Wednesday, 17 May 2017

Definitions of Sexuality Part 3

Before I leap into the body of this post or essay, I'd like to talk briefly about David Foster Wallace.

Wallace has been for a long time my favourite author; I have discussed him a little already in this blog in the early post "An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace". This was the first post in which I first mentioned my own 'mentally illness' and the first to bring up the taboo subject of sexuality. Since his suicide scholarship about Wallace has burgeoned dramatically but this does not mean everyone knows everything about him now. There is n aspect of the man which I suspect is probably often overlooked. Wallace believed that most everything everyone else believed was bullshit.

I don't have a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on hand but I can remember much of it more or less. The last story in the collection describes the attempted rape of a hippie chick by a violent nutter. The narrator of this story says something like, "Psychotics, as everyone knows, having issues with their mothers." The narrator of the story seems to believe this but did Wallace himself give any credence to this snippet of pop psychology? I don't think so – but he knew that very many people do. Wallace specialised in writing from the perspective of someone who knows a little of what passes for psychology today but is not quite smart or critical enough to know that most of it is bogus. As I discussed in my other post about Wallace, the narrator of "Good Ol' Neon" diagnoses his psychologist as a repressed homosexual. On what grounds does the narrator of this story make his 'diagnosis'? He decides that the psychologist is insecure about the size of his dick, is anxious that he doesn't "measure up". A kind of pop psychology idea circulates almost subliminally through the heterosexual community that homosexuals of both the latent and overt sort worry about their 'manhood' and the narrator of "Good Ol' Neon" obviously believes this. But did Wallace as well? I don't think so.

I suspect that Wallace knew that if he wrote about the world as it really is, people wouldn't believe him. Wallace really, really wanted people to like him. And if he told the truth as he saw it, people would dislike him and perhaps even think he was crazy. So Wallace opted for writing literature rather than philosophy, a choice that enabled him to talk through others, to express and conceal himself at the same time, to have it both ways.

I can identify with Wallace's predicament. I have opined in this blog that the massive increase and decrease in crime during the twentieth century was causally related to lead poisoning, an idea John Oliver has also expressed on his show – but few people seem to want to even countenance this possibility. Should I renounce this position and say, as everyone else on the Left seems to say, that the cause of crime is simply poverty? Unfortunately I can't bring myself to do this. Yes, poverty plays a role in pushing people towards crime but, by itself, it is not an adequate explanation for the crime waves of the late 'eighties and early 'nineties.

In this blog I have tried to define sexuality in different ways. I have talked about it in terms of experiences and in terms of love. I have claimed that Kurt Cobain defined it in terms of sexual arousal. It may seem that I have been skirting the issue however, because I have never addressed the psychiatric definition of homosexuality. In early 2014, in the short period between being bullied into going into respite and being put under the Mental Health Act, I saw a psychiatrist once, one that I had briefly seen when I first entered the service and had never seen again and would never see again. She took a risk no other psychiatrist had by stating the psychiatric definition. She defined homosexuality as a sexual attraction toward members of the same sex. When she told me this, I literally felt like something evil had looked at me out of her eyes. Partly this is because she was telling me something that I already knew, as if I was stupid. And partly because I think this definition is evil.

Consider, first, what is meant by the term 'sexual attraction'? The expression is slippery. Is it simply the ability to recognise that another person is good-looking? If a man is aware that another man is attractive does that automatically make him homosexual? Leading Hollywood actors, like Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell and Ryan Gosling appeal to men as well as women and this is partly because these actors are handsome. In Austin Powers Mrs Kensington says of Austin, 'Women want him, and men want to be him', variants of this phrase having been around since at least the 'fifties and which were often associated with James Bond. We have to draw a distinction between identification and attraction. Nevertheless the concept of 'sexual attraction' is hard to define and so almost useless.

In 2011, the real Jess told me a story about a patient she had known who, for a period when he was unwell, thought he might be gay. When his episode passed, this feeling that he might be gay went away. This suggests that what we think of as homosexuality can be transient. The question is: why did this young man feel he might be gay? Did he hear voices telling him he was gay? Did he form the paranoid conviction that others around him thought he was gay? Or did he go through a phase during which he worried that he was sexually attracted to men? Unfortunately I don't know what it was like for him. Men who temporarily worry about their sexuality seldom explain what the feeling was like.

Around 2013 or 2014, I started to worry that I might start being sexually attracted to men. My first hint of this psychotic symptom occurred in 2013: I was at WINZ and when talking to the youngish man behind the desk heard a voice in my head that said, "Nice eyes". In 2013 or 2014 I had become terribly afraid that I might turn gay and this fear subsequently affected my interactions with all men.

I need to make some important remarks about this 'attraction'. First, it didn't start until 2013 or 2014, when I was thirty-three or thirty-four, six years after I had first become a patient of the Mental Health System. Second, I found it incredibly unpleasant. Third, because I had been ill in 2007 and 2009 and been well for two years, during which time I'd reflected upon my illness and done some study into schizophrenia, I knew that this 'attraction' was a psychotic symptom that would pass given enough time or if I did or said the right thing. I knew furthermore that it came from the outside; this 'symptom' never affected my core sense of who I was And it has passed, now, finally, although it took three years for it to vanish completely.

I ought also say that I have always been strongly attracted to women and, during this period, continued to be attracted them.

The horrible thing is that, during this long period when I experienced this distressing psychotic symptom, it was impossible to talk about. For obvious reasons. For one thing it would have been misinterpreted as a trait I'd always had, which would have been false. Towards the end of my 'treatment' with the psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 he asked me something like, "Aren't you attracted to men?" I can't remember his exact words but it was a leading question, a question to be answered only with a 'yes' or 'no'. It was another double bind. I gave no answer at all. What could I have said? Either way I was screwed. But I wasn't going to give the Mental Health Service the satisfaction of confirming their diagnosis when they themselves were the cause of my illness.

As readers of my blog will know (and I hope not all of my posts have been atrociously written) I hated Judkins. In this blog I have suggested that the event during childhood that made me vulnerable to psychosis was my parents' divorce when I was seven; I spelled this out in a fucking essay I had given my psychiatrist in 2014 shortly after I was put under the Act. Did Judkins even bring up the issue of my parents' divorce? Not once. Perhaps he got his psychology degree from the bottom of a box of breakfast cereal. I half suspect, although I have no evidence, that the only reason he got a job at the Taylor Centre was that Tony Fernando had a hand hiring him.

In the previous post I discussed sociopaths a little. Don't mistake me, there are very many good people who work in the Mental Health Service but there are also many arseholes who get into psychiatry and psychology because they want to know how others tick and enjoy having power over damaged people, victims of circumstance. Sociopaths are very different from schizophrenics: a sociopath has no soul, a schizophrenic has too much. Deep down a sociopath has no core self. He doesn't know if he's gay or straight, doesn't even deep down know if he's a man or a woman. The term for this is 'sociopathic inadequacy'. I have been treated by two sociopaths, a psychiatrist and a psychologist and both made me worse rather than better. I might make another remark which may be relevant. I read many years ago that sometimes sociopaths will say, in effect falsely, that they're gay, if they think it can win them sympathy and help them manipulate others better. Despite what many on the Left think, not all openly gay people are good.

I'll finish this post by saying one last thing. In the previous post I described the double-bind the Mental Health Service put me in. In the end, it was not just a choice between Bruce Springsteen and Faith No More, it was also a choice between Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, between "Born This Way" and "I Kissed A Girl". Back in 2007 and 2009, when I was most ill both options were bad, both represented positions I couldn't espouse. But in the end I had to pick one anyway. And so I opted for Katy Perry.

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