Confessionals of life after anorexia: some of the things we forget

A recent comment has come into this blog asking if I would discuss something about life after anorexia that we often forget to talk about. So I’m going to be talking about the slightly unpleasant topic of what happens to the body after anorexia.

I want to start by saying there is a gross error made in the treatment of anorexia in the assumption that once you’re eating normally, you’re cured. Every time I read a story from a recovered anorexic, I find the same thing. They all say they still struggle with body image, with self-esteem. Eating again, as hard and as painful as that is, that’s the easy bit. It took a month to eat normally, and five years to gain a sense of self where I can look at who I am physically with confidence and be happy with who I am.

But that doesn’t mean I’m completely and entirely recovered, that anorexia is in my past. Because every meal out presents me with problems. Not of the emotional kind, but of a physical nature. This is where it gets confessional, where it gets difficult. For as confident as I am about myself, as little as I care what people think about the fact that I have permanent scars on my wrists, some things I’d rather not discuss in company.

I was anorexic for about fifteen years, and anorexic to the point where I hardly ate anything at all. For a year, I was severely addicted to laxatives and diuretics. For another period of about six months I took diet pills, which were frighteningly effective. The damage to my digestive system means I have real problems eating a lot of foods.

It became easier to say that I was gluten intolerant, because most of the foods I struggle with are wheat based. For some reason, it’s easier to be mocked by people who consider gluten intolerance to be fake than to sit plainly and explain that fifteen years of starvation plus addiction to laxatives has left me with permanent damage to my digestive system. If I had a camera, I’d take photos of their faces and put them up on display.

You end up walking an awkward line. Once you’ve crossed over into that other place, if it does physical damage, you’re never going to make it back. It’s a reminder of it. Even worse, if people know about it, they seem incapable of treating you as a normal person, but with a kind of patronising over-care that I find intensely annoying.

It’s perhaps one of the practical things I’d say to any anorexic. If you survive, you’ll look back and regret not just the time you wasted starving yourself, but the fact that every relationship involves explaining that while they make a joke out of certain things, for you they are the impact of damage you did while you could think of nothing but your own self-harm. And that trying to be treated and being a normal person living a normal life is a minefield.

Why Remembrance matters

I have a heavy weight of guilt on me in recent months. It is the 70th anniversary, this year, of the outbreak of World War Two.

When I was a teenager, I was ideologically committed against the idea of war, against the concept of fighting for my country, against actions of violence. During those years, I often saw my grandfather, who had fought as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the North Irish Horse Regiment, and firmly believed in fighting for king and country.

As an artist, I was then fascinated by creating works of desert horizons. I showed him one once, and he started to talk about his contribution to the rout of Rommel in the North African desert as a tank commander. But I turned away, because I didn’t want to know.

He died when I was fifteen, and I never took the time to listen to what he had to say. He wasn’t an easy man to get on with; he was deeply religious, but had dropped a religious degree at Oxford to serve on the day war was declared on Germany in 1939. His house was regimented to military perfection, always clean and meals (which included tea and high tea back then) had to be served at the hour, on the dot.

But in recent years, I find myself wishing that I took the time to hear what he had to say. Because he believed in what he was doing. He fought because he felt he had a duty to protect a country – even though as an Irishman from Dublin, it hardly treated him brilliantly in return. He watched his soldiers die during the war, and was proud of his regiment’s achievements in such actions as the breaking of the Hitler Line.

Now, I see nothing glamorous in war. As Plato says, only the dead are free from war. They are complex, difficult things that like every other human endeavour are carried out with complex motivations that are often not demonstrations of the best features of humanity. Oil, power, and vengeance are not glamorous reasons, and modern warfare hardly compares to the heroic glory portrayed of old war, the charge of the Pelennor Fields, and people who fight for the joy of violence alone.

Yet whether or not you support wars, whether it is the First, the Second Wars, Vietnam, or now Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s important not to forget that regardless of the motivations of leaders, it is the soldiery who do the fighting. For wars like the Second, which regardless of the hideous violence involved wiped out a civilisation that could offer nothing positive to humanity, they fight so that we have the right not to, they fight so that conscientious objectors have the right to be such.

For all the violence and killing that has gone on in recent years, we pay more attention to the shooting of one baboon in sport than the fact that today, the 200th soldier was killed in Afghanistan, fighting a war to which many of us object. The costs of war are mammoth, and it is humans out there on the front line that feel it most keenly.

So for them, rather than for any glamorous idealising of war and violence, I wear a poppy, and I wear one in recognition that both my grandfathers fought, and were prepared to die for their country. It doesn’t compare to sitting at a desk clicking a mouse all day, because no other job actually involves the cost of life itself.

Hundreds come back dead or missing limbs, shell shock has been replaced by chronic PTSD which destroys the lives of soldiers who have survived with all limbs intact but their minds blown apart by what they’ve experienced. So I don’t care, when I wear my poppy, for the values of politicians, but wear my poppy for the sake of those soldiers, who for whatever reasons, are prepared to put their lives on the line, and for those who already have. We rarely pay them any mind in a world where violence is the subject of entertainment. But we should not forget them, or their lives, and giving a day each year to their remembrance is an important act. For in the remembrance, perhaps we could also remember that real war is not entertainment, but violence, and we will be a better race when we have learned to do without it.

You need a lot of outrage to get through these days

It started, I think, with the Jan Moir article.

I use Twitter a great deal (hell, my business, which has just gone and won itself an award, is based on Twitter), and I saw all of that take off pretty sharp. I went and read the article and was stunned – as I wrote here – that somebody was actually paid to write such an awful piece. I also read many of the reactions to it, which were mostly deeply personal in their attack.

