CFI’s Statement on Women in Secularism And What It Implies About Their Opinion Of Their Constituents

I have been following the controversy around Ron Lindsay’s opening remarks at the Women in Secularism conference, and haven’t said a whole lot outside of a couple of comments on twitter. Mostly I’ve been too exhausted dealing with my own shit to get involved this time around. The public statement they issued today, though, is too astounding to not to comment on.

For those who haven’t been following this stuff, the statement and links to descriptions of the events that led up to it are here.

The amazing thing about today’s statement, to me, isn’t that it fails to address the issues everyone wanted CFI to address. Though I had hopes that they would directly address Ron Lindsay’s speech and subsequent douchebaggery, I didn’t really expect it of them. I’ve been disappointed too many times by the inability of skeptic organizations to address criticisms of their own actions with the maturity that they expect of the organizations they themselves criticize. My expectations were not very high.

That said, what I expected was a shitty apology that failed to adequately address the issues that have been raised over the past few weeks. What I didn’t expect, and am still astounded by, is that they didn’t just fail to adequately address the issues, they failed to address the issues at all. As Greta Christina points out, today’s statement mis-attributes the issues to the conference, rather than Ron Lindsay; identifies the issues as divisiveness, rather than a fuck-up on the part of a major figure in their organization; expresses support for all sides of the issues, harassers and harassees in equal measure; and utterly fails to address any of the issues that have been raised.

Here’s the thing: I knew there was a good chance the Center for Inquiry didn’t think the challenges women face in the secular/skeptical movement were important enough to take a stand on. I didn’t know that the Center for Inquiry thought its constituents were stupid. I didn’t know that the Center for Inquiry (an organization that caters to the issues of, for fucks sake, skeptics – people who might, one would hope, be expected to read a statement like this with at least a modicum of critical thinking) thought we were all so utterly inept at critical thinking that we wouldn’t figure out that they hadn’t said anything.

Today’s statement doesn’t just imply a lack of concern for and understanding of the issues that necessitated it in the first place. Today’s statement implies an astounding lack of respect for the critical faculties of CFI’s audience. Did the Center for Inquiry really think this statement would go over well? Did they really think we wouldn’t figure out that it contains zero substantive content? Did they think we wouldn’t realize that they had both mischaracterized and failed to address the issues at the same time?

After all this, what I most want to ask the Center for Inquiry is this: how stupid do you think we are? And do you really expect people whose issues and intelligence you’ve shown such an astounding lack of respect for to want to have anything at all to do with you?

If so, again, how stupid do you think we are?

The Indescribable Redundantness of Chronic Pain

The thing that I find hardest to describe about chronic pain is how redundant it is.

Of all the lines in Allie Brosh’s last post about depression, the one that resonated most powerfully with me was when she described wanting to commit suicide as being like wanting to mute an unbearably repetitive noise. I get emotional reading that line every time I look at that post.

I wish I had a metaphor of some sort to describe what it feels like having dealt with chronic pain for a decade. I find it impossible to describe the feeling in writing, because I can’t think of a way to describe it that isn’t incredibly boring. Interesting written narratives have variation — unexpected things happen, changes happen, and if they don’t your story is boring. The problem with the story of chronic pain is that it is boring.

I have woken up with some amount of pain in some part of my body almost every day for the last 10 years. Every day that pain is just as real, just as visceral, and just as distressing as on any of the other days. It isn’t like a montage, where you get to watch a few isolated scenes of the months or years over which you’ve dealt with it. It isn’t just there when you talk about it, or write about it. It is there, with you, as real as anything else in the world is, for every single one of the days you’ve had it. Every. Single. One. It gets really old, and then it gets old again, and then it gets old thinking, “This is really getting old.” Then thinking that gets old. The day after that happens, you wake up with pain again. And the day after that. And the day after that. And the day after that. For hundreds, and then thousands of days in a row.

It’s like being around a friend who has that completely unfunny joke they like to tell for reasons that utterly escape you, but instead of just being annoyed by it at social events, that friend is there with you every morning when you wake up, telling that same stupid fucking joke, “Ha ha, good morning, you’re in pain again!” and chortling to themselves as though they’re the cleverest human being in the universe. And you want to smash their face against a wall. It’s not funny, it never was funny, but they don’t care, and it keeps happening, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

For ten years.

It is unbearably repetitive.

