Eredien's Journal

Sometimes you just read an article that makes you go, "Holy shit, really, universe?"
Such an article is this column where a woman writes in complaining that her 7-year-old daughter's unibrow makes her uncomfortable.

The professional advice columnist gives the following advice:

When I first held my darling in my arms and gazed on her mass of black hair, I whispered to her, "you're beautiful and amazing, baby."

If your child has an easily fixed cosmetic problem, it's best to avoid her wanting to take a razor to her face, and she's more likely to do something stupid to get rid of unwanted hair if she thinks she's ugly.

I suggest for now that you stop counting hairs and relax. As the brow fills in, or she starts complaining that other kids comment on it, you can say that she has eyebrows just like Daddy, and that's ok.

Oh, wait, that was the sensible advice I wish she'd given. She actually said:
when I first held my darling in my arms and gazed on her mass of black hair, I whispered to her, "Don't worry, baby girl, I will take care of you when the time comes to get some of your hair removed."

If your child has an easily fixed cosmetic problem, it's best to avoid her wanting to take a razor to her face. Fortunately, today a little girl with a brow like Bert the Muppet can have it transformed almost instantly into something more like Brooke Shields.

I suggest for now that you stop counting hairs and relax. As the brow fills in, or she starts complaining that other kids comment on it, you can say that she has eyebrows just like Daddy. Explain that he takes some of his out with a tweezer, but you're going to do something better for her that will mean the extra hair is gone for a long time or maybe forever. It's OK, Mom, that you want a clear path for your daughter's inner beauty to shine.

Did I...miss something about where hair grows, inner-beauty wise? Are there removal creams for the hairy soul, or razors for the heart? Because, well, otherwise that sounds like a totally *outer-body* procedure.

If you're really hairy, and you feel uncomfortable with it for whatever reason, and you're 15 or 25 or 65, and you want to get rid of your own hair, ok, sure. I'm all for getting rid of hair you don't want--I shave my arms and my legs and my feet, and have a short haircut, because I don't like having hair on my body for spiritual reasons. But that's you, dealing with your own hair.

Don't subject your kid to lasers and hot wax because you think that her seven-year-old unibrow isn't ok, and you can't bring yourself to show her Frida Kahlo's self-portrait and talk about inner beauty without thinking, "God, that woman would have been regarded as even more brilliant if she hadn't been so damn hirsute."

I sort of went to town in the comments, and emailed the columnist, and wanted to talk about why: it feels like my mom wrote into that columnist 10 years ago, and took her advice, and it fucked me up. Maybe this is a case of people being Wrong on the Internet, but I don't think so--I think it's a much, much larger problem about who is allowed to police whose body image, and who is allowed to have and develop a body image of their own, and how casually we cut others down for being different, without even realizing it, and what it does to the people who think it's ok, and what it does to the people who've been cut down.

I used to self-harm. Sometimes I still do. These last few weeks have been really, really hard, and I'm proud that today--as of ten minutes ago, even--I can look in the mirror, and see only one tiny scab from the past few weeks, and think that my skin looks ok, and realize that what I need for it to look better is not a half-hour long session staring into the mirror and digging at my nose with a nail file, but more sleep and a walk outside and the realization that I just had my period, so of course I'm going to have a flare-up.

It is really hard for me to believe, with all the hand-wringing that advice columnists do about teens self-harming and the double standards and beauty standards that women face, that they cannot see letters like these as what those problems stem from, and I think more problematically, what problems like rape, eating disorders, and the perception that women do not know their own minds come from. (Not that self-harm isn't problem enough). I feel like there's a huge emphasis on it being culturally ok for women, especially, to not know and own their own bodies--women's standards are expected to be someone else's standards, and women don't know or care what those standards are, or have their own standards for themselves, they are wrong. This happens most obviously in fashion/beauty and in the workplace and in the family, but it happens everywhere else, too: food, news, everywhere. I can't think of anywhere it doesn't apply. Think of the "we girls can do anything, right, Barbie?" slogan from the 80's. (I had that Barbie, and I hated it. Pink stole, yuck. She was always the one to get run over by the mini Ferrari). Sounds empowering at first, right? But it's not just "we girls can do anything"--"we girls" have to turn to Barbie, of all things, and ask her if she agrees with us, and wait for her approval. And then, then it's ok to do anything. (Not asking Barbie does not fall under the category of things we girls can do, apparently. Apparently Barbie never said "no," either.)

