thinking criticalstyle

caught up on dungeon meshi and I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t draw some angsty hugs

Currently getting my socks clean blown off by Rethinking Narcissism, by Dr. Craig Malkin. Which I found, in a roundabout way, from this video on Midsommar, grief, and narcissism.

Tonight I woke up from a nap and accidentally took my morning meds, so I'm going to be up for a few hours because of the meth. In place of sleep, I'll try to roughly sum up some basic ideas proposed by the research the book is based on:

To me this has all been a cross between a gut-punch and a cool, sweet drink of water. There have been other ways to describe echoism over the years, but this feels like the most concise and useful one I've seen in ages.

It specifically puts its pin down in the middle of the moral debate a lot of people struggle with—"What right do I have to put myself forward? What hope do I have of being seen and accepted? Isn't it better not to burden anybody else?"—and says that the problem is not feeling in touch with either side of the equation, but specifically, the inability to move from one part of the spectrum to another when it's merited by circumstances.

When I was a child, I thought Echoism was the answer. It was my ideal. I thought it was what would get me the love and acceptance I wanted, and would keep me safe from the pain of rejection or not being understood. I had no idea it would actually, in fact, be the primary cause of alienation and loneliness for the rest of my life.

Now I'm so deeply thankful I couldn't fully achieve it, in practical terms. As hard as I tried to erase myself, there were always things I loved too much to suppress. I still found ways to express and discover myself in the books I read, the stories I wrote, the intellectual work of school and the experience of pursuing hobbies I loved, my ambitions to be helpful even when they demanded I stop being selfless, and the relationships where I felt safe enough to experience love and acceptance even if I didn't think I deserved them.

There's this question I found a while back that echoed in my bones: Who am I allowed to be around you? Because that's what I felt like, as a child. If I wanted to engage with other people and minimize my risk of harm, it was my job to bend into a pretzel and fit the shape they wanted. And thank god, thank god, thank god, I couldn't fully do it. Despite everything, there were parts of me too strong and bright to lop off completely to get my arms and legs inside the carriage. I was able to take care of myself and let them grow in secret until I found social places I could let them out again. Despite myself, I found ways to grow and thrive, well beyond the trauma that said I shouldn't have.

i wrote this in the notes of another post originally and am copy + pasting it here because im right but "tell the cops nothing, tell the doctors everything" is such a stupid ass fucking abled take. doctors engage in policing idk how to explain to yall that some people cannot in fact just tell doctors everything without it putting them at risk

like im not gonna go into the myriad of ways this is bs but like a quick example is i cant tell my doctors about my substance use issues because if i get that listed on my medical records it will actively endanger me. It will impact how I'm treated in emergency situations and will get me labeled as "drug seeking" when i try to get other issues dealt with.

i dont say this to scare people but because this is actually important information for people to have. if a medical professional claims this isnt an issue, they are NOT "one of the good ones". they are either straight up lying or theyre utterly unaware, which is frankly not better. doctors are cops. never forget it

like YES tell ur doctor abt being sexually active but stop saying "tell the cops nothing and the doctor everything" before i start killing in cold blood

I had a doctor once ask my father to leave the room, then proceeded to tell me that my sore throat was all in my head, and I was making it up for attention -- because I was bipolar. I told him no, that wasnt the case, I was genuinely sick, and he rolled his eyes, said he would do a strep test "to make me feel better", did the test, and left. 20 minutes later he came back and told me the strep test came back positive. No apology, nothing.

This was for strep throat. I had similar things happen for much more important stuff that I dont want to get into. I'm in the middle of a very long process for a condition thats giving me progressive spinal cord damage, and all I can think about is that if I had "substance use disorder" on my medical record, how likely is it that I would just not have been listened to about this. If you have anxiety youre a "hypochondriac". If you're an addict you're "drug seeking". if you're bipolar or schizospec you're making it up, possibly for attention. This shit kills people. This isnt even getting into the inherently carceral nature of the psychiatric system in the US (and elsewhere)

Doctors are not, in fact, neutral figures that can be blindly trusted with any and all information, and pretending they are can literally get people killed. Abled people have GOT to do better.

