#INNOCUOUSLY WORDED POSTS THAT YOU AT FIRST AGREE WITH AND THEN YOU SEE THE PATTERN

[toytulini]

god this stupid fucking intracommunity infighting bullshit never ends and im so god damn tired. stop it. and if youre fucking discoursing this stupid shit you should have to add a fucking disclaimer to your fucking posts at least im tired of having to search yalls blogs when smth slightly off about your wording that i cant explain has me like hmmmmm and then i end up right and i really dont want to be

[imaginesandinserts]

Irreverent Drabbles: Perils of Realization

Title: Irreverent Drabbles: Perils of Realization Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Reader Rating: G Words: 6078

A/N: This takes place chronologically between chapters 28 and 29. 

Irreverent Series Masterlist

You went on a date.

You realized that you were in love with Hotch, and your first instinct was to go on a date with someone else.

In all respects, it was a relatively good decision. Hotch was your boss and despite the close relationship you enjoyed with him, any romantic relationship between the two of you was impossible.

Miles Burton was a Senior White House Advisor whom you'd run into during your social obligations as a member of the Women in Service organization who had persistently flirted with you at the Griffiths fundraiser and had made it a point to say hello at the following two events you'd both been in attendance for.

Once you'd come to the fairly life-ruining conclusion that you were head-over-heels in love with Aaron Hotchner, you made sure to actually flirt back the next time you saw Miles Burton. That was how you found yourself on the date that had you questioning ever having harbored an attraction to men - dinner and drinks accompanied by a rendition of the 101 Life Accomplishments of Miles T. Burton.

This was hell.

After dinner, Miles had insisted on driving you home, and you cursed yourself for having taken a cab to dinner in order to avoid the lack of parking options in downtown. For some reason, he'd gotten it into his head that paying for dinner entitled him to having your mouth wrapped around his cock while he was parked in the street overlooking your house. You'd extracted yourself from the situation with as much contained outrage and dignity as you could muster, and having closed the front door, you find yourself leaning against it with only one thought in your head – Aaron Hotchner would never.

*------------*

"Rough night?"

You look over at Derek as he peers at you over his coffee mug, his eyes filling with amusement, no doubt having already taken in your slightly puffy face and the extra large cup of coffee you're carrying. After Miles had driven away - you'd watched from your window just in case - you'd needed a drink, which had turned into two drinks and ultimately falling asleep on the couch. You'd woken up late and having rushed out of the house - sans makeup - had arrived at work just in time. Hotch may no longer be upset at you being five minutes late, but he's still entirely stringent about punctuality and you hate to disappoint him.

"Bad date," you respond, dropping into your chair and whipping out the little compact and concealer from your bag so that no one else sees you looking like this.

Emily perks up at that, walking over to perch herself on your desk, the beginnings of a grin already forming on her face. "You finally went out with Burton?"

You look up at her, slightly shaking your head in disapproval at her glee. She'd warned you against him. Something about bad vibes, but since it hadn't been anything concrete, you'd impulsively gone against it. You should've known better. Emily's gut, when it came to men, was impeccably accurate.

Pursing your lips, you make sure your face no longer bears the telltale marks of having fallen asleep, drunk on your couch, before you look up at her and Derek once more. "He tried to Lewinsky me," you tell them ruefully, a scowl making its way onto your face as Emily unsuccessfully stifles a snort.

Derek's eyebrows rise in question. "It's fine, I'm okay," you assure him, before looking back at Emily. "You were right. He's an arrogant creep."

"I'm sorry," she tells you, scooching up further onto your desk and swiping up your coffee before you could stop her. "Everyday I continue to be attracted to men feels like a waste."

"Tell me about it," you mutter, careful to not allow your eyes to slip up to the landing where his office was.

"Oh come on, we're not all bad."

Both you and Emily turn to Derek with looks that say exactly what you think about that particular statement.

"Geez, tough crowd." He raises his hands in surrender, turning away from you both and back to his screen, no doubt to message Pen and fill her in on everything.

"I'd make a good lesbian."

You look up at Emily, who has a contemplative look on her face as she continues to take sips of your coffee. Your coffee. Your hot, perfectly sweetened and foamy latte.

"You would," you agree with her, reaching out for the cup, which she thankfully hands to you, before her eyes flit up to the landing. You turn and follow her gaze, eyes coming to rest on Hotch.

He's wearing the navy blue suit with the nice red patterned Gucci tie that you'd helped Jack pick out for him on Father's day. He has a folder on his hand and his brow is already furrowed, straining under the weight of the world far too early in the morning. His eyes move from the papers in his hand to all of you looking up at him, muscles tensed and breath held tight.

"Briefing. Now."

It takes only two words from him to get you all scrambling from your desks and rushing upstairs, his tone telling you everything you needed to know.

It was going to be a bad one.

*------------*

Five girls missing, three bodies found. Based on the pattern, it's already a foregone conclusion that the fourth girl was also dead. Not that you'd tell her parents that. Not until there was a body. All of your efforts were concentrated on girl number five.

You've felt the eyes of the entire team on you ever since the third body was found and Caroline Geller, lucky contestant number five, had been taken from the parking lot of a grocery store after work. All five girls were around the same age, pretty, low-risk, and had no connection to the unsub that you'd been able to work out.

You look up from the notes you'd taken while talking to Caroline's friends from work to see Hotch looking at you. When your eyes meet his, he's quick to look away, turning back towards the screen in front of him. You know why they're all concerned. While all of the girls are roughly the same age as you, Caroline Geller looked like you. Same hair color, similar features, comparable build – at first glance one might mistake her for you.

She taught ballet at the local dance school, volunteered at the soup kitchen every week, and had recently gotten engaged to her fiancé, a beautiful and heartbroken man who had planted himself on a bench outside the precinct and refused to leave his post.

You'd been at their home, combed through their life, seen the wedding invitation pinned to the refrigerator, held her pointe shoes in your hands as you looked around at everything left behind.

Your eyes stay fixed on Hotch's back as he continues to assess the screen of suspects and look at the evidence board, as though willing something to fall into place. He seems more affected by this case, this girl's disappearance, more than any other in recent memory. There's this childish, naïve part of you that's hoping against hope that it has something to do with you. Because she reminds him of you. More likely, it's the fact that he's had to walk past her fiancé, every time he's left the precinct. Hotch had been the one to speak with him, and the poor man had broken down into tears right  in front of his eyes. It was enough to affect even the coldest of hearts and Hotch hardly fit the bill of a cold-hearted man, despite any misconceptions made based on his reticent exterior. Aaron Hotchner was one of the kindest and most sincere people you've ever met – devout father, responsible team leader. His very aura commanded the sort of respect reserved for those men, the kind of men everyone looked up to and knew they'd never be.

Somehow, he's permeated your entire life without you realizing it. Ever since the two of you had made up, it felt like things were back to normal, even more than before he'd left. You had dinner with them as often as possible. Both him and Jack slept over at least once a week when there wasn't a case going on. The sight of Hotch in pajamas, disappearing into your guest bedroom was becoming a familiar one. It's beyond normal coworkers, beyond a normal friendship – you can finally admit that to yourself.

How it had happened though - how the two of you had allowed it to happen - still remained a mystery. It had been innocuous enough in the beginning. Accompanying Jack and Hotch to the Zoo or the Smithsonian. Relieving Jess when Hotch couldn't get away and she had to go home to her own family. Keeping him company late nights at the office because you hated seeing him be the last one there.

You can feel a lump rise in your throat as your eyes stay on his frame, watching as he points out an additional factor for Reid to consider in his geographic profile. You didn't deserve him. You didn't deserve someone like him, even if he were to give you the time of day.

You've already thought through how it would go if you were to tell him. Blocked out what you'd say and how'd respond. The initial shock of your revelation would catch him off-guard. He'd falter ever so slightly. It would be quickly followed by a professional and kindhearted rejection. You were his subordinate. You were too young. He's sorry if he did or said anything that might have led you on. Of course, he understands if you need some time and space to gather yourself and make your peace with the matter. Of course you'd still see Jack, he'd never deny you his son again. And he wouldn't. He'd stay true to his word.

But you'd never be the same again. You'd never be able to look at him again and feel anything but the sting of that rejection. The confirmation – you weren't good enough. It didn't matter that you'd changed everything. It didn't matter that you'd tried and tried to atone. You weren't good enough. You never would be. Not for that. Not for him. Slowly, you'd start to withdraw. You wouldn't be able to help yourself. It would hurt too much, just being near him. Without meaning to, you'd lose him.

*------------*

Samuel Nolen, age 45, a landscaper who'd worked jobs around each of the women's workplaces in the weeks leading up to their disappearance. He'd been the only common link Garcia had been able to pinpoint and he fit the profile exactly. Older white male, non-threatening demeanor, rotating job that gave him the freedom to watch his victims uninterrupted. Grew up with a single father, mother left the family when he was nine years old and was never heard from again. Garcia had found out that she'd moved out to Vegas and had a relatively successful career as a cabaret dancer.

He was sat in the interrogation room with both Rossi and Reid talking to him while the rest of you watched from the other side. There was something almost gentle about how he held himself, how he shied away from Rossi and leaned more towards Reid, whom he perceived as non-threatening. The guess was that he'd lured in his victims under the guise of needing help, and based on the man in front of you, you could see how some women might fall for it. He seemed nice. If there's one thing this job has taught you, it's that men don't ask for help from women. If a man is asking you for help, run.

Neither Rossi nor Reid were having much success with him. You could all see the twitch in his fingers as they curled around something imaginary. All of the victims had died via strangulation. The hope was that you'd captured him before he'd managed to get back to Caroline and subject her to the same fate.

Derek and JJ had been the ones to pick him up, and as Derek had marched him past you, through the precinct, Samuel's eyes had caught yours and they'd lingered, sending a chill racing down your spine. He might be able to fake it long enough to lure those women to their deaths, but there was no hiding that look in his eyes. The look of a predator.

"I want to talk to the female agent. I'll only talk to her."

It was the first thing he'd said since the interrogation had started half an hour ago. You feel yourself tense, the eyes of the rest of the team on you immediately. None of you needed to ask which agent. From the corner of your eye you look at Hotch beside you. He isn't looking at you, still glaring at the unsub through the mirror, but you can see that his jaw is set tightly.

When Rossi and Reid exit, Rossi immediately looks to you before his eyes go over you and to Hotch. You don't have to turn to see that they're engaged in a wordless debate about the right next move.

You can't help but think of that lovely empty house. The despondent man still seated outside. Those satin shoes that had just been broken in. They deserved to be worn.

"Hotch," you turn to face him, making up your mind as you do. You're going in. You're going to get answers.

He's already looking at you and you can tell that he doesn't like it at all. His forehead is already wrinkled and you can literally see the dissent on his mouth. He's incredibly protective of the team and everyone knows that you're being asked for because you look most like the victim. His ritual has been interrupted and he's going to be eager to resume it. With you as proxy.

"I have to go in," you tell him, before he can say anything to dissuade you from the notion. There was no point in waiting. Every second you waited, your chances of finding Caroline worsened.

His eyes bore into you, silently speaking his every concern into existence. You didn't have to do this, there was always another way. You look so much like her. You look too much like her. If you go in there, he won't see you. He'll see her.

It is a tense minute as you and Hotch look at one another. He's giving you the chance to back out despite knowing that's the last thing you'd do. Finally, a nod comes from him.

"We still have the personal effects that were found in her car?" You're already walking out to the main office as you direct your question to Emily, who is quick to follow you. She guides you to a box of items, among which there's some pieces of clothing. Grabbing the box, you go back to the office overlooking the interrogation room. If he was going to think you were Caroline, then you'd play into it.

Quickly, you shuffle through the clothing in front of you, selecting a well-worn seeming crewneck with her alma mater on it. Slipping your blazer off, you pull the sweater over your head, adjusting so it hung off of you in a manner reminiscent of how Caroline wore it in the photos you'd seen. You shuck off your heels as well, finding a pair of low flats in the box, which you don instead.

Behind you, you can feel the eyes of the team on you as you slowly transform yourself. For the final touch, you take your hair out of your usually prim updo and let it down. Your hair was a little bit longer than Caroline's, but, as you part it down the left side just as she did, you figure it was close enough.

Turning finally to face the unsub, you take your first breath as Caroline Geller.

*------------*

Aaron watches, fists bunched tightly together, thumb itching to move, to do something that would accomplish something larger simply watching and waiting.

They all knew what you were doing - playing up the similarities between yourself and the victim to draw out whatever it was about these women that played to the unsub's compulsions. Prey on his weaknesses just as he'd preyed on them. It was a good tactic – one he could feel forming in your head as you'd searched through the evidence box in search of props for your scene.

You're good in the field, there's no doubt about it. But here, in the interrogation room, that's where you really shine. It was one of the hardest taught skills and it was the one that you had outperformed in beyond imagination from the very start. Your methods unpredictable and out of the box, but highly effective. Out of them all, you were always the best at getting inside the heads of the unsubs and finding that one little thing that made them break.

He's seen it before countless times now, been witness to each spoken word, well placed emphasis, timely pause. The interrogation room was a stage and you were always the star.

It had been the topic of some conversation between himself and Rossi – how you'd managed to convince some of the toughest unsubs to crack under the pressure of your presence. Aaron, personally, chalked it up to your childhood and upbringing. When your entire life was a performance, you know how to play your role.

Now, as he watches you, he sees how you've managed to mimic the mannerisms of Caroline Geller from the home videos you'd seen of her – the slight tilt of the head, the fiddling with the ends of your hair. Your voice has shifted as well, a slightly higher and happier pitch, more like what one might expect of a dance teacher with students in primary school. You've done your homework on this one, that one is easily clear. However, it's the slight pause you have as the Unsub addresses you as Caroline, the nearly imperceptible tension in your shoulders as the Unsub mocks Caroline's desolate fiancé whom Aaron hadn't the heart to look at. This one had gotten to you, and you wouldn't be able to deny it. Not to him.

At long last, you get what you're searching for. The docks by the east river.

The answer came at a price – twenty five long minutes with just you and the Unsub as he poked and prodded at your psyche just as you did to him.

The confirmation from Garcia, of a heat signature at the given location, comes within the minute and Aaron is quick to rap his knuckles against the glass, signaling your curtain call.

*------------*

You can't save them all. That's the one lesson every new agent learns at their own pace.

You can't save them all.

She'd suffocated before you could get to her. You'd been too late.

JJ hadn't let you see Caroline's body, dragging you back and away from the dock containers when Derek had emerged with a somber face, slowly shaking his head.

Your gun feels heavy in your hand, and it is only out of sheer rote habit that you manage to disarm and reholster the weapon. JJ stands with you as the flurry of people begin to process the scene, lit only by the red and blue flashing lights of the police cars.

You'd failed. You'd been too slow to extract the location, too slow to get there. You'd been too damn slow.

You've lost victims before. Everyone has. But you lived in this girl. You'd worn her clothes, her shoes, taken her name. You'd walked like her, changed your voice to mimic hers. It was as though, by pretending to be her, you'd taken in a part of her that now yearned to reunite with the rest of its whole, but it wasn't able to. So now a piece of Caroline Geller rattled inside of you, sobbing and crying out for the rest of itself.

Hotch and Emily finally emerge and you follow JJ to join them as Hotch assigns everyone their roles. One of the policemen interjects and informs him that Caroline's fiancé had insisted on coming along and was now waiting with a deputy by the barricades. You see Hotch nod, his eyes briefly moving towards the direction of the barricade, before refocusing on the team and instructing Reid to assist with the evidence logging.

As everyone starts to disperse, you can feel a lead ball drop into the pit of your stomach, knowing that Hotch now had the task of informing the fiancé that Caroline Geller was dead.

"Hotch," you begin, his name coming out full and heavy, sitting in your mouth like warm air.

He halts at your voice, turning back towards you. He'd already given you your assignment, so he has to be wondering what you could possibly have to say to him.

You look up at him. It's just you, him, and Emily left now, as she waits for you to help her with processing paperwork on the unsub that Hotch had tasked you both with. "I – ," you falter as you meet his eyes, and you can barely see a hint of him behind them. He'd already donned his mask to go face the fiancé.

"I'm sorry," you manage quickly, jaw tight and heart clenching at the awfulness of the job that he now has to do. The job he always has to do.

The only acknowledgement you receive that he had even heard what you said over the din of the police and ambulance sirens, was the barest of wrinkling to his forehead. The ever so slight slippage of the mask during which you thought you might get to catch a glimpse of him, but he catches it far too quickly and keeps it in place. As if it never happened. Not even nodding, he turns away and walks towards the barricade.

It's a miserable few hours for Emily afterwards, you're sure, as you monotonously follow her back to the police station and begin the task of coordinating with the local office to handle the case and subsequent prosecution.

Emily likes to talk while the two of you work together. Rarely ever do the two of you work without talking, however she seems to pick up on your mood fairly well and the two of you quietly go through all of the required processes.

"You know what your problem is?"

You look up at Emily, who had finally broken the silence, her sharp voice cutting through the small storage room that the two of you inhabited, gathering all of the files that would need to be sent off to the local office.

You swallow, bracing yourself for the worst. At your slight nod, she proceeds, her voice a calm fury like you'd never seen before. "Even after everything you've done, after everything you had to go through, you seem to harbor this delusion that you're not supposed to be here."