Some days you try to pretend it’s funny, grin and bear it, try to “Well, that’s life” yourself into some sort of Zen-like acceptance of your circumstances. Others you rage, but there is no real life person you can blame, whose head you can satisfyingly smash against the wall until they apologize, over and over again, for making you this way. There’s no one you can punish.

Other days it just strikes you depressively dumb, and you just sit and wish it would all go away.

“If you’re on meds, you’re not ‘The Real You’”: A Vacuous Perspective On Antidepressants and the Nature of the Human Condition

This post brought to you by people who say things like, “If you’re on mental health meds, you’re not The Real You.”

This is just a for the record, for everyone, whether you’re talking about antidepressants or any other form of medication or life circumstances: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE “REAL YOU”.

You know why? Because HUMAN BEINGS ARE CONTEXT-DEPENDENT CREATURES.

You are the real you when you’re being flirty and charming and totally hitting it off with someone adorable. You are the real you when you’re crying on the floor of your room and wishing the world would end. You are the real you when you’re living it up on vacation and you are the real you when you’re just getting through the day at a boring job. You’re the real you when you’re on vacation and hate everything about it, and you’re the real you when you’re flying through the day at an amazing job. You are the real you when you’re at a party, and you’re the real you when you’re staying in with your cat. You are the real you when you’re drinking, when you’re high, when you’re reading, when you’re fucking, when you’re lonely, when you’re surrounded by friends, when you feel absolutely worthless, when you’re brimming with confidence, when you wish the universe would leave you alone, and when you love everything about it. You’re the real you when you’re unspeakably angry and hate everyone, and you’re the real you when you’re ecstatically in love and feeling on top of the world.

“THE REAL YOU” IS A MEANINGLESS TERM USED BY PEOPLE WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW HUMAN BEINGS WORK.

It’s like saying liquid water is real water, and ice and water vapor are not real water. The reality is: water acts in completely different, utterly incompatible ways in different contexts, just like we do.

Me on medication isn’t “not the real me”, it is “me in a different context”. In this case, a different chemical context. I am different with different brain chemistry, the same as I am different in different social contexts, living environments, relationships, etc., etc. If I want to rearrange the context in which I live my life chemically in the same manner that I try to arrange my life socially, environmentally, etc., I may end up different, but I will not end up “less real”.

There are contexts in which I am a shitty human being. I am still me in those contexts. I am still real – just as real as the contexts in which I am an amazing, thoughtful, loving human being. I strive to avoid the contexts that engender my being a shitty human being, because I don’t like being a shitty human being. If I were a better human being in the context of using antidepressants than I am in the context of not using them, then I would make the decision to use them, and anyone who thinks that would be a bad decision because it would make me somehow “less real” can fuck the hell off.

Just for the record.

Depression and Chronic Pain Are More Similar Than I Realized

I recently realized that the way I think about chronic pain and the way I think about depression are a lot more similar than one might expect. I think of both painful sensations and painful emotions as outputs of the brain, and my first reaction to both is to ask myself, “Does this pain make sense?”

A little history: there are two things I think of as significant turning points in my struggles with back pain. The first is when a physical therapist I was seeing told me there was nothing wrong with the tissues of my back – that it was almost certainly a brain thing. The second was when I bought and read through Explain Pain by Lorimer Moseley and David Butler, which is a book about how pain is a product of the brain, not just the tissues of the body (and I cannot possibly recommend it highly enough for anyone dealing with chronic pain).

I recently had a spread of maybe one or two months where I considered my back pain largely defeated. I was able to imagine, for example, taking a plane flight to New Zealand (an 18 hour plane flight is one of the worst scenarios imaginable for exacerbating chronic pain quickly and powerfully), without worrying about the risk of being suicidally depressed (on account of the pain the flight would result in) by the time I stepped off the plane. This, as a measuring stick for how my pain is doing, has proven to be a useful metric.

I attribute that recovery (and the fact that I’m not doing nearly as badly as I could be given my recent back pain flareups) to my having absorbed the knowledge and the implications of my pain being a brain problem and not a back problem.

