The Male Hysteric

Thinking about the novel I realize I am at a turning point of it where, perhaps, it will just quickly go toward the end, or maybe it will be significantly longer. But I guess also as I got to a significantly cathartic point in the narrative, maybe I don't have the energy to go forward anymore, and I need to think about if things are worth it to my 'audience,' if this is even something that has an audience or a future, I don't know. I have other ideas that are half-baked that feel like they will definitely have more broad appeal than the WIP, but abandoning current stuff for stuff that there's not much of is a recipe for disaster.

It was weird. The housekeeper was asking me about writing like I actually knew anything and I didn't know what to tell her because despite all the shuffling I do I don't actually get any writing out and submitted or anywhere to read. Almost like it's not for other people at all, yet I spend so, so much time on it. I don't know. I feel bad.

I had this bizarre idea to start a commonplace book and I went ahead and bought a notebook for it (because of course I did), and was thinking how a lot of things that would probably end up going in there are tumblr posts and other online things that are very likely to get lost into the aether the minute you look in the other direction, because as websites become "content mills" rather than anything worth viewing over and over again. I had the strange thought of making a website to archive these things worth reading, but that seems like it might take a lot of energy I don't have... and also, little reward.

Social media is insidious in that it creates an addictive pattern of immediate gratification but there's also, ah, the whole thing where you get no gratification or even response from anything you do. I remember my early experience on forums, being yelled at for wanting any sort of attention and being told that writing/art/whatever should be an entirely solitary pursuit and that I wanted any sort of response for anything was a sign that I was not cut out for it -- never mind that that's not true, has never been true, and weirdly, all this negative feedback on existing at all and being obnoxious did not stop me from creating anything, though it did stop me from posting. If I am doing something just for me, then writing it down in a little notebook for myself to enjoy is enough for me. A website is a lot of work with absolutely no one to look at it, it would not be for self-gratification. Which makes me, again, question, whether I should do this, or a lot of things, or sometimes anything at all.

I haven't written the novel in a few days. This is probably why I'm going crazy, I think.

I'll admit to a lot of bad habits and making posts that probably should be more thought-out and essay forms but are actually incomplete ideas because I like to pretend I don't have time to do that. Anyway one of those bad habits is sometimes looking at the subreddit r/fakedisordercringe (probably because as someone whose medical issues were neglected for a long time, I like to hurt myself by staring at the mindset behind this, and a general morbid fascination with how bad mental healthcare is and has been historically). Anyway it's a subreddit dedicated to reposting, complaining, pointing out inaccuracies, and generally making fun of more puerile mental health influencers, people who put massive lists of mental health self-diagnoses on profiles, etc. Every so often you'll find someone who is actually educated on things like personality development theories and whatnot but a lot of it seems dedicated to cringing at self-diagnosed DID communities right now. Either way I'm not linking to it. A lot of my scrolling is as a confused observer, of both the people being highlighted and the people doing the highlighting -- it's like different enclosures of animals observing each other in the zoo.

It occurs to me part of what I find so bizarre about both sides of this community is the premium put on diagnoses, both from the posters and highlighted users. The posters do not find any validity in self-diagnosis, despite the fact that major mental health diagnoses have historically, and do continue to wreck peoples lives while navigating legal, medical, and professional systems and even social lives as the masses become more and more educated with pop psychology. Like, look, I left my home state after they started restricting HRT, and to get it under the new rule I would have needed an autism assessment to prove I wasn't autistic and therefore mentally competent enough to... continue taking the drugs I have been taking for 4 years at that point. I don't think I am autistic, but the thought that autistic people are easily influenced into transitioning is particularly insane to me -- why in God's name would a group of people who are famous for their strict routines and visceral resistance to change in spite of massive social pressure to fit in do something like transition genders medically, socially, legally, which is definitionally a massive, scrutinized change that affects all parts of your life because of said social pressure? Like I know there's a correlation but when you think about people being somehow more susceptible to transitioning because they're autistic it's just ludicrous on its face. But that doesn't matter, it's what the state would have wanted. And I would have been forced through an assessment, and how do I know the bias of the assessor? The state would have had to approve of their approval, so the fact that I was transitioning at all would have likely counted against me, and being socially awkward might have been enough considering there's no medical reason for any of this, but who has met a trans person who wasn't somewhat socially awkward, having been raised in a gender they weren't and transitioning to a gender they never had a chance to practice as a kid? The mentally ill and disabled, including autistic people, were among the first victims of the Holocaust -- the idea that an official diagnosis cannot be used against a person is incredibly naive at best if not outright malicious. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you, as they say.

