BREAKING UP STIGMA

In the on-going attempt to pry apart the stubborn clichés and stereotypes that are outdated and even mistaken from the beginning, I’m taking several approaches.  One is that every stigma, race or assumption is a continuum rather than a binary, that the continuum is anchored by high prestige at one end and permission to abuse and even kill at the other.  Vividly, a person who provides sex for money might be a consort of a king or the mistress of an international corporation CEO.  This applies to males as well as females, and to ambiguous sexualities as ascribed to someone like Wallis Simpson.  

Let’s look at skin color.  Given the TV exposure of well-educated and well-spoken black people in popular drama series as well as in news segments about doctors, it appears from their grace and intelligence that they are far more naturally high status than some Republican senators.  But away from these assimilated people are dark street people who are barely existing.  No one knows quite what to do with the high prestige African personalities who remain colorful and energetic to the point of seeming garish and outré.  Some love ‘em, some hate ‘em.  

One moral narrative in this country is that immigrants and low income people can ascend the culture continuum through education and virtue.  But it is challenged.  For one thing, only the predominate highest class decides who IS educated and makes it easier for some to ascend.

The other major lever in prying apart such stigmas as race is the realization that global unity is rapidly erasing the reality and concept of “race.”  Maybe we’ll all be beige.  This complex and changing world has left many criteria behind.  For instance, a delinquent kid may have educated himself to use the Internet to a far greater extent that professors and legislators.  The gizmos are meant to allow self-teaching.  This takes time and experience with the issue, but grown professionals with pressing jobs are not likely to have those “privileges”, those luxuries.  At the same time "populism" is cheapening and coarsening our judges and representatives.  From a rather Nordic white perspective.

In one way the internet is a great leveling force so that kids in China or Australia can theoretically talk to anyone anywhere unless their governments shut down the machinery, which they are not likely to do if they don’t know it’s happening.  The internet grew up around porn — everyone doing it and no one admitting it — so secrecy and unexpectedness is built in, but so is “aggregation” as was described in “A Billion Wicked Thoughts”.  A basic contributor to stigma is not having the facts because they have been suppressed to keep them from disturbing the status quo, particularly if someone loses profit or control.

But the “facts” are easily changed into damn lies by tinkering with obvious things like place of residence (gerrymandering) or shopping — or subtle hoaxes like shell companies.  It’s interesting that that there’s so much revelation about shell companies, empty identities, but none of the outrage that accompanies traditional disguises like “noms de plume”.  People are convinced that sex and romantically squalid identities make narratives more marketable if they are presented as real.  This has been true since “Fanny Hill” and “Robinson Crusoe.”  Combat and prison stories also tempt “shell identities”.  But that doesn’t mean that “The Red Badge of Courage” is bogus.  It’s still a good story.

Consider three stories edited and defended by one particular publisher who shall be nameless.  One was Sherman Alexie whose audacity has finally gotten out of hand.  Another was Alice Randall who wrote “The Wind Done Gone,” a Black counter-story to “Gone with the Wind”.  That went to court.  The third was Tim Barrus who sent a first-person fiction story about “Nasdijj” to Esquire magazine where it was taken by the “white boy” editors to be actual testimony, so that's the way they promoted it.  But they knew that Nasdijj had no mailing address.

It is a great crime in America to jump ethnic groups.  Barrus was not Navajo — he was Delaware, a tribe scattered by the States and then more recently regathered after being moved to Oklahoma.  The Barrus line is named in order by the Miskawest people.  The sequence of descent — nothing to do with blood quantum and everything to do with pedigree — was traced back individual by individual.  So what are the consequences to the critics who accused Barrus of being non-native?  

This European concern for who begat whom comes from the 19th century development of animal husbandry breeding but also, to some extent, from the Biblical begats that justify the pedigree of Jesus.  Maybe that’s why it’s such a moral issue.  Therefore, I was surprised when a respected female rancher/writer just accepted the media’s accusations without reading the book in question or even — as far as I know — the original story in Esquire.  She was equally surprised that I would defend such a stigmatized person.

Sources and sequences are fascinating and even useful, but unreliable as moral indicators, unless you accept Trump’s use of “hoax” and “witchhunt” to exonerate his dubious actions.  We are no longer reluctant to use the stigma of “mafia” against Trump — with proof.

Several stigmas are denials of privilege, like anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism.  In this small town they are very often in play.  Most disconcertingly, if one comes from a faster urban life, the idea of what an elite or an intellectual might be like is much different than what it is assumed to be where not many people go to college.  Shouting and stubborn insistence are often confused with true knowledge, and a motivated ignoramus can take over an entire meeting.  

Mayberry is often mentioned in comparison to Valier, but people forget how people in the story often went off on tangents — a little like white people’s Naapi stories, illustrations of stigma and mistaken assumptions.  https://www.tribdem.com/news/bill-eggert-the-andy-griffith-show-turns-60/article_8a61d0e0-b82c-11ea-91e9-8f4232b1c52b.html

Experiments with birds (who, of course, have bird brains) show how deeply and biologically the exceptional individual, the white crow, is attacked in an effort to drive it off, even kill it.  This is true of many humans, esp. if money or prestige are involved.  Of course, authors take the brunt of accusations because no one knows much about publishers really.  Unless they create a stir of controversy through "their authors", as above.