Take another example: I had shoulder pain for about a year, up until a couple of months ago. This pain, which I supposed was a physical injury, was such that I would get nervous about whether or not turning the steering wheel of my car was perpetuating the “injury”. I haven’t had any problems with shoulder pain since I decided it was probably a brain problem, and started doing weightlifting again — exactly the same regimen that had caused the problem in the first place (although, to be on the safe side, I started it at a very low weight). I don’t experience shoulder pain at all, now. It was, as far as I can tell, entirely a brain problem. It may have been an injury, initially (there was a clear starting point where I may have been weightlifting overzealously), but it probably was only an injury problem for a maximum of six months or so.

My brain is prone to pain problems, even when there is nothing somatically wrong with me. These days, when something hurts, my reflex isn’t to assume that I’ve injured something. My reflex is to say, “Hang on a minute, does this pain really make sense? Or is it just my brain being weird.”

Does this sound familiar to anyone who has dealt with depression?

It’s almost the same thought process I use when dealing with depressive feelings. I think of both physical and emotional pain as happening in three parts: the trigger, then the pain, then the explanation. Ideally, in a well-functioning brain, the explanation correctly identifies the trigger. With depression or chronic pain, however, it is important to operate under the assumption that the explanations your brain likes may not have anything to do with the actual triggers.

The explanation that my brain likes for my back pain is that I’ve injured my back, but the things that trigger back pain for me are not injuries. My shoulder pain made me feel like I had an injured shoulder, but whatever was triggering that shoulder pain wasn’t an injury (at least for the majority of the duration of the pain). The explanation that my brain likes for my depressive emotional pain is that I don’t add anything of value to the world, but in actual fact the triggers for emotional pain for me are almost always stress, and only sometimes is that stress related to my sense of contributing to the world.

I treat physical and emotional pain in almost exactly the same way these days. Both of them are products of my brain. Both of them are things that my brain is historically very bad at attributing to causes that make sense. Therefore, the explanations that my brain comes up with for both of them are worth eyeing with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The Excitement Of Making New Spaces In My Brain

This past week, I spent a couple of days with an um-friend of mine hanging out, talking, fucking, and generally having a good time. I had a lot of fun, but there were moments where I felt distinctly strange, where I felt like I didn’t know how to think about what we were doing – what it was, or what it meant, or what I could expect to happen because of it, or how I could expect to feel because of it.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten used to this feeling, and have even grown to feel a certain affection for it. It’s what happens when I end up in a relationship with someone that works or feels significantly different from any of the relationships I’ve been in before. I wrote about this sensation a while back, when I was experimenting with my first real casual relationship. The discomfort happens because I’m trying to figure out where the new relationship goes in my brain, and I don’t have a space that fits it yet. Trying to fit a square-shaped relationship into round holes in your brain is bound to feel a little funny.

I have more experience with casual relationships now than I did back when I first experienced this sensation, but all relationships are different, and most new relationships require me to carve out a somewhat new space in my brain. I like the mental digging sensation that results from this because it feels so much like learning. I like it because I know after I’m finished making the new space, that my brain will be more interesting than it was before. I won’t just be more comfortable with this new flavor of relationship, I’ll also have new perspectives from which to look on all of the other relationships I’ve been in.

It’s like trying a new kind of food. It’s hard to appreciate really good food until you have had a lot of different kinds of food. The more kinds of food you try, the more fine-tuned and interesting your perspective on all the kinds you’ve had before becomes, because you can look at them from the perspective of that new knowledge. Suddenly, there are presences and absences in everything you’ve tried before that you couldn’t see before, and the experience of all of them is richer for that awareness.

The sensation of unfamiliarity that comes with experimenting with new types of relationships can be uncomfortable at times, but it’s uncomfortable in the same way that not having the answer to an interesting question feels uncomfortable. It’s that kind of discomfort that, with time, I’ve learned to associate with being just on the cusp of discovering new and interesting things about the world. And there’s little that I enjoy more than discovering new and interesting things about the world.

Care

Sometimes I do this thing where I don’t post for a while and then I post a whole bunch right in a row and I’m sorry but not sorry, also.

I wanted to write this down, because I like reminding myself that in spite of all the tough shit, I still have some really awesome moments:

I just got off the phone with an um-friend from far away, a day after spending two days with another um-friend who was visiting from far away. About a week ago, a friend I hadn’t talked to in maybe six months texted me out of the blue and said she’d been thinking about me.

So I’m having a nice moment of feeling cared for by people I care about, and like there is a whole bunch of that care, all at once. I’m feeling loving and loved. So that’s something.