"What're you talking about?"

"I'm talking about you. Apologizing to Hotch. You think you don't belong here. That you aren't good enough. You think that girl dying today was your fault."

You scoff, shaking your head. "It was my fault," you retort, grabbing the box you'd just finished packing and making your way to the door before you're blocked by Emily, preventing your escape.

"No, it wasn't. The only person responsible for that girl's death is the guy who's going to rot in prison for the rest of his miserable, fucked up life."

You sigh, shuffling your weight from one foot to the other. "If I'd gotten – "

"You can't save everyone," she interrupts, barreling onwards. "We're going to try. We're going to try our best every single time. But we can't save everyone. None of us can. Not you, not me, not even Hotch. But that doesn't make it your fault."

Emily stares down at you, reaching out and grabbing the heavy box out of your hands and setting it down on the floor by your feet. You look away, up at the ceiling, tears pricking at your eyes, causing them to burn. Your chest feels tight and you take a shuddered breath. The lure of wanting to believe her was so very strong, struck against the waves of dissonance it posed in your head.

Emily softens her voice, reaching out towards you and wrapping an arm around your shoulders as she easily pulls you into her chest. "Hotch isn't blaming you. He doesn't think you have anything to be sorry for."

*------------*

The plane ride back was a somber affair, everyone on the team off on their own. Spencer was reading a new book whose title had caught your interest, Rossi was tucked away in a corner with his eyes closed but you're not sure if he's actually asleep. Both Emily and JJ were sitting close together, quietly sharing a bag of Cheetos while JJ worked on her presentation to Henry's class for Career Day and Emily bided the time alternating between reading the trashy romance she'd found left behind in her hotel room and staring out the window. Derek sat across from you with his headphones on, leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed. Across the way, you can see Hotch diligently working on his report for the case, the only sound emanating from his faint taps against the keyboard.

Emily's words still play in your head, now competing with that churning voice that you'd had in your head for the past few weeks – you would never be good enough for the likes of Aaron Hotchner. Her words were starting to put some minute cracks in the foundation of that particular statement, and you had no idea what to make of that.

You hear the tapping of the keyboard stop momentarily and watch as Hotch turns up to look at you, your eyes meeting for a long second, before he breaks his gaze, returning back to the screen in front of him. From your seat, you can barely make out a slight crinkling of his forehead as his hands hover above the keyboard, as though faltering in typing out his next words. You have to guess that he's arrived at the part of his statement around the interrogation. You turn away, following Emily's lead and staring out your own window, while unbeknownst to you, his eyes can't help but return to you countless times more.

It felt as though you'd thought of very little besides Hotch, since that day that your mother had visited. She'd left in the wake of one of the few times you'd seen him lose his cool with someone, and having it be done on your behalf, in your defense, had somehow unveiled this entirely ridiculous truth that you'd tried in vain to deny.

You were in love with Aaron Hotchner.

You had no idea what to do with that.

Dating other people hadn't worked out so well.

Trying to simply get over it had been an exercise in vain.

You've run miles in your own head, trying to make sense of it. The question begged itself – why Aaron Hotchner? If you merely wanted a husband and kids, you've no doubt you could have that with anyone you got along with well enough.

Your mind had briefly flitted back to that final date you'd had with Cedric Kensington. It had been highly promising, you'd finally felt it heading in a definite direction and you could see it. You could see yourself being with Cedric, marrying him, having children with him if you were so inclined. Had you not gotten the call from Garcia, informing you that Foyet was back on the grid, who knows what could have happened. Maybe you could've had that with Cedric. Having that perfect life with someone else was not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

You'd thought of John. How it had never been the right time when it came to the two of you. Then finally, when you could conceive being something real with him, you'd faltered. You couldn't go through with it. It hadn't been the right time to choose him. It hadn’t been the right time to choose anyone but yourself.

It had taken you some time but you think you've finally come to the right conclusion of why it was Hotch and no one else – the possibility of losing him was terrifying. Even when the two of you had been on the outs, you hadn't been able to leave, staying anchored to him despite being furious with him. Seeing him had been torture. Not seeing him had been so much worse, and you couldn't bring yourself to endure that again.

Given the absolute fact of the matter – you being in love with Hotch - there were really only two paths forward that you could see. Ignore it and hope it goes away, or tell him and pray you didn't lose him in the process.

The Pro/Con list to that second option had begun, unbidden, the week prior. Your mind going rogue and dreaming up ridiculous and absurd scenarios of you confessing your truth to him.

Pro: You're absolutely, unshakably, madly in love with him.

Con: There's a fairly good chance that he does not and will never reciprocate those feelings.

Pro: Aaron Hotchner was loyal to you. You had always felt he was, but your conversation a few weeks back had cemented that. He would do anything to help you, no matter what.

Con: He's twelve years older than you and has a kid.

Pro: You love his kid.

Con: Between the two of you, your past trauma could be its own wing in the Library of Congress.

Pro: You're both good at getting the other person to talk.

Con: You work together and workplace romances are frowned upon. He was your supervisor, and dating him would no doubt lead to rumors and malicious gossip, which would follow you the rest of your career at the Bureau. It could tarnish you entirely and it could also hurt him.

Con: You would not be alright if the two of you didn't work out. You know that you weren't even together, but the idea of ending things with Hotch, after knowing what it was to have him – that would break you entirely.

Con: He was going to say no, so it was all a moot point.

Towards the end, you'd run out of items for the Pros to balance out each Con, and as of now, the Cons were definitely in the lead.

*------------*

The two of you are once again the last two people in the office. Emily had been the last to leave, leaving her book from the plane on your desk, having already put sticky note bookmarks in all the right spots. She'd winked as she left, encouraging you to skip the rest of the book and skip straight to the good stuff. You had to smile at her attempts to cheer you up. Some friends bought you a drink. Emily Prentiss curated sex scenes that she thought you'd enjoy reading.

You glance up and see that Hotch's door is shut, the orange blush emanating through the glass windows, alluding to the fact that he'd given up on using the overhead lights. They were too bright for him and gave him headaches, so despite the strain on his eyes, he preferred to read by the glow of his desk lamp. With Jack away at sleepaway camp for Cub Scouts for the week, he's unlikely to leave early.

You grab your finished report and head up the stairs to his door, stopping and knocking before hearing his permission to enter. As you open the door, your eyes go immediately to his desk, however he's not seated behind it. Instead, you're greeted by a most unfamiliar sight.

Aaron Hotchner is seated on the brown leather couch in his office, a glass of amber liquid in his hands. You don't think you've ever seen Hotch not working in his office. Sure, he'll take a break here and there when you interrupt, but the image of him outright sitting on the couch, not a report in sight, was entirely foreign to you.

It feels as though you're intruding. Like you’ve stumbled upon something entirely private, because Hotch doesn’t strike you as the kind of guy that makes a habit out of drinking in his office by himself.

You could imagine this was something he did with Rossi on occasion, the two of them sharing a drink after a rough case or catching up and reminiscing about the so-called good old days, before the team had a plane on call.

"You can set that on the desk," he tells you, his voice deeper, made warm by the liquor. He doesn't look up from his glass, eyes fixed on something in the far off distance.

Unsure how to react to the sight in front of you, you quickly make your way across his office, setting your file on top of the already tall stack at the edge of his desk.

Turning around, you quickly walk back towards the door, eager to not bother him any longer than absolutely necessary. When you get to the door, you hesitate, turning back to face him. Before you can stop yourself, you can feel the words tumbling out of you. "Hotch, are you alright?"

He looks up in your direction, his expression entirely unreadable. He nods slowly, and you can see a deep sigh work its way through him, before he finally meets your eyes.

"It was a rough case. Telling the families isn't something I'll ever get used to, I think."

You nod sympathetically. It wasn't fair that it always fell on him.

"I'll be fine, though. Just need to be alone after some of them."

You nod again, not trusting yourself to say much. As you turn to leave, taking his words as your cue, he speaks again.

"You can stay."

You turn back, your head tilting in some confusion as you meet his eyes once more. He looks at you for a second longer, before reaching over to the side table and grabbing a second glass. He pours from the bottle of good scotch that Rossi had given him last Christmas while you watch him.

Proffering the glass in your direction, he beckons you forward. "You're easy to be alone with."

Somehow, in a slight daze, you manage to walk back towards the couch, reaching out and grasping the heavy crystal glass in your hand. He motions for you to join him and you sink into your usual spot, tucking your legs underneath yourself.

His eyes stay on you as you settle in and take a sip of the scotch, feeling it burn your lips, the tip of your tongue, before blooming into a subtle smoky sweetness in your mouth, settling into your stomach like dying embers.

"Are you alright?" he asks, watching you carefully.

You try not to squirm under his inspecting gaze, unable to offer much beyond a shrug. "I will be."

It's quiet for a moment as he continues to look at you and you distract yourself with a stray thread in the cushion stitching.

You hear him clear his throat, shifting slightly on the couch so that his leg bends at the knee as he turns his body to face you, arm stretched out on the back of the couch, fingers grazing the top of your shoulder. "You did everything you could."

You feel that heavy tug in your stomach, unable to look at him, knowing that your face would betray you entirely.

He says your name, soft on his lips, gentle with every part of you. He waits until you look up at him, meeting his brown eyes that held the warmth of an everlasting hearth.

"You did."

You nod slowly, because who were you to disagree with him. Because if Aaron Hotchner said you did everything you could, then maybe it was true.

Not much more is said that night, as the two of you sit side by side.

Pro: You could be alone with Aaron Hotchner.

[treeni]

Sanders Sides Orange Side Predictions

Theories Masterpost

If you haven’t read @averykedavra‘s post on the idea then you absolutely should. It is extremely well thought out and considers a lot of possibilities about the Orange side, even though there are some specific thoughts that I personally disagree with, it is absolutely worth reading through.

First, I want to say I agree with them pointing out @dragonsaphirareads character Otto, aka “Obsession” as being a brilliant take on what the Orange character could be from a conceptual basis. I also think @candied-peach / Peachsneaker’s character Wrath is another brilliant take on the opposite side of the spectrum of the potential of what the orange side could be. Honestly, if you haven’t, you should check out these two creators' works immediately as they are both completely fantastic writers and have a lot of great Sanders Sides stories, both with and without romance.

My only gripe is that I think both characters are too inherently good in their depictions. Personally, I think both authors are right, to a point. I think the Orange character would be someone who cares too much and takes things too far. What’s interesting about DragonSapphiraRead’s character, is that he was once Passion and gave up parts of himself to the others. It’s interesting, but I personally don’t think that’s how it’s going to go.

Instead I think Passion is exactly the trait that the darkside character is going to embody and this is where I most agree with averykedavra’s take. I think the Orange side is going to come in as someone who appears “good,” “right,” and even “helpful” at first glance, and yet, you gradually start to realize the problems further on. 

If you look at the progression of the darksides so far, you may notice that  they have followed the rule of three in establishing a pattern. Virgil showed up and scared the others until his point got across until he was listened to, so really was it any surprise when both Janus and Remus immediately did the same upon their introductions? Given the divide, it took time and understanding to start being open to the good that Virgil brings. Janus has only just started to really prove to Thomas that he is well intentioned and Remus hasn’t even begun that part of the journey yet. However, you can see the three characters all in various states of the pattern that Virgil set. Virgil is at acceptance, Janus is at tolerance (or at least close to it) and Remus is still at distrust, but past the introduction and initial scare.Their actions have all followed the rule of three behavior that establishes a pattern for the audience to recognize. We inherently know Janus and Remus as being on the same “track” as Virgil was on a subconscious level.

Which is why I think the Orange side will absolutely destroy that expectation by diverting from that path and all current expectations of darksides. After a pattern of accepting the darksides, I think they will decide to immediately give the Orange side a chance because by then they will also have multiple examples of their shortsightedness about the darksides potential in helping Thomas.

 I also think Orange will absolutely come in and appear good at first glance. This will probably happen after Janus is really, truly accepted by the other sides and Remus is at least on his way to being accepted. I also really liked averykedavra’s idea that the orange side gives his name immediately, but I disagree on the idea that he can hide his role. The roles are something that others have been shown to bring up to the group and be generally aware of. No side has had to introduce their role as far as I can remember.

However I actually think of this as further evidence for the side having the role of Passion instead of Wrath or Obsession. Because Passion seems good at baseline and is absolutely good if controlled. However, Passion also encapsulates things like Wrath, Obsession, Procrastination, and Spite.

Imagine if you will, a side that comes in dressed as seemingly innocuous in fandom gear and tee shirts with big smiles and excitement. He quickly and easily proclaims his excitement of all of the others’ work and is extremely supportive at the beginning. I could see CharacterThomas becoming quickly and easily attached to someone who seems so positive and relatable. I think he’d be a little like Patton at first glance, but more childish. There would be none of the “fatherly” care in him for example. He would seem interested in what the others would say and generally only make quiet additions to the conversation. In the beginning it seems as if he brings out the good in the other sides with his small bits of help and encouragement. Except, he doesn’t stop at small. Instead as the sides start to become used to his presence he starts pushing things further and further. 

This side never lies, he doesn’t need to. He can manipulate the truth to do his bidding. He gently reminds Roman of all of the things he hasn’t yet achieved of his dreams. As a friend he pulls Patton aside to remind him of some of the bad things happening recently in the world, just to warn him of course. He asks for Logan’s help in clarifying  some facts that might be a little uncomfortable, but definitely important. He gently nudges Virgil about some of the dangerous things that could have happened to Thomas and really? Isn’t he just lucky to have come out okay so far? And self-preservation? No, not even he’s safe as the side reminds him of the rocky state of his “supposed acceptance” until Janus’ doubts overtake him.

You think Thomas struggles in dealing with one of them acting in extremes? Just wait until they all are. Logan becoming obsessive, Roman becoming unfocused, Virgil becoming paranoid, Patton becoming hysterical, and even Janus literally walling himself away because he devolves into extreme self-defense. (Also possibly trying to hastily wall just him and Thomas away. Because defensive rationality.)

The vast differences between the caring Patton and this side become increasingly clear to the audience, but by this point it’s too late. The sides are (almost) all hanging on his every word.

Logan can’t outmaneuver manipulative honesty, Virgil can’t caution against it, Roman’s too restricted to find a creative solution for it. Even Patton and Janus are ineffective because not only does it sound and feel right, it also seems akin to some of Janus’ behavior of revealing “uncomfortable” truths that Thomas doesn’t want to hear. 

I think this side is going to slowly drive the others into their own extreme biases until their own behaviors are so chaotic and restless they become literally unable to contribute to the conversation.

I also think that will be what makes this particular side terrifying. Instead of scaring the others into listening to him, he simply feeds into their own biases until they are so divided there is no longer a conversation. 

You see, this side wouldn’t simply want to be a voice to be heard. He would want to be the only voice.

Okay, now for my justification as to why. 

1. As I already mentioned before, we as humans like threes, comedians will list three things to establish a pattern and then add a fourth in a “one of these is not like the others” to make a joke. The best way to break a pattern is to flip expectation on its head. This side is already breaking that ideology simply by existing as a fourth darkside. He isn’t there to follow the others paths.

2. Janus and Remus’ religious dialogue that is telling of their own negative views of their lack of “inherent goodness” because they consistently use their own existences as proof of Thomas’ “inherent evilness.” While being revealing of their thought processes, I also believe it is a hint to the last side’s state as a Lucifer-like character in the classical sense of his intended perception. Not a demon, but an angel. Someone who believes they have done no wrong and tempts you on a personal level.

3. Also consider some of the things orange as a color symbolizes: encouragement, enthusiasm, and motivation, yes, but also ambition, domination, temptation, and warning.

It’s still loose evidence as we haven’t even met the side yet, but we as an audience can still derive a lot about him from the other characters.

Now that I’m here shoving all my opinions in your faces, I might as well go all out. 

I am currently two for three on darkside names so I’m going to throw my hat in and tell you my guess on that too. 

If the new Orange side follows my predictions I also think he will be named Aiden. 

Why? First, it means “fiery one” which is a perfect association for both passion and the color orange. It also mimics a “light side” name without quite fitting in with the “en” ending. Additionally, like most names, it is a modernization of older names and this particular one has derivative connections to both the Celtic god of sun and fire “Aodh” and the Greek god “Aidoneus” otherwise known as Hades. (Also keep in mind that Lucifer’s name means Morningstar, aka the sun.) Finally, the word “Aid” is literally in the name to give the impression of innocence. 

And that is my TED talk.

[sophygurl]

WisCon 43 panel Learning to Hear the Dog Whistle

[Just wanted to say this was one of the panels I suggested and I’m so glad it went through and that I was able to make it to the panel. This is something so many of us need to work on, and I’ve made it a practice to point out when I think someone has unwittingly passed on a dog whistle-ish message, in large part because I hope/want for others to do the same for me when and if I do it, myself. Anyway, I learned a lot and this panel was really good.]

Political dog whistles are meant specifically to target one audience who agrees with you, and perhaps to trick others into agreeing with your subtle and covert language. It's important for us to be able to recognize these dog whistles, often used by racist, transphobic, and other bigoted groups. How do we learn to listen for and recognize these whistles when they are used specifically to dodge our ears?

