No Mere Mockery

During the days leading up to Christmas I suffered a hilarious lapse in my usual cynical pessimism. I went to the morning service at The Church of the Holy Innocents with hardly a thought in my head that I would be uncomfortable there. I wanted to hear Grace sing, and for that I had to go to the service. I suppose that sense of inevitability caused me to sweep any realistic expectations under my mental rug.

Regardless of why my expectations were unrealistic, it didn't take long for the service to disabuse me of them. A sarcastic narrative spooled out in my head. It sounded something like this.

There was this dude with an awesome hat and a fancy white and gold dress with a matching cape, and he had these two other dudes to hold up the cape for him whenever he sat down or stood up. Well, at one point he got up and walked over to this other dude who had this giant metal tea-infuser ball hanging from a chain. The ball must have had something burning inside it, because there was all this smoke coming out. So Cape Dude took the chain, turned to this big book on a lectern, and swung the ball so that the smoke went onto the book. There was lots of chanting during all this.

And I said to myself “Right on, man. Because that is exactly what Christ meant when he never said anything remotely resembling that.”

With each mental draft I relished my wit and anticipated posting it in a private Facebook group I run. I'd created the group as a safe space to say things one isn't comfortable saying in one's public stream--a place where people can share potentially embarrassing or incendiary thoughts and get honest responses without the usual assumption of ill intent that breeds posturing and flame wars. So my little satire seemed like a perfect fit.

But I knew it wasn't. The more I thought of posting it, the more I knew I wouldn't. Even in that place where I trusted myself to say things I couldn't otherwise say without fear of giving offense, I was afraid of giving offense. I knew there was a problem.

By the end of the service, I understood what the problem was. I wasn't being humane. I was taking cheap shots at the structure and ritual without considering it in its historical context, and I know better. To read history from a modern perspective is worse than useless. One can only understand history by placing historical characters in their historical context.

Just a few centuries ago, Christianity was the only game in town: the substrate of physical, social and spiritual existence. That way of life is nearly impossible for the modern agnostic or atheist to fathom, yet if we don't at least try, we'll never see clearly. The church was the only social cushion at a time when humans lived closer to the bone than we can readily imagine.

I despise what religion has wrought. I believe even the most cursory glance at history shows that religion has done more harm than good, and that the world would be a better place without it. Yet lacking a control for reality, I can never prove my beliefs.

For all I know, we couldn't have gotten to where we are without our ancestors having that social cushion. For all I know, the ritual I was mocking had roots in a structure they couldn't have done without.

To dismiss religion and mock religious people would serve nothing but my own in ego. If I were to indulge in such simplistic thinking, I would be no different than those who have lumped me in with misogynists because I don't regurgitate every feminist talking-point. I have to be better than that, my thoughts more granular. I have to be able to parse adjacent concepts.

Neal Stephenson wrote that “the difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.” That's what my satire was lacking: subtlety.

I'm uncomfortable, scared and angry about the ritual I sat through on Christmas morning. To channel  those feelings into mere mockery would be easy. To respond with measured, contextualized criticism takes an order of magnitude more effort. Yet it's the only honest response. I have to do the work.

To My Daughter: Common Ground

To the reader:

I used to think I could take an idea in my head and write about it, and that you could read my words and get the same idea in your head. But after writing about feminism for a while, I no longer believe that. The language is too charged, and too many people have drawn monstrous inferences from my words.

Fear of being misunderstood has nearly paralyzed my writing. So I'm taking a suggestion from my wife, who agreed that people would get the wrong idea unless I prefaced each piece with an unambiguous statement of intent.

Here are the basic precepts on which I and feminists agree. They are the reasons why I write about feminism, and why I consider myself a feminist. If you find something monstrous in my writing--something that seems to conflict with any of these precepts--please ask me about it. Odds are, you're seeing something that was not in my mind.

COMMON GROUND

1. The United States has a male-dominated culture. By default, men tend to have advantages which may or may not be visible to them.

