Give 'Em The Old Razzle-Dazzle (or, what's not unfucked-up about drug marketing)

Being sick is not nice. People who help us not be sick are generally regarded as pretty nice. One of JF's buddies put it very poetically when he said that hospitals work to "unfuck people up".

But not everything about the medical establishment is wonderfully unfucked. Take, for instance, drug marketing, advertising, and PR.

This commercial is absurd. There are four things going on - the visuals with cute girls and bright balloons; the fast catchy music; the words at the bottom; and the voiceover. Try and focus on "serious complications" and "side effects may include" when you're watching pretty colored balloons, reading the words on them/at the bottom of the screen, and humming along to the song.  This commercial is almost a self-parody - admission of ridiculous amounts of risks, then desperate "but maybe you should still buy it anyway!" The extreme visual overload of text is representative of pharmaceutical marketing's three-ring circus of smokescreens, sparkles, and doublespeak masking lies and insatiable greed. In keeping with our theme of co-opted vulgarity, these commercials are what is commonly referred to as a "clusterfuck".

But wait! Not only does drug marketing employ showy, distracting sleight-of-hand, it also stigmatizes! Commercials for Abilify (a drug for bipolar disorder) show sufferers alone until they make the decision to take the drug, at which point they are walking and talking with other people. Because the mentally ill can't have meaningful, fulfilling, healthy relationships without Big Pharma helping them out. I can't find the commercials online, but their site contains this warning: Some medicines can increase suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children, teens, and young adults. Serious mental illnesses are themselves associated with an increase in the risk of suicide. When taking ABILIFY call your doctor right away if you have new or worsening mood symptoms, unusual changes in behavior, or thoughts of suicide. Patients and their caregivers should be especially observant for such symptoms within the first few months of treatment or after a change in dose.

So this could actually do the opposite of what it intends to do, but that's not their fault because these people are already messed up! Note how it says "patients and their caregivers" - not "patients or their caregivers" or "patients and their doctors" - implying that even medicated, bipolar people can't really be trusted to take care of themselves. To compare, the similar warnings on websites for Yaz and Celebrex say only "tell your doctor", with no third-person reference to "patients" or "caregivers", affording users more autonomy, responsibility and dignity. I also like the vague "some medicines" that distances the product from the warning. Soon we should be seeing food packaging saying "some food may contain nuts!" or laws like "some people shouldn't kill some other people."

Also, even with that stated risk, it does not say the drug should not be prescribed to teens/young adults, while both Yaz and Celebrex warn that "people with [condition] should not" take them. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this - is psychiatry not enough of a concrete science for these risks to be valid enough? Do we care less about taking risks with the health of young mentally ill people? Is mental illness seen as a "worse" or "more devastating" condition that makes the risk more worth it? What the fuck?

Pfizer also cares more about money than those silly crazy folk, defending their new lucrative anti-smoking drug Chantix and claiming it can still be prescribed to the mentally ill even though it has been linked to mania/depression. (Research credit Furious Seasons.) This mirrors the longer-running issue hinted at above - legal and medical cases established a link between SSRIs (anti-depression meds) and suicide in young people and yet the drug companies (including Pfizer, who makes Zoloft) didn't stop marketing them for adolescent use. All the FDA did was slap a black-box warning on them, allowing Big Pharma to effectively "fuck over" kids and their families for money.

Recommended reading: 

The Boston Globe: Congress Scrutinizes Drug Ads

New England Journal of Medicine study says drug advertising may lead to "overuse" of the drugs and that the FDA enforces regulatory laws "weakly"

LJ community post full of "vintage" ads for drugs, including whole opium

New York Times: PhD names put on studies really written by PR

ADL is Actually Doing Little

(SoCI: Still at Valley View. Remember, kids - if you use a microwave, the aliens can scramble the molecules and get inside your brain.)

I should preface this by saying I am a Jew, I am proud to be a Jew, I don't like getting picked on, and picking on Jews isn't nice. Still, the ADL is conducting itself in an awfully immature, ineffective manner regarding the political equivalent of cyberbullying.

