Emotional Barf-A-Rama

——WARNING——-
This entry is agitated and somewhat graphic…
for mature, stout-hearted readers only…
all others please go elsewhere. Thank you!

So I started reading this really interesting book called The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer. She also wrote a book back in 1970 called The Female Eunuch. She has such an amazing perspective on things I can’t believe I never really heard of her before (although her name did sound a little familiar). I don’t know how I missed that first book… oh yeah, I was busy having kids and keeping house. Getting married at 18 and having my first baby nine months and three days later (yes, folks, I was not pregnant on my wedding day as much as my parents’ friends expected that my baby would be arriving “prematurely” – I felt like sending out birth announcements with hands on them that had a month written on each finger so the counting could be done for them… wedding in December, baby in September… nope, she wasn’t pregnant).

Anyway, this Whole Woman book was written more recently (although not THAT recent) and I got so hooked reading an excerpt on Amazon that I asked my husband to pick it up for me on his way home from work because I didn’t want to wait for it to come in the mail nor did I want to wait to see if it was in the library. It’s sort of ironic that my husband got it for me LOL since it is such a down-on-men book, but it’s perfect for my current “hate men” stance. And I don’t really hate them, I just hate SOME of them… I hate the ones that use women. I hate their animal instincts. I hate the men that leer and that feel as if their attainment of an orgasm is more important than a woman’s feelings. I hate the men that fund the rings of prostitution where women are enslaved and traded. I hate the men who rape… not only women but girls and not only girls but boys. I hate men who get off on snuff tapes. I even hate the men who used to read my books. (Geez, it’s good I have therapy today, isn’t it?)

Germaine Greer points out that back when she wrote The Female Eunuch our daughters weren’t cutting themselves and starving themselves. She points out that though we say things have gotten better, many things have actually gotten worse and I guess that’s true although I don’t think it’s limited to women alone. These days plenty of young men are cutting themselves and some are even starving themselves and is it my imagination or does it seem as if more young men are becoming homosexual than ever before? And, since this is my diary I can make whatever generalization I like, but I have had many many gay friends (male) and have found that the majority had some sort of sexual abuse by a male when they were young. Now, some women may have actually been cutting themselves and just not talked about it, I don’t know. But I do know that I “learned” to cut myself from a guy who had done self-mutilation long before it got to be a “popular” thing to do. Now everybody cuts. 😉 I don’t think anorexia was a big thing back then although I do think bulimia was probably a practice back in the day.

Another incisive observation Ms. Greer makes is Along with spurious equality and flirty femininity we were sold sexual “freedom.” One man’s sexual freedom is another man’s – or woman’s or child’s – sexual thraldom. The first tenet of sexual freedom is that any kind of bizarre behavior is legitimate if the aim is orgasm. Men who nail each other’s foreskins to breadboards are not to be criticized or ridiculed, still less humiliated or punished. An individual who gets his kicks by shoving live hamsters into his rectum must not be reviled, though he may be prosecuted for cruelty to animals. Political correctness forbids me to identify such a paraphiliac as male but if he turns out to be female, I’ll eat the hamster.

Thralldom= One, such as a slave or serf, who is held in bondage. One who is intellectually or morally enslaved.

Paraphilia=Any of a group of psychosexual disorders characterized by sexual fantasies, feelings, or activities involving a nonhuman object, a non-consenting partner such as a child, or pain or humiliation of oneself or one’s partner. Also called sexual deviation.

The above definitions were just in case, like me, you weren’t really familiar with those words.

Anyway, I don’t exactly feel like the hamster guy SHOULD be ridiculed or punished nor do I feel as if the guys with the nails and bread boards should be ridiculed or punished either… heaven knows some of the stuff I wrote in my books, etc. were only a step short of the bread board. But I understand, all too well, the pervasive attitude that has spread over our country, if not much of the world, that anything is okay if it’s consensual – including torture and even death as I think we’ve all read about women meeting men on the Internet then turning up dead because they have consented to be tortured and killed during sex. Of course, when/if the man has been found they have been dealt with legally, but there are still women (and men) looking to have that done to them. To be perfectly honest, I actually met some of them on the net when I was doing my writing. I often asked them why and tried to determine what was going on in their minds… what went on in their lives and childhoods to cause their thinking to go so haywire. I never could figure it out. I met a couple of men who wanted to kill women during sex… one who fantasized about a farm of women like cows to grind into meat and eat like hamburger. (Yes, this was a healthy group of people for ME to be talking with considering all MY issues.) The thing is, as long as there is an undercurrent of this is okay… it’s sexual freedom it will never improve. People will not say to themselves, “I’m sick. I need to get help.” Instead they will either seek fulfillment of their fantasies or indulge themselves in legal ways to satisfy them if they’re afraid of getting in trouble. Even when it was not socially acceptable to be “sexually liberated” people did heinous things. Now that it is, they’re even more heinous. Now, though, if you read through some of the OD entries by teenage girls, you will find that 13 and 14 year old girls are making out with each other for the entertainment of their male counterparts. That’s because it’s the IN thing to do these days. And girls are giving oral sex like it’s a handshake these days. Teen girls are more sexually enslaved to a guy’s pleasure than we even thought about back in the seventies and that was a time when we were “making love, not war.”

So… so, what am I going to do about it… I don’t know… get an ulcer or something. My girls are all grown up. There’s nothing I can do about it now I suppose. I have a husband who is not a pig and so my son is not a pig. He’s a good boyfriend. Thank you, God! So, there’s really nothing I can do about it. But, I can rant about it in here and I suppose stop being so insane about how fat or thin I am. I mean, now that I’ve had the surgery and I’m at a healthy weight by any standards, why am I making myself crazy. I’m trying to lose another 20 lbs and I sink to the deepest depressions when I go up by one or two pounds. I drive myself crazy over my hair, my wrinkles, my neck, my sagginess, my un-sexiness. Reading this book is like getting a good slap and I needed it. It is SO ha

rd to separate my worth as a woman from my worth as a sexual object. I don’t feel valuable if I don’t feel attractive. When I was 237 lbs. I felt like a useless person… I felt as if I wasn’t a “good gift” to my husband. Now that I’m 136, 137, 138 depending upon the day, I feel like a much better “gift.” Of course I feel like a better gift on the days that I weigh in at 136 than I do on the days I weight in at 138. This is so crazy. And the amount of confidence I feel is so unbelievable compared to how I felt before the surgery. The improved confidence is good, but I’m disappointed in myself that I couldn’t feel that when I was obese.

And, sadly, I didn’t even want to post that weight loss journey picture because I didn’t want those of you who didn’t know me as an obese person to really KNOW that I was obese. I was ashamed of my past obesity. I was afraid it would change your opinions of me, and you know what… it will and I’m sure it did. Maybe some for the better, maybe some for the worse… but I’m sure it did.

Oh well… I am having an emotional barf-a-rama here. I know this is all good for me in the long run. I need to work all this stuff out. I am having lots of turmoil, partially because I’m still dealing with my new size. A year is a fairly short time to go from who I was to who I am now. Part of it is dealing with intimacy and abuse issues… and part of it is just having more time on my hands because work is slow and I had to stay home to wait for the plumber 😉

I’m off to therapy… I feel sorry for him 😉