I’m not trying to defend any particular author.  I’m just deploring that any individual is defined by color, provenance, or even things like stupidity, which may be very revealing and emotionally compelling stupidity.  But it shouldn’t be judged without reading the work.  Otherwise, where on the continuum of stupidity would one locate it?  Holy fool or pain in the butt?

THAT'S DISGUSTING !

Once in a while I come to write a post knowing what I want to say, pinning it on some tale or phenomenon that seems to work well, so I can unfold the thing coherently.  Then I go to Google to check spelling or dates, and the whole story goes cattywampus.  I had it all wrong.  I have to start all over again because my thinking was based on false assumptions.  Of course, that’s good to find out BEFORE I post.

Nina Strohminger

This time it was an Aeon (the online magazine), an article from a woman named Nina Strohminger.  I had just finished a post intended to dissect the parts of what we call “religion” because the meaning has been so confused and misused.  As an important component of “religion,” I offered spirituality and contrasted it with morality on the basis of boundaries.  Morality is always drawing boundaries between “what is done” and “what is NOT done.”  Spirituality is removal of boundaries, radical inclusion.  Nina gave morality the role I had given spirituality, but her indicator was not sin but “disgust.”  At her website she includes a link to her idea of includes the Strohminger Grotesque Art Database. It’s a ZIP file that I can’t open so far.  Here’s the banner: 

In the end I had an academic scandal.  It was clear that Nina was an upstart defiant critic of a stuffy professor.  This squib advertises Colin McGinn.

“Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. . . Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust. “The Meaning of Disgust” is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition.”

Colin McGinn

It is a Puritan point of view with a prurient subtext.  A cover for abuse.

Here’s Nina’s take-down.   http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.308.1947&rep=rep1&type=pdf  It quickly stirred up opinions which were discussed at http://samirchopra.com/2012/05/21/a-friendly-amendent-to-nina-strohmingers-mcginn-review/   

Then I find out about McGinn.  He is a sexual harasser who in 2013 was forced to leave his job.   An example of his attitude is a faculty meeting where he joked about feminists dripping hot wax on their nipples.  The reaction of the nearly all-male group was laughter. Disgusting. “He claimed he was misunderstood due to cultural differences, humorlessness and his own superior intellect and knowledge of philosophy of language.”  Even more disgusting.  But not surprising.  I’ve long seen the philosophy Ph.D. as a hiding place for skinny boys with bad breath and no love life who tried to excuse everything with their own brilliance.  At least by now they don’t try to be UU ministers. 

Nina is not a feminist, but one who defends the right to be disgusting, grotesque, repulsive, an outsider (as female academics are sometimes seen).  Not because the judgment of them is mistaken, but that they also ought to be included in the valuing of life -- on moral grounds.  The problem always is that if one draws everyone into the circle of acceptable, what’s still out there?  Charles Manson?  But he’s only insane.  Can insanity be repulsive now that we don’t chain them in dungeons anymore?  A long list of rebellious creators like Pasolini or deSade have made it a point to BE disgusting, because that gives them a vantage point for raking culture.  They are identified as transgressive, but also admired and valued.  Why is that? Because of their morality, which urges protection of the small and weak, honesty and fairness in government, and the erotic.  They work between stigma and compassion.  Disgust is a justification for stigma: the dark, the poor, the infected, the uneducated are "disgusting."

Nina’s doctoral thesis is entitled “The Hedonics of Disgust.”  Thus, she is or ought to be defining her morality over against the conventional vanilla establishment standards, which empowers white males.  She also wants acceptance of her own moral code by the establishment because it signals acceptance of her work as “good.” She seems to be addressing propriety, defying rules about fat or nudity or gender.  I wonder how far she would take this idea.  I wonder whether her moral boundary isn’t ignoring what is not merely disgusting but evil.  Is that a real boundary?  I wonder how much she knows about the Mineshaft, dedicated to disgust as a sexual turn-on.  

Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago in her book, “Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004)” was taking on a similar subject but from within the establishment.  Sleek, blonde and lawyeresque, Nussbaum was welcomed with open arms, very much within the mainstream.  I read it, approved, and by now have forgotten what she said exactly.  Bland, starched, near-Puritan.  The contrast is in Nina’s images of the grotesque, which I will NOT forget.  I’m NOT disgusted, but what can you expect from someone who watches CSI-Miami?

I had wanted the next step forward in my “body loop” version of developing humanness to be empathy.  Empathy is an extension of the brain, mostly through the eyes and the mirror cells scattered in the prefrontal cortex above the eyes.  It comes from the phenomenon of seeing someone do something and simultaneously holding an echo of the “doing” in one’s own brain.  It is possible to “echo” emotions in the same way and, in fact, it is this phenomenon at the core of a number of human capacities, as though the eye-beams were physical neuron connections.  In fact, people say they can “feel” eyes on them, even if they can’t see the watching person.