Sometimes poly really is pretty fucking awesome.

Conflicting Definitions Of “Casual”

I’ve realized recently that in spite of being generally more averse to labels than most, I have still managed to fall into one of the traps I associate with labeling.

I was having a conversation with a friend from out of town this week where I referred to our relationship as “casual”. When she told me she didn’t think of our relationship as casual, it clicked in my brain that my definition of the word “casual” is not the same as it is for many people in the context of sex. I can remember other conversations with friends of mine where they said they don’t do casual sex, and sometime after that they and I had started hooking up in a way that I interpreted as casual. It was strange at the time, but makes perfect sense in light of this realization.

My instinctual interpretation of the idea of a “casual” sexual relationship is one that isn’t serious. Effectively, this means that all of the partners I have had in the last year and a half or so, maybe more, have fallen into the “casual” category in my brain. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t cared about any of them – I have. I just haven’t thought of any of them as Long-Term Serious Relationships, and in my mind the term “casual” encompasses all relationships that don’t fall under the umbrella of Long-Term Serious.

The impression that I’m getting is that many people think of “casual” as indicating little-to-no emotional connection or interpersonal familiarity. I definitely would not describe my feelings toward most of the people I have had sex with as lacking emotional connection or familiarity. My reflex is to think of my relationships with most of the people I have had sex with as casual, but also to think of most of them as friendships, and both emotional connection and a sense of familiarity are important for friendships for me.

I feel like I need a new word, now, for the logical complement of the Long-Term Serious Relationship category, to avoid unintentional miscommunication. Is there such a word?

The Weirdness of the Manifestations of My Insecurities

Do you ever notice how strange insecure feelings are sometimes?

I have a friend who has been doing a lot of working out recently, and getting progressively stronger, but who deals with some pretty serious depression and body image issues. I find myself envious of them in spite of the fact that I value happiness and self-esteem more than I value physical strength.

I have another friend who is very happy most of the time, but who I don’t think of as particularly conventionally physically attractive. I find I often experience less envy with respect to them than with respect to people who I see as more conventionally physically attractive but far less happy with life, in spite of the fact that I value happiness far more than physical attractiveness.

The girl from the recent mini-breakup has told me in no uncertain terms that she thinks I’m attractive, cute, a good kisser, and good in bed. She has told me explicitly that the reason she isn’t interested in continuing hooking up is personal uncomfortable feelings about the casualness of what we were doing. Yet, I still find my disappointment about that whole situation often manifests in the form of wishing I were more attractive, or similar, in spite of the fact that this was not the problem in the first place.

I am amazed by the frequency with which I find myself insecure about things in ways that make no sense. I’m not really going anywhere with this. I’ve just been noticing it lately, and it’s weird.

Thoughts on Whether or Not to Identify As a Feminist

One might reasonably presume based on some of the topics I touch on regularly in this blog that I identify as a feminist. Coming from the types that generally read my blog, I would probably take this as a compliment (either it’s coming from one of my awesome feminist readers and meant as a compliment, or from one of the rationally-challenged MRA-types and meant as an insult but taken as a compliment). That said, I don’t generally identify as a feminist. I haven’t made a firm decision not to, and if I were convinced that the center of gravity of feminism as a political movement were well in line with the opinions of most of the feminists I follow, I would absolutely call myself one. I am, however, not convinced that the center of gravity of feminism as a political movement is something I want to identify with.

In a nutshell, the explanation for why I don’t identify myself as a feminist is because, in my experience, the term is not sufficiently specific to meaningfully distinguish me from people I vehemently disagree with on feminist issues. My impression is that there is a not insignificant number of feminist-identified people who are anti-sex work, and a not insignificant number of feminist-identified people who are trans-phobic, and a not insignificant number of feminist-identified people who are anti-porn, to name a few examples. I am not interested in lending my name to those people’s politics, and I’m not particularly interested in arguing with them over which of us is actually the truer feminist, because that’s time I could be spending advocating for the things I believe instead.

