The Serpent's Wisdom

For about a week now, i've had an instance of Notepad up on my computer at home with the words, "boredom; pleasure taken; pleasure shared" written in them. These terms each represent key elements of a complex constellation of thoughts i woke up with on Saturday morning and which have sought articulation ever since.

What do i mean by it? For a while now i've been pondering the notion that pleasure points us towards what is good and right. But obviously i have to say so with caveats because not all pleasure is good. When i say something like that, i am thinking of the way i feel when i am with a lover; and i strive, as much as i can, to see to it that my interactions with lovers are an even give and take, a meeting of equals who bring things into one anothers lives. This is pleasure shared. If my lover has an orgasm, i did not "give" it to him or her, i did not "make" him or her come; it is pleasure he or she felt but which we experientially shared. I am so well-attuned to my closest lovers that i would swear i can feel some of it sympathetically when they experience pleasure.

And i would contrast this with "pleasure taken," and in so saying i suppose that the experienced hedonists among my readers can instantly grok where i'm going with this. I've had encounters with people who took pleasure from me; not just the rapes and the sexual assault, but people who had no interest in sharing an experience with *me* as an individual. Who *i* am made no difference at all; the idea was to reduce sex to a scripted, detached thing, wherein partners are completely interchangeable.

Naturally, this is not a recipe for happy-making sex; it's what people do when they are looking for a way to separate this activity from the rest of their lives, rather than when they want to integrate it.

And, in most of those encounters i took pleasure as well, not as in taking my own, but taking theirs, in a way where i too did not have to share an experience with them as a person, but simply having one.

I've learned how to tell at a glance when someone is the sort of person who is more likely to be looking to take pleasure from me, and i have to avoid them. It is almost certain that they will bring nothing good into my life at all.

When i've been asked, "What did you get out of that?" i can't really answer. Something indefinable. I usually felt incredibly sexually charged hours afterwards, so some part of me was getting something out of it. Most people say they can't imagine having sex that way, but i have to say, i've encountered enough who do from every walk of life and of every gender that the potential for it is pretty much universal (at least among Americans).

Which is where "boredom" comes in, because i think it has a lot to do with what drives it. Not boredom in the sense of, you're sitting around one evening and saying to yourself, "Ho hum, what am i going to do tonight?" No, i mean boredom in the really deep sense of the word. The same kind of boredom that drives zoo animals to mutilate themselves after they've been pacing around a small cell, staring at the same four fucking concrete walls day after day. You can change your room around or get a new apartment, you can get a new job, but your life can still be, in a deeper sense, like staring at four fucking concrete walls all the time.

This is the downside to civilization. And i think all of us struggle with this, some of us more successfully than others.

Eventually it deafferents your soul. Why do i choose that word? Because an animal, after having a part of their body deafferented, will often chew it off. This is what many of the Silver Spring monkeys did. At that point, you know what it is you need, but you actively avoid it in favor of the dehumanizing experience which you know is only going to cut you off from your life a little further. And that thing could be dehumanizing sex, or it could be alcohol or drug abuse, or whatever.

Why do we push deeper into that which we know damn well is going to ruin us? Honestly, i don't know. Maybe the brain gets used to it, and sees it as the closest thing to "interesting" that is going on at that point. I think we can accurately call it a break with reality.

One antidote for that boredom seems to be pleasure shared. And by that i mean in the broader sense, not just sexual pleasure, and not just happiness with a partner; it could be just an evening of "hanging out" and "not doing anything special" (put in quotes to demonstrate that such things are more crucial than people generally think). Think that's not important? Go without it for six months.

I don't want to say it absolutely *has* to be pleasure shared with another person because sometimes it can be very affirming to share pleasure with oneself. But i suspect that most of us would usually need to share with others.

It's not a cure-all, certainly, but i find that a lot of my psychic disorientation seems to clear up when i have enough of this in my life. When i say something "grounds" me, that's usually what i mean; experiences which make me mindful, present in the now, pleasure shared.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

Being transgender is an enigma cloaked in mystery and dipped in murkiness. How and why does gender dysphoria develop at all? Why is it so powerful that many transpeople find it easier to undergo expensive and painful changes to their body than to “just live with it”?

Of course, if i can say, “I was born this way,” there is no longer any mystery. This seems especially true after reading this (h/t to Autumn Sandeen here).

