The Male Hysteric

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 guess I’m having a lot of thoughts in the pandemic, as being at home the vast majority of the time has given me a lot of freedom of what to do with my face. I like to wear makeup, and even when not wanting to look like I wear it, I have seborrheic dermatitis which, even when inactive can make the middle of my face very red so some light foundation and concealer helps with that, and matte bronzer can do wonders for a slight double chin. However these days i can go a lot further than that without thinking about it because, again, I have nowhere to be, and wearing a mask covering stubble can make anyone look more androgynous. There are a lot of women finding wearing no makeup very freeing, while at the same time there are a lot of women doing more editorial looks because it’s the only thing you can see with a mask on, or they have more free time, or they don’t have to worry about office comments about “how much better [they] look without makeup”.

There is a lot made about men and male-passing people wearing makeup, from some men complaining that if women have acne or “are ugly” they can wear it while they can’t, to lines of makeup made especially for men (and tend to be even more overpriced than normal makeup), male MUAs and the like. Makeup has not always been strictly feminine and has always been used by everyone being photographed or filmed so even now it’s not. But I do not think the problem with “men wearing makeup” is adequately understood by most people — they have a blanket idea of “makeup = feminine” and do not understand why.

I remember hearing somewhere that you only adorn things that you already think are beautiful. There is no point in adorning something that is not meant to be looked at as beautiful and I think that’s a big part of the taboo, and this is why I like to wear it, in some form of rebellion. I’m not supposed to see myself as worthy of adornment, so knowing how to do it and doing it myself is taboo, whereas in photoshoots it is others making the decision and putting makeup on the men so it’s in effect “not their fault” to be seen as beautiful, but rather something forced on them by others. Culturally women, especially young women, are “supposed” to be beautiful so that expectation wins out over the sin of looking at oneself as beautiful and adorning oneself, even though the self-adornment is still criticized (“you look so much better without makeup”).

Men’s fashion and presentation is such a mess culturally because of the taboo of thinking of oneself as beautiful. Often fashion for men is boiled down to one piece — a blazer, a Rolex watch, a Jordan’s shoe — and furthermore these pieces are often branded to be more a display of wealth rather than adorning oneself. To adorn oneself is to be “gay” because the only reason a man would do it is to attract the attention of other men. Straight women tend to have mixed feelings about it, because seeing a man as attractive is something they do, but one that intentionally signals it must be signaling to men, while acknowledging the double standard of “naturally pretty” for themselves.

Aside from rebellion there’s the matter of doing something artistic every day, and a beauty in ephemeral art, something meditative about making a whole work and then literally washing it down the drain every day. My other artwork, especially writing, is Sisyphean, written over and over again and rarely getting anywhere, which may be why this appeals to me. I don’t know. Maybe it is a form of that “self care” that people keep talking about, to look at my own face and examine it each day and decide what to do with it, for no one but myself. Or maybe, during the pandemic, I’m just really, really bored, and need the fifteen minutes of diversion in the morning.

If you don’t usually wear makeup, it may be worth it to try some concealer, eyeliner, blush, and think of yourself as worthy of adornment every day for once. In a world that doesn’t seem to value you, it may help.

Yesterday Adrian Sanabria posted a twitter thread about the recent Equifax breach’s House Oversight Report, see here, unroll here, directly to the House Oversight Report here. Considering 2018 has been the longest year on record, I’ll forgive you if you managed to forget about this breach. This is the one back in late 2017 where Equifax managed to allow personally identifiable information of over half the adults in the United States be compromised. I remember saying to a friend that at this point it would be easier to just give everyone a new social security number, it was that bad — and I was only half-joking

Anyway. This breach was allowed to go on for an astonishing 76 days due to a lack of leadership and general incompetence and negligence at Equifax. Right before seeing the report, I’d finished watching the first season of Mr. Robot. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Robot, it’s a TV series where some hackers take down a large conglomerate from the inside because of the conglomerate’s unethical practices. Looking at the findings of the Equifax breach, what happened here is pretty much the opposite of the plot of Mr. Robot. Consider that, in Mr. Robot:

1. The security of the major conglomerate is actually competent and only manages to be taken down by internal malicious actors.
2. The hackers do not aim to victimize the ‘little guy’, AKA you, the normal viewer and consumer.
3. The organization is actually harmed by being breached.

( That last bit is the important bit. )