Guest Post: Sexual Assault By a Medical Provider Is Not a Big Deal… Until It Is

[Content Notice: Sexual Assault, fatphobia]

The following is a first-hand account of mistreatment on several levels at the hands of a medical provider via Ania of Scribbles and Rants, a blog where she, along with her partner Alex, sheds insight onto matters as diverse as skepticism, feminism, disability, and the relationship between being an atheist and a person of color. I had the pleasure of meeting her at Eschaton last year and was impressed with her courage, passion, and intellect. I am even more impressed now.

When I was 18, I was assaulted by a doctor at the university clinic.

I had gone in to get tested for bacterial vaginosis. I was in love and wanted to make sure that I didn’t smell strange if the chance to have sex ever came up. The first doctor at the clinic was very kind. She opted not to use a speculum since I was a virgin, just like every other doctor I had seen for a vaginal issue until that point. I got a call a few weeks later to come in to get my results. The doctor who saw me then was someone I had not seen before. Before she even got to the test results, she began laying into me about my weight. She told me I was morbidly obese, that diabetes must be causing the smell. I was maybe 40 lbs. heavier than my optimal weight for my height. I didn’t know what fat shaming was then, but I tried standing up for myself, letting her know that my cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels were all perfect.

The facts didn’t matter to her. She had decided that I didn’t meet her standards of fitness and that the best way to deal with it was to make me feel horrible about myself. Finally, we got to the results: I did not have BV. She asked me why I had come in to check on it, and so I told her. Unexpectedly, she offered to take a look. I was shocked, but I accepted her offer. I was worried and she was a doctor. She had to be professional, right?

As I sat on the table, getting ready for the exam, I looked over at her and asked her not to use the speculum. I was a virgin, I told her, and the other doctor said it wasn’t necessary. Then, I lay down on the cold table. There is vulnerability in that statement. Everything about the doctor’s office is about power. You sit, while the doctor stands above you. You are naked, while they are dressed. You are in pain, afraid, vulnerable, and they hold the answers. Everything about the doctor-patient relationship reinforces that power dynamic. I was vulnerable on that table, exposing my private parts to a doctor who had already wounded me. She had already established her power over me, so I knew that my request was a supplication. It was her power to grant it.

But she didn’t.

a plastic speculum with a red screw

As I lay there exposed on the cold table, worried about whether or not I was normal, the doctor violated my request. She shoved an unlubricated speculum inside me and opened it to its widest setting. I can’t even remember what came next. I do remember the pain. I don’t remember walking out of the clinic. I do remember trying to rush back to my dorm; I didn’t want to cry in public. I looked for the room of the person I trusted most on campus but he wasn’t home. In my search for him, I ended up in a room with some people I vaguely knew. I broke down crying. I told them what had happened. I was bleeding, I was sure of it. I felt torn. But I was crying about the fat shaming, had every instance of it having happened flying through my brain.

I was lucky in some ways. The people I barely knew, who comforted me as I cried, said all the right things. They told me what happened wasn’t my fault. That what she had done was wrong and that I was right to be upset. Not everyone is so lucky. But I didn’t want to listen. I wasn’t prepared to face that what happened to me was assault, so instead, I concentrated on the fat shaming. I convinced myself that the assault was no big deal.

Years later, when I lost my virginity, I postponed getting a pap smear for two years. Normally, you are expected and encouraged to get one within a year of becoming sexually active, but I didn’t want to be in that vulnerable position again. Moreover, I became more sensitive to fat shaming. I lost my temper more quickly whenever my weight was mentioned. It tinged all my interactions with doctors. If they brought up my weight, I found it more difficult to trust them or found myself reacting negatively to the rest of the appointment. Every time a doctor failed to listen to me, it felt like another betrayal.

Everything came to a head when my GI made the decision to send me to the weight management clinic. The morning of the appointment, I woke up in a panic. My heart was beating like crazy. I was sweating. I couldn’t focus my mind. I found myself sitting in a corner, rocking back and forth and crying. I couldn’t understand why.

All I could think about was that doctor, her cold hands, the pain of the rough plastic edges as the speculum entered me, the stretching-tearing feeling of it being opened. I couldn’t get the feeling of betrayal, of being violated, out of my mind. Superimposed over those feelings was every instance when a doctor refused to listen to me, all the times when I’d had to be vulnerable with a doctor and had that vulnerability rewarded with pain and betrayal.