A crucial question resulting from a previous brain study in male-to-female transsexuals was whether the reported difference according to gender identity in the central part of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) was based on a neuronal difference in the BSTc itself or just a reflection of a difference in vasoactive intestinal polypeptide innervation from the amygdala, which was used as a marker. … The number of neurons in the BSTc of male-to-female transsexuals was similar to that of the females (P = 0.83). In contrast, the neuron number of a female-to-male transsexual was found to be in the male range. Hormone treatment or sex hormone level variations in adulthood did not seem to have influenced BSTc neuron numbers. The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions and point to a neurobiological basis of gender identity disorder.

To summarize, what researchers have been finding is:

1. There are differences between the average man’s brain and the average woman’s brain,
2. Transwomen’s brains are in some ways shaped more like the average woman’s brains (and vice-versa for transmen), and
3. By exposing rat embryos to certain hormone levels during gestation, researchers can induce biologically male rats to exhibit female behaviors and vice-versa - establishing a causal link.

So, perhaps i have a brain that more resembles a woman’s than a man’s. I’m ready to accept this as a likely explanation, because nothing else i’ve ever heard makes sense.

And i’m ready to accept this as a causal explanation, because there is nothing in my upbringing that would have led me to consistently lean towards having a female identity. Since i was born people have treated me as male. When i started showing transgender inclinations i was leaned on even more heavily to be male. How could anything purely psycho-social persist in the face of lifelong constant negative pressure?

A lot of the feminists i know are nervous about the idea of biological determinism when it comes to gender identity. Perhaps some of them mistrust this because of their own differing experience of gender (see my post about this a while ago).

But also, any scientific examination of gendering in the brain is dealing with averages, ranges and statistics. The central tenet of feminism — that women deserve equal esteem, equal opportunity, and equal freedom — is not undermined if there happen to be innate differences, because any “innate differences” as such exist only in general, statistical terms. Any generalization reflects a range of likelihoods and has exceptions. So the key to fairness is establishing a society in which individuals are not bound by expectations based on these generalities.

This can be solved quite simply by establishing individual merit and ability as the focus by which we judge aptitude for a given task, and not averages or stereotypes regarding gender (or race, etc.).

And, furthermore, these differences have no bearing on whether or not women should have control over their own bodies or destiny.

Edited to add. Upon reflection, i feel it necessary to add that i am not trying to say that all transsexualism or all gender dysphoria comes from a neurobiological origin, or that it is the only origin. But i do think that it is a piece in the puzzle. Maybe a key piece, maybe not.  But either way, in my case at least, it is an idea that resonates with my experience very strongly and provides the likeliest explanation i’ve encountered so far.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

This diatribe by Paul McHugh, at one time Psychiatrist-in-Chief of Johns Hopkins University, against transsexualism is not news. But since encountering the text of it online last week, i have been pondering how to respond. I think the best response i can give is a line-by-line answer.

When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity (“gender” was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?

McHugh is a gender essentialist. That is, he believes that at some point in our early development it is determined that we will be a man or a woman, and once this differentiation occurs it is complete, profound, and eternal. Furthermore, this differentiation is based on externally-verifiable clues; in cases of ambiguity an answer can be imposed on someone by society or by an expert with absolute certainty.

This external imposition has nothing to do with one’s individual experience; experience is squishy, unreliable, not to be trusted. Individual variation is seen as aberrance, which is most properly dealt with by being corrected in accordance with the proscriptive norm. For example, the woman who is not subservient or sufficiently maternal is aberrant and must be corrected.

This position is normative; it breaks the human experience down into categories by which individual experience and performance is given a value judgment as “normal” or “aberrant.” In other words, in the gender-essentialist view of the human condition, you are either a “normal man,” a “normal woman,” an “aberrant man,” or an “aberrant woman.”

This position does not recognize transsexualism. People who report an experience of gender incongruence between their body and mind are aberrant, in that we must be delusional.

Once that the gender essentialist declares that i am delusional, there is nothing i can say to him or her. The gender essentialist, confronted with my account of my experience which cannot be reconciled with his or her belief system, has chosen to resolve the dilemma by putting his or her hand over my mouth. So we know from this that the entire article will consist of speaking at transsexual women rather than speaking with us.

Prepare to be depressed. This is long, so i’m putting it behind a cut.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

This morning i had a jarring, chilling exposure to what the word “impressionable” really means.