The ADL may have its heart in the right place with this campaign, but I think its resources are terribly misdirected thanks to hypersensitivity. It's a Facebook group, people. It's a well-known fact that Facebook is heavily monitored to a scary degree, which means that it's not exactly prime terrorist organization HQ. (I know plenty of organizations that don't advocate the destruction of anything that prefer to stay off Facebook because of its Big Brother qualities.) There certainly are websites and online groups with power and the capacity to cause real-world harm, but I'm pretty sure they're not on Facebook. Besides, if the ADL knew anything about Facebook, it would want all of its enemies organized through it, because that's the best way to keep tabs on people, especially when your cause is more supported by our government and powerful corporations than theirs is.

The ADL is focused on minor name-calling from a bunch of kids who, even if they are educated about the issue at hand, don't have a lot of immediate global power. For perspective, the organizations I'm more knowledgable about - the mental health organizations - fight very hard against stigmatization and public defamation, but even they don't bother going after Facebook groups or other online annoyances. They have plenty to lose from bad public opinion and yet they focus on those who are really in power. 

I realize that it is somewhat hypocritical of me to claim that an online group of young people can't change anything. The ADL is correct in perceiving an ideological threat in the fact that large amounts of young people are anti-Israel, but they're approaching the issue incorrectly. Shutting down the group is not going to win over hearts and minds from the demographic most concerned with their right to free speech. Taking a cue from Icarus and MindFreedom and even the TAC, what the ADL should be using is counter-education and awareness. If they want kids to support the ADL, it shouldn't attack them but rather stage campaigns of PR that show it, the Jewish community, and Israel in a positive light. They've got a lot to work with - Israel tends to be more progressively secular and modernized culturally, so they can appeal to kids' support of gay rights, free speech, self-expression or sexuality. (Or, they can take a stance that doesn't involve as much annihilation of someone else's culture and homeland - but that's an argument I'd rather stay away from.)

It's also rather hypocritical of the ADL to want to shut down these sites, since they're organizing online and using the internet to connect to like-minded people, and there are plenty of people out there who think the ADL is a dangerous or hate group and want its communications shut down. America allows free speech, and while it's terrible to use the internet to claim that you don't like someone, it's completely legal. The group itself is not advocating violence - in fact, its stated mission is to simply change Facebook's policy and country listings. This is contrary to the ADL's mission but not even close to the sort of threat not protected under free speech. If they want the freedom to organize online against certain ideas and beliefs, then they must respect the freedom of others to organize online against certain ideas and beliefs.

Diagnosis: Human (Mad Pride Manifesto)

(SoCI: No, I'm not turning into Furious Seasons. I'll still have other stuff to talk about here. This is just a continuation to my previous post, and is here in celebration of Mad Pride month. Next week, new soapbox, I promise.)

Thus, we are “depressed” not because the world is being destroyed while we sell our hours to mindless routines, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. We are “ADHD” not because our culture slams us with an average of 3000 media messages a day, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. We are “schizophrenic” and “bipolar” not because we were traumatized or overwhelmed by the madness of our culture, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. Instead of taking a ruthless moral inventory of our culture, families, societies, economics, religions, education systems, and pointing the blameful finger outwards, we do it of and to ourselves, and now of and to our biology. Everyone is mentally ill, that is, every individual except the sum of the parts: society. ~From "Indicator Species?" by Steven Morgan

I can't get to the page to link you guys because I don't have a membership and don't want to fool around with all that, but apparently if you log into the DSM-V website, there's a place for "suggestions", and the DSM guys list five categories of suggestions. One of these is "suggestions for a new disorder to be added to the DSM."

When you consider that the DSM is pretty much the be-all-and-end-all Bible of psychiatric diagnoses, that's just weird. Inviting laypeople to make up new disorders? Nobody gets to make up other types of diseases; one has to discover a microbe or isolate a cluster of symptoms or something. This exposes the fluidity and subjectivity of what many people like to present as a solid, objective science. This invitation to create mental illnesses out of imagination, social stigmas, boredom, thin air or whatever speaks volumes about our society and the nature of mental illness.