Moderator: Heidi Waterhouse. Panelists: Seth Frost, Keffy R. M. Kehrli

Disclaimers: These are only the notes I was personally able to jot down on paper during the panel. I absolutely did not get everything, and may even have some things wrong. Corrections by panelists or other audience members always welcome. I name the mod and panelists because they are publicly listed, but will remove/change names if asked. I do not name audience members unless specifically asked by them to be named. If I mix up a pronouns or name spelling or anything else, please tell me and I’ll fix it! 

Notes:

Heidi started the panel off saying that the panel was obviously not full of all kinds of representation (example: the panelists were all white), so they were going to miss some stuff. The hope was that they could impart more generally how to recognize dog whistles. [They also had a lot of audience additions later on]

She also said that when we talked about racism and antisemitism, etc. - we’re talking about a set of behaviors vs. individual people. She suggests giving someone a chance to walk back a dog whistle you’ve just heard them use and asking them if they know what they’ve just said.

Seth said he knows more white supremacy dog whistles than even he’s comfortable with, and he points them out whenever he sees them.

Keffy doesn’t know as many as he’d like, but he lives on social media and finds it important to recognize them whenever possible.

Heidi took a moment to define dog whistles - intentionally coded language meant to be covertly used within a group or community. For example: “interested in ethnic heritage” ~might~ mean someone is really into their Scottish heritage and actually eats haggis on purpose, but it also might mean they’re a white supremacist. 

Seth used an example of a time the host of a TV show he was watching had a spider web tattoo on his elbow - without context he didn’t know if it meant the host just really thought spiders were cool or if he was a white supremacist. For context, Seth would have needed to see other tattoos, or what his political affiliations were, etc. Another example is Norse stuff, which can be totally innocuous, but is also something white supremacists are co-opting. 

Keffy brought up seeing the number 88 on people’s user names - it might mean they were born in the year 1988, or it could be a white supremacist signifier. 

Seth added that many Nazi’s are not smart. They use this “bullshit numerology” where 88 = HH = Hitler. However, 88 is also a lucky number in Chinese traditions, so that’s another example of something being used in multiple ways and not knowing without context how someone is using it.

Seth also talked about the 14 words - a white supremacist mission statement. So “14 words” or even just the number 14 can be a white supremacist dog whistle.

Heidi brought up the fact that we’re using dog whistle in it’s negative sense, but all in-group communities have their own language they use to recognize one another. 

One example Heidi noticed was a show Forged in Fire about blacksmiths. A lot of them wore Thor stuff due to that connection, but slowly over time less and less of them continued to wear Thor-themed things as they’d had it pointed out to them how white supremacists were using those symbols.

Keffy talked about one way to notice if something is being used as a dog whistle or not is to pay attention to who shows up when you see it. When, for example, TERFs swarm to a post using specific language, it’s time to look up the terms used and understand how they’re being used. 

Keffy explained what TERF meant, and used scare-quotes around “radical feminist” because he doesn’t see them as being particularly feminist or radical - especially not in the sense it was used in the 80′s. [yup]

Keffy also mentioned the use of pattern matching. If someone is using XX or XY in their bio - well, that’s not bad in and of itself, but if you take a moment to look at their page and you see them harassing a lot of trans people, then you have your answer.

Seth added that watching how they interact with others can be important. If you think they’ve used a dog whistle but aren’t sure, it’s okay to put some distance between you and them to just observe who they’re interacting with and how. 

Keffy said it can be important to have friends from many different groups, and if someone tells you that something is harmful to them - listen and believe them. We often learn by being told after accidentally reblogging or retweeting something, and that’s okay. You just have to believe that people know better about their own oppressions. 

Heidi talked about how bigots were using the triple parenthesis around names of Jewish people to mark them on twitter - some Jewish people and allies started to use the triple parenthesis for themselves intentionally as a sort of “I am Spartacus” protest. There was a big discussion about this in regards to reclaiming vs. causing harm due to generational trauma. It was important, in that instance, to listen to the Jewish people whose trauma was being triggered, and to believe them about not doing this.

Keffy added that he stopped retweeting as much from people who were using it because his followers had told him it was a trigger for them. 

Seth said, as a Jew and trans person, “If I ask you to stop using a hurtful thing, that’s a big show of trust”, so he thinks about that when people come to him in a similar manner. 

Heidi posed the question of having scripts for when we call out our friends, or when it’s time to ping an ally to help us out.

Keffy said he’s not that organized to have a script, but he does have some friends that he’s asked to take over. Gave an example of taking T and shifting pronouns, had a friend with a more masculine sounding voice call the pharmacy to ask about it first due to concerns about not being taken seriously.

Keffy also talked about the term calling in, rather than calling out, which is a more personal and quiet approach. He’ll usually DM someone or talk to them privately about these things - unless the discussion has already spiraled out in public.

Seth also said he doesn’t have a script for this, but in person he’ll usually just comment with something like “oh that’s gross” and if asked why, he’ll explain with as few words as possible. 

Heidi agreed, saying that person is probably freaking out internally, and won’t hear a lengthy response anyway.

Keffy said no matter how long he’s been working on social justice stuff, when he’s called out/in, he still feels shame or defensiveness or both. It can take time to work through that, so expecting a full discussion right away might not be realistic.

Keffy also advised that if you ask an ally to do this for you, make sure they’re actually getting the right point across.

Heidi shifted the conversation to how to support people being targeted. The first step is to believe them when they tell you something. The point of these dog whistles is to seem like they aren’t a big deal, when they are. 

Seth agreed, saying they throw just that much doubt about how they’re being used, so that people aren’t sure if it’s something bad or not. He advised defaulting to at least a base level of politeness when asked to stop using something - you can just stop. 

Keffy gave an example of “drinking the kool-aid” to refer to something being cult-like. Keffy gave some background on the phrase coming from what happened in Jonestown. The leader was very abusive and he did dry runs of giving his followers laced drinks. They were punished and even killed if they didn’t drink it, which made it safer for them to assume it was fake again and to just drink it. Knowing all of this, we can see that no one was really consenting to drinking the laced drinks. Hundreds of people died, and their family members and loved ones can be very triggered by the callous and casual use of this phrase popping up in what seems like otherwise-innocuous instances. 

Heidi gave another example - death marches. These kinds of phrases are used so commonly that we sometimes forget, or don’t even initially know, the history of them or the gravity of that history. 

Seth talked about the trouble with hearing dog whistles when other people don’t. It can be very isolating to have other people saying “no I don’t hear anything.”

Heidi said a panel like this could easily become a “you’re not aware/angry/anxious enough” discussion, but really the world expands more when we learn more about it. 

Seth talked about the main stream media often using antisemitic language that they may or may not be aware of, or mean. Examples: coastal elites, bankers. Keffy added that it’s gotten to the point where if he hears George Soros’s name brought up, he just stops listening. [RIGHT?!]

Heidi put it to the audience to give more dog whistle examples for us to be aware of.

One audience member talked about the “from (whichever city is nearest)” being code for black, poor, and violent. It was pointed out that Chicago is used as code for this nationwide. 

Another audience member talked about Reagan’s “welfare queen” mythology that was put together on purpose and is still ongoing today.

Someone else in the audience asked how to tell if someone is trying to recruit you as an ally or just accidentally passing on a dog whistle they weren’t aware of.

Heidi advised looking for other clues in their language and interactions. Keffy added that this is why dog whistles are so insidious. The welfare queen myth became a meme that people began to believe in. So if you explain the history and context of it’s origins and watch how people respond to it - bigots often respond to these sorts of things by telling on themselves. You can tell in the reaction how they meant it once it’s pointed out to them.

An audience member gave another example  - the peanut gallery. It has racist origins due to segregation - black people had to sit in the balconies and the myth was that they were unruly and tossing peanuts into the theater.

Another audience member talked about “urban” being used as code for black people in a negative sense. This audience member is a white teacher of mostly non-white students and urban can be used professionally as just a definition but she has to be careful about usage due to it’s other association.

Someone else in the audience talked about intelligence, but I missed most of what they said about it. 

Keffy added on to that, by adding that IQ is just racist, and if it’s not being used to be racist, well then it’s still ableist so it’s still wrong. [good points]

An audience member talked about how eugenics is used as a dog whistle for “less intelligent people shouldn’t breed.” 

Another audience member talked about gas stations and other places often owned by immigrants proudly displaying signs saying “American owned”. This is code for saying “this is the white gas station” for racists and xenophobes. 

Someone else in the audience brought up the issue of faux dog whistles, such as the ok symbol. Another audience member replied that the problem is that they become associated with the bigotry anyway. 

Seth added that everything is made up at some point or another. 

Keffy expanded on that by saying the problem with “just for lulz” dog whistles is that this is how white supremacists recruit a lot of teens and young adults. It might not initially mean what it comes to mean, but it draws people in, which is the point of it.

An audience member brought up the dog whistles of merit, merit-based, and meritocracy - a commentary on reverse racism and affirmative action. 

Keffy talked about commentary in science fiction genres about how there’s no more fun adventure stories because of all of these serious issues and social justice inclusion - codes for bigotry.

Heidi discussed ableism and how lots of times people just don’t know they’re using ableist language, but other times it’s done on purpose as gatekeeping. One example was putting “athletic” as what someone is looking for in a dating profile. Keffy added that you could do a whole panel on dog whistles in dating profiles.

Seth offered the example of people referencing Idiocracy as a dog whistle for eugenics. 

An audience member brought up people talking about dueling accommodations - which is a real thing - but it’s often used to say that we shouldn’t even bother trying to accommodate people. Also gatekeeping through issues like service animals, claiming people aren’t “disabled enough” to use them, etc.

Keffy complained about things like signs saying “be healthy, use the stairs”.

An audience member talked about people casually claiming they have OCD or ADHD when it’s not true.

Heidi asked the panelists and audience to consider some transphobic dog whistles and gave the example “real women.”. 

Seth said when people put “bio female” or “Webster’s dictionary defines womanhood as....” (which by the way isn’t even what Webster’s says but whatever). 

Heidi talked about cis women even being attacked for seeming trans - both sides of the political spectrum tend to do this one. 

Heidi also talked about fatphobia used in this way, such as making fat jokes about Trump - but that hurts all fat people. 

Keffy brought up people who claim that cis is a slur.

I raised my hand from the audience to bring up people claiming queer is a slur as a way of excluding lots of groups beyond gay and lesbian, like trans people and asexual people. Keffy added that this is an effective dog whistle because it sounds social justice-y. Keffy also talked about “get the L out” - lesbians wanting their own group outside of the queer community.

Seth added the phrase “gender critical” as another one that sounds on the surface like a good thing, but is used by TERFs. 

Keffy said they often tweak and claim terms that trans and non-binary people use to make fun of them or take power away from them.

An audience member brought up people using respect as a key-word to keep minorities from being angry and standing up for themselves.

Heidi brought up racist school dress codes, and asked people to add more dog whistles to the panel’s # -  #HearTheDogWhistle. It’s a process to learn these things.

Seth closed by saying if someone tells you a thing is problematic - stop. Do some research. Even if it turns out you disagree with them in the end, it doesn’t hurt to stop and find out more. Respect other people. 

[dust2dust34]

Maybe (Kastle, Post-S1, T)

Summary: Frank and Karen fall into a pattern, one they don’t even realize they’re doing until it’s well-established: every Tuesday morning, they meet at a crap-ass diner a couple blocks from Karen’s apartment.

(I dumped water all over myself yesterday and my brain just... went here. It's kind of weirdly fluffy? I don't know. Let’s say this is well past Season 1. I have a lot of Kastle feelings and I don't know what to do with all of them. I'm still trying to find their voices, but I kicked this out pretty quickly so I'm going with it.)

(read on AO3)

Maybe

It started with a check-in.

Karen had put the roses in her window, wanting to make sure he was okay. That was all. It’d been several weeks since the hotel (since the elevator) and while she knew he was alive, that he’d taken care of what he’d set out to do, she wanted to see him, to make sure. (To see if he was doing more than just existing.) (She didn’t tell him when she finally saw him that she’d thought about putting those damn roses in her window for three weeks straight, and that it was only after a bottle of wine that she finally did it.) It was a cold day when she went to their spot on the waterfront, cold enough that her lungs ached with each breath. When Frank didn’t show up, she didn’t let herself think about why, because when she did it wasn’t just the frigid air that made her insides twist and cramp.

She left a note, and she hoped.

He found her the next day, a Tuesday.

Frank was okay, as okay as he could be. Maybe even good. It looked like he was growing a beard again, but it wasn’t as wild as the first time she’d seen him. It was peppered with bits of grey this time, emphasizing the scars that littered his skin. No new bruises, she’d noted, not sure what she’d expected. He was slowly adding bricks and mortar to Pete Castiglione’s life - a new job, a new apartment. He talked about a dog he ran by every morning and she wondered how long it’d be before he got one. He went to group with Curtis and he even owned up to seeing the Liebermans every once in a while. Karen didn’t ask why not her, not this time. She had a place in Frank Castle’s life. She didn’t know where she stood with Pete Castiglione.

The answer to her unspoken question came a month later, when Frank appeared out of the blue. 

He found her sitting at the bar on a Tuesday morning, drinking coffee, flipping through a stack of papers. (It would only be later that she’d tell him she went back each Tuesday with hope, and he would tell her that he’d fought going back until he couldn’t. When he saw her in the window that day, the word ‘inevitable’ was the only way to describe the feeling that filled him. (He didn’t tell her that part, though. Not yet.)) He went inside and he joined her… and then again two weeks later, and then the next week, again and again until it was a weekly occurrence.

(Frank went by the diner on the other mornings, when he was on his way to his new job - to Pete’s new job - but Tuesdays were the only day she was there. It would be a long while before he knew why.)

It was stilted for a while. Surface. It wasn’t on purpose, it was just easier that way. Everything meaningful, everything heavy, everything that pierced through the bullshit with a goddamned machete was left to sighs in place of words, to the glances that lingered, the hesitant touches that made their skin burn, to quiet smiles that filled in the jagged cracks deep inside. So much had happened between them, more than what happened in a lifetime for some people, and it felt impossible to capture all of that when the only tools they had were their own voices, when something wasn’t pushing them together, forcing them to cut through the bullshit.

(For a while Frank found himself thinking he’d almost rather have a shower of bullets and conspiracies that rotted people’s lives over this fucking awkward shit.)

Things were quiet, soft, easy… they were, that is, until Karen dumped water all over herself.

It was so silly, so innocuous, so ridiculous: Karen went to take a drink and tilted it too soon, sending water dribbling all over her mouth and chin, slipping down her neck and spattering all over the front of her cardigan.

Frank wasn’t looking at her at the time, concentrating on slathering his toast with his eggs, but he saw it from the corner of his eye.

Karen froze, her eyes widening, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment as she just… stopped. Maybe if she’d kept moving, pretended like nothing had happened, the moment would have slipped by, but she didn’t. Her eyes burned a hole in the side of his head and he knew she was wondering if he’d seen her, if he was going to say something.

It was in those tiny few seconds that he found the laughter that bubbled up inside his chest.

She’d never heard him laugh, not like this. It was so easy, so natural, so unencumbered, and oddly infectious. It started as a rumble deep in his chest, low and gritty just like his voice, rusty and uneven, like he had to remember how to do it at all. But it was there and it grew, especially when he tried to tamp it down. That only made it worse and before Karen knew what was happening, she was joining him.

“Sorry,” Frank said, shaking his head after a moment. He wiped his face, almost like he was trying to ease the ill-used muscles. The ghost of a smile still sat on his lips. “I didn’t mean to laugh, that was just, uh…”

He drifted off, leaving her mind to fill in the blanks.

(He’d been thinking, Cute. Later he’d tell her, “It was so goddamn cute the way you froze, right, like maybe nobody’d see you if you weren’t moving.”)

The silence that followed his dangling sentence had Karen’s heart climbing up her throat and she quickly shook it away with a breathy, “No.” She grinned, wiping the rest of the water away. “I’ll gladly make a fool of myself if it means seeing a smile.”

It was the truth, but Karen found herself holding her breath all the same, freezing again, for a different reason this time. Frank Castle was a caged animal on his good days, and she knew better than most what happened when you pushed too hard, too fast. But instead of pulling away, Frank huffed.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Guess I don’t do that too often, huh?”

“Definitely not often enough,” Karen agreed. She went back to her breakfast, adding a breezy, “Who knows, though, maybe that’ll change.”

She didn’t look up, focusing on collecting every single piece of her hash brown that she could on her plate, but all that concentration wasn’t enough to take away from the sensation of his eyes boring into the top of her head. His gaze burned into her…

“Yeah,” he said. She looked up and her insides bottomed out when he didn’t look away. They disappeared completely when a peculiar look colored his face as he said, “Maybe.”

“What?” Karen asked.

“Nothing,” Frank said quietly. And it was quiet. Soft. A tone she’d only ever heard when things were going horribly wrong and he was looking at her like he’d never see her again. That look wasn’t there, but the tone was. Karen’s blood pumped a little faster, her breaths coming a little too quick as she furrowed her brow in question. Frank read her perfectly. “Something Sarah asked me once,” he supplied. “David’s Sarah, back before all that shit went down.”

Her voice was equally soft. “What’d she ask?”