When I realized what was going on — a panic attack — I took some anxiety medication and tried to calm myself down. I spent my day curled around myself, trying to hold myself together, as I watched the clock tick down to my appointment. I was terrified. I didn’t know what would happen when I went into the clinic.

a blurred room

Throughout my struggle, I realized that what I had thought was no big deal had actually been affecting my interaction with doctors for years. Suddenly, I was facing the truth: What had happened to me was a big fucking deal. I had been assaulted. By a doctor. By a member of society that I was supposed to be able to trust implicitly. By a person that everyone expected me to trust. Not only had my body been violated, so had my ability to trust that doctors had my best interest at heart. What’s more, the violation brought on the realization that I was very much a member of a vulnerable population: people with disabilities are among some of the most at risk for sexual assault.

Sexual assault is about power. It is about the perpetrator feeling like they have power over the victim. It is not about sex. The inclusion of my genitals in this assault was incidental. The doctor in question wasn’t trying to get any kind of sexual thrill or fulfill a sexual desire. Who I was didn’t matter. She just needed to assert her own power over someone else, and I was the lucky victim.

If you asked her, she probably would have no idea that what she did to me was assault. She might make excuses about how she thought that the use of a speculum was necessary. She might say that she is a doctor and I am not, and that she knew better than I did. It doesn’t matter what she would say. The simple truth is that I made my boundaries clear and she violated them. The fact that she did so without even the courtesy of using lubrication (standard in those types of medical procedures) is just icing on the cake. To her, it didn’t matter if I felt pain. I wasn’t a human being in that moment. I was at her mercy. She was the one in charge and she could do whatever she wanted to me without fear of consequences. To her, what I wanted didn’t matter. And that is what makes it assault.

Assaults by doctors, unless sensationalized and existing on a large scale, rarely get talked about — and are sometimes even trivialized. We as a society put great faith in doctors. We don’t want to face that the people responsible for our health and well-being might be as human as the rest of us. We don’t want to address the fact that power dynamics that are enforced as severely as those between patients and doctors puts everyone at risk of abuse. We especially don’t want to talk about doctor abuse, because in doing so, we risk being lumped in with conspiracy theorists that take things too far and condemn the medical profession altogether. As an advocate of evidence-based medicine, it’s difficult to draw attention to abuses perpetuated by doctors and still defend medicine as a profession.

And yet, drawing attention to this abuse is very important. When someone is hurt so personally by a doctor, it can be easy to lose faith in the entire industry. Being violated by a doctor does more than affect you psychologically, it can also put your health at risk. It can make you afraid to be vulnerable with doctors again. It might mean that you try to protect yourself by keeping things to yourself that the doctor should know about. But more importantly, talking about doctor abuse is essential to help victims know that they didn’t do anything wrong and that they are not alone.

Whenever I discuss what happened to me, someone always feels the need to mention that the doctor might not have been thinking about consent but might have simply decided that using a speculum was necessary. Who was I, as an untrained patient, to decide what equipment the doctor needed or didn’t need, they ask? I have questions of my own. If doctors know better, does that mean they have the right to ignore the boundaries I set for myself? Does that mean that I have no say in what happens to my body? And if so, is my body really mine? What about your body? And where do we draw the line?

Guest Post: Sexual Assault By a Medical Provider Is Not a Big Deal… Until It Is
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The Huffington Post’s Resident Conspiracy-Theorist Creationist

I’ve always had mixed feelings about The Huffington Post. They make money with notorious clickbait and yet don’t pay their non-staff writers. Their UK political editor is someone who, despite being an Oxford graduate and a journalist, chose his words rather poorly when speaking of non-Muslims, especially atheists (he did apologize for it). Steven Novella has written several times on the HuffPo’s promotion of pseudoscience.

Knowing those things, however, could not prepare me for the fact that Adnan Oktar, alias Harun Yahya, a notorious Islamic creationist, is a HuffPo contributor. Let me rephrase it so that those who don’t know who he is can feel the outrage: the Muslim Ray Comfort — with a generous dash of Harold Camping — writes for HuffPo.