Most mental illnesses are seen as disorders because they prevent the person from functioning properly in the social world we have set up for ourselves. People have become so indoctrinated into this reality that they fail to realize almost all of the expectations placed on us are arbitrary and unnatural. Nobody counts "air dependency" as a disorder, but if we all tried to live on the moon, this would become a failure-to-cope disorder just like mental illness. If our society had an established place, purpose, or outlet for "mentally ill" behavior, it would become normal. Normal and healthy behavior is completely relative - an American assertive, go-get-em girl would be seen as irreparably rude and offensive in Japan. Does that mean that by changing location and surrounding culture, this girl acquires some sort of behavioral condition? Is failure to hold up to the expectations of other people really a disorder?

I'm not denying the existence of psychiatric quirks that fit DSM-style definitions of named disorders. I'm not (in this post) bothering with the argument over whether they arise from genetics, brain chemistry, environment, choice, or alien lasers. Those are all extraneous issues. The fact is that some people perceive an alternate reality or experience a state of consciousness that is foreign to most, and society as a whole has chosen to recognize these differences as dangerous or broken. 

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. ~Erich Fromm

Why have we chosen to label certain thought patterns as disorders and not others? My entire family hates being late, to the point that we tend to show up obnoxiously early to things. This creates major stress as everyone gets anxious and tense and people start lashing out at each other because they're upset over the threat of being late. Yet because our society values punctuality, it is acceptable to allow this fear to create high levels of stress. But if a different situation causes one to become very anxious and upset, they have OCD, a phobia, paranoid delusions, etc. Even though excessive need to be around other people may culminate in perpetual partying and perhaps a neglect of relationships, studies or other responsibilities, the DSM IV is lacking Tucker Max Disorder because wanting to be around other people has been deemed "normal" - but excessive need to be alone is bizarre and strange. I can write a checklist of traits and say "if these apply to you, you have X disorder," but that's meaningless. Homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness but today is a (kind of) socially acceptable variation on thought patters regarding sex. Did it suddenly become healthier? Why haven't doctors ever decided that cholera or the flu "isn't a disease anymore, jk guys"?

I concede that many people who are labelled mentally ill may engage in behaviors that are destructive to themselves or others, but I honestly believe that if we collectively showed more respect, empathy and need for those whose minds we do not understand, we would severely diminish addiction/self-harm/homelessness related to mental illness. People often assume that these choices stem only from the thought patterns, without considering that the choices may instead be a reaction to the frustration, anger and alienation that are a result of society's refusal to validate those thought patterns. In an interview on Madness Radio, Richard Unger points out that "recovery" rates for mental illness rose significantly in the 1970s and theorizes that it's because during that time, altered or extreme or alternate states of consciousness were more accepted and so the people experiencing them had the opportunity to work through, engage with, and share them.

It is not possible to separate the autism from the person. Therefore, when parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’ Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.~Jim Sinclair

Before you argue with me on this point, realize that the thought patterns so strange to you have a huge part in allowing your daily life to continue. You appreciate the madness of others every time you turn on the lights (Nikola Tesla, who paved the way for modern electricity, would be considered "very weird" by any social standards), admire Van Gogh's Starry Night (said to represent the ups/downs of manic depression) or wake up in peaceful America (Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister during WW2, made reference to periods of depression as his "black dog", possibly indicating what the DSM refers to as Major or Manic Depression). Would these accomplishments have been possible if the minds of these three men adhered strictly to the thought laws we have established? I'm inclined to doubt that.

If everyone thought inside the box, we'd still be living in the stone age. Creativity and problem solving require the pushing or breaking of boundaries, and historically this has been done by those who do not see or understand those boundaries to begin with. Society relies on the outcasts of thought for progress, but fears them and chooses to arbitrarily define "normal" within random but rigid limits, leaving little room for psychological quirks. If the majority of the population was bipolar, things would be set up to accommodate them, and those without bipolar "symptoms" would struggle to fit in and understand the world.

My main point: Normal means only what we allow it to. There is no such thing as standardized, healthy behavior. Labels are arbitrary. The DSM is a joke. "Mental illness" means nothing. The ostracization of the strange is deeply hypocritical.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.~Marcel Proust

Recommended Reading:

Dissident Voice: Mental Illness or Social Sickness?