It could be argued that the anti-sex work, trans-phobic, anti-porn, etc., people who call themselves feminists are simply incorrect. One could argue that being anti-sex work, for example, is actually counterproductive to the advance of equality for women, and therefore I should call myself a feminist because this means being anti-sex work is not actually a feminist position. I might agree with the premise of this line of reasoning, but I wouldn’t agree with the conclusion. If I chose my labels based on what I thought they ought to imply rather than the impact they have in practice, then by that same logic, I might reasonably decide to call myself a “masculinist”, even though my politics are at odds with almost everything anyone using that label has ever said. Personally, if I were trying to contribute to a movement about men, my objectives would probably be in near-perfect lockstep with the objectives of most of the feminists I know. Most of the feminists I know take political and philosophical positions that, to my mind, help me as a guy, in addition to helping women.

Unfortunately, by calling myself a masculinist, I would be lending my name to a movement that, on the whole, I see as narrowminded, sexist, and destructive. While I think that the center of gravity of feminism as a movement is indescribably better than the center of gravity of masculinism, I’m still not sure it’s sufficiently progressive that I’m interested in lending my name to it.

Another option would be for me to use a more specific label. At the point that I start calling myself something like an Intersectionalist, Sex-Positive Feminist, though, I think it’s gotten to the point where I may as well just say, specifically, what my political and philosophical positions are without using the label at all.

Most of the time it has seemed easier to say what I think, specifically, than to wrestle my misgivings about feminism as a whole into submission. I think rape culture is real and horrible and worth fighting against; I think easy access to birth control and abortion is important; I think fighting sexism is important; I think sex positivity is important; I think fighting community and workplace discrimination and abuse against women is important.

Does identifying as a feminist communicate all of these positions sufficiently reliably that it makes sense for me to take it on? I’m not sure. I would be interested to hear the thoughts of others, though. To my feminist readers, did the things I’m talking about ever give you pause about using the label? If so, why, and if not, why not? How close to the center of gravity of a political or philosophical label do you think someone needs to be before it makes sense to take on that label? How much good is done by taking on the label versus how much is done by avoiding the complications in interpretation that can result from it?

Confronting and Processing Some Issues with Envy

I had a long conversation with a friend yesterday that has left me thinking about many things.

It has been a long time since I have had such intense issues with envy as I have had recently with respect to this friend. He is in relationships of various types with three different people, all of whom I am interested in, and all of whom I am not in relationships with for different reasons — lack of time, with one, lack of interest, with another, and prohibitive distance that I cannot afford to traverse regularly, with the third. He also works in tech, full-time, which is something I would very much like to be physically capable of doing, but can’t.

I am not actually in any relationships of any sort with people who are local to me at the moment, and while I have been doing better than I was a few weeks ago, the stress and frustration associated with not being able to work any more than I am at the moment is with me most of the time. As such, there are times when spending time around this friend feels a lot like watching a movie about all of the things that I don’t have right now. It’s a good recipe for complicated feelings.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to have a face-to-face conversation about this with him to, hopefully, keep my complicated feelings from spiraling into friendship-damaging-level feelings. It went very well. The envy is still going to be an issue with me, I think, but the conversation itself was very positive, and I feel much better for having had it. I think I managed to express how I was feeling without coming off as accusatory, and he managed to show me, once again, that I tend to surround myself with very good people, him included.

I’ve been mulling over one particular part of the conversation that we had, and trying to decide how to think about it. As much as I appreciated that he was able to have this conversation with me about my feeling complicatedly negative around him, and as much as the conversation that we had about what to do about it was reassuring, the thing that had the most immediate positive effect on my mood yesterday was when he told me that one of the three women mentioned above is significantly more into me than him.

I suppose I should take what I can get, in terms of allowing myself to feel good about things that make me feel good, but I feel very… complicated… about the idea of feeling better about the situation in a way that implies a zero-sum framing of it. All things being equal, I would prefer to feel better about the situation in a way that didn’t depend on my “doing better” by comparison with someone else. Partially I don’t like the zero sum framing because it means that my feeling better depends on circumstances which are, to a significant extent, outside of my control. Partially, I don’t like it because I don’t like the idea of feeling better about myself in a way that is specifically at the expense of someone else.

I expressed this, in so many words, to him, and he didn’t seem at all bothered by it, himself. I hope to have more conversations about it in the future in order to flesh out my feelings about the whole thing.

For the moment, I think I’m doing reasonably well at not beating myself up for the superficial reasoning of my brain, but I would still like to get a better fix on everything. And I would like to have a better way of assuaging envy than having to find a way that I’m doing better than the subject of the envy is.

Anyone else have advice on dealing with this  envy thing?