“I, uh…” Frank looked down, going back to that moment, to when Sarah had looked so incredibly lost, when he’d known that her entire world would be changing soon, that she would be getting back the thing she’d lost. And that he wouldn’t be, but also… also that that reality didn’t gut him quite as much as it used to. He cleared his throat. “She was struggling, with the kids, with missing David, and I told her… I told her the only way out is to find something you care about, you know? You find something and you hold onto it.”

The words were so reminiscent of the first time they’d been in a diner it took Karen’s breath away.

Frank continued. “And she asked me… she asked me if I’d found something to do that for me.”

“What’d you say?” Karen asked.

“Maybe,” he replied, meeting Karen’s gaze… and leaving absolutely no room for doubt in what he meant. “I said maybe.”

Karen smiled, a slow-growing pull of her lips that she tried to contain. “Maybe’s good.”

“Yeah,” he said, so softly she barely heard it. But she did. She always did.

“Yeah.”

(And it was good, especially when maybe became definitely.)

The End 

*

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! Reviews literally feed the soul and muse!

[die-nachbarin]

“Now I’ve Got You, You SOB”

I was in a training class for work for the past few days, and the instructor mentioned Eric Berne’s book Games People Play, a psychology book about people playing dysfunctional games in their day-to-day interactions with each other. One of the “games” described in the book, that my teacher said was the most interesting to her, was called “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch,” where someone with anger issues waits for you to make a mistake and then uses it as the jumping off point for blowing it up into a larger conflict where they can turn it to extensive personal criticisms of your whole mindset and way of life (here’s the original short description of the game from Eric Berne):

“White needed some plumbing fixtures installed, and he reviewed the costs very carefully with the plumber before giving him a go-ahead. The price was set, and it was agreed that there would be no extras. When the plumber submitted his bill, he included a few dollars extra for an unexpected valve that had to be installed – about four dollars on a four-hundred-dollar job. White became infuriated, called the plumber on the phone and demanded an explanation. The plumber would not back down. White wrote him a long letter criticizing his integrity and ethics and refused to pay the bill until the extra charge was withdrawn. The plumber finally gave in.

“It soon became obvious that both White and the plumber were playing games. … Since White had the plumber’s word, the plumber was clearly in the wrong. White now felt justified in venting almost unlimited rage against him. Instead of merely negotiating in a dignified way that befitted the Adult standards he set for himself, perhaps with a little innocent annoyance, White took the opportunity to make extensive criticisms of the plumber’s whole way of living… White was exploiting his trivial but socially defensible objection (position) to vent the pent-up furies of many years on his cozening opponent …”

I’ve known two people in my life who liked to play the “gotcha” game. One was a former boss. She was supposed to be a lead analyst, but it was clear that what she really wanted was to be an investigator, because instead of doing neutral, non-adversarial, information-gathering interviews like we were supposed to, instead she would ask interviewees a bunch of leading questions to try to catch them making minor mistakes and then ream them and their entire organization for it. Her favorite thing was to lead a campaign to try to get someone fired for whatever small mistakes she found, or harass them into quitting. Eventually she turned that behavior on me, and wound up getting fired herself for the abusive behavior.

The other person is a friend’s partner who appears to be very controlling and emotionally/verbally abusive. She posted online about how a contractor didn’t do a job the way she wanted, and then she was asking all her friends to help her start a campaign of vengeance where she would completely ruin the contractor’s reputation and destroy their ability to do any business in the future. Another time she was gleefully vaguebooking about how she was about to catch someone in a lie, and she loved to see people walk themselves into that trap with her (clearly, so she could get them at a moral disadvantage and then vent her rage on them). She did enough posts like that to make it clear this was a pattern with her. I think she also sets her partner up to deliberately put him in situations where he’ll make mistakes, so she can yell at him.

I think it’s a really common game for people with abusive personalities to play, because if they can find some minor error to latch onto, it makes them feel morally justified for their abusive behavior. This blog post also had a good explanation of how the game works:

Eric Berne, the great euhemerus of Transactional Analysis and originator of social game theory, observed that most people would not be able to tolerate continuous intimacy. Therefore, rituals, activities, pastimes, games, and even withdrawal serve a useful social purpose, at times. It is the addictive compulsion to rely upon the drama triangle of social games, due to an underdeveloped or damaged capacity for intimacy, which threatens the quality of our personal relationships, and it is the awareness of the existence of a choice that defines autonomy.

He identified somewhere around thirty different TA games in his famous book Games People Play, which he first published in 1964.  In the decades since Games was published, other TA specialists have identified many more. Yet to this day, two of the most widely-played games continue to be NIGYSOB (an acronym for “Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch”), and Kick  Me.

NIGYSOB

NIGYSOB is perhaps the easier of the two games to spot. It is an entrapment game, played by people for whom anger is an important, recurring feeling. This anger may be demonstrated in obvious ways, or it may be submerged. It may build up slowly, or it may build up quickly and violently. But no matter what its depth, or how quickly it builds up, it is always released when a NIGYSOB player sets up other people to do something that enables him to justify yelling at them, and to thus relieve the anger that he has built up in himself (and to feel “better,” or less frustrated, as a result).

In business, NIGYSOB players tend to select people to play with who are in positions of lesser authority and who have little or no obvious interest in resisting entrapment. At home, the stronger of the two spouses usually chooses the weaker spouse to play NIGYSOB with, and mothers and fathers usually select their own sons and daughters.

Occasionally, the opening move in a game of NIGYSOB may be one of the traditional “Isn’t it true that…?” variety – the types of questions used so often by hostile lawyers, TV interviewers, and reporters to entrap their witnesses, guests, and the people who they are interviewing. But more often than not, the opening move in a game of NIGYSOB will be even less obvious – perhaps, for example, some innocuous-sounding statement of fact, like, “I thought you were going to…,” a statement that is equally, if not even more effective, in luring the other person into a trap when he responds “incorrectly.”

Every NIGYSOB player needs a person to play with, and most players need a person with enough skill and experience to help them maintain the forward momentum of the games that they play. Games are always preprogrammed. Each move is always followed by a expected response – a complementary, hoped-for response provided by the next player that challenges or answers the first player in a way that permits the first player to still remain in the game. Without this sort of unconscious help, the first player would often be at a loss as to what to say or do next …

Another model of NIGYSOB behavior to me is actually Jehovah, in the Hebrew Bible! Jehovah is basically an asshole. He sets up rules that people can never completely follow or live up to, and then sends down fire and brimstone on them when they fail. And all the while he gets to stay on the moral high ground, and portray himself as the long-suffering, ever-loving god-father who only wants to do good things for his children - if only they would obey him and be sufficiently loyal! Jehovah is basically the model of a controlling, dictatorial abuser …

Of course, the big question with a “Gotcha”-playing abusive personality is how to deal with them. My strategy with both the ones I’ve known has been just minimizing how much contact I had with them, once I got a sense of what their games were. As Berne says, “In everyday life, business dealings with NIGYSOB players are always calculated risks.” Translation: These people suck to deal with, so avoid dealing with them if you can. Other than that, all Berne suggests is basically that you try never to let these people catch you making a mistake if you have to deal with them. But good luck with that, since the abuser’s game revolves around catching you, and they will inevitably come up with something no matter how correct your behavior, or they’ll just store up extra anger over having failed to find a mistake and it’ll be all the worse the next time they find one …

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Audrey Farley | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,381 words)

  On May 28, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an eyebrow-raising opinion. It concurred with the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Indiana law that requires abortion providers to follow a certain protocol to dispose of fetal remains and prohibits abortions on the sole basis of a fetus’s sex, race, or disability. It wasn’t the justice’s position that caught attention, but rather his method. In speaking to the law’s second provision on selective abortions, Thomas launched into a history of eugenics, the debunked science of racial improvement that gained popularity in the early decades of the 20th century.

Arguing that abortion is “an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation,” the justice offered a lengthy discussion of the origins of the birth-control movement in the United States. In this discussion, written for the benefit of other courts considering abortion laws, Thomas explains how Planned Parenthood grew in tandem with state-sterilization campaigns, providing the foundation for the legalized abortion movement. (As historians corrected, legal abortion preceded birth control, as it was not regulated until the 19th century.) The justice cites the disturbing rhetoric of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who wrote in The Pivot of Civilization that birth control was a means of reducing the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” While conceding that Sanger did not support abortion, Thomas nonetheless argues that “Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.”

Thomas does not offer concrete evidence that American women actually abort fetuses solely because of sex, race, or disability. Nor does he explore the possible reasons for abortions related to these criteria, such as financial hardship or the lack of societal support for individuals with chronic conditions. His grievance with abortion boils down to this point: the practice is ill-borne. This claim is inaccurate, for reasons that historians swiftly noted; it also obscures the fact that eugenics did in fact initiate many traditions in this country, not all of which are perceived to be heinous today. Thomas’s incautious opinion, which echoes other voices in the abortion debate, unwittingly invites a more nuanced discussion of eugenics’ legacies.

However one feels about the ethics of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down Syndrome, it is imperative to recognize the key differences between eugenic sterilization and abortion: who makes the decision and why.

Shortly after the opinion’s release, critics faulted the justice for “using eugenics as a rhetorical sledgehammer.” Adam Cohen, whose book on eugenics Thomas repeatedly cited, observed that Thomas’s argument “relied on a kind of historical guilt-by-association,” rather than on a fully baked thesis. Cohen stressed that, like Sanger, most leading eugenicists actually opposed abortion. From his perspective, Thomas’s opinion was a thinly veiled attempt “to put a new weapon in the arsenal of the anti-abortion movement” by posing this question to opponents: “If you do not buy the argument that abortion ends a human life, how about the idea that it is an attempt to restrict reproduction in order to ‘improve’ the human race?”

State-level lawmakers are testing the same tactic. Six states have introduced legislation banning abortions solely due to a prenatal Down Syndrome diagnosis, and those championing these bills repeatedly invoke eugenics. A representative in Pennsylvania said of the legislation, “We shouldn’t allow eugenics to prevent babies with Down Syndrome from being given the chance at life.” A lawmaker in Utah stated that “selective abortion . . . is the very definition of eugenics.” Pope Francis agrees, saying selective abortion after a diagnosis “is the expression of an inhuman eugenics mentality.”

However one feels about the ethics of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down Syndrome, it is imperative to recognize the key differences between eugenic sterilization and abortion: who makes the decision and why. As Cohen explains in his response to Thomas, in the case of eugenic sterilization, the state acts in the (alleged) collective interests of the population; in the case of abortion, a pregnant person acts in their own interests or those they attribute to the fetus, as in cases where the fetus is not likely to live long outside the womb. For this reason, “A woman in Indiana who has an abortion because the child will be born with a severe disability is not acting eugenically — she is not trying to uplift the human race.”

Some of Thomas’s critics allow that societal biases do influence individual notions of a worthy life, which, in turn, impact decisions related to abortion. But these critics insist that restricting abortion will not resolve these prejudices. HuffPost reporter Lydia O’Connor attributes the practice of sex-selective abortion in Asia, which Thomas references, to pervasive sexism. Like Mara Hvistendahl, who published a book on the subject, she maintains that taking away one of women’s civil liberties is not going to reverse sexism. In fact, restricting marginalized persons’ pregnancy choices extends eugenics-era practices. University of Michigan history professor Alexandra Minna Stern told The Washington Post, “That’s the through line that I see, in terms of state-mandated reproductive control.” From her perspective, demanding that women give birth is not so different than preventing them from doing so.

Stern’s comment suggests the problem, for Thomas and other lawmakers, of drawing upon eugenics to legislate against abortion: there exist many other “through lines” between early-century race crusaders and contemporary institutions that the political right does not care to acknowledge. Anti-immigration legislation is an obvious one. Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, banning entry from Asian countries and restricting the numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans, expressly to prevent further “pollution” of the gene pool by intellectually and morally “defective” immigrants. Republican lawmakers’ public comments suggest that the same logic informs current immigration policies. President Trump has repeatedly defended his support of a Mexican border wall on the grounds that it will keep rapists, drug dealers, and criminals out of the country. The president has also said that America needs fewer immigrants from “shithole countries” and “more people from places like Norway.”

“Family values” as we know them today also harken back to eugenics, when authorities first determined that the nuclear family was essential to protecting the white race. But conservatives are not likely to trace this lineage either. Nor do conservatives acknowledge the eugenic mechanisms rampant within the criminal justice system. In 2013, a California audit found that 39 of the 144 women in the state’s prison system who underwent a bilateral tubal ligation between 2005 and 2013 did so under conditions of missing or dubious consent. In 27 of these 39 cases, a physician failed to sign the inmate’s consent form certifying the inmate’s mental competence and understanding of the procedure’s lasting effects. In 18 cases, the waiting period between the inmate’s consent and the date of surgery was potentially violated. The 144 sterilized inmates shared a profile: they were between 26 and 40 years of age, were poorly educated, and had been pregnant five or more times. In several southern states, judges have issued standing orders promising women sentence reductions in exchange for birth control implants.

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These examples highlight how both the logic and practice of eugenics endure, despite the fact that many Americans situate eugenics in the remote past. They reveal that concerns about the “stock” of the nation continue to shape social and legal policies, even as citizens agree on the moral atrocities of the eugenics movement. But not all of the legacies of eugenics are as easy to stamp with a “toxic” label. There are many eugenics-inspired traditions that people of diverse political leanings would regard as socially valuable, or at least largely innocuous: genetic science, baby contests, couples counseling, IQ tests, and gifted education, for instance. These traditions have developed purposes beyond their eugenic ones, and thereby further complicate Thomas’s rhetorical maneuver. They suggest the illogic of simply lifting historical practices from their context and dropping them onto the present.

Genetics flourished in the United States to undergird sterilization campaigns. Realizing the need to expand upon Gregor Mendel’s research on inheritance patterns, which had inspired Francis Galton to conceive eugenics in England in the 19th century, Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Records Office to apply studies on inheritance to the burgeoning social movement in America. Davenport and his peers also supported the work of pioneering geneticists like Thomas Hunt Morgan, whose work on fruit flies later earned him a Nobel Prize. For many years, “human genetics and eugenics were one and the same,” Edwin Black explains in War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. This changed when geneticists like Morgan denounced eugenics as unscientific, claiming that it disregarded the role of the environment in the development of traits and that the inheritance of positive or negative traits extended well beyond one generation. When Nazi Germany further tarnished the movement by drawing upon its idiom of racial improvement to execute genocide, eugenicists rebranded, adopting the more respected term “genetics.” They quietly changed the titles of professional organizations and journals; and the President of the American Eugenics Society advised the organization’s members to look to genetics, as well as the sciences of population and psychology, “for the factual material on which to build an acceptable philosophy of eugenics.”

Thomas acknowledges this chronology in his opinion, but he does not suggest that we abandon genetic science altogether. And why would he? The study of genes has greatly contributed to medical knowledge, as well as to the development of much-needed drugs. It has helped untold numbers of people to become parents regardless of their race or ethnicity, and it has saved the lives — in some cases, though interventions in utero — of people who would previously have been classified “unfit.” In another ironic twist, a Guardian columnist explains, genetics has “singularly demonstrated that race as a scientific concept holds no water.”

Not unlike genetics — though with considerably less impact — baby contests, like the one Gerber hosts annually, have also shape-shifted over the years. These competitions began as eugenic exhibits at state fairs to promote infants with “a sound mind in a sound body.” The founders of “Better Babies” contests were concerned about high infant mortality at a time when the average American woman was producing only half of the children she had birthed before the Civil War. The contests transformed into Fitter Family contests, where adults won medals based on the whiteness of their pigment, the arch of their noses, the straightness of their teeth, and the flawlessness of their family trees. “Yea, I have a goodly heritage,” read the winning medals, assuring recipients that they should get married and have children — plenty of children. Today, contests like Gerber’s may seem silly and may even provide an occasion for the public to express preferences for certain physical traits, just as advocates of “Better Babies” contests did. But the tradition has certainly moved away from its eugenic roots. Contests celebrate children from all nationalities and social classes, are inclusive of babies with developmental disabilities, and fund programs in low-income communities, once the target of eugenics campaigns. Their purpose is corporate engagement — not the betterment of any specific race.

When Nazi Germany further tarnished the movement by drawing upon its idiom of racial improvement to execute genocide, eugenicists rebranded, adopting the more respected term ‘genetics.’

Perhaps the most useful example of institutional transformation, however, is couples counseling, since it developed precisely to carry eugenics into the present day. Whereas eugenicists initially leveraged genetics and baby contests to expand public support for their movement, they promoted couples counseling to disguise eugenic practices from a society increasingly wary of rhetoric about racial integrity. Nonetheless, this tradition also developed social functions beyond its original one, suggesting the need for measured historical inquiry — attention to the influence of the past without disregarding present realities. Like reproductive technologies, couples counseling can be deployed as a “tool of eugenic manipulation”; but its origins alone are not enough to establish it as one.