Harun Yahya has written 234 (!) books (all available for free online) on topics like Islamic apocalyptic conspiracy theories, the Holocaust, and the evils of Romanticism. His favorite theme, Islamic Creationism, can be found in nearly all of his books, even the ones not about his views of the science of evolution. Despite being advised (and, according to some whispers, funded) by American Creationists, he thinks that “Darwinism” is not only factually and scientifically incorrect, but also pure Western-created evil designed to subjugate Muslims.

After years of exclusively using the Harun Yahya identity, the man behind it, Adnan Oktar, has emerged into very public view. He has a talk show called Building Bridges TV on his television network (not to be confused with the Muslim American TV channel, Bridges TV). All the appalling glory of the show, hosted by women Oktar calls his “kittens,” has been covered by Slate. I personally think the worst part is the dancing, if their version of Gangnam Style is any indicator.

At first blush, the listing of Oktar’s contributions to HuffPo doesn’t look too terrible. One piece appears to be pro-science (even though he’s bad at science) and another pro-women. The problem is that the average HuffPo reader is likely unaware of who Oktar is and what he does. In the same way that Ray Comfort uses politeness, Oktar uses his platform on HuffPo to lull people into a false sense of security. By presenting only his most palatable, sanitized views to the public, he can portray himself as not as dangerous as he actually is.

And mark my words, he is dangerous. When I was a religious Muslim teenager, I happened upon a copy of his Evolution Deceit. The book appealed to my budding distrust of “the West” as well as to my love of science. The fact that the man used a pseudonym appealed to my conspiracy-theory-primed mind: I thought that he must be telling some hard truths if he couldn’t use his real name and face. I read his books, with their glossy color illustrations and exciting-looking covers, to bolster my fading faith in Islam. Obviously, that adrenaline-shot of Harun Yahya to my flagging faith wasn’t enough to stop its death march, but I understand all too well the seductiveness of Harun Yahya’s writings. He is a slick, skilled promoter of pseudoscience, adept at disguising the ludicrous nature of his claims in intellectual-sounding language.

Adnan Oktar along with text exposing hi,
Feel free to save, copy, and distribute this image.

There are legitimate Muslim scientists, one of whom I had the honor of speaking with last year, who are doing good work deserving of promotion. In lieu of helping them with their cause, the HuffPo has given a conspiracy-theorist Islamic creationist yet another megaphone by which he can promote his frankly absurd views. Any amount of awkward dancing and lip-service to female empowerment cannot hide Adnan Oktar’s promotion of conspiracy theories and anti-science in the form of Islamic Creationism. It is utterly irresponsible for The Huffington Post to lend this man an air of legitimacy by providing him a platform.

I urge you all to join in me in calling attention to Oktar’s body of work and to his anti-science agenda. Even if the HuffPo continues to feature him, it’s important that anyone who reads his work knows who he is and what he is about. In addition to spreading the word, you can let the HuffPo know that you aren’t okay with giving Adnan Oktar a platform by tweeting @HuffingtonPost/@HuffPostBlog, posting on their Facebook page, and/or emailing them at [email protected].

The Huffington Post’s Resident Conspiracy-Theorist Creationist

Ex-Muslims of North America: A Dream Come True

Call me biased — I happily accept all charges of subjectivity in this matter. I am going to unabashedly revel in how amazing this is and nothing can stop me. This was so desperately needed and it finally exists.

I’m talking about Ex-Muslims of North America.

When I first became an apostate in 2006, the world of the ex-Muslim was far more narrow than it is today. The only apostates I’d heard of were international figures who had to live under armed guard, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali; anonymous folks mostly found online, like the now-defunct Towelians; or those who somewhat qualify as both, like Ibn Warraq. The idea of run-of-the-mill folks simply being apostates of Islam in their hearts, let alone out under their true names, seemed impossible. The overall message for ex-Muslims seemed unequivocal: your family will disown and shun you at best, Jihadis will put a mark on you, and the world aside from the extreme right-wing will reject you.

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I didn’t want to be an out apostate if it meant being hurt or killed, or losing my family, or automatically joining up with Daniel Pipes.

I did it anyway.

Though I knew it would end up doing so, I didn’t do it to cause trouble. Though I knew the act would be perceived that way, I didn’t do so to rebel, either. I didn’t even do it to make a point — at least not primarily.

I did it because I wanted to be loved and accepted for who I was. All I wanted was to be myself, consistently, everywhere, with everyone. It was how I behaved when I was a devout Muslim and it was how I wanted to continue to behave as a former Muslim.