This shouldn't even be need to be said but don't fucking report people who express being suicidal. I don't care how much you think you're doing it for someone's own good, it does NOT help us it only harms further

READ that AGAIN

You are ACTIVELY harming those people when you try to be a goody two-shoes and tell on them when they get suicidal

Don't fucking report them to social media app features that have the report for self harm option. Don't fucking call a suicide hotline on them. Don't fucking report them to therapists, paychiatrists, cops, controlling parents or partners

It does not matter how uncomfortable it makes you - this isn't ABOUT you - it doesn't matter how much it goes against your cute little saviour complex thinking you're being oh such a wonderful kind heroic person by "saving" someone from themself.

When you report a person to any of those places it heavily risks hospitalisation and incarceration. Where I live it's technically still a crime to attempt suicide, they never overturned the law. And if you think being in a ward might help them - do everyone a favour and go check out the actual conditions in the wards and talk to psych survivors about how they actually are. Otherwise shut up about things you have no experience with.

Everyone should have a right to autonomy, especially bodily autonomy, and you don't have to like what they do with their own body for you to know not to take that away from someone. It's not your place to judge, it's not okay to be moralistic about bodily autonomy suddenly because you can't handle the reality of mentally ill people.

And it's not fucking okay to lock us in and remove us from society just because our disorders are too fucking ugly for you to look at.

If you absolutely have to help just talk to a suicidal person if they're up to it, just ask them what will help, and if you can't do that then leave us the fuck alone you snitches

And don't come at me with the law, if you had to be an ally to mentally ill people, to queer people, to women, to any kind of marginalised people, historically a lot of it has always included standing against the law and with us.

STOP REPORTING US

Hello that post about reporting people on Tumblr is going around again PLEASE DON'T DO THAT WTFFF get over your knee-jerk saviour complex and leave mentally ill people alone PLEASE

I find it funny when people have this idea that anti psychiatry means rejecting all treatment when like half the anti psychiatry subreddit is people desperately trying to access *helpful* treatment without being fobbed off with SSRIs and CBT and without being abused

Rayne Fisher-Quann, no good alone

to me, 'somatic symptom disorder' is emblematic of the DSM's malignant disregard for the chronically ill. it has been argued that the diagnosis exists in order to identify and treat 'true' hypochondriacs, which is woefully disingenuous, considering how the diagnosis is frequently (if not always) weaponized in practice.

with no basis of comparison, psychiatry has deemed certain reactions 'disproportionate'. the mayo clinic states in its page on somatic symptom disorder: "You may or may not have another diagnosed medical condition associated with these symptoms, but your reaction to the symptoms is not normal." through this language and the language of the diagnostic criteria found in the DSM-V, which uses terms such as 'excessive' and 'disproportionate' to describe the symptoms characterizing this so-called 'disorder', psychiatry once again establishes itself as an authority whose purpose is to delineate what constitutes a 'normal' reaction to potentially debilitating symptoms.

such vague diagnostic criteria serve not only to pathologize those who seek care for problems with no known medical cause, but to pathologize the thought processes and actions of those experiencing symptoms whose origins have been identified. individual medical providers may insist upon a 'value neutral' interpretation of these diagnostic criteria. considering the lack of an established baseline for what a 'normal' reaction to symptoms such as pain or profound fatigue should look like, this rings false. such a baseline does not exist. diagnoses like SSD deter patients from seeking treatment, discourage them from finding community, and negatively affect how they are treated by healthcare professionals. and they are unconscionable.