I wonder if this is why so much porn, kinky or otherwise, places such an emphasis on consent or lack thereof;
the idea that women can consent alone of their own free will to wanting things that they are supposed to want is scandalous, and the idea that women can consent alone to wanting thing that they aren't supposed to want is more scandalous, and the idea that women can consent to forego consent is incredibly scandalous. All these stories put women in a place where they gave up consent, or get consent from others, but maybe consent or lack thereof isn't the scandalous thing--maybe the scandalous thing is how they're setting their own standards for themselves, and aren't allowed, by the plot or maybe the gag, to talk about it with anyone else. It's always all a big secret. (To be fair, I think that there are probably cases in which these conventions apply to porn with men in it, too, but I think there one of the big ideas about consent is that the men in porn often seem to be interested in the ways they can have their agency restricted like women. Asking for permission, being humiliated or physically bound due to clothing or social situations, responsibility for cleaning the mansion without having the ability to have sex whenever they want...man, someone needs to write a kinky Austen takeoff with the genders switched and everyone wearing pleather and PVC, just so this can all be seen a little bit clearer for what it is, because I bet it would come out like really generic kinky porn.

Anyway.

Through my whole life, I've been holding myself up to what I thought were my own standards, but I realized today--after spending much of last evening in an agony of fear that I would move ahead with my life only because I was afraid, because I was broke, because of all the wrong reasons, and make bad decisions--that they weren't always actually my standards. I think some of them have been. I think my academic performance was largely my standard. I think that many of my hopes and dreams for the future are largely my standard. I think that my coming out and much of my relationship with rax was largely my standard (and hers). But in the larger parts of my life that continue to dog me--my ability to be on time for things, to set long-term plans to achieve those long-term goals/dreams, to be able to trust other people to set standards for themselves that I and they can live with, to form a healthier relationship with myself and food that isn't based on denigrating my body, to form a healthier relationship with myself that isn't based on denigrating my accomplishments and very real progress thus far, to form a healthier relationship with my work that focuses on what I can do rather than what I can't, to form a healthier relationship with others that isn't based on putting myself down to build others up--I realize that I haven't been doing those things much because I was trained to look to others to tell me how to act, and punished emotionally if I didn't look to others to tell me how to act, and/or punished emotionally if I looked to others to tell me how to act and then decided that their advice wasn't for me. I think that's why I was so afraid to do things on my own--all the times I'd done that before, it hurt a lot because it necessitated me cutting myself off from the people who were around me, because I knew they would not approve of whatever it was I was doing, whether it was reading or not shaving my legs. If I'd just been able to go off and do more things on my own, without worrying about whether it was right for me to do so or not, without worrying whether my going and doing things on my own was destroying the relationship between me and rax, that would have saved me, I think, and I bet it would have saved our relationship, too. I think I was starting to get there. I understood that rax kept pushing me to do my own thing because she wanted/needed space and privacy, but I thought she kept pushing for that space and privacy because she thought that my being with her made me unhappy. So I just kept trying harder and harder to show her and tell her that being with her made me really happy, and gave her in the process, less and less space and privacy, and worked on my own things less than I liked or should have. Because I wasn't sure if working on my own things was really okay with me because I thought that setting my own standards for working on my own things would make me lose the relationship, I had constant relapses into worrying whether my doing things on my own was destroying the relationship, relapses that were just way, way too much for both of us, and way too intense. Relapses which of course destroyed the relationship I loved.

Well, no time like the present, I suppose. My decisions need to be made out of love for myself, rather than fear for myself.

