Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 17

New Gender Zine

Alex Iantaffi and I have created a zine about gender to give you a sense of the kind of thing we cover in our book How to Understand Your Gender. It includes the gorgeous images that Julia Scheele drew for us, kindly paid for by the Open University.

You can download the zine here and work through it to explore gender in general – and your own gender. If there’s anything you want to find out more about, we give furthers detail in the book, and there’s a list of further resources at the back of the zine

Gender Zine

 

More about How to Understand Your Gender

You can listen to Alex and me talking about the book on a podcast here.
You can read our interview for Jessica Kingsley here.
You can read about Alex’s reasons for writing the book here…
And mine here.
You can read a more academic piece about how this book fits into my wider project here.

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The wheel of consent and why I’m a fan

Content note: Includes descriptions of consensual kissing with people in more or less dominant and submissive mental states, and mention of non-consensual sexual behaviour without descriptions.

The Wheel of Consent is an idea from the awesome sexologist and intimacy coach Betty Martin. I heard about it through my mates in the sexological bodywork and urban tantra scenes and found it extremely useful. However, I’ve also introduced it to other people in my life who haven’t connected with it at all. So I thought I’d write a bit here to try and explain it because it can be complicated to get your head around. I’ll also say why I find it so helpful.

This is definitely my take on the wheel, so please do check out Betty’s own website to get her – far more thorough – explanations. She’s super generous with her free resources and you can download both the wheel and the three minute game based on it for free, as well as watching plenty of vids that go into detail about how it all works.

The idea of the wheel of consent is that when we’re sexual – or probably in many other contexts in our lives – we move between different zones. Often we’re not aware of which zone we’re in. The wheel divides the zones up so that we can notice where we are more readily, and reflect on how to do consent in each of the zones, because it works in different ways in each one.

Here’s the basic wheel as I understand it …

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So taking the example of a kiss, here’s what it might be like in each of the quadrants:

Taking

‘May I kiss you?’ you ask, and when they nod enthusiastically, you take their shoulders firmly in your hands, and press your lips up against theirs, invading their mouth with your tongue, feeling the heat and excitement rising up inside you.

Allowing

‘May I kiss you?’ they ask, and when you whisper ‘yes’ they step towards you, tilting your head back and bringing their lips against yours. You open your mouth and let them take it over, knowing how much it’s arousing them to do so.

Serving

‘Will you kiss me?’ they ask, blushing a little at their boldness. ‘Yes,’ you agree, moving slowly towards them in order to judge their response. You bring your lips against theirs, softly at first, tuning into their movements and breathing to judge how your kiss is being received. This is all about giving them pleasure. After kissing them for a while you pull back to check in. ‘How’s that?’ you ask. They flush further ‘Amazing… Please will you do it even harder…’

Accepting

‘Will you kiss me?’ you ask. ‘Hell yes,’ is their immediate response: so keen to serve. They put their arms around you and begin to explore your mouth with their lips, tentatively at first. You make appreciative noises, and pull them into you, to show them exactly how you like it done.

~

Hopefully these examples illustrate both what it’s like to be in each of the zones and how consent works in them. I’ll now say a bit about four reasons why I find the wheel – and the three minute game that’s based on it – so useful. For me it’s about hotness, matching sexual preferences, self-consent, and other-consent.

Hotness

Perhaps one of the big reasons why I, and others, like the wheel so much is that it can be very hot to focus on being in one quadrant at a time. Often in sex – and in other aspects of life – we try to be in many places at the same time. So, for example, we’re kissing each other and we’re trying to excite the other person because we want them to find us a good kisser, but we’re also trying to get excited ourselves because we want to be ready if things progress beyond kissing. Perhaps we’re doing ‘taking’ style kissing because we think that’s what they want, but that throws us more into ‘serving’ mode, except we haven’t actually checked out what they like. In such situations are you doing or done to? Are you giving or receiving? It can be pretty confusing.

Many people like the simplicity of the quadrants because you know where you are and you can focus on one pleasure at a time: the pleasure of taking what you want, the pleasure of somebody using you to turn themselves on, the pleasure of serving somebody, or the pleasure of someone focusing all their attention on getting you excited, for example.

Of course this may well be the reason why the wheel doesn’t work so well for some people. Perhaps they prefer sex that has all these things mixed up together, maybe because it feels more reciprocal and mutual that way. Perhaps sex for them flows naturally between doing and being done to, and between giving and receiving.

Fitting sexual preferences

Another helpful idea – Mosher’s sexual path preferences – might help us out with this. Mosher suggests that people’s sexual preferences can be about three things:

Acting out roles,
Engaging with partners, and/or
Sexual trance.

Many of us enjoy two, or all three, of these things, but often one of them is dominant. So role-enactment people are particularly into bringing certain sides of themselves to sex (e.g. confident, shy, dominant, pleasing, cheeky). Partner-engagement folk are most focused on the connection with the other person or people during sex. And sexual-trance people like to spin off in their own minds and bodies from the sensations and rhythms of sex.

My rough working theory is perhaps the wheel works particularly well for role-enactment people, because sex for us is exciting if we get into a certain headspace or character. We like being the taker, the allower, the server, or the accepter. Some of us probably have a preference for certain of these quadrants, some like to mix it up. And I’m guessing that for many of us it’s easier to know which quadrant we’re in and to stay there. Being encouraged into a different quadrant by a partner could feel quite jolting once we’re in the zone.

Maybe people who’re more into partner engagement or sexual trance feel less need to remain in one quadrant, or even struggle if they’re restricted to one quadrant at a time – perhaps because it prevents them from the sense of flow or mutuality they’re looking for from sex.

Alternatively perhaps the wheel offers us a further dimension of sexuality to add to all of the others (what our sexual path preference is, what gender/s we’re attracted to, where we’re at on the asexual spectrum, etc.) This would be whether we’re somebody who likes to stick with a quadrant, or somebody who likes to mix it up.

