5:04pm June 25, 2014

amorpha-system-solipsistful-jokes-i-do-not

amorpha-system:

solipsistful:

jokes i do not understand: “Lol my headmates are <collection of random characters>”

???

- Ace

It seems to be a hateability thing.

Like people who do it, from what we’ve seen, will often do it in the context of stuff like “My headmates are (collection…

Yeah. And, like… the hateable treatment spills over really weirdly into all sorts of groups that have nothing to do with having what the dominant culture would consider an exceptionally “weird” identity. The only common thread we can manage to pick out in all of it is that they all have something to do with your relationship to your body, in a way I can’t quite put into words.

Which includes the asexuality spectrum, as well as people who have medical conditions that many doctors tend to disbelieve or sneer at. Every time it gets pointed out that a certain number of people do better on a specific kind of diet, or can’t eat a certain kind of food, everyone who is following that diet or avoiding that food gets the hateable treatment, including by mainstream media trying to debunk it.

And along with the attempted debunking comes what seem to be deliberately malicious distortions and misrepresentations, and cherry-picking the worst possible examples, people who don’t have the allergy in question or aren’t really following the diet properly. A few years ago it was high protein/low carb diets. We have a good friend who does much better on this type of diet, and will tell you that you can’t do it without taking into account the type of protein and the type of carbs you’re eating or avoiding, but the media seemed determined to portray it as “people who think you can lose weight by eating McDonald’s cheeseburgers all the time.” And nowadays it’s people with gluten intolerance who are getting the same kind of almost calculated media mockery and deliberate misrepresentation.

Actually, now that we think of it, being fat is another one of those things where, like being trans, there *is* very systematic widespread social prejudice against it, but fat people are also treated as hateable. Not in exactly the same way, but there’s certainly something of the same element to it. There’s something similar in the patterns of people who deliberately create troll identities to encourage others to hate and mock a certain community, and people who do stuff like eat nothing but fast food for a month and then lose all the weight they gained from doing it (people who were thin to begin with), to “prove” that fat people are supposedly all just fat because they eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Or with food allergies, that guy who went around asking people who were on a gluten-free diet if they could define what gluten was. Like you have to be able to give a scientific definition of something in order to be allergic to it, ugh. I’m sure this will be news to someone we know who almost died from eating nuts when he was a kid and couldn’t have told you what anaphylactic shock was back then. (Back in the good old days when the evil PC police didn’t mandate food labeling. /sarcasm)

And “LOL everyone claims to have assburgers to be rude” was/is basically a giant chunk of hateability on display. So it’s a big, often nebulous category of attitudes that all seem to have similar patterns mixed in there somewhere, patterns that catch people up in them and make them pawns to perpetuate those patterns.

Another element of it is that you get continually subjected to a kind of relentless hazing, including from the medical system, and told that it’s vitally important to determine whether you’re “just mentally ill.” The kind of “gatekeeping” that trans people are forced through— less so in the past, but it still goes on in a lot of places— all seems to be aimed at this. And of course, if you’re fat or have a medical condition a lot of people don’t believe in the existence of, people will insist you “try everything” before leaving you the fuck alone, and often not even then. It’s hazing whose goal is to humiliate you out of your identity, or in being able to take even the slightest iota of pride in it, or in how your mind or body work, if you’re not working relentlessly at trying to turn it into something that other people would prefer.

And it seems to be about relentlessly psychologically beating on you if you say you can’t change your identity, or your sexuality, or how your body works, to find a real person buried under delusions and denials and force them to “face the truth” about why they just think they can’t help it. And thinking about it that way makes me understand, I think, why some friends of ours used to think that plurality would eventually be normalized in the same way being gay is becoming normalized now, even if we’re not sure we agree with that these days.

(There are subtypes of this within groups, too, and technicalities I don’t have the spoons to get into right now. Like being told we should get rid of all our fictive members, by a system who informed us that they had people based on fictional characters but they had just turned them all into regular people and stripped off their fictive traits, so we should too. And none of this precludes the existence of people who pressure you to identify as something you’re not, either, even if the vast majority of the “they’re a dangerous cult and they recruit” talk we’ve seen has come from trolls. People who do that do exist and some of them can be very abusive; they just tend to operate on a very small scale because hateability prevents them from gaining the kind of widespread power that people attribute to them.)

~Riel