As a therapeutic practice, couples counseling emerged in the 1930s to complement sterilization campaigns, which were drawing criticism for relying on shoddy science. The father of the tradition, Paul Popenoe, envisioned counseling as the “positive” side of the eugenics coin. (If sterilization prevented the “unfit” from reproducing, marriage counseling saw that the “fit” reproduced.) Popenoe had gained recognition in the 1910s, when he visited asylums across California to inspect inmates subjected to the state’s new sterilization law. Based on his findings, Popenoe argued in Journal of Heredity that approximately ten million Americans — then, a tenth of the population — should be sterilized. Of course, he wasn’t alone in thinking this; Davenport and Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office were campaigning across the country for laws like the one in California. When Popenoe became secretary of the Human Betterment Foundation and founder of the Southern California branch of the American Eugenics Society, he continued to advocate for involuntary sterilization. But he also devoted attention to another “evil” behind the decrease of the fitter races: feminism. This obsession enabled him to adapt eugenics in its time of crisis.

In a 1918 textbook co-authored with Roswell Johnson, Applied Eugenics, Popenoe defined feminism as a foolish effort to eliminate biological, political, and economic differentiation between the sexes. In that book, he predicted that feminism would benefit the race by inadvertently reducing the number of feminists within the population: “Under the new regime a large proportion of such women do not marry and accordingly have few if any children to inherit their defects. Hence the average level of maternal instinct of the women of America is likely to rise.” Popenoe grew concerned when the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (affording women the right to vote) strengthened the movement. He didn’t like how, after gaining suffrage, women began to demand access to other institutions, like higher education. He believed an education distracted a woman from her most important role (you guessed it: motherhood!). In Applied Eugenics, he and Johnson wrote that the typical college girl “had been rendered so cold and unattractive, so overstuffed intellectually and starved emotionally that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company.”

What if cautiously accepting certain institutions in spite of their nefarious roots is necessary to their transformation?

Popenoe also blamed Margaret Sanger for the degradation of the race. She had promised that birth control pills would weed out “idiots,” delinquents, alcoholics, and prisoners. In reality, Popenoe complained, the lower classes were breeding faster than ever, while middle- and upper-class women were taking the pill after two children or even before giving birth to any. (Sanger’s promotion of birth control among all classes and races eventually led to her excommunication from the eugenics movement, a fact that Thomas overlooks in his opinion.)

In 1930, Popenoe opened a counseling clinic to redress the devastating impact of feminism on the American family and instruct on the principles of good breeding. He wanted to ensure that only certain people got married and that, once married, these people stayed married and reproduced. Dubbed “Mr. Marriage,” Popenoe advised dating couples of their genetic risks and used a personality test to assess compatibility. He intervened in disputes and scolded individuals for disobeying gender conventions. In 1953, Popenoe founded and authored the popular advice column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in Ladies’ Home Journal.

Thanks to Popenoe, marriage clinics popped up across the country, giving rise to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, which today represents over 24,000 marriage and family therapists. The long half-life of the early marriage industry contradicts popular belief that eugenics waned after World War II, when Hitler’s unpopularity and scientific challenges to the movement led to decreased involuntary sterilizations. As Wendy Kline explains in Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, eugenicists simply found alternative methods to achieve their means: talk therapy and “voluntary” sterilization, among others. After Popenoe died in 1979, his torch passed to figures like James Dobson, founder of the organization Focus on the Family and host of the radio program of the same name; Popenoe’s own son, David, who writes prolifically on traditional family values; and other crusaders for the nuclear family in churches and local communities.

But wouldn’t it be wrong, both logically and morally, to suggest that couples counseling doesn’t meaningfully help people today? Stigmas already prevent some individuals from pursuing this resource; discrediting it because of its dubious heritage could mean that even fewer people benefit from counseling — and therefore, from the social and economic advantages of marriage. Isn’t this scenario similar to what Popenoe had in mind when he initiated couples counseling? What if cautiously accepting certain institutions in spite of their nefarious roots is necessary to their transformation?

In the mid-century, religious and community leaders made up the vast majority of couples counselors; by the end of the century, psychologists, social workers, and trained professionals primarily fulfilled this role. With this changing of the guard, there was a shift in thinking about marriage: from purely moral terms to behavioral and medical ones. Even if moral biases continued to influence individual practitioners (as they do all human services), counselors increasingly considered research and evidence-based practices in the therapy setting. It is estimated that almost half of American couples today have attended counseling with a partner, with the majority finding it useful. Insofar as it allows individuals to repair relationships with their partners, family counseling can greatly improve people’s lives. Any critique of counseling should consider this reality. The intentions of its early proponents are far less relevant, and we do more to subvert those intentions by accepting counseling than by nixing it.

When we impose a dark history onto the present, whether for political or moral gains, we often just re-inflict the violence of that past on those we nominally seek to protect.

Thomas’s abortion-as-eugenics-via-birth-control argument fails precisely because he tries to cut-and-paste eugenics history, overlooking differences between eugenic visions of birth control and popular attitudes about birth control (including abortion) today. The irony, of course, is that Thomas’s genetic fallacy rehearses eugenicists’ hereditary logic, placing undue emphasis on origins. Whereas eugenicists dehumanized certain people because of their perceived poor roots, Thomas discredits birth control because the roots of the organization that championed it (Planned Parenthood) entangle with those of eugenics. Had he applied more scrutiny to his subjects, he might have acknowledged that many disabled persons and people of color support birth control and abortion, believing both practices to provide economic security and expand their civil liberties. If eugenicists imagined birth control weeding out certain groups, many members of marginalized communities regard it as a technology necessary to broader struggles for social justice. In Sanger’s day, African American scholars like W.E.B. Dubois thought the same, supporting birth control while adamantly opposing involuntary sterilization.

Had Thomas more carefully considered the differences between state-sponsored sterilization campaigns and abortion practices today, he might have realized the ways in which abortion actually does intersect with eugenics. Toward this end, he might have examined the pressures placed upon certain women to abort. Cuts to prenatal care under Medicaid or caps on welfare benefits based on family size are deliberate measures to prevent poor women from reproducing. This becomes very clear when lawmakers promoting such policies suggest we need to stop women from having babies just to get another few hundred dollars a month. The burden that the medical profession places upon disabled women to abort for non-medical reasons is also deserving of discussion. But rather than acknowledging these efforts to restrict women’s reproduction in the interests of society, Thomas targets the women who are subjected to them. In doing so, he forecloses meaningful conversation about how the logic of eugenics truly reverberates in our time.

Of course, Thomas is not the first to invoke a historical atrocity to discredit something or someone in the present, nor will he be the last. Last year, revelations of Hans Asperger’s Nazi connections prompted some to question the clinical significance of his findings on Asperger’s syndrome, as well as the use of the term to describe certain individuals on the autism spectrum. Like the invocation of eugenics, this instance raises questions about when — and how — to consider backstories when evaluating practices that seem neutral or even positive today. We need to properly contextualize past and present practices to avoid abstractions like Thomas’s. It is equally important to engage the voices of those impacted. When we impose a dark history onto the present, whether for political or moral gains, we often just re-inflict the violence of that past on those we nominally seek to protect.

***

Audrey Farley recently earned a PhD in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied 20th-century American literature and culture. Her writing has appeared or will soon appear in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Narratively, Lady Science, Public Books, ASAP, and Marginalia Review of Books.

Editor: Ben Huberman Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel Illustrator: Tom Peake

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Hair Loss: Looking beyond Genetics

Conventional wisdom teaches us to accept our fate when it comes to hair loss. “Runs in the family,” we’re often told—and sometimes it does (but that’s usually not the full story). “It’s just part of getting older,” people say, too—and there we again find only partial truth at best.

But the Primal path is one of thoughtful scrutiny, not blind acceptance. While most people would file hair loss under aesthetic concerns (ranging from neutral to negative depending on social norms and personal views), it’s not always that innocuous. Let’s look today the bigger picture behind hair loss and the situations in which it signifies a genuine health concern.

Hair Loss: Genetic Destiny?

To those in the know, androgenetic alopecia (AA) is the number one form of progressive hair loss. The term can be a little misleading: while it translates to male-pattern baldness, it also encompasses a condition called female pattern baldness. The “andro” derives from dihydrotestosterone, the so-called male hormone that specialists believe to be the primary cause of AA. It’s estimated that half of men over the age of 50 and half of women over the age of 65 have this form of hair loss, and the young people can be affected as well.

The theory goes that every hair follicle on your scalp is genetically predisposed to either be susceptible or resistant to increasing levels of dihydrotestosterone as you age. Those whose hair follicles are sensitive to this hormone will see a steady decline in hair as they age, while those who dodged the genetic bullet can retain their hair into their later decades…provided they don’t succumb to any number of other hair loss factors.

The theory implicating testosterone developed back in the 1940s, when James B. Hamilton reported the notable lack of hair loss in “old eunuchs who were castrated prior to sexual maturation.” It stood to reason that testosterone, which Hamilton assumed wasn’t being produced in any significant quantities post-snip, was the cause of hair loss in “intact” men. In 1980, a team of scientists refined this theory when they discovered a group of pseudohermaphrodites living in the Dominican Republic who had normal testosterone concentrations but lacked an enzyme that converted testosterone into the “hair follicle damaging” dihydrotestosterone.

The rest was history. Pharmaceutical opportunists caught onto the findings, and began pumping out early equivalents of today’s Rogaine and Propecia. Research-wise, not a lot of progress has been made since.

The Problem with a Fatalist View on Genetics

An study published last year in the International Journal of Trichology got me thinking. Researchers examined the medical and family history of 210 patients with female pattern hair loss, finding that close to 85% of the patients had a history of AA. Nothing new there.

But there was more at play: the study also found that the hair loss patients also had a high incidence of hypothyroidism and hypertension, and most were deficient in vitamin D. Clearly, all of these factors are influenced primarily by diet, stress, and other easily-altered variables.

This presents a problem for the fatalist alopecia soothsayers and drug companies alike. The issue with flat-out blaming genetics for something like hair loss is that there’s always confounding factors. For example, if someone has a family history of hair loss, does that family also have a gluten/dairy/egg/nut sensitivity that they don’t know about? Does that family have a ravenous sweet tooth, and therefore consume vast quantities of delicious but inflammatory sweeties? It’s easy to blame genetics for all of life’s maladies, but the waters muddy a little when a “predisposition” is intertwined with unhealthy habits, diet, or food allergies.

An alternative hair solutions blogger Danny Roddy agrees. Drawing on extensive research from Dr. Ray Peat, Roddy firmly dismisses the “genetic determinism” mindset and argues that the decades-old research upon which our current hair loss notions are based is inherently flawed. Roddy suggests that baldness and most genetic-derived hair loss conditions are due to environmental factors.

Crucially, Roddy also points out that those with androgenic alopecia don’t actually exhibit higher than normal levels of testosterone, implying that there are other elements at play here. Many recent findings also suggest that the so-called “sensitivity” of androgen receptors in the scalp doesn’t vary between balding and non-balding people.

The point here is that mainstream perceptions of common hair disorders may be a little off the mark. The other thing to remember is that “risk” doesn’t equate to “inevitable.” Just because your DNA puts you at a greater risk of losing your hair, that doesn’t seal the deal. Let’s examine a few other salient factors.

Hair Loss and Stress

Stress is bad news for your health. And your hair is no exception. Acute, extreme stress provides the primary mechanism by which your hair can start falling out, a condition known as telogen effluvium. This type of stress could come in any form—emotional trauma, physical pain or injury, that kind of thing. Cutting off blood flow and nutrient cycling to your hair follicles is the body’s way of focusing on the vital areas that are critical for survival during what it perceives to be a time of extreme hardship.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Pathology was one of the first lab tests to actually illustrate the short term effects that telogen effluvium can have on mammals. Using substance P as an acute stressor on mice, researchers were able to demonstrate that psycho-emotional stress altered hair follicle cycling, reduced the duration of hair growth, and exposed hair follicles to inflammation.

The second hair-fall mechanism is chronic stress. Low-level but continuous stress, perhaps in the form of incessant background noise, poor diet, or drawn out work troubles, has been shown to contribute to hair loss. Chronic stress can also occur as a negative feedback loop, whereby the stress of worrying about your hair falling out actually contributes to it’s continuing demise—the self-fulfilling prophecy.

The solution is obvious but not always easy: identify the stress and minimize it. The building blocks of stress management are always going to include diet: eat nutrient dense foods like organ meats, a wide range of vegetables, grass-fed dairy and pastured eggs. In addition to providing a wide range of other vital nutrients, these foods are also rich in biotin, which has been shown to be an effective treatment for certain forms of hair loss. Otherwise, you know the drill: scale back on the stress-inducing lifestyle factors, take more time for yourself, ensure regular nature immersions, and consider beginning a meditation or other relaxation-focused practice.

Hair Loss and Hormones

Despite the doubt surrounding genetic precursors to hair loss, there’s no question that hormonal imbalances play a key role in the state of your hair. Long-accepted hormonal contributors to hair loss include:

low ratio of estrogen to testosterone in women, which often occurs during and after menopause

underactive thyroid hormone in both men and women

excess testosterone in both men and women

insulin resistance in both men and women

While prescribing hormone-specific solutions for your hair is a whole article in itself, the key here is to focus on but one word: balance. As cliched as it sounds, true health is achieved by balancing all the systems, processes, inputs and outputs in your body…and the same is true for hair loss. Your first step might be to do a hormone test, or it might be to get back to basics with diet and lifestyle.

Luckily, a Primal way of life is a great way to start balancing out your hormones. Encouraging a shift away from excess carb consumption should go a long way towards improving insulin sensitivity, while steering clear of gluten and other potential food allergens (and making sure you’re getting ample selenium) can allow your thyroid to regain some semblance of normalcy. Excess testosterone typically isn’t an issue for folks like us, as a diet rich in whole foods helps to regulate its production and restore ratios between estrogen and testosterone.

Beyond CW, there’s a potential gollum lurking in the shadows: prolactin. Prolactin is secreted by the pituitary gland during pregnancy, and during times of stress. Prolactin is the mortal enemy of progesterone, one of the “female” hormones that also plays an important role in men.  Progesterone blocks the effects of testosterone, leading some to believe that reducing the levels of prolactin in the body and thereby promoting progesterone secretion is a key element of supporting healthy hair growth. Because there’s very little research to back up these claims, aside from the musings of Dr. Ray Peat, this is a difficult one to explore further.

Nonetheless, reducing prolactin activity in your body certainly can’t hurt. Getting plenty of zinc, along with calcium and its cofactors should help to keep prolactin in check. Reducing alcohol intake and cutting out sugar can also encourage estrogen regulation, which plays a role in prolactin secretion. Experiment with foods and ratios, and see what works for you.

Hair Loss and Disease

I could ruminate all day on the various health conditions that lead to hair loss. Cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, hypothyroidism. The list goes on.

To me, the one which slips under the radar time and again is autoimmunity—particularly in the case of alopecia areata. If your hair loss is patchy rather than general thinning or receding, look to common autoimmune triggers for the answer. Healing your gut should be the first line of defense, which may be as simple as cutting out grains and upping the probiotics. It could also require more focused action, with something more along the lines of an autoimmune protocol.

Hair Loss and Nutrients

I’ve already touched upon dietary changes that can be promoted to treat certain hair loss causes. Still, suffice to say that if you’re following a relatively Primal-friendly eating plan, but still lacking in certain nutrients, you may need to explore efforts more close in. Women should keep a close eye on ferritin levels, as iron deficiency has been associated with up to 90% of hair loss cases. Many women with thinning hair also respond well to lysine supplementation.

For men, zinc and copper deficiencies may play a role in hair loss—particularly in the case of androgenetic alopecia. Because zinc is often lacking in many a person’s diet, it’s worthwhile upping your zinc intake primarily from food sources like grass-fed dairy, red meat, and nuts.

At the other end of the spectrum, overdosing on vitamin A is also thought to contribute to hair loss. Vegetables like sweet potato, carrots, and dark leafy greens should be providing more than enough vitamin A to meet your daily quota, so cut back or cut out vitamin A supplementation if hair loss is an issue.

Thanks for stopping by, folks. What’s your experience been with hair health? Have any of you achieved hair loss reversal with certain key changes to your diet, lifestyle, supplementation or other means? To all celebrating today, Happy 4th!

[fishermariawo]

Hair Loss: Looking beyond Genetics

Conventional wisdom teaches us to accept our fate when it comes to hair loss. “Runs in the family,” we’re often told—and sometimes it does (but that’s usually not the full story). “It’s just part of getting older,” people say, too—and there we again find only partial truth at best.

But the Primal path is one of thoughtful scrutiny, not blind acceptance. While most people would file hair loss under aesthetic concerns (ranging from neutral to negative depending on social norms and personal views), it’s not always that innocuous. Let’s look today the bigger picture behind hair loss and the situations in which it signifies a genuine health concern.

Hair Loss: Genetic Destiny?

To those in the know, androgenetic alopecia (AA) is the number one form of progressive hair loss. The term can be a little misleading: while it translates to male-pattern baldness, it also encompasses a condition called female pattern baldness. The “andro” derives from dihydrotestosterone, the so-called male hormone that specialists believe to be the primary cause of AA. It’s estimated that half of men over the age of 50 and half of women over the age of 65 have this form of hair loss, and the young people can be affected as well.

The theory goes that every hair follicle on your scalp is genetically predisposed to either be susceptible or resistant to increasing levels of dihydrotestosterone as you age. Those whose hair follicles are sensitive to this hormone will see a steady decline in hair as they age, while those who dodged the genetic bullet can retain their hair into their later decades…provided they don’t succumb to any number of other hair loss factors.