Self-consent

I also appreciate the wheel of consent because it helps us to practice consent: both consent with ourselves and consent with others. In Betty’s own depiction of the wheel she includes how consent works in the dynamics between taking and allowing (the taker asks ‘may I…?’) and accepting and serving (the accepter asks ‘will you…?’) – as I illustrated with the kiss example.

Betty’s three minute game suggests trying out the wheel in pairs. Basically during the game you each spend three minutes in each quadrant (with your partner taking the opposite quadrant to the one you’re in). This gives you an opportunity to experience what it’s like to be taker, allower, server, and accepter. If you like the game you can keep going round and round of course, and it can be good to each reflect what it was like for you after each round.

One of the things many people find challenging about the three minute game is that when they are in the taker and accepter quadrants, they have to figure out what – if anything – they want to do to the other person, and what – if anything – they want done to them. For those (many) of us who’ve learnt in their lives to focus on pleasing others this can be pretty challenging, but it’s a great practice for tuning into yourself and figuring out what you want.

Additionally, in the allower and server quadrants you must only allow, and do, things that you consent to. So there’s a great opportunity in the game to tune into your body and to whether it’s responding ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’ to the suggestion the other person makes when they say ‘may I…?’ or ‘will you…’ It’s a good opportunity to practice refusing suggestions that you don’t consent to with a strong permission to do so: something which we know can be difficult during sex.

Other consent

In Betty’s version of the wheel she also includes the non-consensual ‘shadow sides’ that each quadrant can turn into if not done consensually – in other words if you’re doing a thing, or letting it be done, without checking that everyone is fully up for it, and establishing the conditions under which people can honestly say where they’re at. These shadow sides can be helpful to check out whether we’re really engaging with other people consensually. So…

If somebody takes non-consensually they’re being a perpetrator or groper
If somebody allows non-consensually they’re being a doormat or pushover
If somebody accepts non-consensually they’re being entitled and freeloading
If somebody serves non-consensually they’re being a martyr or rescuer

Again, it seems like the three minute game could be a useful one for figuring out which quadrants you feel comfortable in, and which leave you quite uncomfortable. Is it because that ‘shadow side’ is one you’re familiar with, either in yourself or others? Do you maybe need to practice self and/or other consent more than you have been doing in that area?

This gets us to another reason why the wheel might be challenging for people. Given that we live in a highly non-consensual culture we all tend towards some – or all – of these shadow sides at times. Perhaps the three minute game is a painful reminder of this. It certainly has the potential to take us into some deep and troubling territory, so it’s worth doing a whole load of self-care around it if we are going to try it out. However, not exploring our potentials for non-consent is probably even more concerning.

Find our more…

I hope you’ve found this a useful intro to Betty Martin’s ideas. Please do go over to her website and read more if so.

If you want to read and listen to more of my thoughts on sex and relationships, check out megjohnandjustin.com where Justin Hancock and I have our blog, podcast, and zines.

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Bi visibility day: Gay invisibility

For bi visibility day (Sept 23rd) this year I wanted to share a piece I wrote a couple of years back imagining what the world would be like if bi people were treated like gay/lesbian people are now, and vice versa to illuminate the strange place we find ourselves in with bi invisibility. I hope you find it helpful…

There’s also a podcast and blog post all about bi visibility over on megjohnandjustin.com.

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Gay Invisibility

Imagine a world where bi people were treated like gay & lesbian people, and vice versa…

You wake up in the morning and smile, remembering it’s Pride day. You’re going to get to march with all your lesbian and gay mates. Then your heart sinks a little remembering previous Prides. You’ll probably be relegated to the back of the march again after all the hundreds of bi charities and groups and organisations. Sure some of them have finally added LG to their names these days, but BTLG is mostly about the B and everyone knows it. It’s crazy-making when we know that LG people make up around half of all LGB people. Where are they all?

You know you’ll also be lucky this afternoon if there’s even one gay or lesbian identified person up on the stage at the end of Pride. Last year one gay activist got about a minute up there before the next bi band came on. It’s like the Purple List of influential BTLG people: Published in a major national newspaper every year and almost everyone on it is bi. A small gay magazine published a ‘rainbow list’, to make the point that there are lots of influential LG people too, but people didn’t pay much attention to that. It’s so frustrating because you know for a fact that many of the famous bi actors, sportspeople, and pop stars only ever have same-sex relationships, but they still call themselves ‘bi’ because being gay is so stigmatised. When that swimmer came out a couple of years back the bi press immediately called him bi even though he deliberately only said that he was attracted to people of the same-sex. There’s so few gay role-models or gay storylines on TV programmes. It only makes lesbian and gay people more invisible.

You sigh. It’s hard being gay in a world where everyone’s divided into heterosexual or bisexual. They’ve even done research now to try to prove that same-sex-only attraction doesn’t exist: that you’re either ‘straight, bi, or lying’. People can wrap their head around attraction to the opposite gender, or to people of any gender, but not to only being attracted to the same gender only. When you try to point out that Kinsey found that sexuality was a spectrum: there were people at the far end who were just attracted to the same gender, they just dismiss you saying that research is outdated.

Over breakfast you flick through the latest report from a major BTLG mental health charity. It’s great work they’re doing and you try to support them, but the gay invisibility really gets on your nerves. Several places in the document talk about ‘biphobia and transphobia’ and don’t mention homophobia at all. You’ve brought that up with them in the past and they just claim that homophobia is a subset of biphobia. It’s the same kind of argument as people who use ‘bi’ as an umbrella term for everyone with same-sex attraction whether they’re also attracted to the opposite sex or not. You’ve tried to point out that the word ‘bisexual’ doesn’t accurately capture your sexual orientation but they just look at you like you’re making a big deal over nothing. It’s all ‘bi people’, ‘bi relationships’, ‘bi parents’, ‘the bi community’ etc. etc. etc.