My actions did end up making a point. As far as I know, there is no fatwa against me declaring that I should be killed. My family, though in deep disagreement with me, still loves me. The only association I’ve ever had with Daniel Pipes was attending a free event of his where I asked him a pointed question about his racism at which he rather waffled and, of course, contradicted himself. My existence alone, as I am, makes more than a few points.

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Obviously, such is not the case for all ex-Muslims, including but not limited to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Take Marwa Berro, the brilliant young woman behind Between a Veil & a Dark Place, for example. Plenty of other ex-Muslims hide their identities and/or are only out on a limited basis to keep themselves safe from harm. On the flip side, I’ve heard of ex-Muslims whose families don’t care too much about the fact that they’ve left Islam, something I never thought possible. That’s the point: what an ex-Muslim experiences as a result of their apostasy depends a great deal on that person’s family, background, country of origin, nationality, and so on. There are a lot of different experiences out there, and the variety of voices and approaches showcased on Ex-Muslim Blogs is a testament to that. It’s essential that we hear from more than just a few of them.

I am so pleased and honored to be living in a time when ex-Muslims have reached critical mass and are starting to come out more and more as well as to organize. Between the Ex-Muslims Councils that have formed in Europe, the active “ex-Moose” sub-Reddit, Muslimish, and EXMNA, I feel incredibly hopeful. The multiple facets and varieties of the ex-Muslim experience are worth discussing and knowing. Ex-Muslims of North America is one more step in deconstructing the myth of the monolith about those who hail from Muslim backgrounds. More importantly, groups like EXMNA make the world a better and safer place for those who leave Islam, one vocal and/or out apostate at a time.

Ex-Muslims of North America: A Dream Come True

Dear Oprah: One Godless Girl’s Moment of Awe & Wonder

Note: I am quite aware that Oprah promotes some rather skeptically questionable (at best) people and products. This isn’t really about that, it’s about this and draws heavily on my nostalgia for my Oprah fandom. You understand.

Dear Oprah,

I know that some atheists have expressed hostility and ire at you for your recent comments about atheism. I’ve seen some of them condescend to you and dismiss you. I, on the other hand, am writing to you as someone who not only is an atheist, but who spent her formative years religiously watching your show after school. Your candor about your struggle with body image, the Islam 101 episode you thoughtfully created and aired after 9-11, and your existence as a successful woman of color impacted me significantly during my rocky, lonely adolescence. Furthermore, you got my mother, who watched the show with me, to both begin reading and to converse with me in a more meaningful and adult way, something for which I will always be grateful.

I am writing to tell you about something rather magical that happened to me yesterday.

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I was at work but had decided to take a walk outside. As I exited the building and sat at one of the outdoor benches, I spotted a tiny hummingbird sitting on the ground. Its beady eyes looked up at me as I looked down at it. Upon noticing that my shoe was comfortably settled less than a foot from the bird without its having flown away, I figured it was injured.

I’ve encountered injured birds before. Specifically in the case of hummingbirds, I once met a beautiful baby that bore a long, deep gash in its belly. Hoping that this one had a more treatable injury, I approached it cautiously so that I could examine its tiny feathered body for injuries. When I lightly stroked its soft green back with a single finger, it didn’t try to move away from me. After about a dozen passes of my finger, I attempted to pick it up.

To my surprise, it flew up, scolding me with high-pitched chirps! I was startled but caught myself before I frightened it by moving suddenly or exclaiming. The little bird moved over to the umbrella placed above one of the tables that accompanied the outdoor benches. I followed it quietly and then stood on the stone bench so that I could reach it. It let me pet it as I had before for maybe a minute before flitting up with a chirp. It hovered just above me for a second before flying to its nest in the trees above the tables. I looked up at the tree for a little bit before returning to work with a few new pictures on my phone, renewed vigor in my limbs, and a smile turning up the corners of my mouth.

I felt awe at getting to touch and interact with the bird. I felt wonder at how beautiful its green and brown feathers are, how lovely its chirp is, how rapidly its wings beat in flight. I felt a sense of mystery about how the little bird felt comfortable enough to trust me and give me the opportunity to enjoy its tiny company. Most importantly, I felt incredibly happy. I knew that from then on, every time I would walk in or out of the door to the office building, I’d look up at that tree, remember what happened, and smile at my bird friend in silent greeting.