Harvard Gazette: Creativity tied to Mental Illness

FAQs on the DSM website addressing some of the issues I've raised

Critics of the Concept of Mental Illness (Really long PDF scanned book chapter)

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Brain?

(State of CI: Noticing a theme? Mad Pride Day is today. In the upcoming days, the world will be seeing celebrations of neurodiversity, creative maladjustment and destigmatization, as well as declarations of freedom, worth and value from those society has labeled sick or abnormal. MFI has more information here. )

Neurotypical (or NT) people have neurological developments and states that are consistent with what most people would perceive as normal in their ability to process linguistic information and social cues. While originally coined among the autistic community as a label for non-autistic persons, the concept was later adopted by both the neurodiversity movement and the scientific community. ~"Neurotypical", Wikipedia

There are a lot of things out in the world to be scared of. Angry dogs, drunk drivers, fire, floods, nuclear war, people bigger than you, guns, global warming, microbes, monsters, scorpions, getting caught, pandemics, violence, loneliness, uncertainty, fear itself. But ask me what in this perpetually level-orange world scares me the most, and the answer is this: the fact that many people believe that the inability to cope with society's arbitrary standards strips an individual of basic dignities and rights to self-determination, and that frustrations, fears, struggles, perceptions, and beliefs outside the accepted patterns of collective thought and reality render one incapable of making healthy choices for oneself.

The good folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center think that involuntary treatment of the "mentally ill" is an awesome idea even if the people are not endangering themselves or others. The first two bullets under their Mission Statement make this clear - they believe that the mentally ill need other people to make choices for them and that waiting for them to become a danger before forcing treatment is wrong. They claim that "people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder cannot think clearly" which is a completely inane statement for a few reasons:

1.) People with what is referred to as bipolar disorder have "flat" periods during which they are asymptomatic, so even if they were "cognitively impaired" during episodes, they would not be complete morons all the time

2.)  John Nash, Ted Turner, Mark Twain and Winston Churchill; among others

3.) A large group of schizophrenic, bipolar, and others with different minds manage to maintain a few collective communities, run on anarchist principles, which organize events, create publications, and otherwise display the ability to "think clearly" 

Other claims made by the TAC include:

 "we don't take away rights, being crazy already does that." So if you can metaphorically show that someone is already "not free", it's okay to continue to take away their freedoms! I'm off to steal from people in wheelchairs and violate the privacy of blind people because I'm not taking their civil rights, their disabilities already have! It's like robbing a poor person.

"Involuntary treatment hasn't been shown to be harmful." That's why the CIA guys giving LSD to subjects without consent got pats on the back. Nobody has issues getting locked up and  given mind-altering drugs against their will. You wouldn't have a problem with it, would you? Oh, and all these people are liars.

"The mentally ill are violent" This ignores some basic cause-effect issues - for example, those who don't take their meds may be more violent in hospitals/jails because other people are trying to force them to do stuff that threatens their sense of safety. Try and force me to down some beer and we'll see where my elbows end up (hint: your soft parts) but does that mean non-drinkers are violent? It also ignores studies like these, muddies their main point ("force-treat the nonviolent ones"?) and acts as a scare tactic.

Especially chilling is the fact that the words "will" and "rights" as applied to the mentally ill are in quotation marks here. Think about the implications of those quote marks around the "wills" and "rights" of other human beings.

There's a bigger issue here, but it's for another post, and that is the diagnoses themselves - the question of who gets to decide what's rational and what's delusional; what behaviors are healthy and which are not. Most people would agree that stepping in to save a life is good, but what the TAC is advocating is forced treatment for people who are simply not functioning within the parameters of the world we have set up for ourselves. They want everyone to see the world their way, and are threatened by alternate perceptions of reality or society. They think limiting forced treatment to "violent" or "dangerous" people is not enough. We have come up with arbitrary labels like "bipolar" or "schizophrenic" to apply to certain thought patterns and behaviors, and we have collectively decided that they aren't going to fly in our world. People who do things differently are broken and flawed - nevermind that the expectations placed on them are entirely artificial constructs of society. If schizophrenics ran the world, the TAC guys would have a pretty tough time. (Stay tuned for a full-fledged post on this.)