The report talks about the fact that BLG people have worse mental health than straight people, but it just lumps all BLG people together. You find that annoying because you know that it’s the lesbian and gay people who actually have the highest rates of depression, self-harm and suicide. Research like this means that the money and resources go to BLG people as a whole rather than to LG people in particular. And that mostly means the big commercial ‘bi scene’ which very few LG people actually access. So the help isn’t going to the people who need it most, and the bis are the ones who get all the funding.

Again you’ve tried to point this out, but the bi activists you’ve spoken to argue that it’s important to get everyone accepting bisexuality fully as the first step to BTLG rights. Once that’s happened they can work on the more ‘complicated’ identities like gay and lesbian. That’s why so many people’s energy went into the multiple marriage campaign. Now polyamorous bisexual and straight people can marry more than one partner, or one opposite-sex partner. But there’s still no allowance for gay people – and monogamous bisexuals – who want to marry one same-sex partner only. Even during the campaign loads of people were saying that there was a danger that multiple marriage would open the floodgates to same-sex-only marriage, comparing it to incest and bestiality. They call multiple marriage ‘equal marriage’ now, but it’s not truly equal. When you point that out people just accuse you of sour grapes.

Last BTLG history month you tried to get your organisation’s BTLG group to do an exhibition of famous LG people through history, but the other people on the committee (all bi of course) said that most of the people you suggested were ‘probably bi really’. And they’re always going on about Stonewall as this big event in BT history, dismissing all the gay people who were also involved at the forefront of what happened back then. The committee ended up putting a bunch of the Stonewall posters up round the organisation: ‘Some people are bi, get over it’ and ‘One is bi. If that bothers people, our work continues.’ You pointed out that there were actually ‘gay’ posters available as well but they just gave you a look and said ‘the campaign’s about eradicating biphobia in the workplace, alright.’ You hear that Stonewall have consulted with lesbian and gay people to try to improve inclusion, but you feel so jaded after all this time that you’ll believe that when you see it.

You check your phone. Looks like a bunch of your mates are going out to a bi bar after the Pride event. You’re not tempted. Last time you did that everyone assumed you’d be attracted to multiple genders and it was really uncomfortable when you came out as gay. Like at work and with your family they also kept forgetting and assuming you were bi, so you had to come out again and again. And you’re so sick of the stereotypes. Some bi people won’t date you for fear that you’ll leave them for another gay person. Others treat you with suspicion: ‘are you sure you’re really gay?’

The double discrimination is probably the worst thing. You kind of expect homophobia from the straight world, but getting it from bi people as well is really hard. Like when you finally left the football team you were on because of the homophobic discrimination there, and joined a BTLG football team only to find that they called you ‘gold star’ like it was a big joke, and kept going on about your sexuality and how you must be ‘picky’ or ‘confused’.

You remember back to last year’s Pride. Double discrimination there too. Your group marching past a bunch of bi people and they all started singing some old Eurovision song ‘loosen you mind up’ which you know was a homophobic joke. Mostly though the crowd just went quiet when your group walked past and then started cheering for the next bi group.

When you told your bi friends about it in the pub afterwards they said you were probably just exaggerating or being over-sensitive. They think you’re crazy to be so bothered by it, but you think the world is crazy for not being able to see gay invisibility when it’s right in their face.

Maybe you’ll just stay at home.

 

This story is based on all based on research on bisexuality reviewed in The Bisexuality Report (with the sexualities reversed of course!)

With many thanks to Catherine Butler and colleagues for their inspiration with the Homoworld story and short film, as well as this US version.

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How to understand your gender

My new book How to Understand Your Gender comes out today! It’s my first time writing a full book with the amazing Alex Iantaffi, and we’re so pleased with what’s come out of our collaboration. Huge thanks to Jessica Kingsley for all of their support publishing the book, and for signing us up for a sequel already (watch this space!) and to The Open University CCIG for sponsoring Julia Scheele‘s amazing illustrations and supporting my involvement in the project.

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Like most of my books, this one starts from the idea that cultural pressures around gender are a huge part of the struggles we have in this area. It unpacks how gender is viewed in the world around us, and encourages readers to think about their own genders within this through a series of activities and reflections. The book draws on Alex and my own experiences of gender as well as the anonymised experiences of people we’ve worked with over the years, to give examples of the very diverse ways there are of experiencing, identifying, and expressing gender.

People often imagine that gender is only relevant to women, and/or perhaps trans people. However recent writing on the impact of toxic masculinity on men, and rigid gender norms on cisgender people, have highlighted that it’s a vital topic for everyone to explore. For that reason, How to Understand Your Gender isn’t aimed at people of any particular gender – or agender – identity or experience. Instead it aims to provide a route-map for anybody who’s thinking about their own gender, or struggling to navigate the constantly shifting terrain of gender that’s out there at the moment.

Gender hardly ever seems to be out of the news at the moment. Just in the past month, for example, The BBC show No More Boys and Girls showed how highly gendered schools and families are, and the impact of this on children as young as seven who believe that ‘boys are better’, that girls should be pretty and can’t be successful, and that boys shouldn’t show any emotions except anger. Robert Webb publicised his book How Not To Be a Boy about the damaging impact that dominant ideals of masculinity had on him. John Lewis announced that it wouldn’t label children’s clothes ‘for boys’ and ‘for girls’ any more which resulted in a huge backlash. A couple were interviewed in the media because they had threatened to sue their child’s school for allowing a child who was assigned male at birth to wear dresses. Talk show host James O’Brien responded in spectacular fashion to both these news stories. L’Oreal’s first trans model Munroe Bergdorff was fired for pointing out white privilege and structural racism. And Piers Morgan continued his ongoing campaign against non-binary and gender fluidity in conversation with Julian Clary.

How to Understand Your Gender takes an intersectional approach to explore how our genders are  interwoven with race, culture, class, age, generation, disability and many other aspects of our identity and experience. In this way hopefully it will provide some helpful signposts for thinking through these kinds of news stories, as well as being useful for considering how the issues they raise resonate through our own lives.

Find out more:

You can buy the book via Amazon, Waterstones, or Jessica Kingsley’s own website.