( read my reply to the lady who wrote into the advice column )

I have absolutely no ability to schedule things I do for other people into my larger schedule of "things I do for myself."

And since doing things for other people is often (to varying extents) beneficial to me, I tended to veer toward benefiting the greater number of people, rather than doing the action that would most benefit me and others, at any given time. But this tendency to always give top priority to and take immediate action on only the things that benefited me and others, rather than being able to schedule "things solely for me" and "things solely for others" and "things that benefit me and others," was not helpful.

I think I was again starting to believe it was ok to do things solely for my own benefit, and was even starting to do some of those things--but then in turn had problems scheduling "the things I do solely for myself" into a greater schedule of "things I do for myself."

When I am only by myself, all "the things I do solely for myself" always line up with the larger list of "the things I need to do for myself," so there is no tension and no time-management problem.

Hm. Hm hm hm.
Thought-provoking.

On one hand, this looks like a scheduling problem, which should not be that hard to tackle in the first place. I can now look at my tasks and say, "does this solely benefit me?" "does this benefit me and others?" "does this just benefit others?" and then decide to prioritize based on my circumstances and feelings. If I feel like I need more time alone, I can choose to prioritize actions that solely benefit me. If I feel like I need less time alone, I can choose to prioritize actions that benefit me and others, or just others. If there is a task to be done regardless of how I feel that day, I can monitor my emotions and ask for more time for myself or get more time with others later.

On the other hand, I am not good at determining how long any given action is going to take. If I want to do an action that benefits me and others (baking bread, for example, lets me be creative (benefit to me) and lets me feed me and other people delicious food (benefit to me and others)). If I am feeling like I want to do a little action for myself and others and then a great deal of action only for myself, and bread baking takes an hour instead of 20 minutes, and then the action for myself, designing something say, takes four times as long as I thought it would, I will become grumpy due to a problem with understanding estimated time and time-frames for any given action.

Hm.

I think I need to think more about this.
I think it should be solvable.

--
The medication for thrush says it is "cherry mint" flavor, but I think it tastes like banana mixed with wedding mints.

The meatloaf analogy

In rm's journal, trinker wrote a comment about how surviving abuse makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get.

I wanted to expand on that a little, and wanted to put it in a place where I could talk about how that was rekevant to my own situation right now.

To trinker's comment, I would add to this that it makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get--even if they don't want it, even if they detest it, even if getting it is actively bad for them. And when people are told and believe that they should be grateful for getting things that are bad for them over and over again, they generally end up not being able to articulate what it is that would actually be good for them, because they have never had the opportunity to have something that was good for them, whether they got it for themselves or had other people give it to them.

When you are starving for food, and someone hands you meatloaf, you are going to eat it even if you don't like meatloaf. You are going to eat it even if you are allergic to meatloaf, if you are hungry enough. And if all that the people who cook for you know how to make is meatloaf, you are eventually going to learn to eat and probably cook meatloaf, even if you don't want it. Then, once you've learned to eat it all the time without throwing up, you will start to wonder if you really do like meatloaf--after all, you're eating it all the time.

Then, you learn that other people eat other things--beans, squash, fish, ice cream, sometimes even meatloaf. At first you are surprised--people eat a variety of things? You spend a while adjusting to that idea, and then you go to the kitchen and tell the chef about pumpkins and they say, "but my meatloaf is the very best!" or "sorry, I don't know how to make salad; you'll have to make do with meatloaf!" or "you don't like my meatloaf? Fine! Don't eat tonight, then!" or "but you've been eating my meatloaf your whole life, so you must like it--and look at how healthy you are! " These last two arguments are quite convincing, because you a.) don't want to stave, and b.) you yourself were already wondering if maybe your hatred for meatloaf was irrational--it reinforces that self-doubt that was already there. You never stopped to wonder if you could have become more healthy if you ate soup instead: for one thing, you'd never had the opportunity to try soup because you'd never had it in your kitchen. And for another, you had no reason to think that eating something else would fix the problem, since when other people said they ate other things and were "normally healthy" you assumed that meant that they were constantly sick, since that was "normally healthy" for you and everyone who you knew, since you all ate from the same kitchen.

