Recently, because of my Facebook link to Jezebel, I came across this article about actor and model Lauren Hutton and some of her views.

One thing immediately leaped out of the article at me (and Jezebel, evidently):

A lot of the time, fashion is angry. It’s fucked up motherfuckers. Guys pissed off that they’re not women. But that’s why you have to use fashion to do what you want—and not be bossed around by it.”

This jumped out at me because it echoes something that I, myself, have thought for quite some time, and I figure this article is a good platform for launching a discussion of it.

For me, it started when I was watching a television show about women’s obsession with beauty, their constant battle with their weight, and so on.

At one point, they asked some prominent fashion designer (I forget who) why they used such skinny and unrealistic women as runway models.

His reply was that the clothes hung best on women like that.

In other words, supermodels look like that because fashion designers, largely gay men, want women who most closely resemble a clothing rack.

All that dieting and purging and anorexia throughout the world just because a bunch of angry fags would rather change how women look to fit the clothes than the other way around.

And that just floors me. I can’t properly describe how angry that makes me. Billions of women all over the world hating themselves because they don’t look like supermodels who only look like that because a bunch of bitchy fags vent their hatred of women via fashion.

So I think that Hutton hits the nail on the head, honestly. I think that for at least three generations, the world of fashion has been dominated by gay men who hate women and therefore really enjoy judging them harshly and destroying their self-image and making them humiliate and torture themselves just to win the tiniest bit of approval from this cabal of misogynists.

I would not say that these are “men pissed off that they are not women”. That is true in a way, but might mislead people into thinking these men literally want to be women in the transsexual sense.

Instead, I would say that these male fashionistas are virulently and venomously jealous of women.
After all, women get the ninety percent of men that we homosexuals do not. Women are free to be pretty and silly and shallow and sensitive and all kinds of other things that a gay man might desperately want for himself but knows that he could never truly have.

Many gay men would love to be able to draw the kind of attention from men that a good looking woman can get. When you are a beautiful woman, men flatter you, they buy you drinks, they wine and dine you, they give you expensive gifts, they even marry you and “take you away” to a much better lifestyle.

And the knowledge that this can never happen to them, I think, turns some gay men into bitter, vicious shrews who are eager to punish, punish, punish women for having what they could never have.

And it is not just the fags at the top of the fashion industry who are in on this battle of the bitchiest. The entire fashion industry, as Lauren Hutton points out, is full of these sorts of gay men. They channel their hatred of women into brutal judgments of every tiny little flaw, perceived or real, of how a woman looks to them.

And it’s not just fashion, either. The entire celebrity gossip industry is also ruled by bitter, angry homos who, if they can’t have what women have, will settle for cutting people who are more powerful and popular than them to pieces with their words and their disdain.

It is all very, very sick, and very, very wrong, and it is a side to gay culture which is repellent to me and which I refuse to simply accept.

Luckily, I think it is on its way out. I think two main factors will bring about its death :

One, the rise of mainstream acceptance of gay men, expressed ultimately in the movement towards gay marriage, will do a great deal to diffuse a lot of the anger and bitterness in the gay community as a whole. As more and more gay men come out of the closet and join the global gay community, the sense of being an isolated and persecuted minority shut out of society will dissipate, and with that, the impetus behind this kind of bitterness will diminish.

The other factor is that, as the global gay community grows, it broadens, and that means that by sheer numbers alone, a gay man has a better chance of meeting Mister Right than ever before.

There is also a much great chance of, at least on the Internet, finding the exactly little subculture that fits your particular sexuality, and finding at least some acceptance there.

So this vein of poisonous envy will be all tapped out in the future. But while it still exists, I will remain its implacable enemy.

As a gay man, I cannot help but feel connected somehow to these toxic prima donnas, and I think we could, as a community, do the world an enormous favour by unearthing this nastiness, airing it out for all the world to see for what a horrid, petty, nasty thing it is, and publicly denounce it wherever it dares to rear its ugly, ugly head.

I think that, at the very least, we owe it to ourselves to distance ourselves from such low and filthy sentiments that only drag us all down and push us further away from the light.

But more than that, I think we owe it to the countless women who have suffered horribly as a direct result of our misplaced and judgmental wrath.

We need to collectively relax, put our claws away, give up on hate, and see what we can do to repair the damage we have done.

Don’t get me started on the Catholic Church.

A version of this song has started me thinking about children and fear of the dark.

Kind of odd that one of the best songs from one of the best heavy metal bands is about something as simple and innocent as childhood fears, isn’t it?

But really, it makes sense. Being afraid of the dark is a nearly universal rite of passage, something most of us go through when we are children, and a few of us, the adult nyctophobics, it does not stop there.

So just what is this fear? Why is it so common in children? And how do we get over it?

First, I will share my own personal experience with this fear.

