a special title. I don’t have a career out of it. I can’t ever actually _better_ myself by this advocacy.
I have dreams, aspirations and goals in my life that I can’t take steps towards when I am so extremely tired after all this advocacy work.
I was at a story-telling workshop today. I loved every moment of it. It made me want to get back involved with some of the advocacy work I was doing before, but recently gave up. Only it won’t get me and my life and my daughter any further ahead than we are now.
Maybe it could make a difference to the policy, to the bottom line — maybe it could affect change that would matter to LOTS of other people — maybe it is in the act of selflessness that true change happens.
Maybe. But all of that maybe-ing doesn’t keep food on the table and a smile on my face.
I need to work on me and my goals, not the society around me and it’s goals.
I don’t believe that to be the full truth — I think society needs to be taken care of first, so that we might ALL work on our own goals … but I’ve been killing myself for two and a half years with it, and I can’t right now.
2015 is the year of ME. 2015 is the year of fulfilled goals!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)