You can hear a podcast with me and Alex talking about the book over on megjohnandjustin.com.

If you’re in London you can come and here me talk about the book, and gender, on Wednesday 4th October at Conway Hall. Details here.

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It and Intergenerational Trauma

Last night I went to see the new (2017) movie version of Stephen King’s It. I have a long history with this story so I almost didn’t go. I was nervous that it might take away from something that was precious to me, as film adaptations sometimes can. The opposite was the case. Watching the novel that I’ve read so many times brought to life so perfectly enabled the penny to finally drop for me (pun intended). I finally got what this story’s all about, and why it’s resonated with me so much over the years. This is my attempt to explain It.

Disclaimer 1: Obviously this is just my reading. Many other readings are possible.

Disclaimer 2: All the themes present in It are also present in this piece, so don’t read it if you don’t want to be spoilered, or find those topics too troubling right now (bullying; family physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; bereavement; violence and murder; structural and systemic oppression including racism, misogyny, and homophobia).

Disclaimer 3: There are also some images of scary clowns of course.

TLDR: I love Stephen King and I think It is about intergenerational trauma.

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Horror books

Libraries were a focal point of my childhood, just as they are in It. A key moment for me was when I graduated from the kid’s corner of the library to the whole wild open expanse of the adult books. One section in particular drew me to it as surely as if it’d been marked out by the presence of a floating balloon.

I remember the thrill of browsing the covers of the horror books. Some of the images were enough to haunt my dreams without me even cracking the pages. There was a rebellion too in picking these books: disapproving glances from the librarian; bafflement from friends; a shake of the head from my English teacher when I chose to review pulp horror rather than literary fiction. I never understood why these books were somehow regarded as of lesser value. I just knew they were immensely valuable to me, although I doubt I could’ve explained why at the time.

Eventually I got a part-time job at the library. One of the perks was that I got first dibs on the books they were selling off for 10 or 20p. I soon amassed by own horror collection with laminated covers and the library pockets still stuck to their front pages. For my favourite authors I saved my pocket money for the glossy new paperbacks at the big WHSmith in town.

A non-horror fan looking at that section of the library probably wouldn’t be able to discern much difference between the books. They’d just see shelf after shelf of equivalent paperbacks with nightmare titles and dark covers embossed with gruesome images: as identical to one another as the Mills and Boons over by the door.

For me though they were very different. I knew that I was more drawn to the current authors than the classic ones, although I later developed a fondness for M. R. James. I also filtered out most of the books based on movies or supposedly true stories as not particularly inspiring. Finally I learnt to distinguish the writers whose work seemed to be about something more than simply frightening the reader with the nastiest things they could imagine. The latter books did nothing for me apart from disturbing my mind, but the former got my attention and eventually my devotion.

An enduring memory from my teenage years is of sitting on the floor of my sloping attic bedroom, my back propped against the radiator for warmth. There’s a packet of plain digestive biscuits by my side and a mug of hot chocolate. Erasure and George Michael are playing on the stereo. The walls are covered with hand-drawn pictures and posters of my favourite film and TV characters. There’s probably an incense stick burning. I’m wearing a baggy sweater and jeans. In my hand is a thick Dean R. Koontz, or a James Herbert, or a Stephen King. The spine is cracked. I’m lost in the story as the sky darkens outside. I know I won’t go to sleep till I’ve finished the book. Somehow that would be letting the characters down: letting the evil win.

Stephen King

King is the only author from that period who I still read. Returning to these authors as an adult Herbert is a bit too inconsistent: meaningful stories interspersed with just plain nasties. Koontz can get too sappy for me, although I retain my copies of Watchers and Phantoms because those are proper good.

But I’ve come back to King again and again. Certainly there are periods of his writing that don’t inspire me, and occasional books that are complete misses to my mind. But overall there’s so much to love, and his recent stuff is just as good as his early works. He’s a master of the short story, and I regularly return to those collections as well as to the handful of novels that seem to give more on each re-read.

It is one of those books for me. I remember the first version of the paperback that I got out of the library. It had a black cover with the grating of a storm drain on the front and a set of glowing eyes down there. I made it a couple of chapters in and couldn’t get any further. It was too scary.

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I got it out again, a year or so later, and the same thing happened. The book called to me, but it was too much. I wasn’t ready.

Then my Dad went to the US for a conference. He brought me back a present, probably without knowing my history with the book: a copy of It. Quite the departure for my Dad who usually focused on trying to get me to crack the books that he believed everyone should read such as Moby Dick or Metals in the Service of Man! This was a more appropriate gift. The TV mini-series must’ve just come out in the States because the cover had a picture of Tim Curry’s version of Pennywise the clown on it.

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My memory is that I finally managed to read the whole book when I went into hospital for one of the minor surgeries on my ears that punctuated my childhood and adolescence. That copy of It was the only book I took into hospital with me. If I wanted distracting from the scary situation I was in, that was all I had. I read it till they came to wheel me to the operating room. It was there on the bedside table when I came around from the anaesthetic. Back home it saw me through my recovery, taking me away from the pain of my sore and bleeding ears.

A couple of years back I made a decision to revisit It as I went in for surgery for the first time as an adult. It was a meaningful choice as the operation in question was top surgery to flatten my chest. Here I was in my forties making the decision to reshape my body in the way I longed for as a pre-teen. The nostalgic reading material made a lot of sense. It intrigues me now that my two main memories of reading It come from around the same ages as the child and adult versions of the characters in the novel.

During my recovery I also re-read several of King’s other novels. The main thing that struck me, which I hadn’t noticed earlier in my life, was what a legend this guy was. Right back in the 1970s and 1980s he was writing books where convincing women were the main characters, while so many male authors had no female characters, or ones that were poorly drawn and only served as victims or convenient motivations for the heroes. He was similarly awesome on class. Also the horror in these King novels frequently took the form of things like domestic violence, sexual abuse in families, marital rape, or bullying. If supernatural forces were in there at all, they only served to highlight the real human horror of such things.