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I did not, however, turn into a believer in any deity or a follower of any religion. I remain the atheist that I have joyfully been since my deconversion from Islam seven years ago. Indeed, how I experienced the interaction with the hummingbird is in line with my experience of the world as someone without belief in the supernatural. I enjoy the minutiae of sensory experience all the more because I don’t unfavorably compare it to something better that I am allegedly to experience after I die. I savor every detail of every moment because I know that I am going to die someday and that this life is the only one that I know I have.

I am an atheist, and I feel a deep sense of awe, wonder, and mystery every day. Yesterday, I happened to have a rather unique experience with a hummingbird. Most days, my verbose self is moved to silence in appreciation for things as mundane as the invigorating crispness of the clean morning air and as humbling as my teenage brother’s deep wellspring of compassion for all humanity. What I find in this world is not only enough for me, it sometimes utterly overwhelms me with its beauty. To me, how often I experience awe, wonder, and mystery is a function of my atheism rather than something that proves I am not an atheist.

Your biggest atheist fan,
Heina

Dear Oprah: One Godless Girl’s Moment of Awe & Wonder

“Inspirational” Biblical/Quranic Intersections: Abraham’s Sacrifice

[Content notice: child abuse, attempted murder, animal slaughter]

Yesterday marked Eid ul-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, for Muslims all over the world. The other Eid (Eid al-Fitr, or the Feast of Fast-Breaking) marks the end of Ramadan. This one both commemorates one part of the story of Abraham, called Ibrahim in Arabic, and wraps up the many rituals of Hajj.

The Quranic story varies somewhat from the Biblical one, most notably in terms of which son it is and in the amount of detail provided, but the gist is the same. In the Old Testament, the son whom Abraham offers to Yahweh for sacrifice is Isaac (Ishaq in Arabic), the son who just happens to be the progenitor of the Jews, while in the Quran, it’s Ismail (Ishmael in English) who is offered, the son coincidentally said to be the father of the Arabs.

ismailibrahim

The story begins with Ibrahim dreaming that Allah is telling him to offer up his son in sacrifice. The dream repeats to the point where Ibrahim thinks it is a command from Allah. He asks his son if he’s willing to be sacrificed and Ismail agrees. Along the way to the spot where he is supposed to slit his only son’s throat, Ibrahim is tempted three times by Shaitan (Satan) to disobey Allah’s dream-given command. At each point, Ibrahim throws small stones at Shaitan to make him go away. When he finally gets to the spot where his dream had told him to slit his son’s throat, he ties down his son and blindfolds himself, both at his son’s behest. Just before the knife manages to touch his son’s throat, an angel comes down and replaces Ismail with a ram. The angel tells Ibrahim that he has passed Allah’s test of faith.

Today, Muslims performing Hajj symbolically stone three pillars at the spots where Ibrahim was allegedly tempted by the Devil to disobey his god by not slitting his son’s throat. All Muslims who can afford to do it, whether performing Hajj that year or not, sacrifice a sheep or goat (or other halal animal if a sheep or goat is unavailable) to celebrate Ibrahim’s sacrifice. The story is taught to children as a lesson in obedience to one’s parents and to Allah.

All this leaves me skeeved out, to say the least. I wonder what sort of folks justify this sort of story, teach it to their children, commemorate and celebrate it, defend it to those who look at it in horror. Then, I remember.

Me.

I was exactly that sort of person. The story was a big part of my day on Eid and I participated very enthusiastically in the rituals. Before I started doubting my faith, I had used a knife to slaughter at least three cows and two goats with my own hands (as soon as even the faintest doubts entered my head, I found myself unable do it anymore). There is even a picture of me wearing hijab and holding up a severed goat’s head. Theologically speaking, I would defend the story’s cruelty to others, saying that it was just a test of faith, that not a hair on Ismail’s head was ultimately harmed, that Ibrahim was later blessed with another son for his loyalty to Allah, that Allah knows best, that life is difficult and this was the difficulty Ibrahim had to face to prove his strength of his conviction and character as a prophet and friend of Allah.