2. Systematic inequality exists.

3. All forms of emotional, physical and sexual abuse are monstrous.

4. I want to work against the inequality and suffering implicit in the above.

Not Listening to Body Dysmorphia

Today I met some online friends in Manhattan for a 5k run. Afterward, the organizer of the get-together posted some pictures. Here's one of them.

I'm the fashionable one.

Do you know what I said to myself when I saw this one?

God I look fat.

Yup. Seriously. The voice in my head even had a tinge of Valley girl drama 'tude.

I'd like to reassure you at this point that this post is in no way intended to solicit sympathy, or even support. I don't need support. Know why?

I aint' listenin' to that voice any more.

Far from wanting support, I want to express gratitude. I want to convey the bizarre view from inside my head. And I want to write words that might help someone else who, like me, looks at their body and doesn't see reality.

I was morbidly obese for the first seventeen years of my life, and during most of the subsequent twenty-three years I was none too skinny. Finding a sane relationship with food and attaining a healthy weight has been the primary struggle of my life.

A few years ago I got help, got clean and started losing weight. As I approached my goal weight, I was scared out of my mind. It had all gone to shit each time I'd tried before, and it would all go to shit again.

Except this time it didn't. This time I was doing things differently. Despite my certainty that it would all fall apart... it didn't. I hit my goal weight on October 1, 2011. Words couldn't describe my amazement.

Ah, but my life had hardly begun to get weird. At that point, I had no clue how radically my metabolism had shifted as a result of the enormous change in my eating. I added a few hundred calories to my daily intake, figuring that would be enough to halt my weight loss. Didn't even make a dent. I scratched my head and threw another few hundred calories at the problem, and this time my weight loss slowed... a little? Maybe? Huh. More head-scratching, a few hundred more calories thrown in. My weight loss finally slowed markedly, but still didn't stop.

In the fourth round I rolled up my sleeves and, with a mix of disbelief and irritation, added another few hundred calories to my daily intake, bringing it up to well over four thousand calories. Finally, my weight started to go back up.

And I had to let it.

See, I'd committed to a sensible, healthy goal weight, and I'd shot past it, so now I had to gain a few pounds to get back to that weight and then stabilize. Simple, right? Well, if you think so, you've probably never been obese. There's no thrill like the thrill of finally being skinny, and there's always a voice that says "Yeah... I could be skinnier."

But I didn't listen to that voice. I let my weight climb slowly. And if I was scared out of my mind before, now I was scared out of my mind, out the door, into a cab to the spaceport, onto the next long-range ship, out of the solar system, through the nearest black hole and into some other dimension of shrieking, pants-filling horror where no one had ever heard of minds, let alone being in one.

Now here's where the body dysmorphia made itself apparent. In the midst of my fear--in the midst of thinking "No way am I going to be able to gain weight without it all falling apart"--I started to look in the mirror and poke at my face, thinking that it looked too fat. Keep in mind that when this behavior started I had gained at most three pounds.

That's when I started learning the skill of getting a stranglehold on myself. "Dude." I would say. "You cannot look fat. At most you have gained three pounds. And you were too skinny before you gained those three pounds, so there is no way you can look fat. So SHUT THE FUCK UP. And CHILL THE FUCK OUT."

I had to start not listening to the voice that said I looked fat, because every other input, from the people in my life to my own internal logic, told me otherwise. That voice was loud, but it was vastly outnumbered, so I had to let it be overruled.

I overshot my goal weight by a pound or two, decreased my calories a bit, and settled into a groove. Within months I got really good at maintaining my goal weight. I spent two years within five pounds of that mark. Whenever I gained or lost a pound or two between monthly weigh-ins, I tweaked my food intake to compensate. My fear seeped out of me. I no longer believed everything would go to shit.