Then there was Nick Griffin on Question Time. More outrage. How could we allow a man who has denied the facts of the Holocaust and hangs out with the KKK onto mainstream television? At the time I felt that if we believe in freedom of speech we can’t then dictate to whom the right is given. That would be fascist. But then, of course, whenever people like Nick Griffin get a chance to appear in mainstream media they always end up losing their core support. I believe a BNP supporter remarked that he made them look stupid, which I have to say is quite an achievement given what their protest marchers make them appear.

And then, the Baboon Debacle. AA Gill, the Times television and restaurant critic, shot one in Africa. Astoundingly, the row didn’t seem to kick off until two days after the offending column where he mentioned this fact. And I found I had really run out of moral outrage. I felt a little guilty, as though I should be reaching for my pitchfork and torch and ranting along with everybody else, but to be honest, I struggled to find the energy. There’s only so much moral outrage a person can take in the space of a week.

Besides which, I’ve been reading AA Gill in the Times for ages. Not because I go to the restaurants, and not because I watch the TV he reviews. I don’t have a TV and I never live near to the restaurant involved. I just read AA Gill because I happen to like his writing. I am sure saying that is the equivalent, post-baboon, of saying that Hitler might have been a genocidal bastard but Mein Kampf was pretty compelling (which, actually, it wasn’t, it’s more like a raving lunatic in print). Or, perhaps, arguing that since Roman Polanski has done so many amazing films and made such a contribution, what’s a little rape of a 13-year-old here and there?

And perhaps also because if you’ve read a lot of AA Gill you know that he tends to go around shooting things a lot. Not in a Columbine kind of way but in a kind of 19th century sportsman sort of a way. Nobody has complained at his mentions of stalking, or even entire columns devoted to hunting expeditions in the UK with fellow hunters like Marcus Pierre-White.

This makes me wonder: Are baboons higher up the moral ladder than, say, a Scottish stag or a pheasant? Nobody appears to have noticed AA Gill’s shooting habits until the baboon.

Of course, there has been another mob incident, which unfortunately I was too hungover from a Halloween party to notice. Somebody called Stephen Fry boring, and said it on Twitter. Stephen Fry is sometimes a delicate soul who has depression. I know what that’s like and I know that unless you have a metaphorical skin of re-enforced steel girders, you have a down day and somebody says, “Gosh, you’re dull” and it hurts. This happened on Twitter, in public. It’s even more public than getting a megaphone and saying it in the street.

I missed it completely, but I felt sadness for both Stephen Fry and the person who made the comment, and was then deluged with outrage and hatred from Stephen Fry’s loyal supporters.

The poor guy apologised. It was one of those comments that if you made it down the pub, or at an evening soiree or in all the other places where we used to go and say things to other people, Stephen Fry would have been none the wiser. But the thing is, instead of going out and saying things to people In Real Life, we say them on Twitter. Where Google stores them up like a kind of OCD manic digital squirrel, just in case we should need them later.

We don’t really notice the difference, but in the last couple of days I have been more aware that what we say on Twitter is often just the same kind of thing we’d say in private to friends, but now it’s on record for the whole world. It makes one slightly more circumspect about the whole thing.

And if somebody says something online that causes moral outrage, it’s so much easier to create a mob, mass complain or attack en masse. After all, the old method of getting out the pitchfork and torch, gathering in some agreed location and running about required so much organisation, effort and time. Nowadays you can participate in a mob on your lunch break.

When the Jan Moir story broke I thought it was a new means by which the social milieu defined the boundaries of acceptability. After all, we get rid of irrational hatred of other people (for whatever reason) by making that hatred socially unacceptable. Eventually, it is pushed to the fringes before being wiped out altogether.

Yet the constant provision of sources of moral outrage is, to be honest, exhausting. And what good does it do? I find myself uncomfortable at the idea of personal attacks on people for expressing their views; I preferred the Times Finkelstein rebuttal of Jan Moir than the many people who levelled personal insults in her direction. One of the great things about not being eight is that there’s so much less name-calling involved in day-to-day activities. I know I’m boring and academic but if you are going to critique somebody, I’d rather it wasn’t the kind of insult that I last heard slung across a playground when I was eight years old.

So I suspect I may be hanging up my pitchfork and torch. I don’t like myself angry, I don’t like being swept up by a mob. And to be honest, I don’t think I have that much moral outrage in me. After all, if I picked up on everything that runs through my Twitter stream of a day, I’d have no time for anything else.

A fine example of the politics of hate

Well, the tables have been turned.

Following up on my last post about the right of freedom of speech in a democracy, I thought I’d make a few comments on the Question Time aired on Thursday. I’m late, but I’ve spent the last three or four days immersed in various histories and accounts of the Third Reich for other research purposes.

The programme was essentially an hour or so of people who hate Nick Griffin trying to get him to say ‘Seig Heil!’ and reveal his ugly neo-Nazi core. It was uncomfortable viewing, only slightly less skin-crawlingly awful than being an observer at a KKK lynching. The only redeemable panelist was Warsi, the only moderate prepared to come forward and acknowledge that we have an issue with immigration in the UK that every other moderate is too terrified to confront.

This isn’t to say I’m all for Nick Griffin. I find his politics base, violent and reprehensible. It belongs in an era that ended with the fall of Nazi Germany and has no place in the modern world. As far as I can tell, constantly going over the argument of “who will you send home, Nick, all of us?” is boring and irrelevant.

The programme gave us all an opportunity to see the slimy nature of Nick Griffin, and the ugliest side of liberal politics when it forgets itself and turns itself into a thoughtless mob. This is supposed to be intelligent television. I don’t have a TV, but I watched it on the iPlayer and I was disappointed, and annoyed.

