The Susan Claims to be associated with University of Leicester which she isn’t, but she also doesn’t seem to exist, none of the books she claims to have authored exist two of the titles seems to come from a biblical workshop which runs in Australia (link to pdf ) her email address exists, but the domain is a squatter page

What is this? A scam? a practical joke? An a attempt by a transphobe to show how many unhappy trans men there are around?

So this is not written out of some bio purist love your body just the way it is, and never change it, but listening to background briefing I heard, fear fear which sounded very much like that which I have heard from women over the years, that if these young men would have no status, not relationships with women, and no safety if they did build muscle.

If you don’t have the, like, the fucking abs and the chest and shit, the arms, chicks don’t want a bar of you. And, like, who doesn’t go to a festival and doesn’t want to pick up chicks? Heaps of people will be going heaps tight on the diets and stuff like that. They just want to get, like, the rig.

I suspect I, geeky fat and androgynous are probably not what the vast majority of these young men are looking for, but I am still going to talk about what I like, because while it is not at all better *spit* or heroic, god knows my desires are unattainable for many, and would probably cause at least as much self destruction if it was mainstream it isn’t and  just maybe some kid who reads that they are people out there, who like femme skinny guys, and kick arse queer women they might just see themselves as not undesirable, just a speciality. This is going to focus on guys, because that is what the show was on.

I like guys who are my hight or shorter, I have had people read this backwards, assuming I must mean at least as tall as me, because everyone knows tallness is hot right? its not a rule, there have been exceptions, but in general, give me a 5’5″ guy any day.

I like guys who aren’t masculine, more than one of my ex’s has been often assumed to be queer, and several of them identified as straight. Look if you want to body build cool, it would just be nice if there was a little less fear in the world.

First time I came across the term sex positive feminist I hated it, I id’ed as a rad fem at the time and felt that they took an overly optimistic view of the world, and fell into the traps of middle class I have choice lets talk about that feminism, something which is still endemic to feminist as a whole, then I read a book which changed my life
A Restricted Country by Joan nestle
, gave me the strength to start considering gender (though the lens of passing women*). I read about the struggle for lesbian rights, about McCarthyism and the fear of “are you now or have you ever” but it was one of the last essays in that book that shock me to my core, I think it was called dyke’s and whores, and sort to draw connections between socially unacceptable female sexuality, I remember lying in bed, struggling with her words, how could she say that lesbians (good sexuality) and whores (bad) where the same.

Binaries are funny things aren’t they, so for all the things I have to thank Joan for I think the most important thing for me was that she pointed out I still judged women by how they behaved sexually, and in doing that I mirrored the patriarchy I was trying to avoid.

The specific quote from my friend was that sex pos feminists believe avoid the real issue, we talk about the workers rather than the product of pornogrpahy, and it is the product that does the real harm (assuming consenting and well treated workers), now first off, I don’t believe that sexually explicit material is in of it’s self harmful, I do believe much pornography needs to be challenged and discussed for its racism, sexism, the very small set of body types it uses, as well as many other issues.

However I would invite anyone to sit down and watch the latest season of Australia next top model with me and not come up with all the same complaints, “you will never be the girl next door” said to a women of non Anglo (I believe aboriginal) decent or the size 10 model told that she no longer made a dress look good because of her weight. I don’t think as feminists we do ourselves any favours by setting up yet again good women bad women stereotypes, which I believe the porn critical feminists (look mum no scare quotes) do when they set up mostly het ( because this conversations often talk about male partners using porn against their partners wishes) – mostly economically privileged (in that they are not people who might have to do survival sex) women as victims of pornography which contributes to a society where women are only seen as sex objects.

Women have always in Western societies, and I suspect in all societies been seen as sex/marriage/procreation objects, as connected to their fathers, their husbands, their brothers, the real people and frankly given the choice I would, as someone passed as female rather be seen under the guise of cock hungry whores 48 rather than the genesis’s eve, the reason we no longer inhabit the garden of Eden, or Pandora, a punishment sent to man bringing disease and pests to the world.

*Female assigned people who passed as men, many of whom I now believe would consider themselves trans men/genderqueer today.

Gail Dines and her anti porn slide show infuriate me.

It not the Christian right, same shit different day bullshit

It not the dehumanizing of sex workers, when she talked about how porn makes men rape, however “she’s not walking down the street we are” pointing to a soft porn model, as if sex workers get some magical pass when it come to male sexual violence.