Charity or compassion without empathy is oppressive, even sometimes as bullying and destructive as hatred and violence.  People tend to think of empathy as a thought exercise when it is actually a dark brain "feeling" once the information comes in through the eyes.

Langewiesche’s most recent article in “Vanity Fair” describes a soldier riding alone in the back of a military transport on its way to murdering the five captives with him, a fact he is not quite registering.  He shares a cigarette, one of the captives gifts his “worry beads” to the soldier, two of them -- one an adolescent -- lean against the oldest man and cry.  Even in a print description our sympathy goes to them; description makes them human.  

There in the back of a dark, jolting truck -- trying not to think -- was an indelible challenge to the soldier’s identity, not because of any moral code but because of “feeling with” the captives.  Being a soldier means denying empathy for enemies.  He is unable to prevent the execution of the captives because of the force of mainstream dominance. 

Conversion of St. Paul -- Caravaggio

Denying empathy is the essence of stigma: one has no need to understand lesser beings -- they are considered mindless animals or automatons if they are considered at all.  Empathy is an animal ability, but the capacity to deny it is human.  I think Nina and friends have it upside down.  A primitive form of empathy is a basic component of being animal, closely related to “theory of mind” which is how predators predict what prey will do.  Morality comes later when people are gathered into groups, close together and competing.  It can be arbitrary, as mucky as hatred itself.

I’m on the side of feeling things but I would never exclude rationality or forcefulness from the complexity of a person’s identity.  And I would rule that “soul” is maybe part of identity but never part of morality.  Soul, if it exists, is not a creature of the community, but an essence of a person that connects it to the universal, the “Over-Soul,” if you like, while paradoxically validating its individuality.

Empathy is our access to other people.  We can obey the demands of our particular subculture and appear entirely moral, but without being in sync with others, absorbing them, learning what they know, we are not fully human.  The following is from a review by Maria Popova of Ollie Sacks’ latest book, “On the Move: a Life”

“Who we are and who we become is in large part the combinatorial product of the people and ideas we surround ourselves with — what William Gibson so memorably termed our “personal micro-culture” and Brian Eno called “scenius.” The more different those people are from us, the more they expand the echo chamber of our own mind, the more layered and beautiful the symphony of the spirit becomes. Nowhere is this self-expansion via relationship more evident than in the friendships between great artists and great scientists, one of the most heartening examples of which is the friendship between legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks and the poet Thom Gunn.”

Maria Popova

Popova’s article is worth reading for it’s own sake.  http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/19/oliver-sacks-thom-gunn-writing/?utm_content=bufferf251b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Of course, today it’s possible to have a worthy, soul-deep relationship with someone without ever meeting them, without worrying about conventional morality.  My friendship with Tim has been like that.  The more different those people are from us, the more they expand the echo chamber of our own mind, the more layered and beautiful the symphony of the spirit becomes.

Cinematheque - Barrus

A CRUCIAL DISTINCTION (3rd part of a 3 part sequence on pedophilia)

Somehow computers have made it legitimate to deal with forbidden topics so long as they are in terms of statistics, like “one in six men will be sexually molested in their lifetime”.  Or lab research produces charts like the one above by putting a pleismograph on a number of men’s penises to see what images they physically respond to.  (Which might not be what they think they desire.)  But also, more quietly, men have been openly testifying about what happened to them and the consequences of abuse.  Even the children are telling their stories.

http://sexresearchhoneypot.blogspot.com/2011/02/do-gay-men-have-more-sexual-interest-in.html#more

This chart separates out people who are sexually aroused by different age groups.  Also, the scientists were looking for differences between the desires of “heterosexuals” versus “homosexuals,” though the two categories are becoming pretty blurry.  

(Are two ninety-year-old women who are married sitting in their wheelchairs, wearing pink, and after forty years of sharing a household, really like an Act-Up parade of randy naked young men?)   “Gay” begins to seem more and more about specific kinds of activities and locations than about the nature of desire, which seems less and less binary.  But the researchers were hoping to break down the association of homosexuality and pedophilia as society understands them, and in that they probably succeeded.

But the most marked and significant difference I hear when I read the stories of children who have been used to satisfy sexual desire is never even noted.  That’s between those who mix sex with something like nurturing and those who mix sex with violence (possibly deadly).  Street boys doing survival sex for pay report that they will be paid extra if they forego safety measures like condoms (barebacking), but also that they will sometimes be paid even more if they will allow themselves to be beaten up or even tortured.  Some clients don’t ask or pay -- they just do it.  Some seem to replace coitus with violence and others mix the two, one fueling the other.  (The boys cope by using drugs.)

Similar reports come from those abused by family members, esp. step-fathers but even biological fathers.  Why isn’t the difference between inappropriate but non-damaging sexual use and violent, emergency-room level sexual abuse (often fueled by drugs) more discussed and studied?

It seems to me that pedophiles who actually love the children they desire and even try to please them, to “turn them on,” establish an empathic connection with the child that keeps them from physically harming the child.  But they don’t have enough awareness to know they may be mentally and psychologically confusing and crippling a developing child.