We have laws in place that formally protect groups under threat from Griffin’s politics. They have even caught out his party; its membership has been suspended while it is reconstituted. By law, this party of white supremacists and neo-nazis must allow admission to anybody, regardless of ethnicity. A friend remarked with a sly smirk that we should be handing out membership forms to every new asylum seeker that gets citizenship. A BNP made up entirely of ethnic minorities would be an entertaining twist.

My annoyance was that the whole programme played into his hands. Why are we arguing fringe matters and the fantasies of idiots who peddle the lunatic re-writing of history to suit their own political ends (I’m talking here about Holocaust denial). We could have had Michael Shermer face off with Nick Griffin and the founder of the Skeptic Society would happily have wiped the floor with the BNP’s leader on just that matter, as he has done so well with others who have attempted to sell the same idea for their own ends.

Not only did Nick Griffin come across as victimised, but his supporters were decried as idiots, and the programme spent most of its time discussing irrelevant matters like who happened to be living in Britain 17,000 years ago. As I understand it, there wasn’t anybody here back then, and since anybody who was is long since dead, they don’t matter. Arguing the racist point about who belongs here is pointless anyway. Why go back 17,000 years when you could happily jump back a few more and find that we’re actually all from Africa, so it’s meaningless.

Given that Nick Griffin wishes to be taken seriously, it would have been sensible to force him to raise his politics to that level, rather than lowering the whole programme to the very base level of his. Perhaps more important than Nick Griffin’s views on the Holocaust or Ice Age populations of Britain, would be to understand how he would lead the country in a world where the biggest political power is currently run by a black man, given his feelings about black people.

Or even better, given the dire condition of our economy, how he would lead a country struggling in a world where the dominant economic and financial powers are China and India? I doubt white power and right-wing Imperialism will go down well in two places that have good reason not to like Britain very much.

We are not living in the age where Hitler came to power. We are not even the same Britain, the self-assured arrogant global power that failed to keep up with its own industrial ingenuity. We tend to be apologetic, and unable to take ourselves entirely seriously – especially given that the other political uproar of the week was centred around the Prime Minister’s choice of biscuit.

Instead of lowering ourselves to the base nature of the politics behind the BNP, which is simplistic and thick-headed, we should take the opportunity to demand that Nick Griffin attempt to punch at the weight of the really big boys. Forget race, sexual orientation, colour. Forget all of that, because those arguments have been won and we should behave as though they have. That Griffin was able to rile and irritate so many people about debates over ethnicity and sexual orientation suggests insecurity; we should feel as though the argument is so well won it need not even be considered territory for serious debate, to be fought out again.

We should be forcing the BNP to attempt to deal with the real world, not this simplistic black vs white politics. In the real world, the economic balance has shifted dramatically, even if we’d rather not think about it. We have power and recognition thanks to our financial sector and our history, but we are now living in a world where the doctrines of white supremacy have no place on purely practical grounds. You cannot walk into major negotiations with world powers spouting such nonsense.

In creating a show that was effectively The Nick Griffin Show, Question Time became ugly. Hatred on both sides looks hideous. The argument that will matter to many people was the one where Nick Griffin’s attitude is not that uncommon, although in a far more watered down form. Protesters outside the BBC made the liberal left look as violent as the far right. If we want to proclaim that we are the bringers of calm reason and moderate peace, we should act like it rather than a baying mob hungry for blood.

My favourite assessment came from A A Gill, whose writing I personally adore, who remarks that in order to gain power in this window of opportunity brought about by the recession, Griffin is attempting to shoulder his way into the centre, where everybody is jockeying for space. It’s tedious and dull, but at least it isn’t violent. In the whole programme the people who came off worst were those who jeered and shouted, the coliseum audience cheering for the lions. That isn’t a good thing. The worst thing for the left is if the far right can show that underneath our proclamations of equality and respect, we hate just as much as they do.

The struggle to be tolerant

Tonight, the BBC’s flagship political panel show, Question Time, will admit Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP onto the show as a panellist.

This has caused a massive furore. There has been a lot of debate as to whether somebody who has fascist leanings should be given voice on the BBC’s main channel, and treated as a serious politician rather than a racist hate-mongerer. However, the BBC argues that having won nearly a million votes and therefore seats in the European Parliament, the BNP actually have to be given a place.

The reasons against are numerous: it would give the BNP a credibility they don’t deserve, it could fuel the fire of support for them, and it might be seen as condoning fascism.

The reasons for allowing them a position on such a mainstream platform fall into the more awkward and difficult areas of liberalism: freedom of speech, the fact that if we deny the BNP a voice they can claim that they are being victimised and silenced by a media that is only tolerant of those it likes, not those it does not.

I find it to be minefield territory. To be liberal is difficult. Hatred is easy, it doesn’t require much thought or discernment. It doesn’t require work or an intelligent debate. But I cannot support the idea that the BNP should be denied a voice because of their beliefs. I find their beliefs, and what they stand for reprehensible, but I cannot claim to believe in freedom of speech and the right of individuals to believe in what they wish if I deny the voices of people whose views I dislike.

I certainly struggle with protestations by individuals and groups whose hatred of fascism is as powerful as fascists hatred of everybody else. Hate is hate. It is ugly, it is also human. I struggle with the idea that if we give the BNP a voice they will gain more support. That would be to suggest that the British public is inherently fascist and would praise Hitler if given half a chance. Those who make that argument lack faith in post WWII society.

I also think that focusing on just protesting the BNP’s right to a voice ignores the deeper problem. They have won votes in areas and amongst people who previously would have voted for other parties but feel disaffected and without political representation. These communities live in areas of high unemployment, where working class white communities are close to, but segregated from, “ethnic” communities. The former see the latter as taking the few available jobs and benefits. They see nobody doing anything for them.

