Aceso Under Glass

Last week there were a bunch of very angry articles about some douchebags who want to make vaginas smell like peaches, implicitly because the current smell is gross, which is why they grouped it with their product to make pet shit smell like bananas.  Aside from all the body shaming, I heard “vagina” and “peaches” as “yeast infection” and my legs immediately slammed shut.  Vast swaths of people immediately jumped on the company as misogynistic.

It turns out that Sweet Peach is actually a pretty cool company.  It was founded by a “ultrafeminist” woman who wants to facilitate vaginal health by giving users individually-tailored probiotic supplements, based on a microbiome census.  I love everything about this idea.  She doesn’t want to make vaginas smell like peaches because that would be stupid, she named the company Sweet Peach because it’s hard to get a business checking account for Sweet Vagina.

The article didn’t misquote the speakers though.  One was an investor in Sweet Peach, the other was the owner of a different company he invested in (whose end goal really does seem to be making pet shit smell like bananas).  They definitely referred to Sweet Peach as their company, without even mentioning its actual founder Audrey Hutchinson.  “Not mentioning Hutchinson as the founder or including a photo of her among his slides was a mistake”

This story may be the perfect microcosm of everything I think about Silicon Valley.  You have this really cool idea pursued for altruistic reasons, and some douchebags trying to take credit for something that sounds awful.  All you need is a mention of the cloud and it’s the total package.

Turkey isn’t even that rich in tryptophan  If you get sleepy tomorrow, it’s because you ate 4000 calories.  An insulin spike may be involved (more about this next week).

But! I did learn some interesting things researching this.  Wikipedia’s entry on food comas says that tryptophan bypasses the blood brain barrier and is converted to seretonin and then melatonin, which makes you sleepy.  It’s two sources refer only to plasma concentration, nothing suggesting tryptophan leads to an acute spike in melatonin (caveat: I only have access to the abstracts).

Meanwhile, webmd believes that protein is the only nutrient Americans get too much of, which suggests to me they don’t understand that sugar, fat, and salt are nutrients, or are idiots.

The best part of Why Does He Do That? was the description/definition of abuse, which he doesn’t give formally until very late in the book.  Abuse arises from a miscalculated sense of entitlement.  Anger and substance abuse issues may influence how someone expresses those entitlement issues, but are completely orthogonal to its existence.  This is, according to the author, why conventional therapy is useless as a tool against abuse.  Modern therapy is explicitly aimed at helping patients meet their own goals.  Anti-abuse treatment is aimed at teaching someone their values are wrong and changing them.

The difficulty with this definition is it requires knowing *everything* about a situation before you can decide if abuse took place.  Someone telling a partner “Don’t go on that hike with your friends, your knee will hurt for days” could be an abuser isolating their victim, or an abuse victim trying to prevent pain their partner will take out of them, or a genuinely concerned partner in a healthy relationship.   You just don’t know until you know the state of the person’s knee, how they usually act after long hikes, whether there’s a pattern of isolation attempts, support of other endeavors…So you can’t help but come out of this book seeing abuse everywhere.

Given how wonderful the book was in understanding the psychology of abuse, I was extra disappointed to see the author so dismissive of female-on-male abuse.  He acknowledges that men can be abused (by other men), he acknowledges that women can abuse (other women), he acknowledges that men and women can be abused by people physically smaller and weaker than them (because no one tolerates physical abuse until emotional abuse has broken their defenses), he acknowledges the role of various privileges (money, citizenship, education, etc) in same -sex abuse, but he insists that there is no way a man can ever be abused by a woman.  In fact, he says a man accusing a female partner of abuse is a sign that he is abusive. I don’t doubt that most accusations of female-on-male abuse that this guy hears are false, because he’s hearing them in a program for male abusers.  And I suspect that the kind of entitlement he’s describing is more prevalent.  But categorically denying the possibility of the reverse is dangerous and damaging to male abuse victims and ultimately, because it constrains our conception of what abuse can be, female victims.

I am also really uncomfortable with the book’s title and associated goals.  It doesn’t actually matter why a person is abusive (which Bancroft agrees with).  And in many ways, it doesn’t matter if it’s entitlement leading to official Abuse or a sick system, because either way you have to leave.  But I acknowledge that the descriptions of abuser-types could be helpful to victims who think it can’t be abuse because he’s not throwing a lamp at you.

Overall, I think this book has some really good points and brings a lot to the table.  It also propagates some really toxic ideas.  I would absolutely listen to this author if I wanted to treat abusers.  And if I had a friend in a bone fida abusive relationship, I think this book could be helpful.  But it is the last thing I would use as abuse prevention, and especially the last thing I’d give to a young person starting to date. For them, I want a model of healthy relationships,  teaching in how to maintain them, and the self esteem to leave when they can’t.