Moral of the story: think like us, or we will make you.

Scared yet?

If you think this has nothing to do with you because you haven't been labelled or diagnosed, MindFreedom has this to say: This movement is open to ALL, whether or not you have personally been labeled by the psychiatric system. Mad Pride is really about Human Pride. Yes, given humanity's track record, Human Pride may seem daunting. Mad Pride celebrates how each person's eccentricities, passion, uniqueness and freedom makes you truly human. Do not allow our very humanity to be pathologized by a corporate mental health system that has gone out of control! Celebrate YOUR Mad Pride!

If you want to see what people have to say on both sides of the debate (or take action), here are some organizations that lean against forced treatment:

Law Project for Psychiatric Rights

Citizen's Commission on Human Rights

(Mind the sensationalism and the ironic Church of Scientology connection)

The Freedom Center

MindFreedom International

Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law

And here are some that favor it:

National Alliance for Mental Illness

The American Government

(also note all the police support of the TAC)

I'm having a difficult time finding more independent organizations for this section, as all searches lead eventually back to the TAC and all their "affiliates" are really just localized or specialized offshoots of their own group. They and NAMI appear to have monopolized this issue. Hm.

Big Brother's little sister Big Pharma

Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacracy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors. ~Thomas Szasz

I was at the doctor’s the other day, and I saw something incredibly disturbing. In the examination room, there were at least seven drug or drug company logos – on two wall calendars, a clock, a clipboard, two posters and a pen. If you’ve been into any doctor’s office lately, it’s hard not to notice the immense amount of drug-branded swag that’s everywhere.

Boris Sidis was a man after my own heart – a psychologist in the early 1900’s who spoke out against what he saw as social diseases (war and eugenics, to name a few) and was in great opposition to mainstream psychology and especially intelligence tests. He published The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society, the full text of which can be found online here (beware: annoying site layout). Experiments discussed towards the center of this page illustrate that people’s minds jump immediately to what they saw the most or what they saw last.  It is not a stretch to imagine that a doctor is more likely to prescribe the drug that immediately jumps to mind because it’s on the pen being used to write the prescription.

(Don't believe me? Say silk three times. What do cows drink? Most people will give an answer they know is wrong because it rhymes with the last word they said and because they have it mentally associated with cows and drinking. Now apply this concept to doctors. Scary stuff.)

The “results” section of this experiment report contains this observation: It was observed that the inclination to brand name prescribing was more and there were occasions when prescribing by generic names would have reduced the cost of treatment.

This study found that Although it is widely supposed that pharmaceutical advertising accounts for rising CCB use, this is the first study to substantiate that advertising patterns are consistent with this claim. Pharmaceutical companies devote substantial resources to drug advertising, despite assertions by physicians that they pay little attention to advertisements. Only 3% of physicians surveyed by Avorn et al described drug advertising as a "very important" influence on their prescribing practices. Beliefs regarding 2 index medications, cerebral vasodilators and propoxyphene, however, corresponded more closely with advertising claims than with published scientific evidence.

Here’s the issue: humans are suggestible. The more you see something, the more ingrained it becomes into your mind and the easier it is to access immediately. This means that doctors who see the same drug logo constantly, associating it with convenience and charity when it’s printed on useful gifts, are more likely to prescribe that drug. The more they do this, the more money the drug company gets to continue advertising in this manner, and the vicious cycle continues.

What we can do about it: Know your stuff. Be wary when you’re prescribed anything, and ask questions to make sure the doctor has thought this through. What are the alternative drugs and how do they compare in terms of price and side effects? Has it been shown to be the most effective drug for people in your exact condition (co-existing conditions, age, gender, etc.) by independent research, not the research of drug companies? Remember that for most involved, this is about your money, not your health.