The one novel that I didn’t re-read because I still can’t get past the first chapter was Carrie. That one is still too frighteningly accurate in its depiction of the horrors of girls’ bullying and what periods are like for somebody who hasn’t been prepared for them. I’m eternally grateful to King though for understanding and expressing the horror of those experiences.

It

Going back to It, somehow I didn’t put this novel in the same category as those other books (Carrie, Rose Madder, Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, etc.). Sure It had something to say about childhood and bullying, but mostly it was a more standard horror book about the ancient evil haunting the town of Derry.

I figured I was drawn to It because it told the truth that childhood is a horrifying time for many of us, and because I was wistfully drawn to its depiction of a group of loser kids who bonded together and found friendship with each other. I longed as a kid for a world where losers recognised each other and found friendship together. In my experience they either shunned each other for fear of being bullied more, or hurt each other if they did ever become close because they were too bruised or broken to handle the intimacy. I would totally have braved a sewer and an evil clown if it meant the possibility of getting a group of friends like Bill, Mike, Ben, Bev, Richie, Stan, and Eddie.

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I was blown away watching the movie adaptation because it enabled me to see something in the story that I just hadn’t spotted before. I’m not sure whether it was the way this film captured the feel of the novel so perfectly, and/or the fact that I’ve finally understood these themes in my own life, but finally I got It. Several times during the film I found myself in tears. It felt like I was cracked open and someone – or something – was seeing into my soul. At the end I wandered out of the cinema in a daze. I walked along the Thames trying to make sense of it. Finally the phrase ‘intergenerational trauma’ came to mind. At that point I hopped a tube to get home quickly to my journal. I’ll try to explain what I wrote here. I’ll focus on the movie version of the story because that’s freshest in my mind right now.

Pennywise or not?

So the monster in It is an ancient evil force that lies dormant under Derry. Every 27 years it awakes and terrorises the town, taking the form of Pennywise the dancing clown. It entices kids down into the sewers and feeds on their fear. Pennywise will win as long as it keeps the kids separate and scared. If they band together and face their fears then they can beat it.

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But Pennywise isn’t the real monster here. If we took Pennywise out of the picture entirely this would still be a terrifying movie. Before It even comes into their lives, the kids are already going through some deeply scary shit.

Ben is the new kid in school, alienated for his weight and his newness. He’s the target of the town bullies who threaten to ‘cut his tits off’. Mike has lost his parents in a traumatic fire. His uncle attempts to ‘make a man of him’ by teaching him how to kill farm animals, and tells him that if he doesn’t become a man he’ll end up being one of the sheep in life and get shot. Bev is living with a father who is either sexually abusing her, or is poised to start doing so, and she is shunned by all her peers who spread rumours that she’s a slut. Eddie’s mother keeps him trapped and anxious with all of the health-related fears that she projects onto him, gaslighting him into believing they’re real. Stan’s dad makes it clear how disappointed he is in a son who seems unable to follow in his footsteps. When It does come into the picture, Bill’s parents can only deal with their grief over his brother’s death by disappearing into themselves and attacking Bill when he tries to express his grief. We don’t get to see the reasons behind Richie’s ‘trashmouth’ but in the novel we find that similarly tough things are going on for him at home. Like Eddie and Bill, he’s also a target for the local bullies due to his disability.

I don’t know about you, but thinking about the kids I knew growing up I could point to at least one who was going through the equivalent of each of these things, and more. And that’s from a time when most of this stuff was kept well hidden. The childhoods that the people who I’m friends with now had make the home and school-lives of the kids in It look pretty average.

Intergenerational trauma

Let’s think about the 27 year period that It hibernates for. 27 years is about the time it would take for the children who were targeted by Pennywise in one generation to become adults and be having kids themselves. So the parents, guardians and teachers of the main characters would’ve been the children themselves 27 years ago. And their parents, guardians and teachers would be the kids of the previous 27 year Pennywise moment, going all the way back to the founding of Derry.

My theory is that Pennywise is a metaphor for intergenerational trauma. If the kids in one generation don’t face their demons, when they go on to have kids themselves those kids are doomed to be confronted by the very same demons. In this case the demons are both the evil clown who they literally have to face and fight, and the trauma, abuse and neglect that they experience at the hands of their parents, guardians and teachers, and the other children around them who’ve been damaged by their own parents, guardians and teachers. For example, we see in the movie how the main male bully, Henry, is constantly punished and put down by his father, and how one of the female bullies has a father who’s creepy around teenage girls.

So it’s the intergenerational trauma inherent in both family and school systems that’s the real monster here. Not only do parents, guardians, teachers, and other adults hurt kids with their actions and inactions, they also create the bullies who terrorise the kids. Vitally they also refuse to see the pain the kids are going through. No adult intervenes to help even when the kids are clearly distressed. The obliviousness of the adults is captured in the scene where a couple drives past Ben as the bullies surround him, deliberately avoiding looking at them.

And of course the trauma is intergenerational because the adults only behave in these ways towards the kids because the adults in their lives behaved in similar ways towards them, right back to the start.

The legacy of survival strategies

What broke my heart watching the film is how understandable it all is. As vulnerable children we just want to put our heads down and survive the horror. If somebody else is getting targeted we’re relieved that it takes the heat off us for a while. The last thing we feel capable of doing is standing alongside that person and putting ourselves back in the line of fire.

And as adults we don’t want to confront the demons of our childhoods. In fact, as we see in the novel of It (and presumably the sequel to the movie), it becomes way more hard to confront our demons as adults than it was when we were kids. We push all the memories and feelings down and pretend that it wasn’t that bad. That often means that we’re oblivious to what the kids in our own lives are going through. This is because we’ve taught ourselves not to see those demons, because it seems normal and no worse than our own childhoods, and because it’s so intolerably hard to accept that we might be implicated in their horror ourselves.