It the fact that is her world, at least her utopia I don’t exist, and you know what, I like me. In her lectures she talks about men who use porn, never women, about how porn shows “body punishing sex” with the assumption that no real women would ever like body-punishing sex, You know what I woke up sore this morning, most of my body hurts because of the sex last night, and my mouth is sore from how stupidly I have been grinning all morning. I like my life, quit standing in my way.

I can tell you the moment I started collecting porn, my father had gotten a new laptop from work when I was 14, and I inherited the hand me down laptop, it was a Pentium 2 266 with I think 32 megs of ram, it had a four gig hard drive and a internet connection.

I was conflicted, I wanted things which where wrong, I considered my self a feminist and a social justice activist so why did I want thing which where so violent?

On of the arguments I hear from the rad fem crowd is that soft porn, vanilla porn is a gateway drug, once the (male) viewer has seen people fuck he needs something more, harder more violent, more body punishing, that has not been my experience, one of the first pornographic videos I downloaded was cool devices (serious not safe for work, or most humans). Lets make no bones about this, the kind of porn I want to watch isn’t nice, it isn’t appearing at any of your local video stores. It is dark, rough, violent, it often contains descriptions of non-consent, my earliest sexual desire was to be tied up with a girl, naked, pushed up against her unable to get away.

Crucify me or do you wanna save me yes, no maybe…
It doesn’t matter baby you are so clean
But I can’t make you wanna scream scream, scream, scream with me…

Bright red scream – my ruin

I went through cycles of downloading watching and deleting in disgust that I could want that want to see that done to people, I was meant to be a feminist right.

Most of the sex that I had as a teenager sucked, I had partners who where everything that would for me, a young feminist women. Unfortunately it was dry, painful and boring and I put up with it because I wasn’t sure that I could be a good feminist and enjoy myself sexually. I had the sex my partners wanted me to have, and that my feminist elders wanted me to have and tried to forget about the kind of sex I wanted to have, in the name of women’s rights and opportunities. I am yet to forgive Gail and those like her for that.

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I want to talk about terror, and terrorism, that is producing fear to get your results, the fear of violence, and the reality of violence to change behavior. Because I am talking about real life, there isn’t a clear narrative with a good ending.

It’s coming up to tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I could say a lot about the media storm around it, I could talk about how many people remember the date of terrorist attacks which didn’t kill westerns? But there is something closer I want to talk about, something here and now and burnt into my memory, still twisting my emitions around it.

On September 11 2001 I was staying at a friends house, my parents where interstate, but unlike many time when I had stayed at home alone I didn’t, I didn’t because I had recently ended a relationship with a man and I feared that if I stayed in that house he would break in (again) and rape me (again), and with no one around, I feared that wouldn’t be the end of it.

I know september 11 must be hell every year as loved ones morn those who they lost, when the family of firefighters and cleaners and resaeptionists wonder why there relitives where seen as a fair target for Americas sins. My father lost a friend, they where in new york for a conference, the deaths where cruel and senseless, but I flinch for another reason.

I remember being a child fearing for my life because I have left an abusive adult man. Because terrorism is booms and planes flying into buildings, it is also the terrorism small enough to fit into your bedroom, your heart, your cunt and your head.

My story remembers him plying a child who you know is self medicating with alcohol because he wanted sex, and getting sex, after I had begun vomiting.

Of gas lighting, a concept I knew 10 years before I knew the world, when he told me that I was misremembering everything that I should do what he said because I was crazy and my brain didn’t work.

Of silent, and screaming, or never being able to do anything right.

Of when I tried to put my foot down, to stop what I had known from the start was wrong, the threats, his cold dead voice in my room “I will show you what you have made me do” the sound of the ambulance as he was taken to hospital, the knowing, that I was so bad, that I had driven someone to attempt suicide.

So, on this anniversary I have a favor to ask, I want you to tell me that 15 year old that they are not guilty, I want you to tell them that even though they where sexuality active, it was not their fault, even thought they where depressive, it was not their fault. Even though they where precocious it was not their fault, even though they where self medicating with alcohol it was not their fault, because I need to hear it, because I don’t believe any one of those statements completely, I can’t truly believe that what that man did to me was his fault, because I wake up at night shaking with the terror of those memories. And when you have done that, please tell someone who is now 15, because I am sure everything that happened to me is still happening.