 Recommended Reading:

Dangerous pushing-for-profit of atypical psychiatric drugs

Money trumps the rights of patients as mental hospitals are encouraged politically to prescribe expensive new drugs not proven to be an improvement

"Pushing Prescriptions" - a report on pharmaceutical lobbying

American Medical Student Association scorecard on "conflict-of-interest" policies regarding gifts from drug companies

"Communism" vs. communism

I have a serious issue with Misters Stalin, Mao and Castro. They’ve provided a baseless foundation for countless moronic “arguments” against perfectly legit social reforms. Marx and McCarthy aren’t off the hook either.

There have been plenty of teachings that discuss the evils and dangers of loving money, mistreating lower classes, and not sharing. Judaism teaches farmers to not harvest the corners of their fields because everything belongs to God, which means people need to share. The food growing in those corners is available to any poor or any travelers coming through (Lev. 9:9-11*). Christianity teaches self-enforced class equality (1 Cor. 9:22**) and need-based sharing of resources (2 Cor. 8:14***). Respected Buddhist teacher Atisha is quoted as saying “The greatest achievement is selflessness. The greatest worth is self-mastery. The greatest quality is seeking to serve others…The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.” Sounds a little like Stalin’s calls to selfless loyalty and the Communist concept of eliminating ownership.

But do you hear people screaming “THAT’S JUDAISM!” when we discuss welfare programs? “THAT’S CHRISTIANITY!” when we lament the gap between the lower and upper classes? Or “THAT’S BUDDHISM!” when we propose that materialism, possession, and money might be harmful to certain aspects of society (like privatized medicine?) No. People immediately bristle with “THAT’S COMMUNISM!”

I’ll be the first to concede that terrible, terrible things were carried out in the name of Communism. But people being morons doesn’t change the ideas they’re ostensibly pushing. Remember the Crusades? People don’t claim “THAT’S CHRISTIANITY!” when we hear about tortures and abuses at Gitmo. This is because Christianity has had better PR and more people have read enough of the Bible to realize that it’s not about the Crusades. There are aspects of what we know as Communism that are awful – repression of individuality, elimination of religion, etc. We need to step far away from all this and start from scratch, because sharing our toys and empowering the common man (or to use a word with some connotations, the proletariat) are very good things. Unfortunately, one can hardly propose any measures to push for these without being accused of Communism. People make it sound like socializing medicine is going to bring Zombie Stalin back from the grave to start killing people.

Here’s the issue: plenty of good ideas have gotten bad reputations, enough so that identifying something as Communism today counts as an argument to shut it down, when in reality the detractor has failed to establish “Communism = Bad” as a premise for their argument.

What we can do: stop letting faulty language and definitions get in the way of innovations in social reform. Refuse to allow new ideas to be labeled “Communism”, or use “Stalinism” or “Marxism” as a stand-in for what most people describe as “Communism”. Be educated enough to call out this faulty premise, and be confident enough not to back down as soon as you’re accused of being “Communist”. And keep a watch out for Zombie Stalin.

* "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the corner of your field…you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger."

**“When I am with those who are oppressed, I share their oppression”

*** “I only mean that there should be some equality. Right now you have plenty and can help them. Then at some point they can share with you…in this way, everyone’s needs will be met.”

Recommended Reading:

Stalin discusses language and Marxism

Lenin's summary of Marxism to compare with the stated goals of today's mainstream Public Welfare Foundation

Modern-day anti-Bush program that was founded by today’s Revolutionary Communist Party

McCarthy rallies against Cold War Communists

God & Guns & Gays, oh my

I am a hypocritical moron. I did something the other day that I am incredibly angry at myself over – something that other people do to me all the time, and that I hate.

I’m a Christian Jewish liberal gun-hating pro-choice pro-gay rights evolutionist creationist. I sympathize with both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict and I think anarchy, democracy, and communism are all pretty nifty ideas. I think legalizing marijuana makes a lot of sense but I don’t touch caffeine. I trust lawyers over doctors and I’m a feminist who adores guys. And I hate when people assume that since I’m a smartsy liberal I’m an atheist; or that since I love Jesus I hate gays and the Clintons. Any time I want to discuss my views I have to explain or excuse them first, and this is beyond frustrating to me. I feel like I have to prove myself by preaching to the choir before I can make any points. The things listed above shouldn’t have to be contradictions – beliefs and views do not come as a one-size-fits-all bargain bundle pack – but people think they are because they’ve been presented that way.