Our short term strategies of survival (as kids) and denial (as adults) seem like the best ones to keep us alive and sane. But like so many short term strategies they’re the one that put us – and the people around us – at greater risk. If we employ these survival strategies as kids we grow up traumatised and capable of hurting others because of the patterns we develop in our attempts to avoid further trauma. If we employ these denial strategies as adults then we keep repeating the patterns, and we risk losing our connection with the next generation in one way or another. If we want to ensure that the intergenerational trauma doesn’t keep coming back we have to face our demons.

Why we love a bogeyman

It also demonstrates how we create bogeymen to help us to deny our own capacity for hurting others. We see this playing out on a cultural level all the time. We’re obsessed by extremely rare criminals like serial killers and rapists, and stranger child abusers. We consume a vast amount of fiction about such criminals as entertainment. And real stories about them are considered to be the most newsworthy, with crimes that don’t fit that preferred narrative rarely hitting the headlines. Statistically though, people are far, far more likely to be killed, raped or abused by someone they know.

The greatest risks to kids in terms of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are within the home and the school. Way more kids die at their own hands as a result of bullying and other abuses than ever die at the hands of stranger murderers. Many more make it through to adulthood with parts of themselves deeply damaged by such experiences. People clamour for lists of paedophiles to protect their kids from, while telling them that the abuse they experience at school is just a normal part of childhood, or even a positive thing to prepare them for adult life. Interestingly the very first article I ever had published was about exactly this point!

So Pennywise can be read as a very helpful bogeyman for Derry. It keeps everyone’s attention on the evil outsider abducting their kids so they don’t have to think too carefully about what those same kids are going through in their homes or schools.

Normativity as intergenerational trauma

The role of cultural norms in all of this is also clear in It. The ‘losers’ who attract the torment of their peers – and the punishment, disapproval or smothering of their parents or guardians – are the ones who are ‘different’ or marginalised: they’re all disabled, fat, black, Jewish, or female. Tellingly they also all challenge normative cultural gender roles. The boys are frequently called ‘faggots’ for being weak or showing feelings, and punished for any perceived femininity or lack of manliness. The one girl in the group is attacked for being too sluttish and for being too boyish.

Again we’re all implicated in the intergenerational trauma of passing on the systems which oppress and marginalise ‘others’ like this: ableism, fatphobia, racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, etc. For example, there’s a huge investment in maintaining restrictive gender rules down the generations, despite it hurting both those who try to fit it and those who’re alienated by it. Many TV shows and books demonstrate the damage this does to people in general, and many statistics point to the appalling suicide rates of gender ‘non-conforming’ kids. However people still respond to attempts to loosen the rigid gender system in schools and families with cries that it constitutes ‘child abuse’ and ‘social engineering’ and goes against science (it doesn’t).

Look beneath the surface of It and it’s pretty clear that the roots of the intergenerational trauma that run through Derry lie in settler colonialism, structural racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. Each time It awakes, it simply whips up the human forms of hatred and fear that are most prevalent at the time. Thus the disappearance of the first white inhabitants of Derry is blamed on indigenous people. In the 1930s the Black Spot nightclub is burnt down in a racist attack by white supremacists. In the novel, the homophobia of the AIDS crisis is the form of hatred and fear that It particularly draws on during the 1980s.

It’s trying to divide us

The moment in the film which brought me to tears was the point where the kids fought over whether they were going to face Pennywise or not. Bill wanted them to follow him to confront It but many of the others were too scared, blaming Bill for the danger they’d already been placed in. Then one of them said ‘It’s trying to divide us. That’s what It wants.’

Replace ‘It’ in this sentence with any or all of the systems of power and oppression that I just listed and that statement is a punch in the gut. Over the last month I’ve seen LGBT+ activists burnt out by battles with each other, feminists physically attacking each other over divisions between them, a black woman fired for describing the realities of living under structural racism. Meanwhile… Well I don’t really need to recap what’s been happening meanwhile, suffice to say that capitalist, colonialist, white supremacist hetero-patriarchy (or whatever you want to call it) seems relatively un-dented.

Facing our demons together

So what does It teach us that we need to do if we want an end to this intergenerational trauma? We need to stop hiding behind bogeymen and actually face our demons.

We need to recognise what happened to us growing up and the impact that had instead of conveniently forgetting, denying, or glossing over it. We need to acknowledge the systems, structures, and dynamics that hurt us – and those around us – and commit to not simply reproducing them for the next generation.

We need to look at the demons we inevitably have inside ourselves as a result of being part of these systems and structures. We need to face the damage that we – and the systems we’re implicated in – have done, and commit to start doing things differently. It’s terrifying work for sure, but the alternative is that we continue to be the monster. Pennywise is just our own reflection in the mirror.

The other message of It is that we can’t do it alone. It’s too much. It’s impossible. We have to band together despite our differences. We have to resist the tendency to divide into ‘us’ and ‘them’, shunning ‘them’ until there’s only ourselves left, alone and exposed.

We need to recognise that this ancient evil hurts us all and that we’re all implicated in it. And then we need to band together with all the other losers and get down into those sewers to face it. Are you with me?

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Find out more:

Here’s Stephen King writing about why he thinks we crave horror movies.
I’ll be writing so much more about this kind of thing in my long-term book project Everyday Horrors (a mash-up of fic, memoir, and self-help). There’s another post that links to that project here.

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Mindfulness: It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it

Here’s an old post on mindfulness, revamped now that I’m returning to the topic for the 2nd edition of my book Rewriting the Rules. What makes something mindful or mindless?

I’ve been interested in mindfulness for many years now. I’ve written a book on mindful therapy about how all different kinds of counsellors can engage with mindfulness, and how we can approach different struggles – like depression and anxiety – mindfully. It’s a good starting point if you want to find out more.

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Mindfulness is still the big idea in counselling and psychology. The ‘gold standard’ of counselling – cognitive-behavioural therapy – has turned to mindfulness as its ‘third wave’. If you go to a mental health services it’s likely they’ll offer you some kind of mindfulness training. Self help books for depression and anxiety are increasingly mindfulness focused.

One conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s no such thing as an inherently mindful or non-mindful activity. People – including myself at times – often have the idea that only certain activities could be mindful: like meditating, walking in the countryside, perhaps painting or other tranquil pursuits. There’s definitely a notion that certain activities are anti-mindful or mindless, including things like watching TV, commuting or social-networking.

As with the idea that you’re doing meditation wrong if you don’t have a completely ’empty mind’ I think this is a misconception which isn’t helpful and which often leads people to beating themselves up that they aren’t doing mindfulness properly – which really defeats the purpose! Just as you can sit in meditation without being mindful at all, I think you can also be mindful while you’re texting or surfing the internet.

Here I want to say what I think mindfulness is and why it’s all about the way you approach activities, not the activity itself.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is an idea which originated in Buddhism over two thousand years ago. It involves being aware of the present moment in an accepting way. The theory of mindfulness is that much human suffering involves our being out of the present moment – going over things from the past or planning for the future – in a way which tries to make things different, and which takes us away from any awareness of the here-and-now.

I wake up in the morning and immediately remember something I said in a meeting yesterday which I’m worried sounded foolish. As I make coffee and eat breakfast I’m going over and over how I could have done it differently and what people will be thinking of me. Walking to work I’m planning for the day, concerned about how I’m going to fit everything in. I’m brought back with irritation as someone pushes past me on the tube. At work with each task I undertake I’m focused on getting it out of the way so that I can get on with the next one. I keep refreshing my facebook and twitter to distract myself because I’m not enjoying the work. I start worrying maybe this job is no good. If only I worked somewhere else, then I’d be happy. I spend the journey home daydreaming about a different life but the distance between my life and that one brings me down. Back home I switch on the TV and escape into my shows.

The practice of mindfulness involves deliberately cultivating the opposite to this habitual mode of being. Instead of wishing that things were otherwise, we try to be with them as they are with acceptance. Instead of going off into past and future, we try to stay in the present. And instead of missing what’s going on around us, and in our bodies, we deliberately bring awareness to those things.

That explains why the basic mindfulness practice is just sitting still and paying attention to your breath going in and out. That’s a good way of practising being in the present moment and being aware of the most basic aspects of experience. Also, our breath connects us to the world in a fundamental way, and it’s always there, so it’s a useful focal point.

But the idea that we should have an empty mind while we are practising mindfulness is a misconception because the whole point is to be present to whatever is here in the moment. Inevitably that will include sounds outside, thoughts and feelings bubbling up, an itch or pain in the body. Mindfulness is about embracing all these things in a kind of spacious awareness: not latching on to any of them, but equally not trying to ignore them either. And of course we’ll find ourselves following a thought process that’s just too sticky to avoid, or forgetting our breath when the building noise outside annoys us. At those times we just notice what’s happened with interest, and the impact it has on us, and gently bring ourselves back to the breath.

The real, and only, purpose of practising mindfulness (whether we do it in sitting meditation, or slow walking, yoga, painting or whatever works for us) is so that we can bring that way of being into the rest of our lives. Again, this is no easy matter, and berating ourselves every time we realise that we are not being mindful is really not the idea!

Thich Nhat Hanh, who wrote The Miracle of Mindfulness, suggests that everyday tasks like washing up and eating a tangerine are good ones to practise bringing mindfulness into our daily life. And that makes a lot of sense because, like breathing, they’re relatively simple activities which makes them conducive to that kind of accepting awareness of the present.

All activities can be mindful

However, I think it’s important to realise that all activities can be done mindfully, and that’s really what mindfulness is aiming for – without imagining that that is really achievable all of the time, which is why every now and again it is useful to stop and breathe.

So what of those activities which seem the furthest removed from mindfulness? Isn’t television always distraction and escapism? How could day-dreaming ever be present when it is all about the future or the past? And surely it isn’t possible to be mindful as we dip between email, facebook and twitter, skipping randomly from one thing to another without enough time to take any of them in?

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I disagree because in terms of experience I feel that there is a difference between times when I’m watching TV as a distraction and times when I’m engaged with it. Or times when I’m aimlessly wandering around the internet versus times when I’m connecting with this person and that idea in a way that’s present and open to each one. There are times when I can be fully present to a day-dream.

I suspect that we do all need some time in our daily routine when we’re still, or focused on a very simple task, in order to observe our usual habits and to cultivate a more mindful way of being. But I also think we can bring that into the rest of the kinds of lives we have today, noticing when we’ve strayed away from it and kindly reminding ourselves to come back.

I wake up in the morning and sit for a while, noticing how I’m drawn to thinking about that meeting yesterday and gently bringing myself back to the breath. Making a coffee I appreciate the smell as I open the tin, the feel of the warm mug in my hand, the soapy water as I wash up afterwards. Walking to work I think over what I have to do in the day and notice a knot of stress building. I gently bring myself back to the tube, sharing a smile with a fellow commuter as we do-si-do out of each other’s way. At work I take time to check in with a colleague, wryly noticing my desire to ask whether they thought I was foolish in that meeting yesterday. I think about which task I’m most in the mood for and devote a couple of hours to that before moving on to less interesting things. In a break I enjoy the free-floating sense of dipping around facebook and twitter, and focus in on a couple of posts that interest me, enjoying the brief connection with someone on another continent who’s thinking about such similar things to me today. Walking home from the station I create a daydream about an imaginary party with all my favourite fictional characters. I can feel the evening air on my face and see the people walking past me at the same time as I’m sharing cocktails with Anna Madrigal and Dr. Watson. Back home I make myself a meal, noticing the colours, smells and textures of the vegetables as I chop them. I close the curtains and watch an episode of my favourite show, appreciating the sleepy cosiness of the end of the day.

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Queer: The video

For Pride here’s a video about my book with Julia Scheele – Queer: A Graphic History.