The other kind of pedophiles need a different name:  they seem not to realize that a child is a human being, so their desire is not for the child but for the opportunity to torture and oppress, to get a reaction.  It's a cruelty-philia.  The fact that the victim is a child is only about the inability of the child to escape, like a small animal or a weak woman.  It's not about sexual desire at all, but about rage, invasion, power.  And the scariest kind are the ones who sit idle and bored on the sofa, watching tv alongside a child and a dog, when suddenly they have an impulse to make something happen and reach over to press the burning end of the cigarette into either the child or the dog.  Is there any sexual component to that?

rough sex

I started thinking about the opposite: "maternal men," who will feed, comfort, reassure, guide and love children WITHOUT sexual elements -- innocently.  Even if they are desirous.  I think of Walt Whitman at the bedside of young suffering and dying soldiers, treating them as a mother would.  One would hope pediatricians were like this.  But at another point I was googling for images of “grabbed by the back of the neck”  (cats and rabbits do this to hold the female in place) and kept coming across the little motto above that had been repeated in different fonts and backgrounds.  It’s a celebration of rough sex, a frank inability to feel anything that isn’t violent.  If a person has conflated sex with violence, then they likely would be looking for someone whom they could treat violently.  

That still doesn't account for the man who leaves his wife sleeping in their bed in order to cross the hall to rape his small son -- though he created that child by fucking the woman he now deserts.  What kind of displacement is that?

Why is this cute?

Pedophile priests seem to desire transgression per se.  Not the kind of zombie-producing transgression where jungle maniacs force children to have intercourse with their parents and then kill the parents before their eyes and cut off the hands of the child.  But just indecent liberties -- fumbling, inviting sucking, pushing aside clothing.  This is NOT sexual desire for a child's body so much as wanting the knowledge of doing what is forbidden and knowing they can do it with impunity, that they will be protected in order to save the reputation of the church.  

Maybe it makes them seem to themselves more important or effective.  Maybe they feel they are being diddled by God.  The world of ministry, like the world of social work or teaching, is always frustrating.  One is constantly hitting limits of what one can do and constantly having to respond to trivialities that people could resolve for themselves if they tried.  Priests work alone far more than teachers or social workers.  It's not just a matter of not having sex with a wife, but also the comforting domestic life and ego support provided by a wife.

Ashes.

Researchers claim that one in six men is sexually abused over a lifetime.  I suppose mostly as children, but also as adults.  I wonder why EVERYONE is not abused?  What keeps the other five-sixths from being abused?  Is there some marker on the ones who are molested?   They say there is -- esp. after the first incident.  A stigma.  Maybe cringing or resentment.  Maybe false bravado.  Or maybe they felt it was a compliment, a privilege.  Maybe they just look confused, paralyzed like a bird in front of a snake.  Researching such markers is too close to blaming the victim.  But bruises, broken bones, STD’s, personality changes, are certainly markers that the victim neither plans nor enjoys.  Even if the predator takes care not to mark a face, behavior patterns can be giveaways.

In fact, it could be argued that the emotional confusion is the real damage. The distorted brain matrixes that keep people from intimacy, trust, joy, are harder to treat and heal than even broken bones or burst organs.  Yet emotional cruelty -- belittling, berating, bullying, mocking -- is so accepted and pervasive that it’s hard to convince people that it’s not normal and not harmless.  It is an effective way to control others, esp. children and dependents.

I read and think more about male victims partly because it gives me a bit of distance but also because I just like boys.  I have two brothers.  It’s not harder to think more about male than female perpetrators because most of them are male.  That’s who is more likely to mix violence with coition, indeed require violence in order to be aroused.  If they are grown men, equals, and in the SM context, they may share a universe of sensation that the rest of us would just as soon ignore.  The biochemical parameters and components of that have been investigated to some degree.  It’s pretty clear that transgression is a component -- doing socially forbidden things -- but within the intimacy.  

"Last Tango in Paris"

Probably there are accounts of sexual violence against children somewhere.  The most compelling accounts of NON-violent but physical desire for a child might be “Lolita” or “Death in Venice.”  Two films show men tenderly bathing “daughters” they are using sexually:  “Last Tango in Paris” and “Butterfly.”  The women are technically adult but have hebephilic personas.  At no point are they beaten up, there is no blood-letting, and they are not confined.  (Terrifying case histories in daily newspapers tell of girls being shut into boxes, tied into chairs for YEARS, raped and forced to give birth without medical help.)

These heads are made of cake and frosting for a joke wedding cake.

Our culture in general is so violent that I was surprised anyone was shocked by vids of public beheadings of journalists.  The movies show heads rolling around as freely as billiard balls on a pool table.  The technical ability to show recognizable heads on pikes means there must be prototypes on many storage shelves in Hollywood.  Kid gamers commonly watch beheading with great gouts of blood, and spectacular immolations that leave shriveled black remains.  We see people raped on television every evening, often represented as deserved punishment.  Blaming the victim.

What the kids themselves, esp. the ones with enough self-awareness to market their own bodies (NOT their desire) describe is nothing so spectacular.  What they say is that they feel invisible, non-existent, shadowy, immersed in depression, alien.  They long for love, the kind of intimacy that makes marionettes and velveteen rabbits come to life.  Why not real boys?