On the other hand, the highlighted people in this sub, one has to wonder why they do what they do. The posters seem to boil it down to a need for "clout", "attention", "need to feel special", etc. and weirdly do not seem to consider that a lot of these people, while maybe not specifically having their exact diagnoses, are probably actually mentally ill. I don't say this to criticize, I am also, and honestly, most people reading this are probably also mentally ill. That's just kind of the nature of the internet, especially people who care to read this far on an essay written by a nobody in this weird corner of the internet. So that's not really a judgement on them as people. But the posters on this subreddit accuse them of lying because they are not miserable and ashamed enough to actually be mentally ill, which is very weird. It reminds me a lot of when I was a kid when people accused depressed teenagers of acting out for attention, especially with regards to self-injury, and this was used as an excuse... to accuse them of faking being depressed for attention. And now depression is a pedestrian diagnosis. It's ridiculously easy to have that diagnosis on your forms, and everyone and their mom has an SSRI script, and the only people complaining about it are anti-pharma-anti-psych folks and a few more principled wonks who get sorted with anti-pharma-anti-psych types anyway.

When I was a kid and depression was the hot thing (? It seems so crazy to say now) the media was accused of brainwashing and infecting people, telling them they'd be loved if they were depressed or something when in reality the opposite was the case. So I kind of doubt there is much value for the modern people producing this content in their offline lives, because the stuff they're talking about is still very, very, very much so stigmatized. But, maybe I'm just being an old fogey here, there seems to be something wrong with the constant desire to perform DSM-V diagnoses for a camera by choice, without coercion. I'd put it closer to the general weirdness of wanting to perform for a camera 24/7 that's infiltrated some people's minds but nonetheless it is very, very weird, and it seems like they are not thinking because producing video evidence of all of this, connected with your real face and real personal accounts, is actively counterproductive to the point made in the second paragraph here of not wanting a serious mental health diagnosis for possibly paranoid reasons. People don't believe in the panopticon we live in and they'd better start.

So one has to assume that either these people are very stupid, which I don't really believe, or that the major motive is community, or attention, or whatever. But it seems weird also to criticize people for this directly, even if they are spreading misinformation. And the major thing that the posters on this subreddit seem to miss is precisely because they put such a premium on diagnosis from an actual doctor, that the diagnostic manuals are actually handed down from a divinity and describe actual entities and aren't just made up. There's a broader issue here -- uncomfortable and problematic feelings are unsympathetic and do not deserve help even if they're normal, or perhaps especially so. For having them something must be wrong with you, something specific, or on the flip side if we argue that something is normal, then we must also argue that it is neither unproblematic or uncomfortable and requires no help. It boils down everything to a binary -- to deserve concessions and help, you must receive a label. If you do not want a label or can't get one, you must constantly perform at a high level at all times. And let's face it, the label, even if concessions are available, often makes your life harder, because they will be fighting tooth and nail not to give you concessions anyway, and will try to use the label against you. People can't just help people who need help.

Like, Jesus Christ, I have trouble following conversations sometimes. I do have diagnosed ADHD, which people try to discredit because I have been apparently 'too high achieving' for it. But one of the major issues I have is not being able to follow conversations, especially lectures. So at my last job, during a Zoom meeting, I thought it might be helpful to me to have closed captions on, so I tried to turn them on -- and the leader of the meeting immediately started complaining, "Why is it asking me for closed captions? Who requested closed captions? Closed captions are annoying, I don't like them," blah blah blah, it was fucking mortifying. I really didn't think it would be a huge deal for me to get closed captions, but apparently for me to get any kind of accommodation was too onerous for the leader. I can really see thinking, "gosh, what if I was actually deaf? What then?" but then, would it really be less embarrassing for someone to go off on me if I actually couldn't hear? I mean, maybe not because I wouldn't have been able to hear them but the content would have been just as embarrassing, probably more so, because I would have gotten the same shit all the time, and more. I can see why people might think it would be useful to have a "more serious" diagnosis, but also. What the fuck. The forces that make that appealing are so widespread and so fucking sinister.