My wife and i had to go to her son’s school this morning to deal with, well, the kinds of things kids do. All we knew was that the principal wanted to talk to her. I went along as moral support. We didn’t know they were going to drag her son into the room with us so that he could sit on one side of the room with four adults looking at him asking him about what happened. We had no idea we were going to be made into de facto accomplices.

And, to be fair, they didn’t grill him like interrogators. No, it was all maddeningly “reasonable.” It’s just that under any sort of scrutiny whatsoever he closes up, so we didn’t hear much at all of his side of what happened.

I’ve never seen anyone squirm so much in my life. And so, with him basically having been found guilty, we coached him through what he would say by way of apology and reassurance to the other aggrieved kids. To some extent that was appropriate, since kids are still learning about what it means to be an ethical person who respects other people’s boundaries.

But my wife and i were profoundly uncomfortable about the whole “words being put in his mouth” thing. And that’s all i saw everywhere i looked in the school. The “pledge of allegiance to the flag,” which was recited while we were there. Everywhere, ‘motivational’ posters with captions like “Curiosity: i choose to learn.”

The underlying message is, this is a place where we put words into your mouth. You know? I don’t think i’ve ever met a kid who had to be told to “choose to learn.”

When you’re a kid, you don’t have the liberty to choose what you want to do or say. You are told what you want to do or say. And it is often presented obliquely as if it is a desire coming from you, the kid. And when it is said this way often enough, and when you parrot it and get the appropriate reward, it sinks in. Really, really deeply.

It doesn’t matter whether or not kids understand what the pledge of allegiance is about. To them, it’s just dumb words that they have to repeat every morning… which they do in a droning, hypnotic, rhythmic monotone. But they do understand, on a basic level, that it is something they do to make the adults around them beam with pride (”What good, obedient, upstanding, patriotic kids we have!”) and to avoid punishment for not complying.

And much of this is about learning how to perform the gender we’ve been assigned.

Being in school helped remind me about how that worked when i was younger. I remember viewing adulthood as this barren wasteland where you wander around as a broken person, your dreams and individuality stunted beyond repair. I suppose that was my expectation because my preparation for adulthood consisted of this constant pressure to be someone-not-me, by way of the silencing of my own galla-voice and the replacement of it with something suitably “masculine.”

I remember, for example, eagerly joining the high school wrestling team after lots of input from my father about how much he had enjoyed it. I had never been a sporty kid, though being on the wrestling team was actually good for me in some ways. I wonder if people today look at my almost-thigh-length hair and somewhat femme presentation (minus, you know, the occasional stompy boots) and have any trouble picturing me grasping someone and pinning him to the mat?

But i would never have “wanted” to do that if it hadn’t been subtly put there, if it hadn’t been rewarded and encouraged once i said i wanted to do it.

On a bigger scale, this is why women’s “consent” to various kinds of things in a patriarchal society can be so sketchy sometimes.

But this leads into troubling territory because i’m wondering how we can distinguish between “educating” a kid (enabling their cognition while also respecting their identity and will) versus putting our thoughts into their heads and our words in their mouths. Kids don’t always know how to make decisions, it’s one of the things they’re still learning, and they sometimes have to be guided to a decision. (Or… light bulb comes on… do they?)

So, Don Imus was suspended by MSNBC for two weeks for the recent racist/sexist outburst by him and Bernard McGuirk on his show. Who says "jigaboos" anymore -- i mean, really?

Someone on my friend's list (please step forward if you want to be attributed) predicted that of course he wouldn't be fired because he speaks for MSNBC. The more i think about this, the more obvious it seems. Of course he speaks for MSNBC, he has been a mouthpiece for institutional racism/sexism/homophobia/classism for 30 years. It suits the interests of the upper class to have people saying what he says.

A while ago i pondered whether it is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that makes oppression possible, and if i ever create a "Sabrina's greatest hits" tag, that one will be on it, because it is an idea i continually return to. Let me be a bit more specific, though, and modify that hypothesis just a bit: it is perhaps more accurate to say that it is Complex PTSD that makes oppression possible.