"women are more likely than men to develop somatic symptom disorder" you are not serious people

90% of the stuff that people say is 'terminally online' isnt in any meaningful way limited to 'online' and the person saying that just has a narrowminded view of the world and of people

i've had so many people call me 'terminally online' when i talk about family abolition. and it's so funny, like. were marx and engels being terminally online when they wrote the communist manifesto. was cuba's 2022 family code terminally online. are all the physical copies of sophie lewis' abolish the family merely figments of my online imagination. like to be clear i have long held that online is real but its so silly when someone calls an idea that has been around for centuries 'online' because they and their friends do not personally discuss it around the dinner table

one of mainstream feminism's largest failures of the past decade or so was the propagation of the term "toxic masculinity." I don't mean to say that the ways that men uphold rigid, overly-restrictive notions of masculinity shouldn't be discussed and criticized, but the name given to this phenomenon failed to accurately describe it for what it is: transmisogyny.

I think that here, julia serano's definition of transmisogyny makes it clear why that's a better word to describe this phenomenon. transmisogyny is the intersection between oppositional sexism, which is rooted in the belief that male and female are rigid, mutually exclusive, and "opposite" categories with no overlap between them whatsoever; and traditional sexism, the presumption that femininity is innately inferior to masculinity. when these two forms of sexism intersect, the result is transmisogyny.

when you look at it this way, it becomes clear why "toxic masculinity" is an insufficient term. when a man chastises a young boy for crying, or when a woman mocks her male date for ordering a fruity drink at a bar, it's a message that communicates two things:

because the message is a combination of these two forms of sexism, it's transmisogyny, even if the person being chastised is not transfem or even gender non-conforming. however, let's be clear: this doesn't mean that men are uniquely victimized by transmisogyny. while yes, it is painful for some men to be held to these expectations, by and large, it is men who stand to gain the most by upholding them.

the goal behind this particular instance of transmisogyny is to discourage men from becoming "lesser" in the eyes of society. it is to punish them for being feminine, so that they will police themselves without anyone needing to punish them further. it is to prevent anyone assigned male at birth from even thinking about partaking in femininity. it is to stop trans women from existing, because we vehemently reject the notions that the two sexes are opposites with no overlap and that femininity is inferior to masculinity in the first place.

men benefit from this form of transmisogyny, and until now, they've never been held accountable for it. sure, maybe cis women will ridicule a man who refuses to order a lavender drink at a coffee shop and only uses 3-in-1 shampoo with "men's" in a big bold font on the label for being insecure in his masculinity, but this minor grievance is easily outweighed by the many privileges he holds for being masculine. maintaining these privileges is of the utmost importance for him, which is why, even after years of mainstream feminists raising awareness about and mocking "toxic masculinity," men still uphold and enforce the transmisogyny that allowed them to obtain these privileges in the first place. their position at the top of the gender hierarchy is a great place to be, and they can only stay there by ensuring that everyone else is firmly beneath them, with trans women at the very bottom.

and let me make myself clear from the outset, before this post starts circulating around and people start adding their own additions to it. it is a failure of mainstream feminism that this topic always begins and ends with discussions about men, when the people who are the most traumatized by this phenomenon are trans women. yes, it is unfortunate that many men have been so heavily conditioned by this phenomenon that they can't so much as cry when someone near to them dies, but I have very little sympathy for those men who then turn around and enforce the very same transmisogyny onto others.

furthermore, nowhere in this post did I say that only cis men benefit from this form of transmisogyny; trans men can and do uphold it, and likewise benefit from doing so, albeit usually to a lesser extent than cis men. even if they do so because their masculinity is called into question at a far greater rate than cis men's masculinity (and thus the stakes for failing to conform are higher), it still pales in comparison to how often trans women have been harassed and assaulted for failing to conform to the expectations of masculinity that were placed upon us all our lives, expectations which most of us never wanted anything to do with.

moving forward, we need to discard "toxic masculinity" as a term and start describing it for what it is: transmisogyny. we need to center trans women in the conversation, as we're the ones who are the direct targets of transmisogyny. we need to hold tme people accountable for enforcing these overly rigid gender roles in the first place - ESPECIALLY cis men, who benefit the most from doing so. and most importantly, everyone needs to stop talking over trans women when we discuss transmisogyny by redirecting the conversation to talk about how it hurts some other group. it should be enough that it hurts us. transmisogyny is the core of so many forms of gendered oppression that challenging it directly will benefit everyone in the long run, but it will have the most immediate and profound impact on us, and I think that's an important enough reason to work to combat it.