RACISM, STIGMA, AND RAW FEAR OF NOT SURVIVING

Racism has become far too chiaroscuro:  black and white. 

In the first place, few people are unmixed nowadays. 

In the second place, this whole race thing is polarized between only TWO races when -- assuming you accept the concept of races -- there are dozens, hundreds, of groups of people interacting, few of them purely anything biological or even cultural.

In the third place, much of what purports to be about race is really about an urban/rural split or maybe only an urban/urban split.  The issues of country people, the racisms of small towns, are not addressed, though they have much to do with economics.  So long as survival is about money, it will be about potential for getting it.  The one thing that makes it easy to get money is to already have money.  The stigma of have/have-not is gaining -- could potentially change the terms of what we’re now calling “race.”  Or even nation.

Tribes.

So in the fourth place, I’m beginning to wonder how much racism is a red-herring.  The real issues -- as always -- are things like education, jobs, marriage, social conformity, health, and even religion.  The real issue is survival in spite of competition for limited resources.

But the most dominant factor, the most dynamic factor, is stigma.  Stigma is deeply biological and erupts through culture volcanically, both the creeping lava kind and the explosive dust kind.  Stigma is a reflex that has in the past served survival, or it would not have survived itself.  Stigma is a domination reflex.  Grabbing the lesser beings by the back of the neck.

One counterweight is pity.  If we feel pity for the stigmatized -- whether lepers or babies born out of wedlock or minorities or the disabled -- then we will tolerate them, even make allowances for them, but if they show any signs of anger, resentment or -- worst -- POWER, all pity is gone and we try to eliminate them.  Uppity women and n. . .   (Don't even think it.)  This is a reflex, below conscious control.  But it teaches people already hampered that they are powerless and dependent.  This is called "demanding respect" even when your drunken father shouts it at you.

Separation of territory is a biological factor.  Groups form when they are separated by a river, a mountain range, or the languages they speak.  One form of separation is exclusion.  Push people onto reservations, into special schools, into ghettos, into menial nighttime jobs like cleaning, into junk housing on marginal land.  Worst: incarcerate them.  Even worse than worst: incarcerate them in a foreign country.  (Solitary confinement is the same thing.)  Know as little as possible about them.  If they come on your territory, drive them off.  Deport them.  Wall them out.  See them as animals, as machines, as zombies.  Contagious filth.

If you can’t exclude them, fort up.  Walled housing projects, red-lining, patrolled universities, controlled-access shopping malls.  Invitation only.  Lock the church doors.  If this makes people angry, say they are vandals, rioters, terrorists.  By then they probably are.  Or in small towns the strategy is to set up athletic competition so intense that rivalry becomes resentment, maybe active hatred.  If you lose the game, overturn the bus with them in it. (Romeo and Juliet relationships are against separation.  War dissolves internal separation in a common cause.)  

Disconcertingly, the world with connections to the former British Empire where same-sex relationships were stigmatized and even criminalized in order to keep lower classes from entering upper classes through the bedroom, has now discovered that gays were NOT separate.  Everywhere they are individuals among us in families, jobs and classes.  When we realize how many and how “normal” they are, the stigma weakens and the laws relax.  Now the gays themselves want gays to be normal -- at least conventional.  

Many people cannot tell “pity” from love, esp. men.  Most women cannot tell “awwww” cuteness from ownership.  These little problems of distinction combine in “compassion,” which makes demands on those able to provide protection, patronage, and other survival-based contributions that maintain separation.  That is, until the receiver of “compassion” begins to feel entitled and confronts, which is a form of connection, so that separation in terms of intimacy resorts to violence.  Separation in terms of welfare safety nets flips to withdrawal and punishment.  Blame.  You'd have a job if you'd accept oppression. 

These dynamics are part of producing and raising children, who ideally DO become separately empowered in spite of parental attempts at control and merging.  This is also biological.  If the crucial biological forces of stigma and compassion are allowed to overwhelm any cultural counterweights -- which sometimes become aligned with those raw biological drives and enflame them -- the result is war: gang war, territory invasion, terrorism, economic “pencil” death, and the general destruction of culture that the dystopic books, films, and theories vividly illustrate for us.

My experience with stigma and compassion has shaped my opinions.  When I came back to occupy this marginal old house so I could write on a very low income, I was interpreted as needy, weak, and pitiful and so people gave me food.  I only accepted it from people who were established long-term friends BECAUSE it marked me as weak and stigmatized.  On the other hand, people who believed I was a writer said they were in awe and meant it.  A few took me out to supper at the nicest place around.

I was respected by people who remembered Bob Scriver because he was famous.  (Though one old farm wife said, "He wasn't THAT famous.  He wasn't Charlie Russell."  In her eyes, that was failure.)  When I showed power by telling what I knew in books -- "an exposé of the Western art world", said the only honest reviewer -- I was re-stigmatized as a bitter old ex-wife.  