Would I have ever taken a knife to my baby brother’s throat because I had dreamt that my god had told me to do so? No. I would have felt sick to my stomach and prayed to Allah to keep evil dreams from my sleep. If the dreams had repeated, I would have asked my mother to take me straight to a mental health facility and wept the entire way, frightened and upset that my obviously unwell mind was turning me against the brother I so loved and cherished.

On the flip side, I’m sure that if Ibrahim did exist, he would have found whatever excuse, be it his deity or another, for the delusions and dreams that led him to nearly murder his son. It’s sick that a holiday is built around such a person, but thankfully, as with many other holidays predicated on gruesome stories, there’s a lot to it that has nothing to do with its origins, especially since many Muslims aren’t as painfully aware of the tale as I am. Each year, I remind myself to take a leaf from their book and focus on family, friends, and food.

“Inspirational” Biblical/Quranic Intersections: Abraham’s Sacrifice

A Secular Prayer for National Coming Out Day

Today is National Coming Out Day. Although it’s hardly a secret, here’s my official Skepchick coming-out as an radical queer who is pansexual in her tastes. You should also be reading — and now, thanks to the podcast, listening to — Queereka, if you aren’t already.

If you’re scratching your head at “radical queer” and “pansexual,” I ask that you pardon my preference for precise terminology. Laci Green breaks down pansexuality pretty well. As for being a radical queer, that’s the more political side. To quote Nick Benton:

Those who see themselves as oppressed—politically oppressed by an oppressor that not only is down on homosexuality, but equally down on all things that are not white, straight, middle class, pro-establishment. It should harken to a greater cause—that cause of human liberation, of which homosexual liberation is just one aspect.

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In other words, my priorities aren’t exactly neatly aligned with those of the Human Rights Campaign.

This isn’t really about me, though, and for those who suffer, I offer a prayer not to a god so indifferent it appears not to exist, but to myself and others with the ability to make things better.

On this National Coming Out Day, let us remember those whose situations make it difficult or even deadly to come out. Let us remember that being not-straight and/or not-cis is a death sentence — literally, economically, or socially — in many places in the world, including places within the Western sphere. Let us remember the brave trailblazers who sacrificed their emotional and/or physical well-being in order to make the places where coming out is no longer as scary as it was what they are today. Let us remember those who died alone thanks to the bigotry of others and those who watched all too many die due to ignorant silence.

Let us not forget the trans women, especially those of color, who experience daily the fear that they are not safe no matter where they might live. Let us not forget the homeless gender nonconforming young people who make up an appallingly disproportionate majority of homeless LGBT youth but who are often forgotten in the charge forward for LGBT rights.

Most importantly, allow our thoughts to continue to lead us to action as they have with us and with those before us. May we all work to the best of our ability to make it so that we can all live openly without fearing multiple forms of violence. May we rejoice in the victories that encourage our actions and mourn the setbacks that motivate us to do more. May we carry the lessons of both our joys and our sorrows with us as we build a better world.

A Secular Prayer for National Coming Out Day

Three Myths About Piercings

My first non-ear piercing was in my left nostril. Apprehensive of actual piercing parlors, I got it done with a gun at an Indian beauty parlor where the aftercare instructions mimicked the sort doled out by most mall employees post ear-piercing. What a mistake that was. My piercing got infected several times, took forever to heal, and discolored the skin around my nose stud. Thankfully, I knew better by the time I got my next piercings. Thanks to my go-to spot, Barbella Studios, I’ve had nine gun- and infection-free piercings and learned exactly what had gone wrong before.

Guns are the safest and cleanest way by which to get pierced.

a piercing gun

Guns are actually the worst: they hurt more than needles because they use pressure and force rather than sharpness to make their way through the skin and flesh, they can cause weird staining and damage to body tissues, the jewelry used with them is subpar in several ways, and as the entire gun cannot be properly sterilized, gun piercings are more prone to infection.

Standard first-aid practices like cleaning with rubbing alcohol, applying anti-bacterial ointment, and covering up the area with a bandage are good for piercings.

When my gun-made nose piercing got infected, a school nurse gravely informed me that if I didn’t use Neosporin on it, the infection would go up straight into my brain and I’d have to go to the hospital. I followed her advice — and dealt with infections on and off for about a year following my piercing. I later was to find that most of the standard aftercare advice given by mall kiosks and beauty parlors is wrong. Professional piercers’ advice is more along the lines of “let it heal.”

