doctor: it appears you have Cigna

me: oh god is that fatal

doctor: that's your insurance provider

doctor: but yes

I expected my cpap machine to make a dramatic difference right away but after waking up from my first night on the machine I think the experience can be described as I woke up and thought “well I don’t think I feel dramatically different but it also definitely feels like something in there has been unclogged”

[“When I asked focus group participants again about body hair and their desires for women, Adam responded:

That’s what makes the woman different, her body, I don’t mind uh having hair in certain specific parts on her body um . . . in general I . . . like woman to be clean. Just in certain areas. But like I said, down in the genital, like it’s okay for me.

Hair, for Adam, Musiteli, and other participants, served as the visual representation of the differentiation between “men” and “women.” Further, Adam referred to a woman being hairless not only as “proper” but “cleanly,” as well.

Often, when I asked participants specifically about genital hair, the response was that they did not prefer hair due to cleanliness, hygiene, and other such myths surrounding body hair. The idea that hairlessness is cleanly is reflected in colloquial discourse (e.g., “clean shaven”). Ryan, an Indian American, cis-het man, explained to me his distaste for a “bush” or a large amount of hair genitally:

I just think like it's better to sometimes, maybe, fully shave it, like coordinate with your partner if you're going to do that, because then it could help but like, yeah, if like two people both have bushes then like you don't know what's going on. And, also, it's just like, cleaner. Like in terms of like keeping it clean. It's easier when you have less hair in those areas.

When I asked Liz, a cis-lesbian, Latina woman, whether she cares if a woman shaves her armpits and genitals or not, she similarly responded, “Yes (laughs). Yes definitely. It’s just . . . um . . . how should I call it? Hygiene. Hygiene.”

In Ryan, Liz, and Adam’s discourse, pubic hair is conceptualized as unclean, non-hygienic, and obtrusive. Such ideas, again, are not mere individual preference but are instead shaped by cultural and generational understandings of hair. Herzig highlights that “the normalization of smooth skin in dominant U.S. culture is not even a century old,” with such ideas arising during the same years as the Cold War with individuals in the United States describing “visible body hair on women as evidence of a filth, ‘foreign’ lack of hygiene.” Porn and the framing of sexually explicit material have also shaped cultural understandings of pubic hair. While pubic hair removal for women went out of vogue after the nineteenth century, it became popular once again in the 1980s, in part, due to pornographic depictions largely including hairless vulvas, and more recently, hairless bodies for men, as well. Cultural discourse surrounding pubic and body hair is, thus, shaped by racialized, gendered, and xenophobic understandings of the body and hair. The fact that these ideas are shared by immigrant participants/participants of color does not deny the racialized and xenophobic roots of such discourse, so much as it highlights the internalization of racism and xenophobia by immigrants and/or people of color, as an adaptive response to the racism of society.

As participants conceptualized hair as animal-like, masculine, and/or filthy, they also conceptualized of it as excess or surplus to the human (woman’s) body. Pubic hair shaped their idea of what it means to do womanhood and to be a woman. As such, participant discourse not only was shaped by racist, sexist, and xenophobic conceptualizations of hair that have proliferated in the United States but also cissexist concepts of manhood and womanhood as opposite, different, and biologically based. That which is “improper to manhood/womanhood within White schemas of a gender binary are unnatural, unclean, and undesirable.”]

alithia zamantakis, from thinking cis: cisgender heterosexual men, and queer women’s roles in anti-trans violence, 2023

keiko lane, from the disclosure of specialization: a qpoc therapist’s questions about embodied mirroring and mentoring, from the remedy: queer and trans voices on health and healthcare, 2016

[“Instead of adapting to reality, emotionally immature people try to remake reality. Although reality is a blooming, buzzing, evolving mass of stimulation, EIPs cope by oversimplifying reality into streamlined parts that make sense and seem manageable to them.

They Use Coping Mechanisms That Resist Reality

George Vaillant (1977) is a researcher who became famous for his thirty-year participation in Harvard’s Grant Study of Adult Development, a research project that followed men’s lives for decades to identify the factors that correlated with health, successful functioning, and happiness. He developed a rating scale to assess how successfully and adaptively a person deals with life, a kind of index of emotional maturity. Vaillant concluded that we adapt best to life when we are aware of our own feelings and motives and can assess reality objectively.

Adaptive, emotionally mature people have balanced lives and emotionally satisfying relationships. They can comfortably relate to the inner experiences of themselves and others. They accept reality on its own terms, adapting to it and mostly not fighting it. Their coping mechanisms are flexible, and instead of trying to rigidly control everything, they look for the most adaptive, least stressful solution that takes all factors into account. To get through tough times, they might use humor, creativity, deliberate suppression of unhelpful thoughts, and altruism.

In contrast, the most immature EIPs try to alter reality by denying, dismissing, or distorting facts they don’t like. At the lowest level of maladaptive coping mechanisms, a person might lose touch with consensual reality and become psychotic.

