Allan's Taboo Topics

(For some reason I seem to have a ministry trying to encourage depressed people over the internet. Here’s one of the most recent.)

I’m sorry to be such a downer, but I’m just not going to make it if someone can’t help me. I haven’t been eating much in the last 3 weeks, and I can’t get the understanding that I need from my mom or friends. I’m under 120 pounds, and a mental hospital isn’t going to help me the way I need; I’ve tried that before and I’m afraid they would not let me out. I’m 29. If anyone is willing to have me please contact me. My email is *****@yahoo.com. I don’t have many obligations, and nothing else matters, I can fly out and stay for a while if you’re willing. I need real dedicated support, I’ve lost the will to live which is why I don’t eat. I feel so perverted and discarded and mutilated in the most cruel of ways. Can anyone please consider? I can’t live with the guilt of mom my killing herself if I starve myself to death. I’m sorry to be so dark, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t think it will be to much longer before my organs start shutting down, and I know the hospital won’t really help me, they only offer a temporary fix with drugs, and a therapist can’t really do anything either. They just try to make you see things from other perspectives, and I’ve already done that. I’d be willing to take the drugs if I was actually getting help that wasn’t temporary.

 My boyfriend was trapped in the whole eating disorder thing when he was in his teens and twenties. He checked himself into hospital a couple of times and saw a few different therapists. A combination of several things, I think, were effective for him. Getting an antidepressant drug that worked for him was an important part of it. That took some experimenting with different drugs and different dosages. Counselors who couldn’t prescribe medications did not turn out to be very helpful for him, at least not that he realized at the time. He would probably agree with your statement that “they just try to make you see things from other perspectives.” He said they only wanted to explore issues from his childhood and not the problems he was having now. Also the passage of time was helpful for him. In his thirties he became more independent (in his case, by learning to drive and by working more steadily). He also gained more self-confidence and became less concerned with what other people thought of him. This may sound negative, but he has come to conclude that most people are stupid, and therefore their opinions of him are meaningless.

You say you are looking for “real dedicated support.” What do you have in mind when you say this, and how would it be an improvement on weekly appointments with a therapist or a stay in an eating disorders unit? I’m not asking this as a challenge, because I assume you have a good answer to this question; I just don’t know what it is.

You say, “I feel so perverted and discarded and mutilated.” It might (or perhaps might not) be helpful to elaborate a little bit?

By the way, I bet you haven’t completely lost your will to live, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered to send out this plea.

Please feel free to write directly to me instead of the group if you feel that would be appropriate. I look forward to hearing from you and hope and pray that your situation turns out for the better.

(We exchanged emails several times, and he did go into more detail about his situation and say that I and others had said nice things to him. I last heard from him as he was preparing to visit his mother over Christmas. Needless to say, he has a ton of unresolved issues from his childhood and feelings towards her.)

Eleanor Brown wrote:

TV talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres isn’t much of a butch….

But DeGeneres — no bull dagger — seems to be the closest to a tough dyke allowed in the mass media.

Popular culture seems so lesbian-positive these days… but only a certain kind of lesbian, thank you very much. To be a lesbian is to be femme: Hot blonde Serena Southerlyn on “Law & Order,” the bi gal on “The OC,” even the “The L Word” is all femme….

But fact, now that’s another story. The teeny tiny bit butch Ellen DeGeneres fits into the fact category (or at least, I hope her talk show does). But real bull daggers exist in the world. Why aren’t they on my TV? On reality television?…

On “What Not To Wear,” butch girls — gay and straight — are forced into girl clothes, into girl walks, even into girl mannerisms.

The show’s hosts, by the way, present as a straight woman and a gay man. The show reflects the esthetic of high fashion, of Hollywood, of a certain kind of gay man. The type of gay man who rolls his eyes at a dyke’s plaid shirt and big biker boots.

The type of gay man who loves nothing better than to erase butch dykes from existence.

Help me out here; I don’t get this. Is she saying Ellen is femme because she’s blond and smiles?

That’s not the reading I get. Umm,… how shall I put this?

You see, I’m only 99.9% gay. That remaining sliver of me, well, Ellen is butch enough to turn me on.

And that’s how I spotted her before the tabloids began gossiping about her. Women that I notice in that way invariably turn out to be lesbians.

So my 0.1% heterosexuality has never been put into practice.

[Originally published in 2006.]

The impression I got growing up was that males are supposed to be tough. We’re meant to endure a lot of wear and tear—scrapes and bruises on the athletic field, cuts and black eyes from schoolyard fights, doing the chores that involve heavy lifting and dangerous power tools, and eventually going off to war.

And what advantage did we get in return for this? Precious little, as far as I could tell. When I was a boy I was oblivious to the ways women are disadvantaged in society. The only benefit to being tough that I could see was that men’s clothing didn’t have all the frills and lace that was delicate and difficult to keep in repair.

Besides unrealistic and unattainable expectations for myself, this also led to mistaken ideas about others. If men are tough in ways that women aren’t, then this must mean that women are supposed to be fragile. What a lie that is!

I certainly didn’t learn all this from my parents. Must have been peers and television.

As I matured, I learned that it was okay for me not to be tough or not to fit someone else’s idea of what that meant. I still appreciate durable, easy to clean clothing, though.