Spacing out your piercings is the best choice.

a very pierced-up woman with face paint and colorful hair
She looks the way that she wants to look.

This really depends on what piercings you’re getting and how sure you are about your future piercing plans. If you’re going to get multiple piercings in one ear, for example, getting them all done at once means a shorter period of time in which you’re limited to sleeping on one side of your body. Similarly, nipple piercings often make wearing a bra painfully difficult or even impossible; getting one before the other just means having to go without a bra for two separate spans of time instead of one.

With most piercings, however, spacing them out is a good idea financially as well as psychologically. After my first piercings, all I wanted was more. Not getting them all at once meant that I could get pierced every once in a while over the course of years without ending up looking completely unemployable in most industries.

Three Myths About Piercings

It’s Okay to Say “I Don’t Like Them:” On Body Modifications

[Content Notice: pictures of scars]

When I first discovered that there are people who think nothing of circumcising their infant sons for social reasons (i.e. “so that he looks like everyone else”) but who clutch their pearls with clammy fingers if they spot a baby with pierced ears, I had no idea what to think. I’ve come to understand that there are cultural reasons behind what’s considered acceptable to do to a baby’s body.

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Most white Americans consider piercings to be edgy in a way that people of other backgrounds may not. For example, many people who are assigned female at birth and hail from Desi backgrounds like mine had their ears pierced as infants. I am no exception. Since I’ve been rocking lobe jewelry since I was three months old, for me to consider ear piercings to be “daring” in any way seemed utterly ludicrous.

My conception of bodily autonomy affirms that people should have a say in any modifications made to body parts as significant as their genitalia to as seemingly-insignificant as their earlobes. At the same time, though, I cannot help but notice that those from a more mainstream cultural American background tend to become quite upset over piercings in a way I can’t understand.

Setting aside the obviously judgmental, subjective statements that dub piercings and/or pierced people as “not classy,” “gross,” “unprofessional,” and so on, there are some notions regarding piercings that masquerade as objective in some way that simply are not. The same goes for tattoos. Finger-waggers will often make claims akin to the three below.

Piercing [insert body part here] in [insert place on said part here] can cause paralysis.

I’ve heard this notion used to dissuade people from piercings in as mundane of a place as ear cartilage. There is no evidence that piercing some part of your body is a surefire way to induce paralysis of any kind. There is a rare paralysis-causing condition that was known to be have been triggered via an ear piercing in one case, but anything from a vaccine to the flu can trigger it, too.

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Not pictured: A direct line from piercing to brain

If you pierce your nose or tongue and it gets infected, the infection could spread to your brain.

Tongue piercings have been named as the culprit in a few severe cases of infection that led to harm and death, but in both cases, there was an infection involved. Merely getting the piercing doesn’t cause the brain to become infected; furthermore, other causes can lead to the same sort of infection. There doesn’t seem to be any recorded case where a nose piercing caused a brain infection. I’d imagine that an infected nose or tongue piercing could cause sepsis if left untreated for too long, just like any other infection.

Piercings and tattoos cause unsightly scarring.

It is true that for people with certain skin types and scarring predispositions, both piercings and tattoos can develop into a highly-visible and sometimes disfiguring scar. So can any other injury to the skin, however, especially if you are predisposed to such marking.

What the naysaying really boils down to is this: any kind of injury to the body can develop into further problems like infections and scarring that are potentially harmful. Piercings are no different, but aren’t as dangerous or as risky as many hand-wringers would have you believe. Practicing care, sense, and caution, as well as accepting the level of risk inherently involved in body modifications, is key.

a grid depicting scars of varying size and pigmentation
top to bottom, L to R: right knee after three surgeries; left leg with shaving scars from over 10 years ago; left arm, left forearm, and right wrist with scars from random scrapes

Personally (and yes, anecdotally, in 25 years of life, I’ve gotten 14 different piercings as well as one tattoo. Not one of my body modifications, not even the one ear piercing that I allowed to heal or the tattoo that took over 5 hours to complete, left me scarred. The tissue around my nose stud did become darkened post-piercing, but that’s because it was made by a gun wielded by some beautician rather than by a sterile needle in the hands of a professional piercer (I didn’t know any better at 17).