Some EIPs can be realistic about objective reality, but can’t deal with feelings. They use defenses like rationalizing, intellectualizing, and minimizing to dodge unpleasant emotions or keep them at a distance. They might also indulge substance abuse or other forms of acting out to hide from painful feelings, even though their awareness of factual reality may be intact.

Reality Is Determined by Their Emotions

Because EIPs and EI parents approach life emotionally rather than thoughtfully (Bowen 1985), they define reality based on how it feels to them. Perceiving reality as identical to the way one feels at the moment is called affective realism (Barrett 2017; Clore and Huntsinger 2007). We all do this—when we feel good, things look good—but EIPs take this to an extreme. The way it feels to them is the way it is.

For example, Darcy’s mother used to make pronouncements about things that simply were not true, just because they occurred to her. Darcy wasn’t sure why this so infuriated her, but then she realized that it was emblematic of her mother’s pathological egocentricity: everything and everybody should be what she thought they should be.

They Deny and Dismiss the Reality of Others’ Feelings

EI parents are thin-skinned themselves, but they are often insensitive to other people’s feelings. Because of their low empathy, they frequently respond in ways that other people find insensitive or hurtful. This lack of emotional resonance with others lowers their emotional intelligence (Goleman 1995), making it harder to get along with people.

Their Intense Emotions Oversimplify Reality

EIPs and EI parents have intense, all-or-nothing emotions, like the unmodulated feelings of little children. They oversimplify people and situations into categories of all good or all bad. Their black-and-white thinking prevents them from experiencing conflicting emotions at the same time, so there is little balancing or tempering of their emotions. This is a serious problem because blended, nuanced emotions are necessary for a richer, truer perception of our multifaceted reality. Emotional maturity allows you to experience a simultaneous mixture of emotions, such as feeling sad yet grateful or angry but cautious. It is only through our own emotional complexity that we can grasp the subtler emotions of other people, as well as the full implications of reality.

They Disregard Reality’s Time Sequence

Appreciating how life events are hooked together on a timeline is crucial to understanding how cause and effect works. However, EIPs live in the immediate emotional moment and can be oblivious to the chain of causation over time. Instead of seeing reality as a timeline, EIPs experience events as isolated blips unrelated to each other. This makes it hard for them to anticipate the future or to learn from errors. Ignoring time’s sequential reality lets them say and do the most dumbfounding things because they don’t feel the need to be logically consistent with their past statements or actions. For instance, they may be blithely oblivious to how their recent behavior has made them unwelcome. They can’t see why things shouldn’t go back to normal when they are ready to interact again.

Instead of analyzing their mistakes, they think, That was then; this is now. They are famous for their philosophy of “moving on” and “getting over it” and other forms of not processing the lessons of the past. They don’t connect the dots to see the overall trajectory of their lives. Therefore, they don’t notice when they are repeating past mistakes, nor can they steer themselves toward a different future.

The future isn’t a real consideration for them, so they feel free to deceive others, burn bridges, or create enemies. In seeking immediate gratifications, their future is left to take care of itself, often with predictably negative results.

Lack of time sequence awareness also makes lying seem like a reasonable solution. They never seem to realize that past actions or lying will likely catch up with them. They concoct something that gets them off the hook but don’t realize others will be suspicious due to past lies.

It can be maddening to try to get EIPs to take responsibility for their past behavior. Because their memories are not meaningfully connected to the present, they don’t understand why things from the past should be such a concern now. It’s over: why haven’t you moved on like they did? They simply don’t understand the persistence of cause and effect, especially when other people’s feelings are involved.

How They Think

In his study mentioned above, George Vaillant (1977) noted that maturity in coping isn’t determined by a person’s level of education or social standing. Emotional maturity is much deeper than intellectual ability or conventional success. EIPs and EI parents tend to show certain characteristics of thought, especially in the world of relationships and emotions.

Their Intelligence Doesn’t Extend to the World of Feelings

Being emotionally immature doesn’t necessarily affect a person’s raw intelligence. EIPs can be plenty intelligent as long as there is nothing emotional to unsettle them. Some can be highly intelligent and good at theoretical concepts, working well with abstract ideas or business models. As long as issues are safely cognitive or data-based, they can address the past and future, such as budgets, spreadsheet analyses, and retirement planning. But when it comes to emotionally arousing situations, like relationships or temptations, or subtle empathies, such as sensitivity or tact, they stop paying attention to cause and effect.

Their Thoughts About Life Are Simplistic, Literal, and Rigid

The immature personality structure of EIPs results in oversimplified, black-and-white thinking and rigid moral categories of all good or all bad (Kernberg 1985). The complexity of nuanced or ambiguous situations is boiled down to simplistic judgments that disregard crucial elements. EIPs’ thinking tends to be literal, based on a few favorite concepts and well-worn metaphors. They dislike the uncertainty of an evolving reality, so they can irrationally defend what is familiar. Abhorring complexity, they will cast off facts in order to jump to a quick conclusion that agrees with their preconceptions.