As an English teacher I was respected as a representative of propriety.  As an animal control officer I was stigmatized as a persecutor of animals.  As a friend of Blackfeet I was both stigmatized by locals and given status by romantic liberals.  As a former co-writer with Tim Barrus, I was stigmatized except by the other people who love his writing and vids.  I don’t align with the compassion people either, because Tim's work proves daily that even boys pushed out of the system are not powerless.  It is their brave work as observers and interpreters that aligns us.

A sharp issue (indeed, "cutting") arose when the clergyman next door to me refused to see me as his equal -- we both attended the U of Chicago Div School -- and insisted that I was a needy old woman who should be grateful for a gift jar of jam and could be freely dominated if my tree interfered with his desire for a suburban lawn (status).  We ended up in a stigma standoff.  All compassion blasted.  (Much laughter around town -- deserved, I admit.)  We are the same race.  He has more money since for much of his career he was a veteran’s hospital chaplain on salary.  He feels it is an achievement to have children, though his wife did all the work -- as usual.  Religious affiliation can be racial even when color is not involved.

In the interest of self-preservation, there are people in this village whom I actively avoid.  I move on quickly, try not to “see” them.  They are too curious, too eager to find a weakness to exploit, if only by gossip.  There are other situations -- church, school -- that I avoid because I am socialized to a world so different from here that we can’t read each other’s signals.  I was asked to judge a speech contest when I first returned, and discovered that I’d given the highest ratings to those the other judges gave the lowest ratings.  I valued personality, creativity, uniqueness.  They wanted conformity.

Of course, identifying with the rez towns -- Browning and Heart Butte -- does me no good in Valier and it IS color-racial.  In the larger world, I have a hard time not stigmatizing many people in my former denomination and profession.  They seem like a different privileged race, perpetual children so confident of their entitlement that they are inadvertently cruel, greedy, and stigmatizing of any difference.  

It surprises me that they complain they are powerless, since they are not, though their power is a little atrophied and they turn it on each other, like the recent attack on her own seminary by a social activist used to attacking "bad" people.  They won't award her a diploma though she has completed her course work.  She is SHOCKED.  Of course, it means she won't have to candidate for a pulpit and do that daily drudgery or that weekly sermon.  

But she's not used to being gripped by the back of the neck, nor did she realize she would be stigmatized. The world cares about her predicament about as much as they care about the rez kid thrown out of the local high school for being a pain in the butt.  Not only do the two kinds of ostracized students not care about each other, each thinks he or she is unique, just trying to survive.  Neither knows the other exists.  Would it help if they did?

WHO CAN CONTAIN BOYS?

A child should be embraced in loving arms as the first container of life outside the womb.  This is a given of survival.  Even before birth the child is experiencing and creating the contents of his own brain/body which are interwoven through the process of being alive, centered in the bony chalice of the brain, flickering chemical/electrical neurons weaving patterns that are the floor of the rest of identity.  By the time the baby gets to language, the patterns are entrenched and unconscious.

What the circumstances of birth and the ensuing years will establish to the rest of society is what category to put you in.  The first decision will be “like me” versus “other”.  Then “others to be feared,” and “others who should fear you.”  What all that means in terms of attitudes and behaviors is the source material for novels and psychotherapy.  Some distinctions are so subtle they are hard to understand for those outside the system: can you tell a Hutu from a Tutsi?  Even they had to resort to documentation.

The attitude of separation ends in differences in survival and encourages the polarizing of continuums into binaries.  Lately we’ve been challenging the binaries of gender identity, not least because such dichotomies underlie prejudices that damage the whole culture and destroy lives, even entitling murder directly by violence or indirectlys by withholding the basic needs for life, not excluding meds, but including food, shelter from weather, basic cleanliness, safe sleep.

I’m talking about the category of “boys.”  

Big and little, blonde or black, thin or thick, cheerful or morose, “nice” or “wicked.”

There is another set of binaries that controls how we react to these differences. Among a myriad of reactions is the idea that we will kill the bad ones.  Or we will “save” them by taking them home and making them be like us.  We will use them for our own purposes, whether chimney-sweeping or as sexual objects.  We will consider them toys, playing with them so they are made fools or maybe in "good" play so that they pass small hurdles that improve their skills.  We can teach them to belong to us or to belong to themselves.  But they are not belongings.

We are slow to realize that it’s possible to be a mix of boy/girl -- anatomically. hormonally, psychologically.  A “boy” can feel he is really a “girl” or a “boy” can actually have the nuclear DNA code for “girl”.  More than that, there are many dimensions to being one gender rather than another:  physically, boybrain-shaped (yes, there are differences), and testosterone-powered boys might nevertheless be disinterested in what the culture thinks a male should be, which is to say:  physical to the point of violence; competitive; scientific; dominating; tolerant of grease, dirt and pain; indifferent to aesthetics and nurturing; constantly “up” for sex.  All these are arbitrary markers for the cultural container we call “men” or “boys.”  Conan the Barbarian fits, but the man who invented the character of Conan does not.

A certain kind of man -- obviously an aggressive, powerful, competent person -- might have a son who is thoughtful, even poetic, slight, better at reading than manual labor -- and might interpret that son as “girlie.”  Using the only tools he has, he might try to shape the boy as a blacksmith shapes metal:  hot rage, steady pounding.  Since boys are not horseshoes, the result might be a smashed container for a life.