The theory implicating testosterone developed back in the 1940s, when James B. Hamilton reported the notable lack of hair loss in “old eunuchs who were castrated prior to sexual maturation.” It stood to reason that testosterone, which Hamilton assumed wasn’t being produced in any significant quantities post-snip, was the cause of hair loss in “intact” men. In 1980, a team of scientists refined this theory when they discovered a group of pseudohermaphrodites living in the Dominican Republic who had normal testosterone concentrations but lacked an enzyme that converted testosterone into the “hair follicle damaging” dihydrotestosterone.

The rest was history. Pharmaceutical opportunists caught onto the findings, and began pumping out early equivalents of today’s Rogaine and Propecia. Research-wise, not a lot of progress has been made since.

The Problem with a Fatalist View on Genetics

An study published last year in the International Journal of Trichology got me thinking. Researchers examined the medical and family history of 210 patients with female pattern hair loss, finding that close to 85% of the patients had a history of AA. Nothing new there.

But there was more at play: the study also found that the hair loss patients also had a high incidence of hypothyroidism and hypertension, and most were deficient in vitamin D. Clearly, all of these factors are influenced primarily by diet, stress, and other easily-altered variables.

This presents a problem for the fatalist alopecia soothsayers and drug companies alike. The issue with flat-out blaming genetics for something like hair loss is that there’s always confounding factors. For example, if someone has a family history of hair loss, does that family also have a gluten/dairy/egg/nut sensitivity that they don’t know about? Does that family have a ravenous sweet tooth, and therefore consume vast quantities of delicious but inflammatory sweeties? It’s easy to blame genetics for all of life’s maladies, but the waters muddy a little when a “predisposition” is intertwined with unhealthy habits, diet, or food allergies.

An alternative hair solutions blogger Danny Roddy agrees. Drawing on extensive research from Dr. Ray Peat, Roddy firmly dismisses the “genetic determinism” mindset and argues that the decades-old research upon which our current hair loss notions are based is inherently flawed. Roddy suggests that baldness and most genetic-derived hair loss conditions are due to environmental factors.

Crucially, Roddy also points out that those with androgenic alopecia don’t actually exhibit higher than normal levels of testosterone, implying that there are other elements at play here. Many recent findings also suggest that the so-called “sensitivity” of androgen receptors in the scalp doesn’t vary between balding and non-balding people.

The point here is that mainstream perceptions of common hair disorders may be a little off the mark. The other thing to remember is that “risk” doesn’t equate to “inevitable.” Just because your DNA puts you at a greater risk of losing your hair, that doesn’t seal the deal. Let’s examine a few other salient factors.

Hair Loss and Stress

Stress is bad news for your health. And your hair is no exception. Acute, extreme stress provides the primary mechanism by which your hair can start falling out, a condition known as telogen effluvium. This type of stress could come in any form—emotional trauma, physical pain or injury, that kind of thing. Cutting off blood flow and nutrient cycling to your hair follicles is the body’s way of focusing on the vital areas that are critical for survival during what it perceives to be a time of extreme hardship.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Pathology was one of the first lab tests to actually illustrate the short term effects that telogen effluvium can have on mammals. Using substance P as an acute stressor on mice, researchers were able to demonstrate that psycho-emotional stress altered hair follicle cycling, reduced the duration of hair growth, and exposed hair follicles to inflammation.

The second hair-fall mechanism is chronic stress. Low-level but continuous stress, perhaps in the form of incessant background noise, poor diet, or drawn out work troubles, has been shown to contribute to hair loss. Chronic stress can also occur as a negative feedback loop, whereby the stress of worrying about your hair falling out actually contributes to it’s continuing demise—the self-fulfilling prophecy.

The solution is obvious but not always easy: identify the stress and minimize it. The building blocks of stress management are always going to include diet: eat nutrient dense foods like organ meats, a wide range of vegetables, grass-fed dairy and pastured eggs. In addition to providing a wide range of other vital nutrients, these foods are also rich in biotin, which has been shown to be an effective treatment for certain forms of hair loss. Otherwise, you know the drill: scale back on the stress-inducing lifestyle factors, take more time for yourself, ensure regular nature immersions, and consider beginning a meditation or other relaxation-focused practice.

Hair Loss and Hormones

Despite the doubt surrounding genetic precursors to hair loss, there’s no question that hormonal imbalances play a key role in the state of your hair. Long-accepted hormonal contributors to hair loss include:

low ratio of estrogen to testosterone in women, which often occurs during and after menopause

underactive thyroid hormone in both men and women

excess testosterone in both men and women

insulin resistance in both men and women

While prescribing hormone-specific solutions for your hair is a whole article in itself, the key here is to focus on but one word: balance. As cliched as it sounds, true health is achieved by balancing all the systems, processes, inputs and outputs in your body…and the same is true for hair loss. Your first step might be to do a hormone test, or it might be to get back to basics with diet and lifestyle.

Luckily, a Primal way of life is a great way to start balancing out your hormones. Encouraging a shift away from excess carb consumption should go a long way towards improving insulin sensitivity, while steering clear of gluten and other potential food allergens (and making sure you’re getting ample selenium) can allow your thyroid to regain some semblance of normalcy. Excess testosterone typically isn’t an issue for folks like us, as a diet rich in whole foods helps to regulate its production and restore ratios between estrogen and testosterone.

Beyond CW, there’s a potential gollum lurking in the shadows: prolactin. Prolactin is secreted by the pituitary gland during pregnancy, and during times of stress. Prolactin is the mortal enemy of progesterone, one of the “female” hormones that also plays an important role in men.  Progesterone blocks the effects of testosterone, leading some to believe that reducing the levels of prolactin in the body and thereby promoting progesterone secretion is a key element of supporting healthy hair growth. Because there’s very little research to back up these claims, aside from the musings of Dr. Ray Peat, this is a difficult one to explore further.

Nonetheless, reducing prolactin activity in your body certainly can’t hurt. Getting plenty of zinc, along with calcium and its cofactors should help to keep prolactin in check. Reducing alcohol intake and cutting out sugar can also encourage estrogen regulation, which plays a role in prolactin secretion. Experiment with foods and ratios, and see what works for you.

Hair Loss and Disease

I could ruminate all day on the various health conditions that lead to hair loss. Cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, hypothyroidism. The list goes on.

To me, the one which slips under the radar time and again is autoimmunity—particularly in the case of alopecia areata. If your hair loss is patchy rather than general thinning or receding, look to common autoimmune triggers for the answer. Healing your gut should be the first line of defense, which may be as simple as cutting out grains and upping the probiotics. It could also require more focused action, with something more along the lines of an autoimmune protocol.

Hair Loss and Nutrients

I’ve already touched upon dietary changes that can be promoted to treat certain hair loss causes. Still, suffice to say that if you’re following a relatively Primal-friendly eating plan, but still lacking in certain nutrients, you may need to explore efforts more close in. Women should keep a close eye on ferritin levels, as iron deficiency has been associated with up to 90% of hair loss cases. Many women with thinning hair also respond well to lysine supplementation.

For men, zinc and copper deficiencies may play a role in hair loss—particularly in the case of androgenetic alopecia. Because zinc is often lacking in many a person’s diet, it’s worthwhile upping your zinc intake primarily from food sources like grass-fed dairy, red meat, and nuts.

At the other end of the spectrum, overdosing on vitamin A is also thought to contribute to hair loss. Vegetables like sweet potato, carrots, and dark leafy greens should be providing more than enough vitamin A to meet your daily quota, so cut back or cut out vitamin A supplementation if hair loss is an issue.

Thanks for stopping by, folks. What’s your experience been with hair health? Have any of you achieved hair loss reversal with certain key changes to your diet, lifestyle, supplementation or other means? To all celebrating today, Happy 4th!

[milenasanchezmk]

Hair Loss: Looking beyond Genetics

Conventional wisdom teaches us to accept our fate when it comes to hair loss. “Runs in the family,” we’re often told—and sometimes it does (but that’s usually not the full story). “It’s just part of getting older,” people say, too—and there we again find only partial truth at best.

But the Primal path is one of thoughtful scrutiny, not blind acceptance. While most people would file hair loss under aesthetic concerns (ranging from neutral to negative depending on social norms and personal views), it’s not always that innocuous. Let’s look today the bigger picture behind hair loss and the situations in which it signifies a genuine health concern.

Hair Loss: Genetic Destiny?

To those in the know, androgenetic alopecia (AA) is the number one form of progressive hair loss. The term can be a little misleading: while it translates to male-pattern baldness, it also encompasses a condition called female pattern baldness. The “andro” derives from dihydrotestosterone, the so-called male hormone that specialists believe to be the primary cause of AA. It’s estimated that half of men over the age of 50 and half of women over the age of 65 have this form of hair loss, and the young people can be affected as well.

The theory goes that every hair follicle on your scalp is genetically predisposed to either be susceptible or resistant to increasing levels of dihydrotestosterone as you age. Those whose hair follicles are sensitive to this hormone will see a steady decline in hair as they age, while those who dodged the genetic bullet can retain their hair into their later decades…provided they don’t succumb to any number of other hair loss factors.

The theory implicating testosterone developed back in the 1940s, when James B. Hamilton reported the notable lack of hair loss in “old eunuchs who were castrated prior to sexual maturation.” It stood to reason that testosterone, which Hamilton assumed wasn’t being produced in any significant quantities post-snip, was the cause of hair loss in “intact” men. In 1980, a team of scientists refined this theory when they discovered a group of pseudohermaphrodites living in the Dominican Republic who had normal testosterone concentrations but lacked an enzyme that converted testosterone into the “hair follicle damaging” dihydrotestosterone.

The rest was history. Pharmaceutical opportunists caught onto the findings, and began pumping out early equivalents of today’s Rogaine and Propecia. Research-wise, not a lot of progress has been made since.

The Problem with a Fatalist View on Genetics

An study published last year in the International Journal of Trichology got me thinking. Researchers examined the medical and family history of 210 patients with female pattern hair loss, finding that close to 85% of the patients had a history of AA. Nothing new there.

But there was more at play: the study also found that the hair loss patients also had a high incidence of hypothyroidism and hypertension, and most were deficient in vitamin D. Clearly, all of these factors are influenced primarily by diet, stress, and other easily-altered variables.

This presents a problem for the fatalist alopecia soothsayers and drug companies alike. The issue with flat-out blaming genetics for something like hair loss is that there’s always confounding factors. For example, if someone has a family history of hair loss, does that family also have a gluten/dairy/egg/nut sensitivity that they don’t know about? Does that family have a ravenous sweet tooth, and therefore consume vast quantities of delicious but inflammatory sweeties? It’s easy to blame genetics for all of life’s maladies, but the waters muddy a little when a “predisposition” is intertwined with unhealthy habits, diet, or food allergies.

An alternative hair solutions blogger Danny Roddy agrees. Drawing on extensive research from Dr. Ray Peat, Roddy firmly dismisses the “genetic determinism” mindset and argues that the decades-old research upon which our current hair loss notions are based is inherently flawed. Roddy suggests that baldness and most genetic-derived hair loss conditions are due to environmental factors.

Crucially, Roddy also points out that those with androgenic alopecia don’t actually exhibit higher than normal levels of testosterone, implying that there are other elements at play here. Many recent findings also suggest that the so-called “sensitivity” of androgen receptors in the scalp doesn’t vary between balding and non-balding people.

The point here is that mainstream perceptions of common hair disorders may be a little off the mark. The other thing to remember is that “risk” doesn’t equate to “inevitable.” Just because your DNA puts you at a greater risk of losing your hair, that doesn’t seal the deal. Let’s examine a few other salient factors.

Hair Loss and Stress

Stress is bad news for your health. And your hair is no exception. Acute, extreme stress provides the primary mechanism by which your hair can start falling out, a condition known as telogen effluvium. This type of stress could come in any form—emotional trauma, physical pain or injury, that kind of thing. Cutting off blood flow and nutrient cycling to your hair follicles is the body’s way of focusing on the vital areas that are critical for survival during what it perceives to be a time of extreme hardship.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Pathology was one of the first lab tests to actually illustrate the short term effects that telogen effluvium can have on mammals. Using substance P as an acute stressor on mice, researchers were able to demonstrate that psycho-emotional stress altered hair follicle cycling, reduced the duration of hair growth, and exposed hair follicles to inflammation.

The second hair-fall mechanism is chronic stress. Low-level but continuous stress, perhaps in the form of incessant background noise, poor diet, or drawn out work troubles, has been shown to contribute to hair loss. Chronic stress can also occur as a negative feedback loop, whereby the stress of worrying about your hair falling out actually contributes to it’s continuing demise—the self-fulfilling prophecy.

The solution is obvious but not always easy: identify the stress and minimize it. The building blocks of stress management are always going to include diet: eat nutrient dense foods like organ meats, a wide range of vegetables, grass-fed dairy and pastured eggs. In addition to providing a wide range of other vital nutrients, these foods are also rich in biotin, which has been shown to be an effective treatment for certain forms of hair loss. Otherwise, you know the drill: scale back on the stress-inducing lifestyle factors, take more time for yourself, ensure regular nature immersions, and consider beginning a meditation or other relaxation-focused practice.

Hair Loss and Hormones

Despite the doubt surrounding genetic precursors to hair loss, there’s no question that hormonal imbalances play a key role in the state of your hair. Long-accepted hormonal contributors to hair loss include:

low ratio of estrogen to testosterone in women, which often occurs during and after menopause

underactive thyroid hormone in both men and women

excess testosterone in both men and women

insulin resistance in both men and women

While prescribing hormone-specific solutions for your hair is a whole article in itself, the key here is to focus on but one word: balance. As cliched as it sounds, true health is achieved by balancing all the systems, processes, inputs and outputs in your body…and the same is true for hair loss. Your first step might be to do a hormone test, or it might be to get back to basics with diet and lifestyle.

Luckily, a Primal way of life is a great way to start balancing out your hormones. Encouraging a shift away from excess carb consumption should go a long way towards improving insulin sensitivity, while steering clear of gluten and other potential food allergens (and making sure you’re getting ample selenium) can allow your thyroid to regain some semblance of normalcy. Excess testosterone typically isn’t an issue for folks like us, as a diet rich in whole foods helps to regulate its production and restore ratios between estrogen and testosterone.

Beyond CW, there’s a potential gollum lurking in the shadows: prolactin. Prolactin is secreted by the pituitary gland during pregnancy, and during times of stress. Prolactin is the mortal enemy of progesterone, one of the “female” hormones that also plays an important role in men.  Progesterone blocks the effects of testosterone, leading some to believe that reducing the levels of prolactin in the body and thereby promoting progesterone secretion is a key element of supporting healthy hair growth. Because there’s very little research to back up these claims, aside from the musings of Dr. Ray Peat, this is a difficult one to explore further.

Nonetheless, reducing prolactin activity in your body certainly can’t hurt. Getting plenty of zinc, along with calcium and its cofactors should help to keep prolactin in check. Reducing alcohol intake and cutting out sugar can also encourage estrogen regulation, which plays a role in prolactin secretion. Experiment with foods and ratios, and see what works for you.

Hair Loss and Disease

I could ruminate all day on the various health conditions that lead to hair loss. Cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, hypothyroidism. The list goes on.

To me, the one which slips under the radar time and again is autoimmunity—particularly in the case of alopecia areata. If your hair loss is patchy rather than general thinning or receding, look to common autoimmune triggers for the answer. Healing your gut should be the first line of defense, which may be as simple as cutting out grains and upping the probiotics. It could also require more focused action, with something more along the lines of an autoimmune protocol.

Hair Loss and Nutrients

I’ve already touched upon dietary changes that can be promoted to treat certain hair loss causes. Still, suffice to say that if you’re following a relatively Primal-friendly eating plan, but still lacking in certain nutrients, you may need to explore efforts more close in. Women should keep a close eye on ferritin levels, as iron deficiency has been associated with up to 90% of hair loss cases. Many women with thinning hair also respond well to lysine supplementation.

For men, zinc and copper deficiencies may play a role in hair loss—particularly in the case of androgenetic alopecia. Because zinc is often lacking in many a person’s diet, it’s worthwhile upping your zinc intake primarily from food sources like grass-fed dairy, red meat, and nuts.

At the other end of the spectrum, overdosing on vitamin A is also thought to contribute to hair loss. Vegetables like sweet potato, carrots, and dark leafy greens should be providing more than enough vitamin A to meet your daily quota, so cut back or cut out vitamin A supplementation if hair loss is an issue.

Thanks for stopping by, folks. What’s your experience been with hair health? Have any of you achieved hair loss reversal with certain key changes to your diet, lifestyle, supplementation or other means? To all celebrating today, Happy 4th!

[cristinajourdanqp]

Hair Loss: Looking beyond Genetics

Conventional wisdom teaches us to accept our fate when it comes to hair loss. “Runs in the family,” we’re often told—and sometimes it does (but that’s usually not the full story). “It’s just part of getting older,” people say, too—and there we again find only partial truth at best.

But the Primal path is one of thoughtful scrutiny, not blind acceptance. While most people would file hair loss under aesthetic concerns (ranging from neutral to negative depending on social norms and personal views), it’s not always that innocuous. Let’s look today the bigger picture behind hair loss and the situations in which it signifies a genuine health concern.