every so often, I continue to see people discuss toxic masculinity as if it's an actual issue that needs to be addressed for the sake of men, because the limitations that are placed upon them are too restrictive and deprive them of many forms of self-expression - be it love, joy, sorrow, and the like. is it unfortunate that they are limited in these ways? certainly, but the thing that you absolutely MUST understand is that, by and large, it is self-inflicted. they restrain themselves, often subconsciously, because they have been conditioned over the course of their lives to do so with the knowledge that adhering to these restrictions will grant them material benefits and privileges in the patriarchal society they live in and uphold.

it is actually remarkably easy for men to attain freedom from these limitations; they simply have to choose not to enforce them anymore. they are the ones with the patriarchal authority to do so. unfortunately, there is no chance of this happening. men uphold and enforce these limitations specifically because it allows them to deny power to women. if men allowed themselves to freely express the full range of human emotions, for example, then how could they paint women as irrational and illogical for expressing completely normal emotions, and thus unfit to occupy positions of power, or even to participate in the decision-making process in relationships?

the simple fact of the matter is that so long as men stand to materially gain from enforcing transmisogyny, you will not convince them en masse to give up their power voluntarily. in order to do so, you would have to convince them all to care about women's liberation, and especially trans women's liberation, which simply isn't going to happen.

if you actually care about combating "toxic masculinity", then you need to strike at the root and deny men the ability to gain power over women, especially trans women, in the first place. we, as trans women, absolutely must prioritize one another. we must wield our collective strength against men - even individual men - who attempt to exert power over us. much like the relationship between employee and employer, we are powerless as individuals to stop the oppressive force that controls our ability to live securely. together, however, we are strong. we can abolish the patriarchy that subjugates us. T4T forever.

What's that bro? You began interacting with a media from a different country than yours and/or was made in time period different than the recent present day? Haha that's sick bro! Keep expanding your horizons bro! You're remembering to take into account that sociocultural norms, gender roles and genre expectations are different from what you are used to and meeting the story halfway, instead of forcibly superimposing your ideals into the story, right bro? Right? Right?

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

Clarifying the above, since it references multiple different issues, the 2009 salmon study wasn't about whether there's a "link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming," it was about whether you're measuring anything real at all, or just turning up random false positives in the noisy voluminous voxel data. If they're measuring actual brain activity and then making wild claims about what it means, that's a different problem than what the salmon study was about.

The basic point is that it's critical to apply proper corrections to avoid false positives, making sure that you're measuring something real rather than nothing.

According to the description by a PhD Physiology researcher here, before the 2009 salmon study, "between 25-40% of studies on fMRI being published were NOT using the corrected comparisons. But by the time this group won the Ignobel last week [in 2012], that number had dropped to 10%"

Saying the percentage of papers that were making this statistical mistake and failing to properly check that they were measuring anything at all went from 25-40% to 10%.

Which is super cool!

This article provides a description from the scientists: 'Bennett said their study was a warning to neuroscientists to be careful with the way they do their work, so that they are not caught out by chance signals when they repeat a scan multiple times.

"If you have a 1% chance of hitting a bullseye when playing darts and you throw one dart, then you have a 1% chance of hitting the target. If you have 30,000 darts then, well, let's just say that you are probably going to hit the target a few times. The same is true in neuroimaging.

"The more chances you have to find a result, the more likely you are to find one, even by chance. We, as a scientific field, have accepted statistical methods to correct for this, but not all scientists use these methods in their neuroimaging analysis." '

“empathy” is not a synonym for “good person”. some of the kindest and most respectful people I know are low empathy. and lord knows there are high empathy dicks out there.

being a good person is a choice. the amount of empathy you have is not.