From an essay on C-PTSD:

It's widely accepted that PTSD can result from a single, major, life-threatening event, as defined in DSM-IV. Now there is growing awareness that PTSD can also result from an accumulation of many small, individually non-life-threatening incidents. To differentiate the cause, the term "Complex PTSD" is used. The reason that Complex PTSD is not in DSM-IV is that the definition of PTSD in DSM-IV was derived using only people who had suffered a single major life-threatening incident such as Vietnam veterans and survivors of disasters.

... It seems that Complex PTSD can potentially arise from any prolonged period of negative stress in which certain factors are present, which may include any of captivity, lack of means of escape, entrapment, repeated violation of boundaries, betrayal, rejection, bewilderment, confusion, and - crucially - lack of control, loss of control and disempowerment. It is the overwhelming nature of the events and the inability (helplessness, lack of knowledge, lack of support etc) of the person trying to deal with those events that leads to the development of Complex PTSD. Situations which might give rise to Complex PTSD include bullying, harassment, abuse, domestic violence, stalking, long-term caring for a disabled relative, unresolved grief, exam stress over a period of years, mounting debt, contact experience, etc. Those working in regular traumatic situations, eg the emergency services, are also prone to developing Complex PTSD.

"lack of means of escape, entrapment, repeated violation of boundaries, betrayal, rejection, bewilderment, confusion, and - crucially - lack of control, loss of control and disempowerment" -- these are par for the course when you live in a sexist, racist, classist culture. That is pretty much what those terms mean.

Suppose people were not capable of being beaten down and broken. Suppose they would object to every mistreatment and slight, no matter how big or small, no matter how often it had happened to them, no matter how vicious the repercussions. If this were so, then over time, it just wouldn't be worth it for one person to expend the energy to lord it over another human being. The benefits would be outweighed by the costs involved.

It wouldn't be possible for employers to exploit the people who work for them. It wouldn't be possible for an entire nation to lock women up in their homes and keep them separated. It wouldn't be worth the grief to build walls dividing neighborhoods and populations.

But, because we hear about our worthlessness in subtle ways every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we DO get beaten down and broken. We learn that when we complain, instead of finding solidarity in others who have been wronged as we were, we get left to twist in the wind and take the heat alone, and be made an example of; and maintaining one's defiance in the face of that takes more and more energy by the day. Eventually the complaining stops, because tending to the emotional injuries (and, not infrequently enough, the physical injuries) on top of the disadvantages we are asked to accept become so costly that there is no energy left to complain any more.

Bit by bit, so slowly that we rarely see it happen in real time, the efforts we expend make those with privilege wealthier and better-fed, while we lose sleep and make do and struggle to pay our bills and say "it's nothing" when we're sick but can't afford to see a doctor. The pattern is so widespread there is nowhere we can go where we aren't under the net, we can't even talk about the net without people saying we're crazy or exaggerating, and nothing we can do will stop us being slow-motion cannibalized.

And then there are people like Don Imus and Michael Savage and Ann Coulter. These are folks who keep up the steady drumbeat of negativity, the slow pulse that reminds you how and why you're broken. Polite society hems and haws and says they are out of line, but if they were really out of line, they'd be out of work, wouldn't they? They wouldn't have audiences of millions and millions, would they? They wouldn't be living high on the hog 14 years after comparing the New York Times' White House Press correspondent (at the time) to "the cleaning lady", would they? Their "rowdy words " (hey, can't you take a joke?) wouldn't be repeated again and again and again in the mainstream media if they were truly offensive, would they?

So, yes, Don Imus speaks for MSNBC and all of corporate America. Don Imus speaks for people who don't want us to complain about their privilege.

I've been flirting with the label of "Bright" (mostly as an act of self-defense, since i have come to consider religion a direct threat to my life, health, sanity, and well-being).

But i'm not sure that my views are actually 'naturalistic,' in the sense that they mean.

I do not believe in anything supernatural. I do feel very strongly though that there are things which rationality cannot explain. Rationality is a product of the human nervous system and therefore contains inherent limitations. To be a naturalist, is it necessary to believe that all natural processes can be rationally described?

Notable Brights like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett actively deny the existence of the mind, claiming that it is an illusion created by the brain's continual revision of an ongoing first-person narrative. Dennett's conclusion is based on the presumption that everything that occurs within our conscious mind MUST have a neural correlate.

This is not a presumption that i'm willing to concede. My theory that mind is a physical field is naturalistic and monistic (i deny the "mind/body duality") but not eliminative or deterministic. Supernatural? Close enough for government work?