Give it a read if you fancy learning more about queer activism and queer ideas, including some of the tensions around Pride marches: Assimilationist &/or radical? Normative &/or challenging the norm? Intersectional or one-dimensional? lG(bt) &/or queer?

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Triggers and triggering

Justin Hancock and I have just released a new podcast over on megjohnandjustin.com all about the topic of triggers and being triggered in sexual encounters.

You can find this – and our other podcasts – here.

If you’re interested in the topic you might also like to check out this piece I wrote a while back for Open Democracy which unpacks the idea of triggers and trigger warnings in a bit more detail.

There has been a great deal of discussion lately on the topic of trigger warnings. First a spate of articles appeared in the press describing situations in which students had asked teachers to provide warnings about the content of materials on their courses. These warnings aimed to provide people with information about any topics that they might find personally difficult, due to connections with events that had occurred in their own lives. Many of the newspaper articles ridiculed the idea of putting warnings on great literature, for example, and portrayed such requests as entitled, over-sensitive censorship.

Following this, a number of online authors wrote defences of trigger warnings, portraying them instead as a means for people to have some control over what they are exposed to, often in the context of wider discriminations.

Most of the articles and blog posts that I have seen on this topic have taken a stance for or against trigger warnings, often presenting an impassioned argument in favour of providing trigger warnings or virulent opposition to the practice. To me this binary either/or approach seems unhelpful. Instead I think it is more useful to adopt an approach where we first clarify what we are talking about when we speak of trigger warnings; we then ask what they have the potential to open up and to close down; and we finally consider how we might engage with them in order to maximise this potential (instead of whether we should engage with them).

What are triggers?  Read more…

 

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Mental health interview

I was recently interviewed by Bridget Minamore for a piece in The Debrief on young men and mental health.

You can read the full article here, and here are my answers to Bridget’s questions about mental healthcare and people being open about their struggles.

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What are some of the biggest barriers to people accessing good mental health care?

One major barrier is financial. While there is some good mental health care provided on the NHS, and by voluntary agencies, if you have less money or no money then it is much more difficult to ensure that you see a practitioner who is a good fit for you, and you may well be limited to a certain number of sessions. Wealthier people have a much greater range of private options available to them, and can shop around to find somebody they have a good relationship with: which is the most important factor predicting success in therapy.

After that I would say the stigma around mental health is still a massive barrier. People can be scared to acknowledge any struggles to themselves and others. For many groups it goes beyond an issue of stigma and shame, to being actually dangerous to admit to mental health difficulties, for example in terms of risk of losing work or having control over treatment taken out of their hands. Again it is generally the most marginalised groups in terms of class, race, disability, etc. for whom this is most risky.

What sort of practical support do men and young people with mental health issues need?

For men a major barrier are the cultural expectations around masculinity which can make it very hard to speak openly about emotions or admit to having problems. Until we have some major cultural shifts in how we understand gender, this means that it can be good to offer support tailored specifically to men, perhaps in ways that fit masculinity better than conventional therapy. For example, peer support which takes place in sport or pub settings can feel a better fit for some men.

In addition to being protected from poverty, discrimination, abuse, neglect, and violence (key causes of mental health problems), young people drastically need better personal and social education in schools to help them to learn about how to handle difficult feelings and develop relationship skills. These kinds of preventative measures would be far better than treating young people after they’ve developed mental health difficulties. However, of course, until the world has changed we definitely need good online and offline support for young people to go when they’re struggling.

Do you think it’s a positive that people in the public eye are speaking more about mental health issues? Why?

I think it can be very helpful indeed in decreasing the stigma around mental health, and letting people know that it is okay to struggle. However, unfortunately, people in the public eye often tend to tell very particular stories around their mental health issues: often stories where the issues are seen as purely biologically caused, and stories where they ‘got better’. It’s important to recognise that many mental health difficulties are caused by social problems, such as the ones I’ve already mentioned, and that many people do not have the resources that celebs have to get help and support.

What are the problems in the NHS at the moment re mental health care? What solutions are needed?

The main problems would be those facing the whole NHS at the moment of being hugely under-resourced and under-staffed. We need far greater investment in the NHS to enable it to support all those with mental and/or physical health needs, and we need to become a more welcoming country to immigrants, many of whom have just the expertise that we need.

Are you worried about the fate of the NHS with regards to mental health care? Why?

Very worried given the current lack of investment in the NHS. It’s just one more area where we see a widening gap between the rich (who can afford private therapy and other healthcare) and the poor (who can’t). Often those with less money will end up getting 6 sessions of CBT, maybe online rather than in person. This can be helpful, but it doesn’t work for everyone, and it can even be counter-productive for somebody whose distress has very real social causes to locate their suffering in individual ‘negative automatic thoughts’, for example. If we want to tackle mental health problems we need a more equal society.

End of story.

For more on the social side of mental health struggles, check out:

My zine on Social Mindfulness,
This piece I wrote for Ladybeard Magazine
This blog post about why I hate the 1 in 4 statistic!

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LGBT+ mental health video

I was very happy to be involved in this video made about mental health issues affecting the LGBT+ community, by Sally Marlow and her colleagues from King’s College London.

 

On the video I spoke about the issues faced by bisexual and non-binary people when it comes to mental health. In particular these include:

The stress of being invisible in a world that assumes that people are binary in their sexuality and gender (gay or straight, man or woman)
Having ones sexuality or gender erased when the existence of bisexuality and non-binary gender are questioned
Being regarded as untrustworthy or suspicious because of your sexuality or gender
Living an everyday life in which you rarely see other like yourself represented, and are constantly confronted with binary assumptions which don’t fit your experience (e.g. on toilet doors, changing rooms, forms, or media representations)
Being misgendered and/or shoved back into the closet

These, and other, points explain why research across the world finds that bisexual people have worse mental health than straight and gay people, and why studies so far are finding that non-binary people have high levels of mental health struggles too. One important solution is to move towards more expansive cultural understandings of gender and sexuality, and to depict the range of gender and sexual expressions in the media.