Then, two months ago, I took a huge step. I'd been going to CrossFit for about seven months, and I knew it was past time to adjust my goal weight. Gaining muscle without gaining weight is the equivalent of losing weight, so if I was going to be honest with myself, my weight had to become a moving target. So I started gaining weight intentionally.

At the beginning of November I weighed myself and found that I'd gained three pounds. I'm happy to say not only that I felt only small echoes of that old fear, but that I resolved to continue. Three pounds was a good start. I was still on the slender side of fit, and my pants were still on the loose side of comfortable. I judged that, if I were to gain another three pounds during November, it wouldn't be a bad thing. So I let it ride.

I'm in the middle of that second month now, and it's... a bit challenging. I still have those moments when I walk by the mirror and stop and examine and poke, and that old voice returns. It's always a negotiation. Which leads me to today. I've looked at that picture ten times, and each time, here's what still goes through my head.

I see my man-boobs and my upholstery. I see that I'm a size 42 frame in a size 52 skin. And I wouldn't change any of that. If I had a million dollars, I wouldn't get liposuction, because that flab is part of me. I like who I am, so I won't deny my past. Moreover, I know the difference between flab and fat, so although I see those flaws, I know they don't make me look fat.

I see that I'm wearing sweats, and I know sweats make a person look dumpy.

I see that I'm running like a spaz because I tore a muscle in my calf a few moths ago, and it hasn't healed yet.

I think of all the times since I lost weight when I've seen a video of myself and I said "Holy shit I'm skinny!" and how bizarre it is that I can look at a still picture and have the opposite reaction.

I think of how people have different body types. I think of my mesomorph frame. I know I have a pernicious tendency to compare myself to ectomorphs and think that I'm fat.

I take all these factors into consideration. I extrapolate and interpolate. I weigh it all like Indiana Jones with his bag of sand. And I come out the other side knowing with dead certainty that I do not look fat.

And still I look at that picture and think "God I look fat."

The cool thing is, I'm getting good at not listening to that voice. It's still there, like the imaginary people in the room in "A Beautiful Mind". It's just that, in the convocation that informs my judgment, I've allowed that voice to be drowned out.

I'm feelin' good about that. I'm amused by my crazy brain and tickled at having learned how to rein in one of its more quizzical aspects. So again, the last thing I need is sympathy or support. What I want is to reach anyone who might find this a bit familiar, and tell you that this body dysmorphia shit is real. As real as it gets.

And you can get help.

One other thing. A few months back, a friend and fellow compulsive overeater invited me to speak at a weekly meeting that focuses on body issues. There were twenty-five people in the room, and I was the only man.

That's bullshit. Come on, guys! I know for a fact that I'm not the only man whose perception of himself is compromised. So that stuff I said above, about how it's real and there is help? Yes. It applies to you, regardless of gender. This whimsy doesn't discriminate.

The Abuser In My Head

The other day I was walking down the hallway at work when the thought of a sandwich popped into my head. The neat stack of bread and fixings coalesced before my mind's eye with no apparent associative chain leading up to it.

But just because there was no associative chain doesn't mean there was no cause. Moments before I thought of the sandwich, an old, angry, embarrassed feeling had surfaced. I wouldn't have noticed this two and a half years ago. But since then I've gotten good at seeing how my mind leaps to thoughts of food to avoid feelings it doesn't want to feel.

I visualized the sandwich and remembered how it felt to reach out for food without a thought in my head of stopping. My behavior was a simple reflex arc; I saw food that I liked, my hand reached out and it went in my mouth. I touched that old feeling, and the contrast between then and now shocked me. I no longer exist in a state of perpetual hedonistic freefall.

In the midst of that overwhelming contrast, there were striking similarities. My new way of eating has so deeply ingrained itself in my behavior that I spend very little time thinking about it. So when I start eating, I have exactly as much thought of stopping as I did years ago, which is none at all. The difference is that the structure provides limits. I'm no longer in freefall. I'm standing calmly in a landscape that has fallen deafeningly quiet.