So I was thoroughly ashamed when the other day I (wrongly) assumed that a libertarian-leaning atheist was rabidly pro-choice. Turns out that the question of human life and its origins, rights and value isn’t religious or political, but personal – and I knew that, I really did, but I allowed myself to be brainwashed by the blue vs. red mentality we have going on, and I jammed my foot into my mouth quite uncomfortably.

This is why I get so annoyed at the democracy of personalities we have constructed in America. No one human is a perfect package, and the way we have the system set up, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to finding the best candidate for the job as president. We don’t have Executive Branch scouts out finding and auditioning the best and brightest minds – we have mostly rich kids from privileged families rising to the top. The way I see it, there’s more of an equal selection process to cast the next star of Final Destination 908 – and they aren’t expected to write, direct, or produce; but a presidential candidate is expected to hold balanced and “complementary” views on economics, military actions, social policies, etc.

When we force all these decisions to fall to one or a few human beings, we cheat ourselves out of democracy. True democracy votes for ideas, not people. The focus on Obama’s pastor is a perfect example – instead of squabbling over his influences, his past, his ideals, we need to demand a game plan we can say clearly “yes” or “no” to. I don’t want to sit around and speculate about his inner psyche – he should tell us what exactly he would do in certain situations and we should judge that. It is, of course, then our job to hold candidates to that standard – lying is not nice, and when Bush denies saying something that he’s been filmed on camera saying, there should be more of an outcry. That’s the closest we can realistically get to voting for ideas and decisions over people. Ideally, there would be a neutral Executive who carried out the wishes of the masses: every morning there would be new issues on the table (“Should we declare war: yes or no”) to decide on. This would be true democracy and it would allow people to be more informed and involved. What we have now forces the bundling of ideas I discussed before, which is frustrating. I’d like to be able to vote for a candidate who will carry out true Christian values in office – “purity, understanding, patience, kindness and love” (2 Cor. 6:6) – but I think today those who claim to be furthering God’s agenda are getting it pretty wrong (and they endorse a religion that encourages me to say this: Romans 16:17-18*).

So here’s the real issue: people come in unique packages capable of thinking for themselves, and thinking independently on every separate question. Objectively, owning guns for self-defense has nothing to do with whether or not you support the right to a homosexual marriage and neither has any impact on whether you think the Iraq war is right. This is why politics of personality is dangerous and damaging to democracy.

What we can do about it: refuse to participate. Only engage in discussions about candidate’s relevant political ideologies, and shut down any gossip about “omg Hillary Clinton’s hairdresser has a gay goldfish” (DISCLAIMER: I made that up) by pointing out its irrelevancy. We’re stuck with a system that unfortunately forces personality politics, but supporting legislation that regulates campaign donations/spending is a step in the right direction. And spread the awareness that leaders/ideas don’t get to dictate entire belief sets by refusing to make assumptions and allowing ourselves ideological flexibility, considering separate issues separately.

*"Watch out for people who cause divisions and upset people’s faith by teaching things that are contrary to what you have been taught…Such people are not serving Christ our Lord; they are serving their own personal interests."

Recommended reading:

New York Times: Taking their faith, not their politics, to the people

The Washington Post: Communion denied for supporting pro-choice Obama

Focus on the Family's response to the claim that one can simultaneously be gay and Christian

New York Times: Liberal explains why he's against same-sex marriage

One reporter's take on an unconventional juxtaposition of views

Sex & Power

State of CI: I promise to keep to a Monday-Thursday update schedule, which I know for certain will carry through the summer because I've got a month's worth of scheduled posts ready to publish themselves (yay new features!) on the right days. Also, new banner, yay! Featuring my feet, Monica's, and Nahee's. I'm trying to tweak the layout so it's more comfortable to read, but I'm having a hard time fooling with the html - anyone wanna help me out?

