Book update

I finished the index for Rewriting the Rules over the weekend (hence no big posts for a while).  That has gone off as have the proof changes. Next step: actual book in my hand – almost too exciting!

In anticipation I made a wordle of the index which captures the book pretty well:

Can men be funny?

And another great post from a friend – turning the world upside to reveal the taken-for-granted gender stereotypes which I always love: Can men be funny?

Judging by appearance

Awesome post on the wonderful Trish Oak’s blog about attraction and judging people about appearance.  She reflects on the experience of strangers commenting on your looks. What an inspiration

Happy!

For anyone who enjoyed my recent post here about the trouble with happiness, there’s a great piece over on Social Mindfulness by Steven Stanley about the same topic, which was written as an introduction to the new documentary ‘Happy‘.

Tuning out, turning in – Turning out, tuning in

Yesterday I found myself reflecting on two different issues that I think about a lot: depression and conflict.

I’m about to start writing a chapter for my mindfulness book on depression so I’ve been mulling over what the experience of being depressed Is like, and what things help and hinder when we’re in that place. At the same time I’m becoming fascinated and concerned by the processes of conflict between people which seem to inevitably happen in all the academic and activist groups I’m part of. I’m wondering what might be done to maintain some kind of useful dialogue, rather than people convincing themselves that the other side is wrong and bad whilst they are right and good, and thus ceasing all engagement. Even as I see the problems in this approach I recognise the same tendency in myself.

As these two lines of thoughts unfurled themselves yesterday I found that they began to weave together into a similar set of ideas, so I decided to write a little about the patterns that I see in how we experience depression and conflict, and in how the experience can shift. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised that these ideas have come together: I deliberately started my book on relationships with a chapter on the self because of the connections that there are between how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to others.

Depression: Tuning out, turning in
When I reflect on being depressed the experience is one of being simultaneously tuned out, but turned in. What I mean by tuned out is that when we’re depressed many of us become terribly concerned with other people and the outside world. We monitor ourselves closely through the imagined gaze of others and judge what we think they are seeing very harshly. We become anxious about what others will see in us, and frightened that we will get it wrong somehow and be exposed in all our uselessness. Decisions become very difficult because we are so tuned out – trying to be okay for everyone else – that it is almost impossible to tune in to what we want and need ourselves. We might find ourselves busily rushing around trying to please everyone and not letting on how much we are struggling, or we might withdraw from contact as much as possible for fear of what others might see if we let them in close.

At the same time as being tuned out, we are also turned in. Whilst we are hugely concerned with what other people think of us or how we are being seen out in the world, we don’t really see or hear the people around us because we are so turned in and focused on our own struggles. We often spend a great deal of time in internal conversations with ourselves about whether something is wrong with us, what it is, and how we might fix it. We view other people in terms of their danger to us (‘they might see me as I really am!’), or the possibility that they might be able to help (‘maybe they have the answer’), but it is hard for us to make the shift that is necessary to understand how they are feeling and what is going on for them. Often we assume that we are the only person who is this bad and full of problems, and we are so fixated on not showing other people that this is the case, or apologising to them for our perceived wrong-doing, that there is no space available to turn towards their experience and let go of all of our own stuff for a moment.

The H-word: Happiness

On May 22^nd the magazine DIVA and the mental health charity PACE are holding an evening event called The H-word. The H-word in question is happiness, and the plan is to have a discussion about happiness, health and well-being and about how people can support each other towards ‘happier, more meaningful lives’, with a particular focus on lesbian, bisexual and queer women.

The focus on these groups is appropriate because both women, and lesbian, bisexual and queer people, are particularly highly diagnosed with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety (when compared with men, on the one hand, and heterosexual people on the other). They also self-report higher levels of distress and lower levels of happiness and well-being than other groups.

Self help or not self help?

I recently read a great new book by my colleague, Scott Cherry, called How to Stop Reading Self-Help Books. As well as being an entertaining read it presents some serious problems with self-help books and the self-help industry more widely. The book ends with a programme for weaning oneself off self-help books, written in a self-help book style of course!

But of course I am in a bit of a strange position in relation to criticising self-help books because haven’t I recently written something which looks very much like a self-help book myself? Here I want to summarise some of the reasons why I agree, with Scott, that it is worth being very cautious about such books, and also to explore some possibilities for engaging with this genre creatively (and, as Scott emphasises, critically) rather than wishing for its total demise.

Sexual cultures: Polyamory panel

We ran a panel on open non-monogamy and polyamory at the Sexual Cultures conference in Brunel last weekend.

Daniel Cardoso (who organised the panel) kindly recorded the event, and the recordings, along with the presentations themselves, are available here.

Rubin Revisited

This weekend I’m attending the Sexual Cultures conference at Brunel which I hope to write up here when I return.

For the conference I prepared a presentation about how we view sex in our culture, specifically focusing on the way it is understood in medicine and mainstream sex therapy, compared to the way that it is understood by people in various sexual communities. Mainly I’m making the point (which I also make in Rewriting the Rules) that the mainstream sexual categories we have give us a rather limited and fixed idea of what sex is. Straying outside this idea is seen as being abnormal or ‘dysfunctional’. In contrast, groups like bisexual, asexual, BDSM and slash communities, often have a more diverse and fluid understanding of what sex is and how it may differ between people and in the same person over time.

The idea in the presentation was to revisit Gayle Rubin‘s ‘sex hierarchy’ diagram (from her classic paper: Thinking Sex) where she illustrates how the dominant way of viewing sex in our culture is that we have to stay within a ‘charmed circle’ of good, natural, normal, acceptable sexuality, and that we will be seen as bad, mad, dangerous or wrong if we stray outside of this:

I started to wonder what the circles might look like if we placed the different understandings of sex, which have emerged from various sexual communities, in the centre. This is what I have come up with so far, but it’s definitely a work in progress:

Racism and attraction

Very thoughtful post over on Peril about race and attraction. It covers gendered racial stereotypes in mainstream movies, whether race is an acceptable exclusion criteria on dating and hook-up sites, and how racism can play out through such cultures. It also raises an interesting point that attractions to anyone outside the current white, young, thin, non-disabled, gender-normative body ideal are regarded as a fetish (when attraction to those ideals is not).

This touches on something that I explore in Rewriting the Rules about how attraction is often regarded as ‘natural’ and unchanging. It is considered acceptable that we have certain ‘types’. But in a culture where attractiveness ideals are increasingly narrow, excluding many in ways which reflect and reinforce patterns of privilege and oppression, might it be useful to challenge this: to consider how our attractions are influenced by wider culture, and to explore practices which might open up our conceptions of beauty and attractiveness rather than closing them down?