Hair Loss: Genetic Destiny?

To those in the know, androgenetic alopecia (AA) is the number one form of progressive hair loss. The term can be a little misleading: while it translates to male-pattern baldness, it also encompasses a condition called female pattern baldness. The “andro” derives from dihydrotestosterone, the so-called male hormone that specialists believe to be the primary cause of AA. It’s estimated that half of men over the age of 50 and half of women over the age of 65 have this form of hair loss, and the young people can be affected as well.

The theory goes that every hair follicle on your scalp is genetically predisposed to either be susceptible or resistant to increasing levels of dihydrotestosterone as you age. Those whose hair follicles are sensitive to this hormone will see a steady decline in hair as they age, while those who dodged the genetic bullet can retain their hair into their later decades…provided they don’t succumb to any number of other hair loss factors.

The theory implicating testosterone developed back in the 1940s, when James B. Hamilton reported the notable lack of hair loss in “old eunuchs who were castrated prior to sexual maturation.” It stood to reason that testosterone, which Hamilton assumed wasn’t being produced in any significant quantities post-snip, was the cause of hair loss in “intact” men. In 1980, a team of scientists refined this theory when they discovered a group of pseudohermaphrodites living in the Dominican Republic who had normal testosterone concentrations but lacked an enzyme that converted testosterone into the “hair follicle damaging” dihydrotestosterone.

The rest was history. Pharmaceutical opportunists caught onto the findings, and began pumping out early equivalents of today’s Rogaine and Propecia. Research-wise, not a lot of progress has been made since.

The Problem with a Fatalist View on Genetics

An study published last year in the International Journal of Trichology got me thinking. Researchers examined the medical and family history of 210 patients with female pattern hair loss, finding that close to 85% of the patients had a history of AA. Nothing new there.

But there was more at play: the study also found that the hair loss patients also had a high incidence of hypothyroidism and hypertension, and most were deficient in vitamin D. Clearly, all of these factors are influenced primarily by diet, stress, and other easily-altered variables.

This presents a problem for the fatalist alopecia soothsayers and drug companies alike. The issue with flat-out blaming genetics for something like hair loss is that there’s always confounding factors. For example, if someone has a family history of hair loss, does that family also have a gluten/dairy/egg/nut sensitivity that they don’t know about? Does that family have a ravenous sweet tooth, and therefore consume vast quantities of delicious but inflammatory sweeties? It’s easy to blame genetics for all of life’s maladies, but the waters muddy a little when a “predisposition” is intertwined with unhealthy habits, diet, or food allergies.

An alternative hair solutions blogger Danny Roddy agrees. Drawing on extensive research from Dr. Ray Peat, Roddy firmly dismisses the “genetic determinism” mindset and argues that the decades-old research upon which our current hair loss notions are based is inherently flawed. Roddy suggests that baldness and most genetic-derived hair loss conditions are due to environmental factors.

Crucially, Roddy also points out that those with androgenic alopecia don’t actually exhibit higher than normal levels of testosterone, implying that there are other elements at play here. Many recent findings also suggest that the so-called “sensitivity” of androgen receptors in the scalp doesn’t vary between balding and non-balding people.

The point here is that mainstream perceptions of common hair disorders may be a little off the mark. The other thing to remember is that “risk” doesn’t equate to “inevitable.” Just because your DNA puts you at a greater risk of losing your hair, that doesn’t seal the deal. Let’s examine a few other salient factors.

Hair Loss and Stress

Stress is bad news for your health. And your hair is no exception. Acute, extreme stress provides the primary mechanism by which your hair can start falling out, a condition known as telogen effluvium. This type of stress could come in any form—emotional trauma, physical pain or injury, that kind of thing. Cutting off blood flow and nutrient cycling to your hair follicles is the body’s way of focusing on the vital areas that are critical for survival during what it perceives to be a time of extreme hardship.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Pathology was one of the first lab tests to actually illustrate the short term effects that telogen effluvium can have on mammals. Using substance P as an acute stressor on mice, researchers were able to demonstrate that psycho-emotional stress altered hair follicle cycling, reduced the duration of hair growth, and exposed hair follicles to inflammation.

The second hair-fall mechanism is chronic stress. Low-level but continuous stress, perhaps in the form of incessant background noise, poor diet, or drawn out work troubles, has been shown to contribute to hair loss. Chronic stress can also occur as a negative feedback loop, whereby the stress of worrying about your hair falling out actually contributes to it’s continuing demise—the self-fulfilling prophecy.

The solution is obvious but not always easy: identify the stress and minimize it. The building blocks of stress management are always going to include diet: eat nutrient dense foods like organ meats, a wide range of vegetables, grass-fed dairy and pastured eggs. In addition to providing a wide range of other vital nutrients, these foods are also rich in biotin, which has been shown to be an effective treatment for certain forms of hair loss. Otherwise, you know the drill: scale back on the stress-inducing lifestyle factors, take more time for yourself, ensure regular nature immersions, and consider beginning a meditation or other relaxation-focused practice.

Hair Loss and Hormones

Despite the doubt surrounding genetic precursors to hair loss, there’s no question that hormonal imbalances play a key role in the state of your hair. Long-accepted hormonal contributors to hair loss include:

low ratio of estrogen to testosterone in women, which often occurs during and after menopause

underactive thyroid hormone in both men and women

excess testosterone in both men and women

insulin resistance in both men and women

While prescribing hormone-specific solutions for your hair is a whole article in itself, the key here is to focus on but one word: balance. As cliched as it sounds, true health is achieved by balancing all the systems, processes, inputs and outputs in your body…and the same is true for hair loss. Your first step might be to do a hormone test, or it might be to get back to basics with diet and lifestyle.

Luckily, a Primal way of life is a great way to start balancing out your hormones. Encouraging a shift away from excess carb consumption should go a long way towards improving insulin sensitivity, while steering clear of gluten and other potential food allergens (and making sure you’re getting ample selenium) can allow your thyroid to regain some semblance of normalcy. Excess testosterone typically isn’t an issue for folks like us, as a diet rich in whole foods helps to regulate its production and restore ratios between estrogen and testosterone.

Beyond CW, there’s a potential gollum lurking in the shadows: prolactin. Prolactin is secreted by the pituitary gland during pregnancy, and during times of stress. Prolactin is the mortal enemy of progesterone, one of the “female” hormones that also plays an important role in men.  Progesterone blocks the effects of testosterone, leading some to believe that reducing the levels of prolactin in the body and thereby promoting progesterone secretion is a key element of supporting healthy hair growth. Because there’s very little research to back up these claims, aside from the musings of Dr. Ray Peat, this is a difficult one to explore further.

Nonetheless, reducing prolactin activity in your body certainly can’t hurt. Getting plenty of zinc, along with calcium and its cofactors should help to keep prolactin in check. Reducing alcohol intake and cutting out sugar can also encourage estrogen regulation, which plays a role in prolactin secretion. Experiment with foods and ratios, and see what works for you.

Hair Loss and Disease

I could ruminate all day on the various health conditions that lead to hair loss. Cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, hypothyroidism. The list goes on.

To me, the one which slips under the radar time and again is autoimmunity—particularly in the case of alopecia areata. If your hair loss is patchy rather than general thinning or receding, look to common autoimmune triggers for the answer. Healing your gut should be the first line of defense, which may be as simple as cutting out grains and upping the probiotics. It could also require more focused action, with something more along the lines of an autoimmune protocol.

Hair Loss and Nutrients

I’ve already touched upon dietary changes that can be promoted to treat certain hair loss causes. Still, suffice to say that if you’re following a relatively Primal-friendly eating plan, but still lacking in certain nutrients, you may need to explore efforts more close in. Women should keep a close eye on ferritin levels, as iron deficiency has been associated with up to 90% of hair loss cases. Many women with thinning hair also respond well to lysine supplementation.

For men, zinc and copper deficiencies may play a role in hair loss—particularly in the case of androgenetic alopecia. Because zinc is often lacking in many a person’s diet, it’s worthwhile upping your zinc intake primarily from food sources like grass-fed dairy, red meat, and nuts.

At the other end of the spectrum, overdosing on vitamin A is also thought to contribute to hair loss. Vegetables like sweet potato, carrots, and dark leafy greens should be providing more than enough vitamin A to meet your daily quota, so cut back or cut out vitamin A supplementation if hair loss is an issue.

Thanks for stopping by, folks. What’s your experience been with hair health? Have any of you achieved hair loss reversal with certain key changes to your diet, lifestyle, supplementation or other means? To all celebrating today, Happy 4th!

[cynthiamwashington]

Hair Loss: Looking beyond Genetics

Conventional wisdom teaches us to accept our fate when it comes to hair loss. “Runs in the family,” we’re often told—and sometimes it does (but that’s usually not the full story). “It’s just part of getting older,” people say, too—and there we again find only partial truth at best.

But the Primal path is one of thoughtful scrutiny, not blind acceptance. While most people would file hair loss under aesthetic concerns (ranging from neutral to negative depending on social norms and personal views), it’s not always that innocuous. Let’s look today the bigger picture behind hair loss and the situations in which it signifies a genuine health concern.

Hair Loss: Genetic Destiny?

To those in the know, androgenetic alopecia (AA) is the number one form of progressive hair loss. The term can be a little misleading: while it translates to male-pattern baldness, it also encompasses a condition called female pattern baldness. The “andro” derives from dihydrotestosterone, the so-called male hormone that specialists believe to be the primary cause of AA. It’s estimated that half of men over the age of 50 and half of women over the age of 65 have this form of hair loss, and the young people can be affected as well.

The theory goes that every hair follicle on your scalp is genetically predisposed to either be susceptible or resistant to increasing levels of dihydrotestosterone as you age. Those whose hair follicles are sensitive to this hormone will see a steady decline in hair as they age, while those who dodged the genetic bullet can retain their hair into their later decades…provided they don’t succumb to any number of other hair loss factors.

The theory implicating testosterone developed back in the 1940s, when James B. Hamilton reported the notable lack of hair loss in “old eunuchs who were castrated prior to sexual maturation.” It stood to reason that testosterone, which Hamilton assumed wasn’t being produced in any significant quantities post-snip, was the cause of hair loss in “intact” men. In 1980, a team of scientists refined this theory when they discovered a group of pseudohermaphrodites living in the Dominican Republic who had normal testosterone concentrations but lacked an enzyme that converted testosterone into the “hair follicle damaging” dihydrotestosterone.

The rest was history. Pharmaceutical opportunists caught onto the findings, and began pumping out early equivalents of today’s Rogaine and Propecia. Research-wise, not a lot of progress has been made since.

The Problem with a Fatalist View on Genetics

An study published last year in the International Journal of Trichology got me thinking. Researchers examined the medical and family history of 210 patients with female pattern hair loss, finding that close to 85% of the patients had a history of AA. Nothing new there.

But there was more at play: the study also found that the hair loss patients also had a high incidence of hypothyroidism and hypertension, and most were deficient in vitamin D. Clearly, all of these factors are influenced primarily by diet, stress, and other easily-altered variables.

This presents a problem for the fatalist alopecia soothsayers and drug companies alike. The issue with flat-out blaming genetics for something like hair loss is that there’s always confounding factors. For example, if someone has a family history of hair loss, does that family also have a gluten/dairy/egg/nut sensitivity that they don’t know about? Does that family have a ravenous sweet tooth, and therefore consume vast quantities of delicious but inflammatory sweeties? It’s easy to blame genetics for all of life’s maladies, but the waters muddy a little when a “predisposition” is intertwined with unhealthy habits, diet, or food allergies.

An alternative hair solutions blogger Danny Roddy agrees. Drawing on extensive research from Dr. Ray Peat, Roddy firmly dismisses the “genetic determinism” mindset and argues that the decades-old research upon which our current hair loss notions are based is inherently flawed. Roddy suggests that baldness and most genetic-derived hair loss conditions are due to environmental factors.

Crucially, Roddy also points out that those with androgenic alopecia don’t actually exhibit higher than normal levels of testosterone, implying that there are other elements at play here. Many recent findings also suggest that the so-called “sensitivity” of androgen receptors in the scalp doesn’t vary between balding and non-balding people.

The point here is that mainstream perceptions of common hair disorders may be a little off the mark. The other thing to remember is that “risk” doesn’t equate to “inevitable.” Just because your DNA puts you at a greater risk of losing your hair, that doesn’t seal the deal. Let’s examine a few other salient factors.

Hair Loss and Stress

Stress is bad news for your health. And your hair is no exception. Acute, extreme stress provides the primary mechanism by which your hair can start falling out, a condition known as telogen effluvium. This type of stress could come in any form—emotional trauma, physical pain or injury, that kind of thing. Cutting off blood flow and nutrient cycling to your hair follicles is the body’s way of focusing on the vital areas that are critical for survival during what it perceives to be a time of extreme hardship.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Pathology was one of the first lab tests to actually illustrate the short term effects that telogen effluvium can have on mammals. Using substance P as an acute stressor on mice, researchers were able to demonstrate that psycho-emotional stress altered hair follicle cycling, reduced the duration of hair growth, and exposed hair follicles to inflammation.

The second hair-fall mechanism is chronic stress. Low-level but continuous stress, perhaps in the form of incessant background noise, poor diet, or drawn out work troubles, has been shown to contribute to hair loss. Chronic stress can also occur as a negative feedback loop, whereby the stress of worrying about your hair falling out actually contributes to it’s continuing demise—the self-fulfilling prophecy.

The solution is obvious but not always easy: identify the stress and minimize it. The building blocks of stress management are always going to include diet: eat nutrient dense foods like organ meats, a wide range of vegetables, grass-fed dairy and pastured eggs. In addition to providing a wide range of other vital nutrients, these foods are also rich in biotin, which has been shown to be an effective treatment for certain forms of hair loss. Otherwise, you know the drill: scale back on the stress-inducing lifestyle factors, take more time for yourself, ensure regular nature immersions, and consider beginning a meditation or other relaxation-focused practice.

Hair Loss and Hormones

Despite the doubt surrounding genetic precursors to hair loss, there’s no question that hormonal imbalances play a key role in the state of your hair. Long-accepted hormonal contributors to hair loss include:

low ratio of estrogen to testosterone in women, which often occurs during and after menopause

underactive thyroid hormone in both men and women

excess testosterone in both men and women

insulin resistance in both men and women

While prescribing hormone-specific solutions for your hair is a whole article in itself, the key here is to focus on but one word: balance. As cliched as it sounds, true health is achieved by balancing all the systems, processes, inputs and outputs in your body…and the same is true for hair loss. Your first step might be to do a hormone test, or it might be to get back to basics with diet and lifestyle.

Luckily, a Primal way of life is a great way to start balancing out your hormones. Encouraging a shift away from excess carb consumption should go a long way towards improving insulin sensitivity, while steering clear of gluten and other potential food allergens (and making sure you’re getting ample selenium) can allow your thyroid to regain some semblance of normalcy. Excess testosterone typically isn’t an issue for folks like us, as a diet rich in whole foods helps to regulate its production and restore ratios between estrogen and testosterone.

Beyond CW, there’s a potential gollum lurking in the shadows: prolactin. Prolactin is secreted by the pituitary gland during pregnancy, and during times of stress. Prolactin is the mortal enemy of progesterone, one of the “female” hormones that also plays an important role in men.  Progesterone blocks the effects of testosterone, leading some to believe that reducing the levels of prolactin in the body and thereby promoting progesterone secretion is a key element of supporting healthy hair growth. Because there’s very little research to back up these claims, aside from the musings of Dr. Ray Peat, this is a difficult one to explore further.

Nonetheless, reducing prolactin activity in your body certainly can’t hurt. Getting plenty of zinc, along with calcium and its cofactors should help to keep prolactin in check. Reducing alcohol intake and cutting out sugar can also encourage estrogen regulation, which plays a role in prolactin secretion. Experiment with foods and ratios, and see what works for you.

Hair Loss and Disease

I could ruminate all day on the various health conditions that lead to hair loss. Cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, hypothyroidism. The list goes on.

To me, the one which slips under the radar time and again is autoimmunity—particularly in the case of alopecia areata. If your hair loss is patchy rather than general thinning or receding, look to common autoimmune triggers for the answer. Healing your gut should be the first line of defense, which may be as simple as cutting out grains and upping the probiotics. It could also require more focused action, with something more along the lines of an autoimmune protocol.

Hair Loss and Nutrients

I’ve already touched upon dietary changes that can be promoted to treat certain hair loss causes. Still, suffice to say that if you’re following a relatively Primal-friendly eating plan, but still lacking in certain nutrients, you may need to explore efforts more close in. Women should keep a close eye on ferritin levels, as iron deficiency has been associated with up to 90% of hair loss cases. Many women with thinning hair also respond well to lysine supplementation.

For men, zinc and copper deficiencies may play a role in hair loss—particularly in the case of androgenetic alopecia. Because zinc is often lacking in many a person’s diet, it’s worthwhile upping your zinc intake primarily from food sources like grass-fed dairy, red meat, and nuts.

At the other end of the spectrum, overdosing on vitamin A is also thought to contribute to hair loss. Vegetables like sweet potato, carrots, and dark leafy greens should be providing more than enough vitamin A to meet your daily quota, so cut back or cut out vitamin A supplementation if hair loss is an issue.