I find the mini-analysis in this blog fascinating for the same reason I like reading movie reviews after I see movies (especially these ones) – I like looking at the world in different ways, and this offers a perspective on the images I see every day that is different than my own. Since I started reading it, I’ve found myself identifying subtle sexual/gender statements in media all around me. But I disagree with a lot of the feminist indignance inherent in a lot of the analysis.

The fact is that the female body is attractive, and both genders like to enjoy this. My girlfriends and I love an excuse to get dressed up, even when anything remotely sexual is not part of the plans – a group of us will primp and prep together, go out to eat, and head back to chill in the hot tub. We know that our bodies are beautiful, and that is fun. Driving a sleek, fast car is a rush even when you are not racing. Women like looking nice, and men like looking at women who look nice. This does not in itself create a power imbalance or exploit women. I wear tank tops and skirts on dates, but this does not objectify me. When women are sexually attractive, that does not strip away the rest of their identity and reduce them to a place to stick it.

There are a lot of recurring problems with the blog, which might produce some later essays, but one thing that really gets me is the fact that is lambasts any visual “inequality” between the genders. This post asks “And is it not possible to just have some images where men and women are equals and no one has to be dominant? Is that out of the question?” Well, yes,  images like that do exist in advertising. The thing is, though, that power plays are deeply sexual, and wherever there is sex, there is almost always going to be some element of dominance. This is why there are different positions and different practices and different costumes and such. For the most part, men are big and women are little, and this immediately makes men more powerful, even when that power isn’t being exercised. But even hinting at the possibility of a power inequality annoys the blog. Here, all it takes is size and position to evoke a power inequality, which the blog claims is only linked to sexuality because it’s been taught that way. I have to disagree. If sexual preferences could be so subtly taught and molded by advertising and what is socially acceptable, everyone would get off on missionary-in-the-dark and we would have no "sexually deviant" cultures (BDSM, furries, what have you), not to mention homosexuals. (They make a similar, equally outrageous claim in this post. Why would ads make extra work for themselves by re-defining sex, then using that to sell? It makes more sense to lean on what already excites people. Ads have no reason to "re-define" sex as more violent or unequal than it always has been.) When you think about it, sex lends itself to “power asymmetry” – you have a person reliant on another person for pleasure; extreme vulnerability; and the, ahem, “mechanics” of it. 

Or you could consider that social stereotypes may help make power plays sexy – the theory goes that since girls are taught that “good girls say no”, being “overtaken” can be sexy because they get to indulge in sex without the guilt of having said yes. Either way, it’s not the way the blog makes it sound – some unnatural, evil construct we have been brainwashed into. True equality is not about who’s bigger or who’s on top, true equality is about respect and understanding. By reducing the issue of equality to who holds who, and how (see this post), it actually trivializes the issue and it pushes sexual freedoms backwards. Let’s make women feel guilty for betraying their gender by engaging in (and maybe even enjoying!) sexual play that may involve them held in a “non-egalitarian” way. I’m a confrontational, self-respecting woman very proud of her X-squared chromosomes, and I am not offended by either of the two advertisements. Things would get pretty boring, awkward and annoying if a couple insisted on maintaining “equal positioning” at all time. This equality is just as stereotyped, hollow and contrived as the unequal gender roles in some of the other ads. (Note how the boy is bending down to make their heights equal, and how the girl has a short, boyish haircut.) Once people stop squabbling about images like the one at the bottom (can you imagine their positions reversed? That doesn’t work – she’s shorter than he is! And note how he’s only holding her hair softly, but she’s got a serious grip on his belt, implying a grip on something else – I honestly see very little inequality in that photo), they can get down to the real issues. Like this - wrong on so many levels.

P.S. I would also like to point out that sex blogger “Girl With A One-Track Mind” (not one I would recommend to everyone – pretty raw and graphic – but fascinating, hilarious, human, intelligent and interesting nonetheless) has been praised, as well as other woman sex bloggers, for advancing feminist causes and empowerment. But she herself describes scenes involving huge power inequalities (both genders), and sings the praises of male dominance in the form of “teasing” – an idea that should deeply offend the writers of Sociological Images, but their comrades in feminism seem to disagree.