It’s absolutely a diet for life but I don’t tell people that in the beginning. I say ‘this diet works amazingly well for weight loss, just get going and get started’ and we have kind of covert ways of introducing people to new foods so they change their food preferences during the process of weight loss. - Sue Roberts

This isn’t about diets, or maintenance, or whether intentional weight (IWL) lost is a good health strategy, this is about two words: Informed consent.

Informed consent needs to be the basis of medicine, unless you patient is unconscious and dying* you need to get their consent to act, patients aren’t doctors and they aren’t researchers so informed will often mean something along the lines of “sometimes things go wrong, and sometimes we might need to do more work to make it right, are you ok with that” or “We can do X, or we can do Y, here are the basis reasons why you might choose X over Y”

But lying to patients, not telling them information they need to make an informed choice about there health, when yo-yoing is probably worse than never dieting at all, when you might be risking peoples health, if they know they would not be able to keep up this diet. That is unconscionable, that is doing harm.

I was interested in the rest of her thoughts and would like to have read about it, unfortunately her science page contains no science, so I can’t report on that. I understand that she wants me to buy the book, but seriously, if there isn’t a single paper backing up your claims, then why should I trust your sciencey Factbricator(tm).

A brief look at pub med for the instinct diet, or the I diet I found nothing but I am happy to add linked if anyone can provide them, and would humbly suggest that Sue might add them to her webpage too.

*For example being brought in to accident and emergency after a car accident

I went on a date a couple of weeks back, guy seemed nice online but there really wasn’t a lot there in real life, he wasn’t psychically my type, he belitted my thesis* and well, he didn’t dress well. He really didn’t dress well, old faded conference shirt. I felt bad about thinking this, I mean who am to judge, am I any better than men who wont date any women who doesn’t go through hours of prep every day? Am I wronging judging guys who kink on a particular kind of high femme? But I am not talking about hours of prep I am talking about cute tshirt or a button up shirt, something anything that says, hey I am interested in you being interested in me, now logically, I mean he came out to meet me, so one should assume that he is interested, but, but …

I’ve talked to a number of friends about this and got a bunch of different answers.Some claimed that I was supporting false adversiting, that I was setting up to not be able to find people I liked because they will all look good for the first few dates, well I already assume that, perhaps unfairly, so to be frank I wonder what the guy who came to a first date in a worn out conference shirt will look  like in 6 months? Others suggested that it is part of being a femme, and that I while it is fine to be interested in how my partners look, I need to understand that not everyone will look like that, and be up front about what I like, and be willing to filter for those who get me hard.

Hat tip to ultra hedonist who got me thinking about this again, a bunch of things she said struck me as true.

But whether women tend to value looks less or only think or report that they do, I think it’s fair to say that many of us feel we aren’t supposed to be superficial. And I think there’s a broader cultural idea that caring ‘too much’ about looks means one is immature and shallow.

Exactly, I remember bitchy jones telling submissive men to try look hot [As a side note when searching for the link I misspelled objerctification and google suggested I change bitchy jones submissive men objectification to bitchy jones submissive men objectification, because one one objectifies men, there is no such thing as the female gaze right**?

It is tied up to gender roles and sexism and crap, it is about women(and those who are passed as women) who are meant to be nurturing and understanding and put there desires behind everyone else and you know what, fuck that noise.

Maybe its unfair but I am ok with saying, if you don’t make me hard, I ain’t going to fuck you, in fact I think I should work on being a damn bit pickier than that***, but it feels like a good place to start. Part of that, which sure is influenced by culture, based of current treads and everything fucking else is looking pretty, and no one I yet meet look there prettiest in a old faded conference shirt.

*do I even have to say not to do this? Really, my thesis was 9 months of pain and suffering, sleepless nights and panic.

**My gender studies course actually discussed this.

***That post pushed though all my protections and got to me, really got to me, and got offsprings, self-esteem stuck in my head for days It was all a bit too close.

I was at pycon last weekend, that I must say was not hard, nor was seeing the keynote by Audrey Roy, she spoke about diversity and open source communities, and I hope she wont mind me shortening her argument to “support diversity you selfish bastards” open source for most projects is a volunteer run, sure some core dev’s are paid, but many aren’t, and libraries, little side project, they are worked on by people in there spare time, helping out, throwing some support when they have time. We as open source advocates can not afford to lose half of our dev, which we will if we don’t support women in IT and open source, all good stuff, good positive worthwhile stuff.