My thinking is, therefore, rather than to stray into the sticky territory of supporting freedom of speech (but only for people of whom we approve), that we should focus instead on these areas. And I’m not talking about woolly liberal nonsense like “tours of the local mosque”, but the kind of real work that creates jobs, shifts focus and moves people out of dependence on benefits.

Protest is easy; this kind of real work is very hard indeed. Although the core of the BNP is no more sophisticated than the average football hooligan, they have started to win the support of people who have been ignored by big political parties who prefer to court the middle class vote. If we really want to be rid of the people who put people like Nick Griffin in charge, we should undermine the reasons why the previously moderate voters legitimise his position at the polls.

And this we should not sit around and leave to politicians. It’s easy to say “Labour and the Tories won’t do anything…” because when it comes down to it, the people who create jobs are people who are prepared to run businesses, who take risks, who have the intelligence to create wealth in areas where previously it has been sorely lacking. But of course, that would require us to do some work, rather than leaving it to other politicians.

I have to say, speaking from a purely personal perspective, I find fascism thoroughly abhorrent. I come from a family that includes in its numbers Germans, German Jews, Dublin Irish, and old English. I was raised by a father who taught history, and spent my adolescence watching videos of Auschwitz survivors, where the message was clear that I should not sit idly by and let this kind of horror happen again. I write fiction about the horrors that humans commit against other humans, about the brutality of political hatred and totalitarian regimes.

As it happens, I’ve just finished reading Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s Bunker, the book that provided a great deal of the material for the film Der Untergang – Downfall in English. Hitler is known and despised as a figure of pure evil from a distance, but up close he is even more disturbing. We know the figure of six million Jews killed, but there were 17 million in total who died in the purge of ‘inferior races’. In his last days in power, he wanted not to raise up a great nation, and in the end did not fight for some high ideal as other dictators have done, but seemed only interested in massive, endless destruction. I find him more frightening than any of the other historical figures I’ve studied. I write about the senseless destruction of human life in the pursuit of power in my fiction, mostly because although it’s a dark and terrible topic, I would stand against it as much as I could. I struggle to tolerate the views of people who espouse and promote the hatred of other people they consider inferior, so I understand why others do as well.

I’ve also written here about the views of Jan Moir, and I was very clear in participating in an online, verbal response to her published comments about the death of Stephen Gately. I feel we should speak up when somebody like this uses a platform (for which they are paid) for the proliferation of such views. Of course, as I stated, I would not deny her the right to hold those views, but she should be held to account for them.

In the same way, so should Nick Griffin. It is right that rather than rumbling on in the background about being victimised by so-called liberals he should be given a platform where he can express himself. And of course, we who disagree with his views should make our feelings known. But I struggle with the idea of doing this with violence, with personal hatred directed at him and his supporters. Because often when I see anti-fascists protesting against groups of fascists, I simply see two groups with faces equally twisted by hate, and neither helping anybody else who really needs it in the process.

As I stated in my piece about Jan Moir, we should make clear that society as a whole does not accept these outdated viewpoints. But that is not the same as denying them a voice at all, simply because we dislike them. Society has moved on wondrously; we now live in an age where the BNP and indeed any white-supremacist party in this country, is actually breaking the law if it doesn’t open its membership to non-whites. That equality of opportunity for all no matter their creed or colour or sexual orientation is enshrined in law is great progress. It is often in these quiet courts, amonst people who are never seen on TV but do tireless work to give people better options than supporting the BNP, that we see such change take place.

And lastly, while of course you have the right to protest against the BNP with as much gusto as possible (this is the right of living in a free society), do your best not to become the thing you hate the most. Intolerance of intolerance is still intolerance, after all.

This takes the political biscuit

Note for my American readers: The biscuit, in England, is akin to a cookie. However, they are not the large, round, sumptuous articles to be acquired in the US. They are small, neat, and considered appropriate for elevenses (at 11am), to accompany a cup of tea and a sit down (dunking optional). It should also be noted that they may, or may not, be dunked in the aforementioned tea. For more details on this critical aspect of English culture, please see this website for weekly Biscuit of the Week reviews and critical discussions of relevance to the biscuit and tea consuming sections of society.

England is reeling. It is in political turmoil. We are devastated by the apparent lack of decisiveness on the part of our Prime Minister, Gordon “If I go I’ll take the economy with me, and if I stay it’ll tank anyway” Brown. We demand answers. We want to know the truth.

We want to know what his favourite biscuit is.

This is obviously crucial information for all of us over here in Blighty, as we contemplate an election where we must choose between the upper class twits, the middle-class twits, the liberals who’ll never get in no matter what and the pig-faced man with pretensions to being Adolf Hitler.

The story goes like this: Gordon Brown participated in an online chat with some mothers from Mumsnet. He was asked, during the course of this conversation, which biscuit he preferred to eat. He refused to state a preference, deftly avoiding the question with some of the usual political stonewalling. Like John Humphries demanding to know where the bombs are, the Mums would not let this matter go. He was asked several times to clarify the matter of the biscuit, and still he refused to state a preference.

England is thus in uproar.

David Cameron swiftly came forward with a strong declaration in favour of Scottish Oatcakes and confirmed that he would never be found to be indecisive at tea time, or indeed at any other time of the day. He was also quick to denounce the continued presence of the pink wafer in the market.

The Liberal Democrats (Rich Tea) also released a statement to the effect that they would be the ones to assure the British public that they would not be forced to go without biscuits during the recession, and that they would guarantee that the NHS would continue to supply the best in biscuits during the 9 hour wait in Emergency, never to be reduced to the decidedly bland Nice.