But then you finally figure out that maybe you should to learn how to cook.

You go to the cook and ask to use the kitchen, but they won't let you make anything other than meatloaf; so you have to go elsewhere to learn to cook.

There are three options from that point.

( Please read below the LJ cut, this is cut only for length and not for importance. )

I have been--am--guilty of this fundamental selfishness, in terms of relationships. I think that is because I believed that the only permissible way to live with and love others in a relationship--and in turn be lived with and be loved by those others--was the already socially sanctioned way of showing those things. Which is just not true.

Which is probably why I spent a lot of time in the past six months deconstructing arguments against gay marriage and following the news about worldwide queer rights and Prop 8--I was using my thoughts about what was actually happening as a tool to try and work through my feelings about the social sanction of marriage. After the first few months, I was even able to articulate to myself that I was using all that reading and writing as a tool to get to something else, a means to an end, but I wasn't quite sure what end I was looking for. (I was so crushed when the prop 8 victory was handed down a day before R. and I broke up, but the reason I was crushed didn't make sense to me--we had never planned on getting married in CA anyway, so why would the timing have such an affect on me and my relationship, personally? Turns out I was crushed because the social sanction aspect so central to the case was something that I had really believed I needed to have a happy, loving relationship, and at the very point that that social sanction was making global news headlines, I no longer had a happy, loving relationship for those sanctions to apply to). It was that reading and writing and thinking that led me to realize that I didn't actually want or need those social sanctions to have a loving relationship, and further led me to realize that my insistence on those sanctions was what led me to ignore my own idea of what I actually wanted, which led me to destroy the loving relationship I actually had going on already. [After some reflection, I don't think that I destroyed the relationship, and I don't think it was the pressure for social sanction that led it to be destroyed. I do however, think that my insistence on the sanction let me to ignore what I wanted.]
This is not to say that other people shouldn't want or need social sanctions, because I think the vast majority of people do, and deserve them. I will continue to fight for gay marriage. I just won't continue to fight for it for me anymore, because it's not what I want.

(The meatloaf analogy, BTW, is both a metaphorical and a literal analogy--I'm vegan and I literally get the "wow, this is so good but it's so weird, I don't think I could eat it every day; are you sure you don't want steak--and you aren't losing any weight, are you?" with every family dinner for which I make and bring my own food. (When I was a preteen and decided to become pescatarian, my parents forbid me from buying and/or cooking my own food at home. I would eat what they cooked and pick out the bits of meat. I survived a year on frozen/canned side-dish vegetables, pasta, and McDonald's caesar salads, before I realized that I could not get enough protein without the tofu that I could not buy or cook, and went back to eating meat for my own long-term health.) The whole point of bringing the food in the first place is to enable me to make the food choices that are right for me, and stay emotionally and physically healthy by doing so), but my mom just complains that eating fish would make me healthier and feels bad that I won't eat her turkey gravy, and my dad won't try anything made of tofu at all, though I think he had three slices of vegan cake).

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with food--I didn't like the food I was being given, but didn't have an opportunity to eat kind of food I wanted much, wasn't allowed to have my own diet when I found out my ideal foods were radically different from those of the people around me, and was told my choices were invalid so began to doubt my own ideas about what I liked and whether my food opinions were just totally invalid.

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with relationships--I didn't have an opportunity to get much attention as a kid, and didn't like what attention I was given. But when I expressed this, I was told that it was not acceptable to ask for or want different kinds of affection, because the kinds of attention I was given were the kinds they could give, and the prevailing socially sanctioned idea my parents and I had of love was "the parents will love to the best of their ability, and since that is all they can do, the child will know and feel loved" -- even though that doesn't really follow. Even when I found out that my ideal forms of getting attention and expressing love and affection were acceptable to ask for from people who weren't my parents, I still didn't have a good understanding of what kinds of attention I did want, or if I wanted attention at all, or if I wanted it how to get it or give my own.