I am not sure if all of this makes sense, it is probably just meandering and not going anywhere. I should be applying for jobs. Fuck.

I have a lot of things I could write about but instead I'm going to write about a twitter post.

User solarlesbian wrote in response to another user,

"the bechdel test was a satirical joke about lesbian loneliness and alienation. don't piss me off

passing the bechdel test is not a litmus test for whether a work is feminist or not, it's not even about setting what is supposed to be "the feminist bare minimum" or whatever. it's literally a joke about how lesbians have to look for less than crumbs and still find nothing."

Another user notes how specifically the comic itself implies that this specific comic was made in response to 1980's muscle-guy movies, which aren't really a thing today, and another user notes how Allison Bechdel's favorite movie is apparently Groundhog Day, that does not pass this test.

There is definitely something to think about how 'lesbianism' has been conflated with 'feminism' when it's not, and has forced lesbianism, which is not a coherent social and political movement and never has been, to take up the reigns that straight feminists are unwilling to due to their inevitable proximity with men. One of the consequences of that has been kicking historically lesbian men (like me) out of lesbianism entirely on ideological grounds, but that's probably a topic for another post. With even the slightest bit of analysis, that straight women saddle lesbians with the 'job' of feminism unfairly while they get to be more 'complex' because they are 'forced to navigate men' becomes obvious and unjust.

Idk. These are not fully fleshed-out thoughts while I'm waiting for my boyfriend to get ready to go. I'm not the one to ask about this.

As I don't have a job right now, today I spent time clearing out my email inbox of endless garbage I receive from job posting websites and otherwise so that I will actually see a request for an interview when I get one. I cleared out the garbage from the months of January and December, and my inbox still says I have 8,434 emails, and this is my newest email address out of 4 different ones I maintain.

This reminds me of a tweet I saw a few days ago:



text: I’m fascinated by the idea of the Dead Internet, in which AI bots create website copies littered with ads that are then recursively crawled by “audience bots” over and over again. There are sectors of the internet devoid of all humanity, except for the person collecting ad rev. --twitter user telefontelaviv

Computer and internet tools have made the dissemination of data so easy that it happens automatically without regard of who it is for and if that data is even useful to spread. It just happens automatically at this point, making the forms it takes -- emails, articles -- less and less useful, because as the amount blows up, the amount of actual meaningful information contained within is endlessly diluted. But who pays for this dilution? It's not the person actually making money off of the transaction or creating these 'helpful' tools. It's an entirely externalized cost on those of us who have to put up with this garbage. And it is a lot of garbage.

I said I was reading 10 novels this year, and this is a book I started last year but I'm counting books I started last year because I make the rules here.

My boyfriend is very into LoTR and we're seeing the movies at Alamo Drafthouse in January, and I said I was going to finish this book before we saw Return of the King this Saturday, and so, I did. Well, I got to the end of the actual story with 3 hours and 33 minutes left of the audiobook for the appendices which my boyfriend said weren't especially worth listening to, and I've been trying to speed-listen to this book so I think I'm done for now.

I feel like I wouldn't have been able to get through this book if it weren't for the audio, especially because of how much of it is human king drama and I can't say that a lot of the human king drama is stuff that I have been especially invested in, despite that being like... the point of a lot of the books, I guess. One of the big issues I have with the books though is where are all the Dwarves? I get they're supposed to be seclusive but I have a hard time believing that Gimli was the only one who would have cared, and it's not like the Shire was unaffected the whole time. Even the Ents got off their asses. Where were they? And then Gimli went off to the West with Legolas. I get that Dwarves apparently helped rebuild the Human kingdom but like, there's something pretty apocalyptic about Gimli being the only Dwarf we see around, seeing Moira as a graveyard, and then going to the west with Legolas, especially given what we know of Tolkein writing the Dwarves by drawing inspiration from the Jews.