Biscuit preference obviously counts for a lot in a land with 2.5 million unemployed, for whom the morning drags through Jeremy Kyle’s showcase of society’s least desirable inhabitants (which at least reassures people that however bad their circumstances, at least they aren’t like them), to elevenses and the choice of biscuit has been reduced to the cardboard and plastic digestives in Tesco’s Economy brand.

The preferred biscuit of the Prime Minister might well be considered to offer an insight on his character, and many pop psychologists weighed into the debate suggesting that such indecisiveness suggests that if a man can’t step forward and claim his biscuit, can he be trusted to run the economy? Brown is well known for U-turns on political hot potatoes, and was possibly sweating over how The Sun and The Daily Mirror might interpret the selection of, say, a Dark Chocolate Digestive over a regular Hobnob.

Now, you may say all of this is a nonsense, but in the UK the biscuit is of great significance. Indeed, the eating of a biscuit could be considered an extreme sport. Apparently, more than half of all Britons have at one time or another been injured directly or indirectly by biscuits. As many as five hundred people have suffered enough harm from biscuits that they have required hospital attention.

According to the Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation, the custard cream is the most dangerous biscuit. This is a riskier indulgence than, say, binge-alcohol consumption or pot-holing. This changes the whole perception of the argument. For coming forward and declaring oneself to be a consumer of biscuits as a politician is pretty much akin to announcing that you snort cocaine of a weekend.

This is what England has come to. Once upon a time, most of the world’s map was coloured in a delicate pink to indicate the lands that had fallen sway to the great Empire, upon which the sun never set. The British led the world into industrial revolution, sparking such wondrous modernities as global warming and, by extension, Al Gore.

And now we are brought low by the humble biscuit.

I expect all over the world, countries are sitting, shaking their heads in wonder, thinking: “How the hell did they even make it past breakfast, let alone conquer the world? They can’t even eat a biscuit safely. How did they ever rule us for hundreds of years?”

It really does take the biscuit, doesn’t it.

Social media and the Jan Moir scandal

The internet has proved itself to be a very, very bizarre place.

I’m not actually talking about the really weird fetishes that you can find out there, but the things that actually hit the headlines of traditional media, make news and go ‘mainstream.’

The thing I love about Twitter is that it is, basically, the market square of the world. For a very long time we really haven’t had a communal place where we congregate to discuss and make group decisions on what the human tribe accepts and rejects. Twitter does that. It may not have managed to topple the current Iranian administration, but it has the power of the flashmob when it comes to what is and is not socially acceptable.

Homophobia is not in. This is a good thing. Personally, I think it’s fine if you want to be homophobic, as long as you do it behind closed doors and don’t hurt anybody (Eddie Izzard, thank you). However, making ludicrous claims like Jan Moir’s column yesterday about Stephen Gately’s death is just monstrous nonsense. It’s usually the kind of thing that people blog about anonymously. Because this is what happens when you do put your name by the opinion that being gay is somehow fatal.

There’s nothing weird or suspicious about Stephen Gately’s death, or indeed, his life. Speaking as somebody who once flew all the way to Australia to sleep on the floor of a person I’d never previously met, the idea that you’d take a soul you’d only just met home with you to offer them a roof over their head doesn’t seem that weird.

The Telegraph attempts to argue that everybody who denounced Jan Moir and complained about her was basically a bunch of militant liberals declaring that we’re the only people allowed to be nasty. I beg to disagree. It is in society, and in the case of the western 21st century society, and in large groups that we decide what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. The most effective way to deal with bigoted, racist, fascist, and anti-semitic opinions is for society as a whole to declare that they are unreasonable, ill-informed, or downright stupid.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t express those views. But if you do, expect the rest of the human tribe to rise up and tell you what a bunch of bollocks you’re talking. In many ways, therefore, it is helpful for people like the BNP to express their views in public so that the public can say “No, thanks. Go away.”

This isn’t so much politics but the nature of what we define as a society as mainstream opinion. It’s taken a very long time for society to reach a point where the majority are quite happy with the idea that you can sleep with whomever you so please, as long as the pair of you are consenting to what happens (and that, of course, everybody is of the right age and able to make an informed decision).

Perhaps the most effective way to deal with people who promote hatred and violence against whichever group they’ve decided is “other” is for the majority to make known their opinions. And with the power of social media on the internet, you can participate in that without even leaving your chair.

I liked the Times Online’s comment from Daniel Finkelstein best of all. Ignoring the polemic, the bile and the hatred, he went for the technical argument. You can’t prove from a sample size of two (Kevin McGee’s suicide and Stephen Gately’s death) that civil partnerships cause death. You can’t even prove that “being gay makes you dead” from that. They are human stories, and the reasons they hit the headlines is that the people involved happen to be in the public eye.

Her argument would be the equivalent of taking the suicides of, say, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and say that being female and a writer is a deadly combination. Finkelstein does the best job of intelligently pulling apart the piece, demonstrating that nobody on earth should be paid to write the kind of idiotic bullshit you’d normally only expect from one of those ignorant trolls who use anonymity to express the sewerage that passes for their brains. It doesn’t even work on an intellectual level, you see.

To take Jan Moir’s argument further, we could make a lot of unpleasant arguments about the nature of heterosexual marriage, based purely on the ongoing – and seemingly never-ending saga of Katie Price and Peter Andre, or the past love life of Jude Law.

This is the wonderful thing about social media, you see. Instead of people writing to us from on high telling us this kind of nonsense, we get to turn around and call them on it. Which should, of course, be done. The same goes for the likes of the BNP. Bring them forth, let them explain their economic policy of sending everybody not native to the UK home. And we’ll call them on it, too. This is how we debate and establish what is and is not acceptable in society.

Get some respect, girls

Two items have been brought to my attention in one morning.

Item 1: The horrifically photoshopped Ralph Lauren model photo, depicting a woman with a head so out of proportion to her body she looks like an alien.