My thoughts about god are pretty unconventional too. My attempts to describe god as "meaningfully nonexistent," as something that exists in the potential for things to happen or grow or as a result of the conscious explication of reality out of the holomovement, feel to me now, in retrospect, as somewhat desperate attempts to justify holding out for the possibility of any sort of transpersonal being in the light of serious questions that the idea of god is anything more than a hiccup of the human brain.

Pascal Boyer made a point which sticks with me. On page 158 of Religion Explained he points out that our understanding of god is primarily concerned with god's knowledge of and concern with human affairs. Thus it seems silly or irrelevant to ask whether god knows the state of every machine on Earth or what every insect is up to, or what god is made out of... and these questions seem silly because we think of god primarily in terms of god's relation to us, to other people, and to human society. I think it was this point that nailed the coffin shut, for me.

I don't want to deny the importance of faith or hope, or it's potential for transforming someone's life for the better. But is it necessary to have faith "in" something? Or, alternately, is it necessary to discard faith and hope utterly if one is an atheist? I have long thought that the whole idea of holding faith hostage to one set or another of poison memes is an intolerable cruelty.

For a while now i've been toying around from time to time with the idea that mind is a field. Under this view, mind is given the respect it is due as a phenomenon in its own right, but without a metaphysical dualism of the sort with which mind/body theories typically wrestle.

Some implications of this are interesting. Fields have properties like resonance, and theoretically extend over the whole universe. Noön particles would be quantum-interlinked just like other particles. So our individual minds, thoughts, feelings, are not as isolatedly individual as we seem to experience them. While noöns may be concentrated inside living brains, they wouldn't be found only there.

If noöns exist, why haven't we seen them? I think they possess a rather unique place in nature, in that they serve as an explication factor which draws spacetime reality into being from the melange of the holomovement. Trying to observe one directly would be difficult for the same reason it is hard to pinpoint the exact nature of first-person experience. Noöns are, in my hypothesis, what acts on quantum fields to produce what we perceive as the "quantum wave collapse." In other words, what defines "reality" as distinct from the fullness of existence is the influence of a noönic field. So to look at a noön would be analogous to looking at a mirror; you don't see an image, but only a reflection of what is around. Seeing anything at all *is* the process of seeing a noön.

(It sounds like i am proposing a duality here between explicated and otherwise, but i do not imagine a universe where explicit matter is free from influence by that which remains enfolded. If you said this sounds like a hidden-variable-invoking Bohmian interpretation, you'd be right. Heck, noöns themselves are a hidden variable.)

There is a lot that might be explained by the supposition that each mind extends over all of spacetime. It might partly explain, for example, instant attraction or repulsion. Have you ever met someone and felt like you recognized them immediately? Perhaps there is a strong resonance between your noönic fields. If however you meet someone whose noönic field is dissonant with your own, you might be inclined to dislike them, and you'd likely be right: that person would think and act in ways very different from you.

Many different aspects of collective human behavior might be explained this way, from mob consciousness to the intuitive appeal of ideas like Jung's collective unconscious, or Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere as the endpoint of human evolution.

It also allows for the possibility of noönic solitons or persistences. I could write a whole entry on what that means, persistent noönic waves floating around free of brains to shape them, affecting thought, feeling, and perhaps even matter. Some memes might be noönic solitons -- as might memories or experiences some people attribute to "reincarnation." Perhaps instincts and patterns of human behavior i referred to recently as "human nature" are noönic solitons as well.

There are interesting implications regarding will and causation, too. Jeffrey Schwartz proposed a notion he called "mental force" to explain the observable change in brain structure which can result from focused meditation. That the brain is capable of self-reprogramming is fascinating and opens a wide range of potential for human improvement. But this result also gives us hard evidence that consciousness is something real. (Contrast the views of Daniel Dennett and other eliminative-materialists who claim that consciousness and self are pure memetic illusion, on the basis of the observation that there is no place within the brain where consciousness resides.)

I've come to think that being abusive, hateful, and intolerant is evidence of having a weak will in the face of external influence. A person who displays these traits is less of an individuated person; they are blown about and easily carried along by external currents. In my opinion, the work of individuation, of learning to focus one's will by way of discipline (meditation, contemplative prayer, martial arts, esoterica, and other kinds of discipline) is inseparable from the work of cultivating a better human society.

