The dirt from Dirt: 16 October 2011

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Gradual Dysphoria or Overnight Dysphoria?

Since many readers have or are still suffering from some degree of body dysphoria, I thought we could discuss the timing your dysphoria occurred. Given the phallocentric world girls grow up in, it isnt at all surprising many of us from our earliest memories hoped and dreamed we would awake with a penis. Even in our early years, we recognize the world is fully available to those with penis's that it isnt to those without. Even the "without" seems an accusation of less than or missing something important. But penis privileges aside, not having one doesnt really signify dysphoria. Similarly to wanting something the wealthy posses that you dont and never will, it doesnt create a pathological uncomfortableness (sometime suicidalness) that dysphoria does.

So describe when and how dysphoria came into your life. Was it slowly or swiftly? Did something trigger it or was it accumulative?

dirt

Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Internet-Look before you Leap

We the non-celebrities are making ourselves more available, in vaster quantities. But in doing so, we are losing control over the information we considered to be ours alone. We have the convenience of online bill-paying. But credit cards companies know facts about us we never remember telling them. We have the ease of online shopping. Now online shops advertise to us long after we visited their site, wherever we happen to be on the Internet. We want to stay in touch with people we would have, in another age, left behind — people we met on holiday or on the street, people we knew only as children. So we post mundane, daily facts about our workday or our meals — information that used to disappear before it was even registered as experience — hoping that it might bring this giant network of people closer to our mundane, daily lives. But the mundane information starts to define us; we can’t get rid of it.

The Urban Dictionary includes a term called “Public Privacy.” Public privacy is defined as:

The illusion of which is given to people on a cell phone or blue tooth in public and within earshot of others. These people believe that others cannot hear about their husband's rectal exam or their mothers attempt at making toast in the microwave.

When we go home at night, we are still in the crowd. We hop on our computers, consume information. We might go onto Facebook and talk to hundreds of friends at once, retool our image: What do I want to tell people that I like today? How do I want to look today? How can I expand the breadth of my crowd? The more people I am friends with, the more people I can see. Like Baudelaire, we are watching, observing, hoping to find ourselves in the multitude. We think maybe it’s crazy, that having more acquaintances, perpetually developing our personae, and sharing every moment of our lives in the panoptic milieu of the Internet will somehow bring our private lives into focus.

Baudelaire wrote about the romance of throwing oneself alone, directionless, into the crush of public life. And it is exhilarating — spending your days wandering from shop to shop, fact to fact, video to video, stranger to stranger. But his poetry was a reminder. The passion for roaming means a love of masquerades and a hatred of home. Baudelaire, too, wanted to protect his privacy. But he feared he had lost the very thing he wanted to protect.

A fitting article for all those trans trenders and the like, who protest to their YT's being linked, their pictures being utilized, their words being discussed. When you act like a celeb, you will be treated like a celeb/ And celebs learn straight away, once you make yourself the property of the public, privacy ceases to exists.

dirt