Now that we’re beginning to accept the container we call gay, we still have a lot of sorting to do in terms of other sub-aspects.  Consider the possibilities.

A boy who is physiologically an outlier on the spectrum of possibilities: an “elf” or an “orc.”

A boy who simply doesn’t match the culture that contains him.

A boy who reaches adolescence and -- when his hormones turn on -- finds his desire is atypical or low-powered or uncomfortably high-powered. 

A boy who realizes that his sexual desire is focused on his own sex instead of the opposite, but not other gays -- only straight guys.

A boy who is abused so much that he is confused about whom to love, how to love, how desire is different from love, which is different from the expectations of the culture.

A boy who desires sex with one gender but prefers forming bonds/attachments of intimacy with the opposite gender.  There are other ways of dividing up the dimensions of gender distinctions among different cultural “containers.”  Aggressively physical in dance instead of sports; delicately creating porcelain objects instead of welded steel public art.

Some aspects of this will be considered transgressive by the culture, at least one culture, and may be punished.  For instance, drug-taking or sexwork.  The punishment may be overt, like confinement by this incarceration-crazed society, the ultimate idea being that containing is what imposes order.  Or it can be exclusion from all containers, even locking the dumpsters that are a source of food for street people.  Like other feral and wild mammals, these boys are forced to find or make burrows, nests, out of the debris of a culture so rich that it cannot help excreting, dumping, trashing -- people as well as objects.  People forced to BE objects in solitary confinement that empties their bone chalice skull, snuffs out the fire that burns there.

Then there are the diseases, but none of diseases is specific to males.  NONE.  (Maybe sperm diseases.)  Microbes don't care about human sex.  They are opportunists of skin, blood, bone and flesh.  TB, Hep C, Herpes, and, of course, HIV.  

Containers can be protective or destructive.  Most are unconscious and managed by metaphor, but if those metaphors are examined -- often through art -- they can be brought up to the surface for moral reflection.  Which assumptions are necessary?  Which walls need to be taken down?  Why do we think a wall will keep people from migrating or smuggling in the first place?  Why do we think that a walled community will guard us against trouble when we are most endangered by those inside with us?  Like our families.

What Lakoff and Johnson try to get us to “see” is that in order to change these categories that punish boys for who they are, we must EXPERIENCE who they are.  More than that, we need to see what they see.  Luckily -- as organizations like Real-Stories Gallery, Smash Street Boys, and Show Me Your Life -- have discovered, there is a container that can do this: digital screens.  Forsaking words as too many levels removed from raw sensoria, the boys themselves are able to take you into their worlds -- both internal and of the streets.

Boys who desire males and identify with that.  (Gay, one style or another)

Boys who do sex work because their bodies are all they have. 

Boys who have been so abused and confused that they are drifting, letting anything happen.

Boys with infected and deprived bodies.

Boys stigmatized, marked as victims and constantly in mortal danger.

Boys who have lost the boundaries of behavior that signal to the larger culture that they are    safe to others.

Boys who challenge and try to smash every attempt to contain them because all of them have meant confinement, torture, invasion.

Why should we embrace them?  Because we are the ones who made them that way and because we know what we need to do.  We just don’t want to.  Asking the reason for the refusal is the most dangerous question of all.  The answer has to be action, resources.  From ALL of us.

FACE IT !

Carmen Tarleton, whose angry husband destroyed her face

To know someone deeply is to love them.  Our culture’s insistence on surface, on conformity to a prescribed appearance -- always appealing -- is not true to the way people attach to each other.  Consider that to a lot of us, Worf on “Star Trek” has come to seem familiar, friendly and lovable.  In fact, he gets paired off on the show and NOT to another fierce Klingon, but to Counselor Deanna Troi, gorgeous and compassionate.

Michael Dorn who played Worf

Most people haven’t really known people who needed face transplants.  My hostess during my ministerial fellowship in Hartford had had a husband who lost a quarter of his face to cancer, but he had died by then.  When he was alive, he never left the house.  Now that we actually CAN transplant faces, we see them as half of the before/after pics, optimistically, redeemed.  The media normally censors the most “disturbing” (their euphemism) images of human damage.  The trouble with the truth is that a lot of people can’t handle it.  But if it’s not available to our map of the world, we never come to either accept or provide the resources for change.  

Tough as it is to realize how damaged one can be and still live, it’s even worse when we find out how often the faces were smashed and melted by someone trying to destroy the identity of the person, hoping to make them suffer terribly without dying, to be repulsive to everyone else out of a twisted desire to own them.  Hate is the obverse of love; the opposite is to walk off whistling and find someone else.

Carmen before the lye attack

So I love the story of Carmen Tarleton.  After her estranged husband poured industrial lye on her and she endured fifty surgeries to get a face back, she decided to learn to play the piano.  And she and the piano teacher (an older guy) fell in love.  I think he sees her the way she is just above and she does, too.  THAT’s how people attach: sharing something.  http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/01/health/tarleton-face-transplant/   So now she’s looking forward to having enough muscle and nerve grow back in her face to be able to pucker up for a kiss.  She still has her voice.