I dunno, I just finished today. The Lord of the Rings is a big series, I'm sure there's more to digest.

I have a basket full of pronoun pins with all different pronouns on them and someday when I'm feeling feisty I'm just going to put them all over my battle jacket to fuck with people.

I really, really wish we had just come up with a polite way to ask 'what gender are you' rather than how pronoun usage has become a stupid proxy for it in the stupid reality we live in. My pronouns are really, really not something I want to fuss with unless we're discussing editing actual copy, when I may have strong opinions but they're not going to be consistent over everything, so you'd better fucking ask. Otherwise, just leave me alone!

I've found it, the last tweet. There will be no better tweet than this, and therefore there is no longer any reason to read twitter anymore. I'm done.

So I just saw the monthly "Is Haruka/Sailor Uranus genderfluid" post on Reddit and they're at it again, arguing about how gender works in Japan vs the west and lots of quibbling over terminology of what did or did not exist in 1994 when the character was invented.

I think it's very tiring to read this because regardless of the creator's intent, Haruka Ten'oh is probably the clearest, unambiguous, most simply read genderfluid character I've seen in a lot of media. Sometimes Haruka is a girl, and sometimes Haruka is a boy, and she's enough of a girl that she's in the 'girl only' group of sailor scouts, but also enough of a boy that she lives through her private school system as a boy in a boy's uniform without any of this presentation being questioned. This is different in the anime, apparently, which I have not seen all of, where she clearly denies being a boy at some point, but in the manga the read is startlingly unambiguous, and the waffling is from people who deny that gender fluidity is possible or real, and want to couch her existence in safer terms, like 'really' being a girl who likes to dress in boy's clothing.

And, like... I do think there's a huge cop out here when labeling characters as 'only' butch lesbians vs genderfluid, transgender, etc. Because the pervasive labeling of a character like Haruka as a butch lesbian is never a real analysis of her identity but always couched in making her safer and simpler to understand to a cis audience, when this is not the reality that actual butch lesbians who are actively read as men in real life situations experience. The 'only a woman in man's clothing' has been a label to soothe cis people and has not protected butch lesbians from gendered and sexual violence for their existence and does not necessarily reflect their views on their own genders. There's multiple writings by butches on how they don't feel like women, and they feel like men forced to live in some kind of liminal space or otherwise not women, and how they feel like they can't actually express this. This is not to discount possible butches who do see themselves as women in men's clothing, but to shove off a character into the category of 'butch' does not mean that they are devoid of gendered feelings, complexity, and interiority that would make a cis audience uncomfortable, and Haruka's actions do demonstrate that whether the audience likes it or not, regardless of any vocabulary used. Gendered subcultures like butch, genderfluid, nonbinary, etc are historically very fluid but this does not mean the formalized gender is correct, just that it is a forced choice forced by a society that cannot tolerate ambiguity.

I'd call Sailor Uranus genderfluid but she could be read as butch. But she's not 'just' butch. She's not 'just' anything.

Going to be honest I'm a little disturbed that my first Christmas in Minneapolis for a while and it's... rainy. Not snowy, no. It's raining outside. There's something seriously wrong with that.

Anyway, to make my brother's gift to me simple I asked him to just take me out to a movie on Christmas and we went to see The Boy and The Heron which is a movie that leaves much to think about, but also, my brother somehow found tickets to a subbed showing rather than a dubbed showing, and I was particularly looking forward to hearing Robert Pattinson as the gray heron and I didn't get that. I'm not sure if my brother was just not paying attention when he bought the tickets or what...

I guess on the movie -- it was very Miyazaki. I guess what's interesting from a Western perspective is that Western aesthetic is a sign of the exotic otherworldly here in a pretty straightforward way. Like I know a lot of anime will pull from western stuff as it's exotic in a way that tends to fly under the radar to westerners, but this one... didn't? Or maybe I am just seeing something differently than I did before.

Either way. I am still trying for a new username. I've started typing up the novel again as I have over a hundred pages to type up. I don't think it's really close to done, though. I feel like it's mostly cathartic at this point. Though I dream of publication, it's possible that this is too personal... or too much like garbage. Whatever.