Thanks for stopping by, folks. What’s your experience been with hair health? Have any of you achieved hair loss reversal with certain key changes to your diet, lifestyle, supplementation or other means? To all celebrating today, Happy 4th!

The post Hair Loss: Looking beyond Genetics appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Article source here:Marks’s Daily Apple

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We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics

Audrey Farley | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,381 words)

  On May 28, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an eyebrow-raising opinion. It concurred with the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Indiana law that requires abortion providers to follow a certain protocol to dispose of fetal remains and prohibits abortions on the sole basis of a fetus’s sex, race, or disability. It wasn’t the justice’s position that caught attention, but rather his method. In speaking to the law’s second provision on selective abortions, Thomas launched into a history of eugenics, the debunked science of racial improvement that gained popularity in the early decades of the 20th century.

Arguing that abortion is “an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation,” the justice offered a lengthy discussion of the origins of the birth-control movement in the United States. In this discussion, written for the benefit of other courts considering abortion laws, Thomas explains how Planned Parenthood grew in tandem with state-sterilization campaigns, providing the foundation for the legalized abortion movement. (As historians corrected, legal abortion preceded birth control, as it was not regulated until the 19th century.) The justice cites the disturbing rhetoric of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who wrote in The Pivot of Civilization that birth control was a means of reducing the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” While conceding that Sanger did not support abortion, Thomas nonetheless argues that “Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.”

Thomas does not offer concrete evidence that American women actually abort fetuses solely because of sex, race, or disability. Nor does he explore the possible reasons for abortions related to these criteria, such as financial hardship or the lack of societal support for individuals with chronic conditions. His grievance with abortion boils down to this point: the practice is ill-borne. This claim is inaccurate, for reasons that historians swiftly noted; it also obscures the fact that eugenics did in fact initiate many traditions in this country, not all of which are perceived to be heinous today. Thomas’s incautious opinion, which echoes other voices in the abortion debate, unwittingly invites a more nuanced discussion of eugenics’ legacies.

However one feels about the ethics of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down Syndrome, it is imperative to recognize the key differences between eugenic sterilization and abortion: who makes the decision and why.

Shortly after the opinion’s release, critics faulted the justice for “using eugenics as a rhetorical sledgehammer.” Adam Cohen, whose book on eugenics Thomas repeatedly cited, observed that Thomas’s argument “relied on a kind of historical guilt-by-association,” rather than on a fully baked thesis. Cohen stressed that, like Sanger, most leading eugenicists actually opposed abortion. From his perspective, Thomas’s opinion was a thinly veiled attempt “to put a new weapon in the arsenal of the anti-abortion movement” by posing this question to opponents: “If you do not buy the argument that abortion ends a human life, how about the idea that it is an attempt to restrict reproduction in order to ‘improve’ the human race?”

State-level lawmakers are testing the same tactic. Six states have introduced legislation banning abortions solely due to a prenatal Down Syndrome diagnosis, and those championing these bills repeatedly invoke eugenics. A representative in Pennsylvania said of the legislation, “We shouldn’t allow eugenics to prevent babies with Down Syndrome from being given the chance at life.” A lawmaker in Utah stated that “selective abortion . . . is the very definition of eugenics.” Pope Francis agrees, saying selective abortion after a diagnosis “is the expression of an inhuman eugenics mentality.”

However one feels about the ethics of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down Syndrome, it is imperative to recognize the key differences between eugenic sterilization and abortion: who makes the decision and why. As Cohen explains in his response to Thomas, in the case of eugenic sterilization, the state acts in the (alleged) collective interests of the population; in the case of abortion, a pregnant person acts in their own interests or those they attribute to the fetus, as in cases where the fetus is not likely to live long outside the womb. For this reason, “A woman in Indiana who has an abortion because the child will be born with a severe disability is not acting eugenically — she is not trying to uplift the human race.”

Some of Thomas’s critics allow that societal biases do influence individual notions of a worthy life, which, in turn, impact decisions related to abortion. But these critics insist that restricting abortion will not resolve these prejudices. HuffPost reporter Lydia O’Connor attributes the practice of sex-selective abortion in Asia, which Thomas references, to pervasive sexism. Like Mara Hvistendahl, who published a book on the subject, she maintains that taking away one of women’s civil liberties is not going to reverse sexism. In fact, restricting marginalized persons’ pregnancy choices extends eugenics-era practices. University of Michigan history professor Alexandra Minna Stern told The Washington Post, “That’s the through line that I see, in terms of state-mandated reproductive control.” From her perspective, demanding that women give birth is not so different than preventing them from doing so.

Stern’s comment suggests the problem, for Thomas and other lawmakers, of drawing upon eugenics to legislate against abortion: there exist many other “through lines” between early-century race crusaders and contemporary institutions that the political right does not care to acknowledge. Anti-immigration legislation is an obvious one. Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, banning entry from Asian countries and restricting the numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans, expressly to prevent further “pollution” of the gene pool by intellectually and morally “defective” immigrants. Republican lawmakers’ public comments suggest that the same logic informs current immigration policies. President Trump has repeatedly defended his support of a Mexican border wall on the grounds that it will keep rapists, drug dealers, and criminals out of the country. The president has also said that America needs fewer immigrants from “shithole countries” and “more people from places like Norway.”

“Family values” as we know them today also harken back to eugenics, when authorities first determined that the nuclear family was essential to protecting the white race. But conservatives are not likely to trace this lineage either. Nor do conservatives acknowledge the eugenic mechanisms rampant within the criminal justice system. In 2013, a California audit found that 39 of the 144 women in the state’s prison system who underwent a bilateral tubal ligation between 2005 and 2013 did so under conditions of missing or dubious consent. In 27 of these 39 cases, a physician failed to sign the inmate’s consent form certifying the inmate’s mental competence and understanding of the procedure’s lasting effects. In 18 cases, the waiting period between the inmate’s consent and the date of surgery was potentially violated. The 144 sterilized inmates shared a profile: they were between 26 and 40 years of age, were poorly educated, and had been pregnant five or more times. In several southern states, judges have issued standing orders promising women sentence reductions in exchange for birth control implants.

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These examples highlight how both the logic and practice of eugenics endure, despite the fact that many Americans situate eugenics in the remote past. They reveal that concerns about the “stock” of the nation continue to shape social and legal policies, even as citizens agree on the moral atrocities of the eugenics movement. But not all of the legacies of eugenics are as easy to stamp with a “toxic” label. There are many eugenics-inspired traditions that people of diverse political leanings would regard as socially valuable, or at least largely innocuous: genetic science, baby contests, couples counseling, IQ tests, and gifted education, for instance. These traditions have developed purposes beyond their eugenic ones, and thereby further complicate Thomas’s rhetorical maneuver. They suggest the illogic of simply lifting historical practices from their context and dropping them onto the present.

Genetics flourished in the United States to undergird sterilization campaigns. Realizing the need to expand upon Gregor Mendel’s research on inheritance patterns, which had inspired Francis Galton to conceive eugenics in England in the 19th century, Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Records Office to apply studies on inheritance to the burgeoning social movement in America. Davenport and his peers also supported the work of pioneering geneticists like Thomas Hunt Morgan, whose work on fruit flies later earned him a Nobel Prize. For many years, “human genetics and eugenics were one and the same,” Edwin Black explains in War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. This changed when geneticists like Morgan denounced eugenics as unscientific, claiming that it disregarded the role of the environment in the development of traits and that the inheritance of positive or negative traits extended well beyond one generation. When Nazi Germany further tarnished the movement by drawing upon its idiom of racial improvement to execute genocide, eugenicists rebranded, adopting the more respected term “genetics.” They quietly changed the titles of professional organizations and journals; and the President of the American Eugenics Society advised the organization’s members to look to genetics, as well as the sciences of population and psychology, “for the factual material on which to build an acceptable philosophy of eugenics.”

Thomas acknowledges this chronology in his opinion, but he does not suggest that we abandon genetic science altogether. And why would he? The study of genes has greatly contributed to medical knowledge, as well as to the development of much-needed drugs. It has helped untold numbers of people to become parents regardless of their race or ethnicity, and it has saved the lives — in some cases, though interventions in utero — of people who would previously have been classified “unfit.” In another ironic twist, a Guardian columnist explains, genetics has “singularly demonstrated that race as a scientific concept holds no water.”

Not unlike genetics — though with considerably less impact — baby contests, like the one Gerber hosts annually, have also shape-shifted over the years. These competitions began as eugenic exhibits at state fairs to promote infants with “a sound mind in a sound body.” The founders of “Better Babies” contests were concerned about high infant mortality at a time when the average American woman was producing only half of the children she had birthed before the Civil War. The contests transformed into Fitter Family contests, where adults won medals based on the whiteness of their pigment, the arch of their noses, the straightness of their teeth, and the flawlessness of their family trees. “Yea, I have a goodly heritage,” read the winning medals, assuring recipients that they should get married and have children — plenty of children. Today, contests like Gerber’s may seem silly and may even provide an occasion for the public to express preferences for certain physical traits, just as advocates of “Better Babies” contests did. But the tradition has certainly moved away from its eugenic roots. Contests celebrate children from all nationalities and social classes, are inclusive of babies with developmental disabilities, and fund programs in low-income communities, once the target of eugenics campaigns. Their purpose is corporate engagement — not the betterment of any specific race.

When Nazi Germany further tarnished the movement by drawing upon its idiom of racial improvement to execute genocide, eugenicists rebranded, adopting the more respected term ‘genetics.’

Perhaps the most useful example of institutional transformation, however, is couples counseling, since it developed precisely to carry eugenics into the present day. Whereas eugenicists initially leveraged genetics and baby contests to expand public support for their movement, they promoted couples counseling to disguise eugenic practices from a society increasingly wary of rhetoric about racial integrity. Nonetheless, this tradition also developed social functions beyond its original one, suggesting the need for measured historical inquiry — attention to the influence of the past without disregarding present realities. Like reproductive technologies, couples counseling can be deployed as a “tool of eugenic manipulation”; but its origins alone are not enough to establish it as one.

As a therapeutic practice, couples counseling emerged in the 1930s to complement sterilization campaigns, which were drawing criticism for relying on shoddy science. The father of the tradition, Paul Popenoe, envisioned counseling as the “positive” side of the eugenics coin. (If sterilization prevented the “unfit” from reproducing, marriage counseling saw that the “fit” reproduced.) Popenoe had gained recognition in the 1910s, when he visited asylums across California to inspect inmates subjected to the state’s new sterilization law. Based on his findings, Popenoe argued in Journal of Heredity that approximately ten million Americans — then, a tenth of the population — should be sterilized. Of course, he wasn’t alone in thinking this; Davenport and Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office were campaigning across the country for laws like the one in California. When Popenoe became secretary of the Human Betterment Foundation and founder of the Southern California branch of the American Eugenics Society, he continued to advocate for involuntary sterilization. But he also devoted attention to another “evil” behind the decrease of the fitter races: feminism. This obsession enabled him to adapt eugenics in its time of crisis.

In a 1918 textbook co-authored with Roswell Johnson, Applied Eugenics, Popenoe defined feminism as a foolish effort to eliminate biological, political, and economic differentiation between the sexes. In that book, he predicted that feminism would benefit the race by inadvertently reducing the number of feminists within the population: “Under the new regime a large proportion of such women do not marry and accordingly have few if any children to inherit their defects. Hence the average level of maternal instinct of the women of America is likely to rise.” Popenoe grew concerned when the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (affording women the right to vote) strengthened the movement. He didn’t like how, after gaining suffrage, women began to demand access to other institutions, like higher education. He believed an education distracted a woman from her most important role (you guessed it: motherhood!). In Applied Eugenics, he and Johnson wrote that the typical college girl “had been rendered so cold and unattractive, so overstuffed intellectually and starved emotionally that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company.”

What if cautiously accepting certain institutions in spite of their nefarious roots is necessary to their transformation?

Popenoe also blamed Margaret Sanger for the degradation of the race. She had promised that birth control pills would weed out “idiots,” delinquents, alcoholics, and prisoners. In reality, Popenoe complained, the lower classes were breeding faster than ever, while middle- and upper-class women were taking the pill after two children or even before giving birth to any. (Sanger’s promotion of birth control among all classes and races eventually led to her excommunication from the eugenics movement, a fact that Thomas overlooks in his opinion.)

In 1930, Popenoe opened a counseling clinic to redress the devastating impact of feminism on the American family and instruct on the principles of good breeding. He wanted to ensure that only certain people got married and that, once married, these people stayed married and reproduced. Dubbed “Mr. Marriage,” Popenoe advised dating couples of their genetic risks and used a personality test to assess compatibility. He intervened in disputes and scolded individuals for disobeying gender conventions. In 1953, Popenoe founded and authored the popular advice column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in Ladies’ Home Journal.

Thanks to Popenoe, marriage clinics popped up across the country, giving rise to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, which today represents over 24,000 marriage and family therapists. The long half-life of the early marriage industry contradicts popular belief that eugenics waned after World War II, when Hitler’s unpopularity and scientific challenges to the movement led to decreased involuntary sterilizations. As Wendy Kline explains in Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, eugenicists simply found alternative methods to achieve their means: talk therapy and “voluntary” sterilization, among others. After Popenoe died in 1979, his torch passed to figures like James Dobson, founder of the organization Focus on the Family and host of the radio program of the same name; Popenoe’s own son, David, who writes prolifically on traditional family values; and other crusaders for the nuclear family in churches and local communities.

But wouldn’t it be wrong, both logically and morally, to suggest that couples counseling doesn’t meaningfully help people today? Stigmas already prevent some individuals from pursuing this resource; discrediting it because of its dubious heritage could mean that even fewer people benefit from counseling — and therefore, from the social and economic advantages of marriage. Isn’t this scenario similar to what Popenoe had in mind when he initiated couples counseling? What if cautiously accepting certain institutions in spite of their nefarious roots is necessary to their transformation?

In the mid-century, religious and community leaders made up the vast majority of couples counselors; by the end of the century, psychologists, social workers, and trained professionals primarily fulfilled this role. With this changing of the guard, there was a shift in thinking about marriage: from purely moral terms to behavioral and medical ones. Even if moral biases continued to influence individual practitioners (as they do all human services), counselors increasingly considered research and evidence-based practices in the therapy setting. It is estimated that almost half of American couples today have attended counseling with a partner, with the majority finding it useful. Insofar as it allows individuals to repair relationships with their partners, family counseling can greatly improve people’s lives. Any critique of counseling should consider this reality. The intentions of its early proponents are far less relevant, and we do more to subvert those intentions by accepting counseling than by nixing it.

When we impose a dark history onto the present, whether for political or moral gains, we often just re-inflict the violence of that past on those we nominally seek to protect.

Thomas’s abortion-as-eugenics-via-birth-control argument fails precisely because he tries to cut-and-paste eugenics history, overlooking differences between eugenic visions of birth control and popular attitudes about birth control (including abortion) today. The irony, of course, is that Thomas’s genetic fallacy rehearses eugenicists’ hereditary logic, placing undue emphasis on origins. Whereas eugenicists dehumanized certain people because of their perceived poor roots, Thomas discredits birth control because the roots of the organization that championed it (Planned Parenthood) entangle with those of eugenics. Had he applied more scrutiny to his subjects, he might have acknowledged that many disabled persons and people of color support birth control and abortion, believing both practices to provide economic security and expand their civil liberties. If eugenicists imagined birth control weeding out certain groups, many members of marginalized communities regard it as a technology necessary to broader struggles for social justice. In Sanger’s day, African American scholars like W.E.B. Dubois thought the same, supporting birth control while adamantly opposing involuntary sterilization.

Had Thomas more carefully considered the differences between state-sponsored sterilization campaigns and abortion practices today, he might have realized the ways in which abortion actually does intersect with eugenics. Toward this end, he might have examined the pressures placed upon certain women to abort. Cuts to prenatal care under Medicaid or caps on welfare benefits based on family size are deliberate measures to prevent poor women from reproducing. This becomes very clear when lawmakers promoting such policies suggest we need to stop women from having babies just to get another few hundred dollars a month. The burden that the medical profession places upon disabled women to abort for non-medical reasons is also deserving of discussion. But rather than acknowledging these efforts to restrict women’s reproduction in the interests of society, Thomas targets the women who are subjected to them. In doing so, he forecloses meaningful conversation about how the logic of eugenics truly reverberates in our time.

Of course, Thomas is not the first to invoke a historical atrocity to discredit something or someone in the present, nor will he be the last. Last year, revelations of Hans Asperger’s Nazi connections prompted some to question the clinical significance of his findings on Asperger’s syndrome, as well as the use of the term to describe certain individuals on the autism spectrum. Like the invocation of eugenics, this instance raises questions about when — and how — to consider backstories when evaluating practices that seem neutral or even positive today. We need to properly contextualize past and present practices to avoid abstractions like Thomas’s. It is equally important to engage the voices of those impacted. When we impose a dark history onto the present, whether for political or moral gains, we often just re-inflict the violence of that past on those we nominally seek to protect.

***

Audrey Farley recently earned a PhD in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied 20th-century American literature and culture. Her writing has appeared or will soon appear in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Narratively, Lady Science, Public Books, ASAP, and Marginalia Review of Books.

Editor: Ben Huberman Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel Illustrator: Tom Peake

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