Sometimes people mistake the EIP’s oversimplifications for wisdom. EIPs and EI parents are famous for making statements that sound catchy and decisive. Thanks to their self-involvement, they deliver these pronouncements with authority. However, if you examine their words closely, they have a trite quality that isn’t giving you anything new. This is different from a mature person’s wisdom, in which they say things that feed your mind the longer you think about them.

EIPs’ mental rigidity makes them sticklers for rules and authoritarian values. They love the feeling of being in control so much that they will arbitrarily make up rules just to have a rule. They stubbornly uphold rules even when situations are so complex that hard-and-fast rules fly in the face of good sense.

However, EIPs’ egocentrism also means that they will break the same rules for their own gain. This is why some EIPs can commit such egregious moral misconduct within an otherwise rule-bound culture: if there wasn’t a specific rule about that specific behavior on the books, they might do it. EIPs are famous for behaviors that are so wrong that no one would’ve thought to make an explicit rule against it.

EIPs get increasingly single-minded and stubborn as situations become more complicated or stressful. Their one-track mind prevents them from taking individual differences or unanticipated consequences into account. Proud of being unyielding, they call their judgmental rigidity “moral fortitude” or “having a backbone.”]

lindsay c. gibson, from recovering from emotionally immature parents, 2019

[“You don’t know true freedom until you don’t want what they want you to want. Coming from white trash has advantages people with money don’t seem to understand. For years I’ve watched friends whose parents are doctors and bankers live in fear (even while rebelling) that they’re not good enough, not achieving enough, not clean enough, and especially not thin enough. The quest for socially-acceptable body fat ratio has never been discussed in my family, too consumed with bill collectors and police reports and how the judge will react.

When I escaped rural poverty for life in Philadelphia I was still a kid, skinny and conventionally cute, and I made friends with guys my age who were turning tricks for quick cash. My first boyfriend in the city was a coke dealer who kept me out of the skin trade, kept me in parties, kept me high and frantic. When he went to prison, I was lucky enough to fall into friendship with a group of vegans and macrobiotic spiritualists. For ten years my life revolved around eating well, animal rights, paganism; it was a beautiful ten years.

When I started working at Giovanni’s Room, the queer bookstore in Philadelphia, my diet became more vegetarian than vegan, and I started to gain weight. There was plenty of talk about this from customers, and especially my faggot friends who warned, “You better be careful, you’re getting FAT!” One regular customer who had a crush on me came into the store drunk one evening to stroke my cheek and tell me, “If you lost forty pounds you’d be my ideal!” And I said, “Oh really? How much do you weigh?” He beat his chest, “I’M A HUNDRED SIXTY POUNDS OF PURE MUSCLE!” I nodded and said, “Well, if YOU lost a hundred sixty pounds you’d be MY ideal!” He didn’t get it, standing there drunk and confused in his self-centered fantasy, as though I should have been grateful that he told me the secret to winning the trophy of his big hard cock.

They didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t care, and never had cared about my looks. And what they also didn’t seem to register was that there are a lot of faggots who love fat men. And there are precious few of us fat faggots to go around. While my friends were warning me to be careful, lest I lose love, they were missing the simple fact that love is for everyone! At the bookstore, the guys buying the fat porn like Bulk Male and all the other blubber-zines were starting to give me the glad eye. Hmm, it was something new, and I felt adventurous and titillated.

Suddenly, and I mean suddenly, my dance card was very full—being a self-assured fat gay man made me an overnight rock star! Now men bake me endless chocolate cupcakes, make me peanut butter cream sushi, and prepare my favorite deep fried vegan ham and noodles dishes. They indulge me, I indulge them—full, fully loved. Food and sex over long blissful nights have plucked my fat flower from the massive bouquet of cultural shame and released me in ways I never knew when I was thinner and with men who were obsessed with thinness.

There are faggots I know who are only attracted to the fat Elvis, and you feel the soft purr as they talk about His chubby neck and breasts. Some people get angry when debating how long Elvis was fat, furiously whittling it down to six months as though the dead are anything but thin. Let me assure you that a photograph of the fat Elvis will not evaporate from your wall in six months. Yes, you can jerk off to it for the rest of your life, I give you my word!

Existing simultaneously outside queer and straight norms is liberating, and constantly exciting in ways I had never anticipated. The tedious, predictable world behind us, we have it our way—and I mean that sexually as well as politically! Outside the respectable domain, the vantage of an unjust world is always clearest.”]

— CaConrad, from Going to zero to sexy on high-caloric queer overdrive, from why are faggots so afraid of faggots? flaming challenges to masculinity, objectification, and the desire to conform, edited by mattilda bernstein sycamore

James baldwin’s the artists struggle for identity. Btw.

‘no one wants to see your pictures of the sunset or food’ actually I Do

They just don’t release the hounds like they used to

one low/no empathy person who is trying their best to be kind and compassionate is worth a million '''empaths''' who use their 'high empathy' as an excuse to treat people they don't vibe with like shit