Item 2: German women’s magazine, Brigitte, has declared a moritorium on the use of professional models. Sick of having to photoshop living skeletons to make them more human, the editor is calling for ‘real women’ to be their models.

Let’s add two more items from recent weeks:

Item 3: The Times’ writer Carol Midgley asks readers to write in with their examples of casual sexism. Her initial target is the proliferation of lads mags whose sole focus of interest is women’s naked bodies.

Item 4: The appearance of a woman with a small roll of abdominal fat in a magazine that sent the world into a frenzy. Oh my God, it’s a woman. She is naked. And she has a bit of fat. The horror.

They all have in common a horrifically skewed impression of women’s bodies, and what women’s bodies are like. Designers have even been criticised by the editor of UK Vogue for producing sample clothes so small that the magazines have no choice but to use women who are skeletal in form (hence the decision by Brigitte magazine, presumably).

The “size-zero” debate has been raging for a few years lately, including Spain’s decision to ban underweight models, and London’s decision not to. The issue is blamed for the rise of eating disorders in young women who are desperate to resemble the pictures they see in magazines. In a recent Times article, a writer wondered why young women are so miserable; they grow up pushing themselves to desperate limits from adolescence and even earlier.

It’s not just how they look, though. It’s the fact that they push themselves to get the highest grades, to be the most perfect, to get the best job. We live in a society where women are under immense and terrible pressure to look right all the time.

And the people putting us under this pressure are not men. It’s other women. I’ve shuddered at the shelves of women’s magazines cattily pointing out the tiny physical faults of celebrities. On one cover of Grazia I saw six women picked out. Three were blasted for being too fat, the other three for being too thin. Graphic red circles point out where a miniscule stomach can be seen – after a meal – on an otherwise svelte Paris Hilton.

And then you have the mommy bloggers. If anybody lived in fear of a “sisterhood” of women, they need not fear. The sisterhood is so busy tearing its own members to pieces they’d never get to the problem of unequal pay, maternity rights or real issues of actual consequence. The war rages between moms who stay at home full-time, working moms and working-from-home moms.

They hate each other. They treat their decision to work or not work as a commandment from God and defend it with about as much force as a Muslim terrorist. They are vicious and uncompromising, and they tear each other to pieces.

Men don’t seem to feature in this terrain, or at least, they occupy the very fringes of it. And compared to the campaigns raged by women against each other, the violence of men – while far more obvious – is no more or less damaging. Women subject each other and themselves to torment and abuse. We don’t just attack once and let things lie. Women can hold grudges and wage campaigns of hate the like of which would make Osama bin Laden wet himself.

I spent five odd years researching women’s lives in the nineteenth century and I know what a battle it was for feminism to get us the right to be treated as human beings. Never mind rights to equal pay, jobs on the board or the glass ceiling. It wasn’t that long ago that we were considered to be property.

But what I’ve grown up in is almost as oppressive. I’m writing this because for fifteen years I had anorexia. I had anorexia so badly that it almost killed me, and for a few years I was considered incurable. I have damaged my digestive system with a year of laxative addiction and overdoses of diet pills.My scars from cutting will last me the rest of my life.

I’m writing this because I wasted fifteen years of my life being miserable about myself. My body bore the brunt of it because it was the physical manifestation of me in the world. It was easier, back then. It seems to be worse now. But for fifteen years, I was obsessed with weight, with eating and food. I was a straight A student, I somehow managed to get a degree and a PhD through the worst years of the illness before I let it go.

I look back on those years as utterly wasted. When I consult or contract in offices I find them filled with normal-sized women obsessed with dieting, carrying around great rocks of guilt about every chocolate, every moment they don’t worry about food. They’re constantly starting diets. They never seem to finish them or get anywhere with them. They try one after the other, endlessly.

It’s the thin end of a wedge that on the thick end results in death, or abject misery. Women’s culture in the west – or at least the UK – is suffused with a miasma of self-hatred. Success isn’t success unless you have the kids, the perfect man and the perfect home. Women won’t allow themselves to settle for less and they won’t give themselves – or each other – a break.

I have heard it said that it isn’t important that the images of women we are surrounded with are so ridiculously unreal as to be alien. But it is. We grow up looking around us for what’s ‘normal’. We look at these images for what we expect to become. My niece is seven and already celebrating the fact that she has high heels. I’m baffled. I didn’t even know what high heels were when I was that age.

So girls are growing up with images of women that look ridiculous. They are told “this is what is beautiful” in our society, because that’s what they’re presented with. And we foist this pressure to have, be and do everything. I feel it myself, when encountering certain groups of women who find me an alien because at 31, I’m not already married. I don’t even have a boyfriend. They find the idea of not having a man – and it doesn’t matter how awful he is, as long as you’ve got one – utterly horrifying.

A great deal has been said elsewhere about the sexualisation of young women for the sake of male pleasure, but I suspect that even this is done by women, to women. It wasn’t her father who gave her the high heeled shoes and dressed my niece like a tart when she was but six years old. It was her mother. At least the lads’ mags show off women who actually have more than a millimetre of fat on them. The one redeeming feature of the porn industry is that it doesn’t abide skeletal girls.

All of it makes me sad. It makes me most sad to see that we do it to ourselves. That we snipe and criticise in magazines and then in the gym, berate ourselves for every treat, and lumber about the world on a treadmill of guilt.

When I look back at the years I was anorexic now I just can’t understand how I could have wasted so much life on being so thin. It is a haze, an illusion of the mind that unfortunately, has a lot of backing from the messages we receive from the outside world. I look back and see that I wasn’t who or what I thought I was, that through my own choices I cut myself off from life. What is even more upsetting is that while I was strong enough and lucky enough to have the bloody-mindedness to survive, many women don’t.

