addiction

by

Are Men “Visual Creatures”?: A Discussion on Porn & Bioessentialism

TW//mentions of SA, porn addiction, objectification

One thing that really stood out to me in Throwing Like a Girl is how Iris Marion Young criticizes bioessentialism, which is the idea that men and women behave a certain way because it’s just “biology”. She shows how people explain things like throwing differences as natural, when they’re really learned through social expectations. It is similar to how people perform worse due to the stereotype threat, which is when minority groups tend to underperform on tests because they believe that they are not capable of performing well, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I think that same logic of “inherent” or “biological” behaviors can be applied to how men justify watching porn by saying “men are visual creatures”, which is not based in fact at all. That phrase is so harmful because it makes it seem like objectifying women is unavoidable, instead of something that men are choosing to participate in. 

Read more: Are Men “Visual Creatures”?: A Discussion on Porn & Bioessentialism

Porn is extremely dehumanizing because it turns people, often women, into objects meant to be looked at, not individuals with complex life experiences who have their own agency. Young talks about how women are taught to experience their bodies as something to be watched and judged, rather than as something they fully control. Porn takes that even further by reducing women to their body parts and presenting sex as something women exist to provide. It trains people to see women’s bodies as products rather than as a part of an intimate and sacred human interaction.

The idea that porn allows people to “buy” consent is disturbing on its own as well. Consent in porn is always available and detached from real emotional or physical consequences. Sometimes consent can even be depicted as NOT freely given, and disrespected, as part of r*pe fetishes. Humans were never meant to have instant and unlimited access to sex like this, and pretending that it’s just “natural male sexuality” ignores how artificial and extreme this level of access actually is. The harm doesn’t just affect the person consuming porn, it impacts the women in it, who are often exploted, and women in the modern dating world that have to deal with unrealistic expectations and porn-driven violence and entitlement.

Just like Young argues, bioessentialism isn’t harmless. It is used to excuse behavior that causes real harm by making it seem inevitable, and vanishing accountability for those who are engaging in them. Saying “men are visual creatures” works the same way as saying “girls throw like that”. It hides socialization behind biology.

by

Queer Brokenness: Intersection with Mental Illness

feature-470x260

Image Source: http://trauma.blog.yorku.ca/2015/12/south-asian-queer-community-lacks-visibility/  (Artist – Jinesh Patel)

(Content and Trigger Warning: Self Harm, Suicide, Substance Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence, Bullying)

.

.

I often find that mental illness and queerness aren’t addressed properly or constructively when talked about together. So often the public at large would have us believe that queerness is a result of mental illness or that mental illness is the result of queerness exclusively. With this in mind, the queer community will often push back on society’s behavior by talking about the two exclusively from each other, frequently ignoring all the ways mental illness intersect. That’s does not go to say that queerness is the result of mental illness or vice versa at all, but rather it shouldn’t be ignored that many people in the queer community go through both because of the way society has constructed and reacted towards queerness. For example, queerness has often been perceived as a deviant thing, it has historically been punished and worked against in a variety of ways. Continue reading →

by

Diff’rent Smokes

I remember it was a cold, dark night. I was back at my house in Columbia, and I believe I was in elementary school at the time. Back then, my dad was barely ever home, and this particular night happened to be one of those rare occasions where my mom was not home either. Fortunately, my sister was home to babysit me (sidenote: she is 12 years older than me), but at the time, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her around the house for a good 30 minutes (sidenote: I was kind of needy). So I searched around the house, and finally I thought to look out the little windows to the side of the front door. I could just barely make out a dark figure at the door, with puffs of smoke slowly seeping out the figure’s mouth. The glow of a lit cigarette was also evident. A couple minutes later, after I ran far away from the front door, my sister came back inside. I told her I saw someone (“or something“) smoking right outside our front door. She seemed kind of panicky at this point, but then she replied, “Oh, it was just our neighbors, the Silvermans!”

Nice try, but why blame our nice Jewish neighbors?

Fast forward to the present, and my sister is still smoking. Note that she was just a small girl at a pretty shitty high school at the time of the incident described above; now, she’s a high-powered account executive in her early 30s. She has tried quitting on several different occasions, and just recently, she went about a month without lighting up. But she succumbed to the temptation this past week, blaming it on work stress, and that I could “never understand” how hard it is to really kick the habit. And honestly, I probably never will. From what I can tell, based on her addiction, as well as that of my father and my significant other, the lure of nicotine is terribly strong. It does not matter that the scent of tobacco stains everything she wears. It does not matter how many times my mom has tried to scare my sister with all the ailments and potential disabilities she could develop from a smoking habit. It does not matter that she knows all of this, because that is how true addiction works I guess.

I want to be as supportive as I can, but it’s admittedly becoming tougher by the day. She herself talks about how life was really hard for her, and that our mom was barely ever around when she was growing up. She sometimes gets annoyed with me, saying that she could have been working towards a medical degree too if only my mom was around to encourage her academic growth (she’s doing just fine work-wise though…I mean she’s making more money than most doctors ever will).

She mentioned that she started smoking due to peer pressure (which is weird to me, because I’ve always seen her as such a tough, intimidating person…), and she figured no one around the house would try to stop her. I was fortunate enough, in hindsight, to constantly have my mom there to supervise me and my development into the (arguably) healthy, neurotic asshole that I am today. I was lucky that our family’s financial situation was a million times better, just as I popped out into the world. I did not have to go to the high school my sister graduated from – instead, I ended up attending a much more competitive, high-ranking school (not to mention, most of the students I knew there were more interested in sabotaging my class rank than trying to get me to smoke). But it makes me wonder how much more susceptible I could have been to peer pressure and the lure of cigarettes, alcohol, or other types of drugs if my privileges were not available to me.