Then there was Sunday morning, I got a message from a good friend of mine, his cousin had been murdered by her ex husband, I don’t know the details but it seems that the story falls into very well tread lines of violence.

I know leaving an abusive relationship can be more dangerous than staying I know domestic avoidance is hard, hard to deal with, hard to get people out of.

I also know that one of the reasons I fight for women in Tech, women in Math, women in everything is because it makes women human. because I believe that one of the most dangerous things one person can think of another is that they are other, outsiders, not like us.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it is a cure all for domestic violence, or any other kind of volience, but I wonder and I worry how much of an inpact “you can’t understand those bitches” battle of the sexes and all that shit has.

Next conference, or in 10 when I stand up and present my new killer app (TM) I hope and pray that maybe just maybe I will make women, and female bodied people more human, not the non understandable other, not a scary other, or a breathing blow up doll, but a person, with a life that starts before you, and might well continue after you, with non perfect test coverage and a laptop that crashed half way though my talk. An end in my own right. That is a valuable thing, even if we don’t get any more dev’s out of it.

Mindful meditation may be relatively innocuous fluff

Where as I would call it evidence based treatment this is mostly about his commentors, not him, but I think he is writing in good faith. One commentor said

You miss one point. If one sees years and years of bad studies, without proper controls, small sample sizes, and self reporting, we are right to be skeptical. Do you have any studies, with thousands of subjects and non-self reporting for endpoints, and the proper controls in place, that show anything better than PLACEBO, the wonder drug? Then, and only then, can a real statement be made. You just sound like you are gullible with weak evidence.

Do you have any idea? Any idea at all how much thousands of people in a study cost? Do you understand that statistical significance? Can you suggest any non self reported end points for chronic pain or mental illness? (if anyone can, I am not an expert, feel free to jump in, I would be really interested in signs of pain or mental illness). Are you in fact suggesting that we throw everything we know about mental health care out, deregister all the psych drugs out there because OCD doesn’t cause a distinctive rash? At this point the bartender in my brain started taking the good bottles off the shelf.

I didn’t mind the original article that much, I think PZ raises some good points about the funding of non scientific organizations, and just because mindfulness meditation has some evidence doesn’t mean this group hasn’t just picked up the name without offering anything useful, and yes, the cost of a day session is really high which sets off my bulshit user alarm. However when it does come to the usefulness of mindfulness meditation for stress and mental illness. Some of the commentors have talked about claims suggesting that mindfulness lowers your risk of cancer and/or will fix everything, I want to be clear here, as far as I know these claims are totally unsupported by the evidence and should be stamped on whenever they turn up, exactly in the same way you would stamp on the same claims made about antibiotics.

You see, I am crazy, we could go into DSM IV diagnosis’s but for now lets stick to crazy. I have a very good doctor, she knows her stuff, but she is a big big hippy, she is really into green tea and long flowery skirts so when she suggested mindfulness meditation I quietly dismissed it, I was busy, when she brought it up again, I looked it up when I got home I was impressed enough that I thought I would try it, and I am glad I did. I know the research isn’t perfect, but it is good enough for me, given the low cost (around 20 dollars a bookstore) and low risk of harm I decided it was worth a go.

But this isn’t about me, it is about evidence, and it is about evidence in imperfect setting, you know what a statistician like me likes? A machine that goes bing with describable errors, when you get humans involved, actually humans who are really susceptible to placebo (both from hippies and pharmacological agents) who have good days and bad days it gets really hard to measure, and that is even with something that you can measure like blood pressure, when you get into really wacky stuff, stuff we can’t measure, like pain or mental illness well then your well past proof. If you want to trial a new painkiller, a new psych drug or know how effective meditation is as say an agent to avoid depression relapse you can’t avoid talking to actual people, and if the evidence for mindfulness isn’t good enough for you, I suggest you head to your local chemist and stop them selling NSAID’s

Write

Your life depends on it.

My politics comes from a place of selfishness; people like me are dying for being like me, I am not special so I am also at risk.

It’s that simple, it isn’t academic, it isn’t about theory, it about surviving long enough to live, it is able making sure that when I have survived will be people I can stand next to, because enough freaks like me have survived. I am privilege bunny, I am probably safe, my skin is the right colour and my disabilities aren’t written on my visible skin, but you know I might put a rainbow sticker on my car

That might be enough.