After all, a responsive voice (if it belongs to Scarlett Johanson) is enough for a man to fall in love with, according to Hollywood.  But there are plenty of stories about people who imagine a face for a voice they know and get a shock when they meet it.

It’s even a shock to meet one’s own face in the mirror after sort of forgetting about one’s age, esp. if one doesn’t use makeup or shave regularly.  If I go through the day with computer glasses, which are set for 18 inches, my wrinkles disappear, my Scots ruddiness seems natural, and I don’t see the rampant eyebrows.  The first selfies I made were on a hot day after I’d been in the yard working.  I deleted them but was startled when Google Images resurrected them.  Maybe people won’t realize that’s me.  

As an alternative I sent someone a photo of my face taken when I was still a teen and, sure enough, that shows up on Google Images, too.  Of course, the images I get are not the ones you get.  The computer algorithm thinks every old woman with short hair and glasses is me.  We’re a tribe.

These are not me.  My mom's mastectomy was on the other side and more radical.

We are used to rarely or never seeing genitalia or female breasts until the Aquarian Revolution began addressing the question of “why not?”  There were two contexts that had custody of the images:  one was medical, which kept photos of the result of breast surgery from sight; one was pornographic, which omitted any examples “substandard.”   (At least the newer “fab” actors, like other Hollywood performers, are remarkably attractive.) 

Today transgender folks go where few have ever gone before.

Of course the reaction is obsession among the young and otherwise insecure about whether they are “normal.”  They never really develop the inner understanding of how multiple, surprising, and unique human bodies (like any other mammal bodies) can be.  Radical differences used to be assigned to freak shows -- the fat man, the giant, the bearded woman -- and even mild divergences could be stigmatized.  At least in junior high.

These days in the paradoxical way the society often works, women of extreme emaciation and men with steroid-produced muscles have become the most admired.  Plastic surgery offers a nice living to surgeons, though the examples of bad practice abound on the Internet, the shocking reverse of face-transplants in which known and loved faces become masses of scar tissue.

We stigmatize people who are different and yet one of the figures who has recently entered many hearts is a dwarf -- not a cartoon character but a real-life dwarf actor of major acting chops and a gift for making us look at his heart instead of his height.  Our present fascination with sci-fi and fantasy creates a context that welcomes him.  Here’s a clip that’s not “Game of Thrones.”  It’s “X-Men.”  The pretty girl is blue -- literally. No one was looking at her face anyway.    http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/178525/

Mammals don’t like difference.  White crows are commonly killed by black crows.  Humans create their own markers with paint and headdresses in hopes of looking impressive instead of edible.  We look for faces and if they can’t be seen, they can’t be “read,” which interferes with our empathy.  On the other hand humans sometimes prefer the unusual (albino buffaloes and tigers), attributing magic to them, trying to “own” them.

Babies at first react to anything that’s vaguely like a face: researchers can hold up a paper plate with two eyes and a smiley mouth drawn on with a felt-tip and the baby will “see” a face, pay close attention, and perhaps smile.  But then later comes a phase when babies are afraid of unfamiliar faces and kick up a fuss when their usual caretaker isn’t there.  These changes in reaction seem to be created in the process of brain maturation: perhaps from learning or perhaps from new brain parts coming on-line -- or, wait now, the interaction of the two because it is the learning that brings the new brain parts into existence.

A person with Marfan syndrome

I have trouble managing my desire to stare, which is fine if I’m looking at photographs, but not so much for the beautiful young woman with Marfan syndrome who used to ride the same bus.  Or the young man who composed music on the bus, using a special laptop sort of instrument.  He was more direct, challenging me,  “What are YOU lookin’ at?”  I was abashed and scolded myself, but just wanted to know about them, not to hurt them.  Why were they hurt?

Because of The Stigma.  We stare at “the different” as though we were creating repelling beams that will keep them away from us.  Or tractor beams that might trap them.  It’s as though the traffic streams of photons were magic rays.  One of the abilities of those rays is to activate in the victim of the staring a visceral reaction of self-criticism, feeling exposed, unhuman.

The fourth level of the brain and therefore the identity is the community, esp. the one usually within eyeshot or most familiarly known.  We are nervous about them changing -- losing or gaining weight, dressing some new way, creating a new hairstyle -- and even challenge them.  But that works in reverse: if people react to us, ask us if we’ve lost weight, even remark,  “Hey, lookin’ good!” we say to ourselves, "What?"  Community view, world view, affect our identity and therefore the way our brains function.

Al Pacino played Dr. Kevorkian in a movie.

So if we look at these face transplant photos -- which we can do at our leisure -- and see the redemption, esp. on a video where they speak and move, we begin to understand human appearance in a different way.  I just watched two movies about “Death with Dignity.”  One of them was “How to Die in Oregon,” about an upscale beautiful wife and mother, and the other was “Kevorkian,” bony and hollow-eyed, surrounded by red-faced and hugely obese ordinary guys.  I’d love to see a psych student set up an experiment to see how these contrasting presentations affect the way people see the issue.  Appearance is one of the ways we weight decisions.  

Would you trust this woman?