Now here's the odd thing about that sense of quietude: it felt lonely. I was bemused and curious at that. I wanted to explain the loneliness. At the time, the closest I came was to say that the act of mindlessly eating everything in sight had carried with it a sound and fury. It was reckless and exciting, like a wild party in my head. Now that the party had fallen silent, I was experiencing the silence as loneliness.

But that didn't do it. The feeling of loneliness still didn't make sense. After all, every fiber of my lucid self saw my new way of eating as joyous and free, and saw the loneliness as peacefulness. I was feeling the hush in the wake of decades of binge eating and self-loathing. But that's not how my emotional self experienced it. So for days I rolled more metaphors around in my head, wondering if I was merely overthinking it.

Then the muse came to me unexpectedly in a conversation with my sister about my ten-year-old nephew. She said that he feels constantly pestered by his eight-year-old sister, yet recently he had a day at home without her, and he missed her. I smiled and exclaimed to myself "That's it! That's the feeling!" My relationship with food had been a constant, pestering presence, but once that pestering was gone, I missed it.

I mused on the sibling metaphor and soon found myself extending it, shifting from sister and brother to abuser and abused. I thought of how often people stay in abusive situations. This image of the abused struggling against all reason to stay with the abuser resonated so strongly with me that it seemed like the metaphor I'd been fumbling toward all along.

Maybe my loneliness is analogous to the urge to stay in an abusive relationship. Maybe the silence in my head is not that of the house after the loud party, but rather that of the house after the abuser has left. For decades my house was full of tumult. It hurt, but it was exciting and I didn't know how to live any other way. Maybe, no matter how long I stay away and no matter how good I feel about being away, part of me will always want to be back there.

And maybe this all seems fatuously Freudian to you. Maybe you don't think of yourself as a convocation of sub-selves. But when you ask yourself a question, to whom are you speaking? To whom do the voices belong that debate ethical questions in your head?

To a greater or lesser degree we are all sandboxes in which cavort calved-off aspects of ourselves: personality constructs granted sufficient autonomy to compose the dialectic on which cognition thrives. And maybe it's that granting of autonomy that gets people like me into trouble. Maybe a brutish, heedless part of me overpowered the rest.

Maybe my addiction was an abuser in my head.

To My Daughter: You Are Beautiful

I've been thinking about something you said recently--something about a friend of yours who's prettier than you. You said it in such a matter-of-fact way that it was disheartening to me, yet I couldn't think of a thing to say, in much the same way that I might not know how to respond to someone telling me that the sun is green. What is there to say to a statement so obviously, wholly untrue that it seems not to bear on reality?

We've spoken about this before, so I suspect that right now you're defending your self-deprecating position by pointing out that men respond to your friend differently than they do to you. To that I have two replies.

First, human perception is flawed, and you're human. You don't see yourself clearly. None of us do. When I look back at myself at your age, I see a young man crippled far more by his perception of himself than by any intrinsic limits. I thought I knew what I was and how people saw me, but now I know that I was just telling stories. I could have been whomever I wanted to be, if I'd just had faith in myself. I see the same aching gulf in you. I doubt you see yourself clearly, let alone how men react to you and your friend.

Second--and I know we've talked about this before, but given the dismal sound of your voice when you talked about your friend, it bears repeating--even if those men do react to her in some way that they don't react to you, so what? Men respond to women for a host of reasons, of which static physical attributes compose a small portion. In a person's motion and behavior there are hundreds of cues you would consciously recognize and thousands that you wouldn't. Men may respond to traits that have nothing to do with your friend's looks--traits which you may or may not want to possess.

Your statement stuck in my head so thoroughly because of that article we spoke about, How to talk to your daughter about her body. Many of the women who commented disagreed with the author because they'd spent their whole lives wanting their fathers to tell them they were pretty, but they never did. I keep thinking back to your childhood, wondering what I said to you, if anything, about your body. Did I tell you that you were pretty, or beautiful, or cute? I don't remember. I tend to think I didn't, because I didn't want to emphasize physical attributes. Did you want me to?