It’s not that I’m resistant to scarring, either. I have many, many hypertrophic and keloid scars from surgeries as well as from the various little scrapes and injuries I’ve acquired over the course of my life (not to mention the stretch marks courtesy of puberty and weight fluctuations). I am happy to take the risk every time I get a mod because my body is already riddled with unwanted marks; the ones I’ve placed there of my own volition please me aesthetically and psychologically.

If you are not aesthetically pleased by body modifications, by all means refrain from getting any. I don’t believe that anyone should have any piercings or tattoos that they didn’t consent to getting. Playing up the risks of tattoos and piercings as way to disguise the fact that you don’t approve of them for subjective reasons, however, strikes me as rather petty.

It’s Okay to Say “I Don’t Like Them:” On Body Modifications

Dear Skinnier Men, Especially the Formerly Fat Ones

[Content Notice: weight loss talk]

Last week was Weight Stigma Awareness Week; I told my personal story about my relationship with the medical establishment and with my body. Last week was also when I foolishly decided to take a peek at my Google search results. The usual haterade was there, including digs at my weight and at my mentions of keto. You see, by writing about lowcarbing, I have sparked the ire of a certain hater contingent.

Christmas ornaments accompanied by text readings "Low Carb Holiday"
Yep, totes easy to keep under 20 net carbs a day. It’s like a holiday every day.

All of that was nothing that I didn’t already know. Scrutinizing the results with the theme of the week in mind, however, I noticed something that I hadn’t before. Whenever I mentioned the steps I was taking towards weight loss, the most common response accused me of being “lazy” for low-carbing and told me to exercise rather than “take shortcuts.”

Obviously, low-carbing and exercising aren’t mutually exclusive. For the record, I do both, thank you very much, and low-carbing has hardly been a “lazy shortcut” for me. That aside, what struck me is that if you strip away the naked scorn from what those types say, they echo what I, as a fat cis woman, have heard from many thin and/or formerly fat cis men (and at least a few of the fat ones). It starts with a “just,” continues into a “tip” that requires very little in the way of lifestyle modification, and ends with the assurance that the speaker lost [insert a number that sounds ridiculously high to me] pounds thanks to that small change.

In many cases, these men meant to be empathetic and helpful, not to leave me feeling frustrated and misunderstood. It is for those men that I write this, although I suspect that the more antagonistic types as well as formerly fat people of all genders might also benefit.

Plainly stated, weight loss is generally hard for women than it is for men. Gender affects weight loss both from a biological and societal perspective. Neither category of hindrance is wholly or at all avoidable for many women.

testosterone molecule tattoo
The inequality-bestowing hormone itself.

In terms of biology, anyone whose body’s hormonal balance is skewed towards the ratio of testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and androgen usually found in cis women is generally going to have a harder time losing weight. Testosterone encourages muscle development; having more muscle means that your body is going to have a higher resting metabolic rate (RMR). Cis women and trans women on hormones tend to have less testosterone, meaning that their body fat percentage will usually be higher than that of cis men and trans men on hormones. Compounding the RMR issue is sexual dimorphism; as most cis men are simply taller and bigger overall than most cis women, they require more maintenance calories.

When a man tells me that I could just “burn it off” instead of dieting, that all I need to do is cut out [insert a single caloric food item here] to lose weight, and/or that “moderation” on their terms is preferable to my perceived “extreme,” he unwittingly erases my reality as well as the reality of countless other women. The difficult truth is that as a fat cis woman, I must change my diet in order to lose weight, period. Exercise alone might make me feel good and get me fitter and healthier, but without dietary changes to accompany it (in my case, reduced calorie and carb intake), it yields little to no weight loss. Based on the outcomes of several studies, this is true for more people than just me.

The less hormone-based reasons are much more complex. Due to societal factors, weight loss is not always as emotionally straightforward for many women as it can be for many men. I mean, losing weight doesn’t even mean that we’re necessarily perceived better, for one.

As is the case in most matters, projection does nothing to help and can even hurt, but a little empathy goes a long way. I really am happy for you if you’re a man for whom losing weight was as easy as not-pie. Just because skipping dessert was enough to lead you into skinny territory doesn’t mean that the same is true for everyone. Ignoring the factors that make it harder for so many of us is not only insensitive, it contributes to the culture of shame and stigma against fat that has been linked to weight gain.

Dear Skinnier Men, Especially the Formerly Fat Ones