And on the fringes, women who constantly diet but never lose weight are as disordered in their eating and their thoughts about their body and eating as I was. Just because they don’t successfully starve themselves into bony nightmares, does not mean they’re healthy. I often find myself on social outings with women I can’t talk to because their conversation revolves exclusively around their dieting, their gym attendance (or lack thereof) and their efforts at hair dyeing.

It has taken a great deal to extricate myself from the world of women, which is marked by such appalling, fundamental insecurity that it’s frightening. We’ve come so far and done so much, and yet we beat ourselves up all the time. We are bitches to each other, and men are left on the sidelines. I’ve never actually met a man who said he found underweight women attractive.

I’m often left with the impression that the battle of the sexes is a myth; the real war is between women and their tragic, overwhelming sense that they simply are not good enough, and have no right to exist. So if we’re going to stop all of this, from starving ourselves to over-sexualising younger and younger girls, we need to get a bit of self-respect. It’s no good demanding of men and society the basic freedoms we will not grant ourselves.

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of snidely and cattily denouncing working mothers/single mothers/older mothers/single women/fat women/thin women/any other woman than yourself we could support each other? If we could give ourselves a break for not finishing the washing up/having a perfect home-husband-child/having a bottom comparable to Angelina Jolie’s/doing the ironing/finishing that diet/going to the gym a thousand times a week.

What if we could appreciate ourselves, our bodies, each other’s bodies and selves. What if working mothers stood up for the right of stay-at-home moms to make their own independent decision to mother fulltime, and what if stay at home moms respected the valuable contribution working mothers make to their family incomes?

Wouldn’t that be better. It all starts with our own behaviour, and how we treat ourselves. When we grow up, get self-respect and improve our own self-esteem, then we will see the changes we’ve all been longing for. But it won’t change until women demand it of themselves.

Eat chocolate, love your body. Burn the magazines, not your bras.

Living in fear of small things

I am about to venture into dangerous territory with a hot topic: fear. I don’t normally do this, but lately events have made me wonder more about fear, especially as I so frequently read columnists wondering why we fear the wrong things.

There has just been a health scare in the UK.

Everybody is up in arms. A girl died after receiving a vaccine for HPV, which protects against girls getting the virus which is largely held responsible for cervical cancer. It turns out that she died from another cancer in her chest and was likely to have dropped at any minute. The vaccine had nothing to do with it.

Of course, everybody is ignoring this and currently rabid with fear and anger at governments, health professionals and everybody else sane and sensible enough to want to vaccinate girls against cancer. Since we spent the nineties and early part of this decade terrified of the MMR vaccine, the topic is one that really raises everybody’s ire.

The figures look something like this, if the Times is to be believed. Of 1.4 million girls innoculated, there have been around 4000 reports of adverse effects, and no deaths. People report various symptoms after receiving the vaccine, but it’s often difficult to prove causation. People look at causation simply: something happened and then shortly after, something else happened. Yet often, events just happen to coincide.

The furore around the MMR jab was driven by incredibly flawed evidence, and the tendency of people to jump on something and make a big fuss. I’ve been curious about this, because similar things drive people into a rabid frenzy. Schizophrenics who kill, for example. Strangers who abduct and molest children.

Sane, reasoned commentators are bemused by people’s reactions. A very small number of schizophrenics kill, and strangers are far less likely to hurt children than a relative. Most abuse is committed by an adult in the family. Somebody the child knows. Yet all the time stricter and stricter laws are brought in that focus on strangers having access to children. The new vetting procedure being brought into the UK which Philip Pullman hates so much would not have stopped Ian Huntley doing to the two Soham girls what he did. He didn’t even work at the school; his girlfriend did.

Doctors are baffled that no matter how many studies are released about the relative safety of MMR vaccinations, and all the court cases surrounding the originator of the theory that the MMR was responsible for causing autism, people are still insistent that it is responsible. If somebody attempts to soothe, they jump on increasingly bizarre accusations, in terror of a faceless organisation or pharmaceutical companies.

I’m curious about this. Having watched the explosion of horror around the death of the 14 year old following her HPV vaccination (a vaccine I desperately wish I could receive for free, as an adult woman with a down-to-earth attitude toward sex), I suspected that it would be revealed that something else was at cause. And I also was not surprised to see such a furore arise.

My own little hypothesis is that we lack for things to fear, and that we’d rather fear things we can control and just pretend the real horrors aren’t there.

First of all, there are very few people around now who remember what it was like when child mortality was very high in the first five years of life. The years before incubators, and before such things as the smallpox and polio vaccines. We live a cossetted life, in health terms. You only really notice it when you travel to the more distant parts of the globe and suddenly require vaccination against the strange and foreign horrors that lurk out there.

A hundred years ago, death in the first five years of life was common. Polio and smallpox, tuberculosis and measles were common. You could see, first hand, exactly how devastating they were, and how virulent they could be. In my research on the lives of women living a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago, many of them had many children; it was not uncommon to find that most of those children died.

Now, child death is rare. Severe childhood illness is also rare. We don’t see the victims of polio wandering around. In the west we are spared cholera, typhoid and typhus. We are incredibly safe. So safe, in fact, that ‘lifestyle illnesses’ are more common than viruses. We do damage to ourselves through poor eating and health habits rather than be damaged by the ravages of a virus.

This means that we don’t really appreciate the deadliness of the viruses against which we are protected. It makes innoculation seem pointless because we just can’t see the real danger. And we have grown to fear different things; faceless bureaucracies and a mysterious and frightening government apparently plotting against the world. If governments can’t even manage our data sensibly enough, I doubt they have the organisational capacity to do the many things of which they are often accused.