This fits in perfectly with things i have been saying about "the hypostatic reverie," the "conscious censor," and pseudo-religion memetic parasites.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

from Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds (thanks to chipuni for the link)

I've written previously about advertisers "colonizing" the brain. Now there's evidence of it:

A person’s liking for a particular brand name is wired into a specific part of the brain, a new study reveals. The research may provide an insight into the brain mechanisms that underlie the behavioural preferences that advertisers attempt to hijack.

It has long been known that humans and animals can learn to associate an irrelevant stimulus with a positive experience, for example the ringing of a bell with food, as in the case of Pavlov’s dogs. And neuroimaging studies have recently implicated two regions buried deep in the brain – the ventral striatum and the ventral midbrain – as having an important role in this learning.

But now work led by John O’Doherty, currently at Caltech in Pasadena, US, shows that the actual level of preference is encoded in these brain regions, and that people access this information to guide their decisions.

“The key message of our study is that we are able to make use of neural signals deep in our brain to guide our decisions about what items to choose, say when choosing between particular soups in a supermarket, without actually sampling the foods themselves,” says Doherty, who did the research while at University College London, UK.

from How brands get wired into the brain

This is a very difficult topic to grasp at, as both a writer and a reader, because our patterns of perception and conceptuality have been formed in ways that facilitate the kyriarchal status-quo.

Some forms of oppression are visible, and we can have awareness of them, because there have been somewhat successful movements to raise that awareness. Even so, one must undertake constant positive effort -- as if one were swimming upstream -- to avoid allowing sexist, racist, or classist presumptions to intrude into one's language. Consider the depth of effort and vigilance required -- and witness the consequent resentment many have against "political correctness" -- for an illustration of how deeply our brains have been colonized by oppression.

It sometimes seems like a fruitless undertaking to be conscious of sexist/racist language, because what we've witnessed in recent decades is a flowering of tacit forms of sexist or racist expression -- and the sense that "we all know what's really going on, so why candy coat it?" The best answer i can give involves the transmission of oppressive memes to our children. It is now well-known that the brain is exceedingly plastic when we are children, but not so when we are adults. Our brains were wired with racism and sexism when we were young, watching the way adults treated us and each other, in actions and words. In the brain there is no real distinction between hardware and software -- this is why the "software upgrade" of oppression awareness does not automatically fix our internalized sexism/racism. It may only seem like a faulty pretense, but there's a chance that the next generation will observe our struggles, and our attempts to address them, and will be better equipped to handle the struggle against institutional oppression.

Some forms of oppression are just now coming to public awareness, such as the oppression of queer people, transpeople and people with disabilities. Other struggles have yet to come to public awareness, such as the mistreatment of neuro-atypical or fat people. Modern oppression of these people includes marginalization by way of patterns like medicalization (the above are treated by modern society as medical disorders, as femininity was and still is in some ways), moralization (they are treated as moral failings or psychological errors fixable by therapy or religious intervention), fetishization (cultures of 'chasers' and 'admirers' have been established around these characteristics), and ridicule (much "humor" depends on the ridiculousness of being fat or transgendered or neuro-atypical). Light is made of our plight and then we are told, "What, can't you take a joke"?

Whole industries have been set up to make a profit off the plight of the oppressed. The beauty and diet industries are huge; politicians make political and financial capital by promoting homophobia; neuro-atypical people are medicated or unwillingly hospitalized.

These marginalizations are "common sense" -- we all know and understand them and they are the expected social attitude towards people with these attributes. Since they are common sense, the person who questions these attitudes or agitates for their reversal can be characterized as unreasonable (especially if, heaven help them, they have a bit of anger in their voice) -- and can then be told their errors in a "calm, reasonable" tone of voice. Other language tactics of avoidance are employed -- the accusation of having an agenda beyond the scope of one's actual comments, or the use of cavil to draw attention to the details of one's statement and away from the wider implications.

In all of these ways the deck is stacked against the targets of oppression, so that it is impossible for us to win; to turn our abuse in on ourselves, to make it our fault, to traumatize us, to deny the perception of the larger pattern, to isolate us, to desensitize us to the reality of what is going on, to break up our coalitions, to render us more helpless, to make it easier to exploit us economically, emotionally, sexually. And this cannibalism is the bottom line, why it is all done.