I clearly remember being quite terrified of the dark. It took me a long time to get over it. If it had not been for the gentle pressure of my parents and my siblings, I might not have gotten over it at all.

Early in my childhood, I shared a bedroom with my older brother David, and so it was not exactly up to me whether the light was on or not.

Knowing that my brother is a fairly light sleeper to this day, I can only assume that we both slept with the light off every day. But we are talking myself at maybe three years of age, so my memories of that time are not exactly distinct.

But I do not remember ever being afraid of the dark way back then. I guess with my big brother snoring on the bunk bed above me, I felt safe. Or maybe I was just not old enough to be paranoid and neurotic yet. I remember being lonely sometimes when I would wake up at night and everyone else was asleep, and wishing I had someone to talk to, but no fear.

So it was not until my father build an extension onto our house and suddenly every kid got their own bedroom. which meant that suddenly, I was sleeping alone for the first time.

And that is when the trouble started. I remember, in fact, not being really all that keen on the idea of having a bedroom all to myself if it meant I was all alone, but I was far too young to be able to sufficiently articulate that idea, let alone bold enough to go against what everyone else in the family clearly thought was a great thing.

I think I complained about it to my brother Dave once, and that was it.

So there I was, a wee thing not yet of school age, sleeping alone at night for the first time. But nobody was asking me to sleep in the dark yet, so things were not too bad.

But then my siblings and my parents started pressuring me to learn to sleep in the dark. At the time I could not see the point of this, but what kid could? It just seemed that they were needlessly making life harder for me when the light in my room worked just fine.

The first step was to take away the other lamps in my room, leaving me only with the “night light” attached to the head of my bed.

I put “night light” in quotes because since then, I have discovered what a “night light” normally means. Usually, it is something plugged into an outlet that provides a soft, gentle, reassuring glow for the child. Something to make the darkness less than total, and yet, still not be bright enough to keep the child awake all night.

My “night light” was actually a perfectly normal 60W bulb in a plastic holder. It could easily light my entire room, and because it was literally right over my head, it hardly made any difference that the overhead light and the other lamp did not work any more.

But then came the pressure to turn that off when I wanted to go to sleep. And that was… not cool.

After I resisted that for a while, my parents decided on a compromise : I would turn out my “night light”, and they would close my door most of the way, and leave the light on in the hallway outside my room, and thus give me a sliver of light to cling to in the darkness.

And that lasted for a while. It took me a long time to get used to it, and I spent a lot of scary nights imagining that a ninja-like bogeyman, a human shaped creature completely covered, head to toe, in night-black clothing (not even eyeholes… all black) was tucked into the corner of my room opposite the head of my bed and just waiting for me to go to sleep so it could attack me.

But eventually I adjusted. Then, it was time for the last step : turning out the hall light. This was a move championed by my brother Dave, who had the bedroom next to mine and who was rather sick of the hall light keeping him awake at night.

And that seemed like a big deal at the time, but honestly, I got used to it pretty fast. It helped that my brother had been waiting till I fell asleep and then sneaking out to turn out the hall light anyhow.

Of course, as an adult, I want it to be as dark as possible in my room when I sleep, and I totally understand why my parents and siblings put me through what they did.

But why, exactly, was I afraid of the dark in the first place? What’s the big deal?

I think that, primarily, fear of the dark is fear of the unknown. When you are alone in the dark, you have effectively lost your primary sense, sight. The amount of information you have about your environment plummets to not even a quarter of what it was before.

And when you are a kid, you lack the mental defenses to distinguish between “I don’t know what is there” and “I know something awful is there!!!”

It is easy for your mind to project onto this blank blackness whatever fears and insecurities you have as a kid, and kids have plenty of those, being tiny people in a big scary world that they mostly do not understand at all.

Anytime anyone gets too nostalgic for childhood, I like to remind them of fear of the dark.

It is also possible, though, that our childhood fear of the dark is also influenced by a deep seated and quite sensible instinct for young humans to stay within the light of the fire that was keeping all those predators away at night.

Even us mighty humans are prey animals when we are young, and it would make sense to be scared of the dark when the dark could legitimately be filled with predators eager for a snack called “you”.

I think that might, even, be why we imagine horrible monsters in that darkness. Our instincts are telling us that there are predators out there, and our imaginations plus whatever we have seen that seems very scary combine to create these illusions.

And I don’t think that necessarily stops when we become adults, either. A lot of supposedly grownups seem quite willing to imagine, and believe, that the unknown things that frighten them must be incredibly dangerous, even if any reasonable examination would show them to be harmless and that their fears are wildly exaggerated or even entirely illusory.

Sure, we stop being afraid of the dark.

But some people never stop being afraid of the unknown, and they are quite capable of filling the voids in their knowledge with whatever bogeymen will justify that fear.

So I ask you, readers : were you afraid of the dark?