I know I can't reach in and change you. I know my opinion only goes so far. I just want you to know the depth of befuddlement and sadness I feel when I hear you say your friend is prettier than you. She isn't prettier than you. You aren't any less attractive then her. You're beautiful, inside and out. I've always thought so.

Love,

-Dad

To My Daughter: Introduction

Dear Morgan,

Last night you posted the following on Facebook.

i'm going to be corny and post this on your wall so everybodyy can see it: you are the best dad and i love you : ]

In addition to getting me all choked up, you may have dropped an answer into my lap.

About seven months ago I broke my decades-long silence on the subject of feminism. During the following six weeks I wrote six more articles. In the last five and a half months I've written only one.

If you read all of my feminism articles from the beginning, you'll see the progress I've made and you'll understand why I've been reticent despite that progress. My initial passion was suffused with an anger that cooled as I wrote. I needed to write about, and with, that anger to get past it. That process has given me both clarity and pause.

Do you remember when I told you I was learning the difference between writing to say what I needed to say, and writing to communicate with my readers? I was thinking primarily of this piece. I don't know if you've read it. Hell, I don't know if I want you to read it. It's not the type of thing your average Dad wants his daughter to see, yet perhaps that very discomfort makes it all the more important to share with you. I stand by every word of it, because it's the truth. Yet I see now that it's an example of my saying what I need to say, rather than writing in a way that communicates. That's why future articles will include rewrites of that piece.

Feminism is polarized, politicized and rhetorically ossified, and I am angry. That's a shitty combination. Now that I've written a few pieces and gained a bit of clarity, I doubt that I'm yet capable of writing usefully about feminism, because the concepts I consider so vital to convey are so easy to misconstrue. Yet I have to keep writing if I'm ever to write more usefully.

I spent months ruminating somewhat bitterly on all these thoughts, and then last night you wrote the post above. And it suddenly occurred to me that I should write all my pieces on feminism TO YOU. After all, why am I concerned about feminism? Because I want to contribute to a world where you are safe, where you have equal opportunities, where you can exercise your vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording you scope.

I trust myself when I think of you. I have faith in my ability to do what I do not because anyone's watching, not because I'll get credit--hell, not even caring whether you know about it or not--but because it's right for you. If I write to you, you'll be my pole star leading me through pitfalls of anger and narcissism.

Thanks for being you. I don't know whom I'd be without you.

Love,

-Dad

The Rope

It must have been around late 1984—my first year of high school—when I first saw that rope hanging from the gym's ceiling beam. I weighed at least 250 pounds by then. I seem to recall a few more rope-climbing days during the next few years, so it's safe to assume I weighed over 300 pounds during at least one "attempt". The quotes are there for the same reason that I remember the experience so well. The handful of moments I spent with that rope weren't my most humiliating--not by a long shot. But they made a singular impression.

Pretense. That's what made those moments unique. I went numb trying to pretend that there wasn't a whole gym class full of boys standing in a silent circle, looking at me, waiting for the inevitable. I played along with the pretense of trying to climb the rope when I knew just as well as they did what was coming. There was an inexorability in seeing the moment in the near future when the misery would be over, and knowing that between me and it there was one path and zero choices. I had to play along with the absurdity. I had to pass through that eye of the storm of eyes.

The pretense was necessary. Grades in gym class were based on effort. I didn't have to climb an inch. I just had to try my best. So I was grateful for that pretense. And I felt pathetic for feeling grateful for the protection that pretense afforded me. I was a freak who was lucky not to suffer more than humiliation for not being able to climb a rope—a matryoshka of gratitude and shame.

So when I stepped up to that rope, I knew I would do my best, and I knew I wouldn't climb it. I had seen the other boys climb it--seen one or two of them reach the top. I dreamed of being like them. I knew I never would. I knew I'd never climb a rope to the top.

Today I climbed a rope to the top.