I think this problem, though, has gone a long way toward being solved in the past decade. Some highlights: I learned a lot about what kind of types of affection I actually wanted and about what kinds were no good for me. I learned that it was ok to desire them, and to ask for them. I learned how to say "no" and "yes" when someone gave them to me, and mean it. I learned it was ok to say "I don't know," and wait. I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself beyond "what I desire in my relationships." I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself within my relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires in their relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for themselves beyond "what they desire in their relationships."

All those things are really important.

..and now today my mom just wrote that maybe she realized that she hadn't always communicated love to me very well and hopes that she can express it to me in better other ways in the future.

Who knew, all I needed to do was be a bitch for a week and actually start expressing the anger I felt at them in impolite ways, and I'd get them to say something like that; I am going to try it more often.

August sucks doublehard; I needed to hear that like a month ago and I probably would have been a lot less angry and stressed going into it.

All this stuff coming on top of stuff is really wearing.

Quite a few people, seishonagon and rm among them, have pointed out interesting things about this letter from a doctor to patients dealing with chronic illnesses.

I wanted to more widely spread an idea which I had talked about earlier in someone else's friends-locked post, because I think it bears thinking about:

A lot of people are angry, and I think rightfully so, about some assumptions made in the letter: namely, the idea that patients with chronic illness may make doctors and the medical system uncomfortable for a number of reasons, but that the patient should try and make the doctor comfortable, even if that process makes the patient uncomfortable, so they can get better treatment.

I think that this idea--so often hidden in discussions of chronic mental or physical illness--comes right out into the open when discussing the Benjamin Standards of Care for transsexual persons seeking gender-confirming surgeries and/or hormone therapy.

I think it's interesting to see that the often-unspoken systematic methods that therapists, doctors and hospital systems may use to deal with persons with chronic illness dovetail so neatly, and so nearly, with the explicitly written-out standards and systematic methods that therapists, doctors, and hospital systems may, and in fact must often, use to deal with transsexual people.

I'm not trying to conflate transsexuality with sufferers of chronic illnesses, or vice versa. But I do think that:
a.) persons with chronic illness may find discussions of how transsexual people have navigated an explicit doctor/patient power imbalance (one where the patient is the one expected to make the doctor comfortable, often at expense of patient comfort, in order to receive proper treatment) instructive and/or useful in
navigating a much less explicit or articulated, yet similar, doctor/patient power imbalance paradigm.

b.) Transsexual people may find discussions of how those with chronic illnesses deal with the un-codifed nature of the doctor/patient power imbalance interesting and useful: I know there are a lot of dicussions on whether the Standards of Care are necessary or useful, or harmful; there is a lot of anger and constant calls for repeal and revision. I have found that those discussions tend to center around a few things: how much explicitly codified standards help and/or harm those seeking GTS, how much explicitly codified standards help and/or harm those in the medical professions, how much those explicitly codified standards ultimately rest on personal judgement calls made by medical professionals, and how those medical professionals act as gateways to treatment or bars from treatment, depending on how comfortable the transsexual person in question makes them.

c.) Those persons who are both transsexual and have chronic illnesses would, I hope, also find said discussions useful.

d.) Allies of transsexual people and of those with chronic illness should not use one as a metaphor for the other--doing that is both inaccurate and inconsiderate. But thinking about the different ways in which the medical establishment hides its uncomfortability with difference by telling the patient that it is their job to make the doctor more comfortable in order to get better care hopefully will help allies be better and more understanding allies, especially when/if interacting with medical professionals at a friend's request or on their behalf.

e.) All morning I have been thinking, "especially when it comes to the medical profession and the medical system, it looks like a lot of people treat transsexual identity explicitly like an illness; it also looks like those with chronic illness have doctor/patient power dynamics/expectations of the idea that the patient should make the doctor comfortable in order to get treatment placed upon them in some of the same ways that transsexual people do, without the benefit/drawback of those power dynamics being explicitly written and encoded. I don't see other people writing about this, so I bet I should."