The same thing goes for child abuse. Most of the recent sensational cases of child abuse leading to death – if not all – were at the hands of a relative, a person known to the victim. And yet we’re still more scared that our child will be snatched by a stranger than raped by its own father.

In truth, we have few reasons to feel fear, but when we do, we want to place it on things we can control. That your daughter is being abused by her uncle is too much; it’s easier to take action against the remote possibility of her being snatched on the street. We just don’t think about the real dangers because there’s just no way we can control against them.

Jabs are the same. The illness we’re being protected from is a far away, distant thing. We’ve never been exposed to the harm they cause, but we are leery of mysterious doctors who claim to know more than us. Choosing to have a substance injected into you is a risky business for us.

We have so little left to fear in life that we place it on relatively minor risks. It’s interesting that despite the fact that we have made ourselves so safe from the vagaries of the natural world that we haven’t reduced our capacity to fear. Instead, we stress over jobs as though not handing in a report is a life sentence; a poor credit score is like leprosy for some. We are intensely paranoid, and we have made relatively normal behaviour into disorders.

We also have the internet, something that allows people to get together and anonymously terrify each other. I sometimes suspect that it’s because we have so little to fear in our everyday lives that we have to construct monolithic conspiracies (a back-handed compliment to politicians who never demonstrate such capacity for planning), and live in dread of small things.

Death is a far bigger drama in the West than once it was, because it is no longer such a feature of the landscape of human existence. To doctors it is failure; to most of us it is so far away, so unlikely, we never consider it. When it touches our lives in some way we are rocked and shocked; we are not immune in the ways we once were. Becoming more physically safe seems to have made us much more emotionally vulnerable.

I have no answer to this, but I find it fascinating. Through my academic research and my charitable involvement, I have access to other lives where death, illness and trauma are so much more visible, so present in people’s lives. And yet the fear of them is less. Perhaps it’s true that we fear the unknown most. We focus on what we can control (stranger danger, getting a jab), but having relieved our lives of the worst of human suffering, it is a shadow lurking at our door, and we’re suddenly all the more sensitive to its appearance in our lives.

If I could have anything in the world, it would be a Pensieve

It might be the cleverest (or at least the most appealing) idea in the whole Harry Potter universe.

Put your wand to your temple, extract a thought as a long strand, and drop it into the Pensieve for later perusal. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate cure for depression?

I would have all these thoughts whistling about in my head extracted, and then since I don’t feel they need later perusal of any kind, would have them knitted into garments for orphaned dolphins. Then, at least, they might be of some use.

Imagine a world where we could extract our thoughts with a wand. Deposit them for later review.

I’d probably realise just how much garbage my mind produces in a single day.

Yesterday, I sat opposite a friend in the Cornerhouse cafe, drinking English tea from a glass mug (this is somehow, fundamentally wrong; tea should be drunk either from fine china – if you’re upper class or upper middle class – or a mug). I put my hands down on the table and tried to explain how I was feeling.

There’s two of me, I was saying. I wiggled my left hand, slicing the air over the table. This hand represents the shriveled up bit, the bit that lives, really and truly, as though it was fifteen years ago. Then there’s the right hand – air gestures – which has moved on, and lives in the present. I am firmly stuck in the past.

My head felt heavy.

“I think this is going to be a major breakthrough,” I said. “Either that, or I’m getting a cold.”

My eyes were sticking out on stalks, watching the buses go by. A cold, adjusting to being on medication and Holosync all combined to give the world a slightly swimmy feeling. As though my brain was floating on a sea of porridge.

Realisations don’t get much bigger than this. It’s like waking up and seeing the world for the first time. I had never realised how fundamentally, how deeply I was stuck in the past. Somehow, I never left school, and my brain was convinced that I’d open my eyes and find myself there. I’m only just hacking away at the strands of conditioning, the ropes that have kept me tied there. I awake out of meditations with a brief view of my life now, and it’s like being a different person.

I feel like saying, “Oh my god, here I am. It’s now. It’s not then. It’s over.”

I have been slipping in and out of this for the last few days, which is why I haven’t been blogging, or writing, at all. For the last month I’ve been hit, like clockwork, every other day, by a sudden explosion of thoughts, of memories, details. It hurts like a bitch and then it’s gone, and I’m over it.

I told my friend that it was like having food poisoning, and knowing that every time you throw up that’s another bit of the poison out of your system. He was rather disgusted by the metaphor but it’s appropriate.

My whole life collapsed, but I feel as though I am waking up out of a dream. I have gone to the very depths of me, and possibly beyond, and untied all the ropes around me. If I had the time and the inclincation – and if I didn’t have a cold – I’d go back to the work of Jean Piaget or others and tell you about developmental stages, and how I seem to have been trapped in one.

Or not, or something like it.

For part of me, I never left school. It had such an impact on me and my life, those years, that I trapped myself there. On the first day I consciously set up a means of survival, but I forgot to leave myself a note to drop the survival techniques once I left. Instead, they’ve still been running, and my life has crashed in the process.

It was inevitable, of course. Accelerated by Holosync, perhaps, but eventually, my life and my self-description became so detached from current reality that it stopped functioning at all. I wish, I dearly wish, life issued warnings of these things. I could have done with an email in December last year, perhaps, mentioning that all my mental systems had run out of time and I needed to get them replaced.

It would be a bit like a form of the millennium bug.

Instead, my life crumbled before my eyes, and I seemed to be falling to bits. Nothing worked, nothing went right. And I felt as though I was in a prison, and paralysed, unable to move forward at all.

There are now weird moments when I slip between being who I was then, and being the person I’ve grown up into. I don’t actually have to do all my growing up in one go, fortunately, it’s just a matter of realising, on a deep and fundamental level, that all that is over, and I am free to move on with my life now. In the present.