Putting the “men” in menstruation, Salon, August 12, 2010, by Tracy Clark-Flory, quoted verbatim, with essay by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans:

Comment by Paul: If this article is at all disjointed, YOU try withdrawing from cigarettes and see how coherent you are!

OK, so this article is a little strange, what with the bizzare ‘menstruation machine’ and leading with that. If you’ve seen it before I invite you to look at it anew with the addition at the bottom below the music. But it’s really an article about my personal odyssey in internet dating and quitting smoking. Particularly the quitting smoking. I’ve never done anything so hard for me in my life. I can’t really believe how hard it is for me. But I’ve never been more determined, and I pray to Jesus and I know that with God’s help I will get through this. This is day three without cigarettes, about 44 hours so far. My stomach and torso feels like it’s trying to pull itself inside out, but I may even be a little “together” today. If anybody wants to lend a few words of encouragement, please leave a comment or email me.

I wanted to add some material that might express my empathy to the several girls I have dated, so I found this Salon.com article about how they’ve now invented a machine that simulates for a man what the experience of menstruating is like for a woman. In other words, I have found the whole internet dating thing rather painful and even something I don’t spend much time at any more. Therefore I simply wanted to find some piece about men expressing their empathy to women by experiencing their pain. I know I have been hurt more than I have hurt women that I dated. But still, I just wanted to express my empathy as well as say “I’m sorry” to anyone I might have hurt. Particularly to one lady. The one that should have worked out.

Salon: Good news, boys: You finally get to feel what it’s like to menstruate! Now you too can experience the sensation of being repeatedly punched in your abdomen — from the inside out — and having to deal with an inconvenient flow of blood between your legs. You have the Menstruation Machine to thank for this brave new world of period by proxy. Consider it the prequel to the Empathy Belly; it’ll be a blockbuster, I’m sure.

That is, if it ever leaves the realm of high-concept art and enters the commercial market. (Chances of that happening: slim to none.) The machine, designed by Japanese artist Hiromi Ozaki, wraps around your waist and is “fitted with a blood dispensing mechanism and lower-abdomen-stimulating electrodes” to simulate “the pain and bleeding of an average 5 day menstruation process of a human.” As far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually alter your hormonal state to such a degree that you tear up at the mere sight of a puppy (which is what happens to me every month-slash-day).

It isn’t just designed for men, according to Ozaki, and could be used by women “when menstruation may become obsolete in future and the biological process has become a mere ritual of identity.” For the time being, though, its main aim is to allow men to walk a couple miles in women’s shoes. The music video below tells the story of Takashi, a boy who sets out to understand, Via Carnal Nation.)

Menstruation Machine Invites You to “Feel the Pain:”

"This creation reminds me of an example from one of Midori’s Japanese fetish shopping trip articles, but instead it is a disturbingly brilliant invention created by an artist named Hiromi Ozaki and is part of the Design Interactions exhibit at the Royal College of Art in London."

If you’re adventurous, see The Kinky Shopaholic’s Guide to Japan, Carnal Nation, January 8, 2010, by Midon.

(A menstruation machine is also about all I could find appropriate to what it feels like for ME to have to go through quitting smoking.)

Essay by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans
on What I Can Guess About What It’s Like to be a Girl
and a Few Internet Dating Tips As Well As
Tips on Quitting Smoking:

Paul: I’ve been doing the internet dating thing for almost six years now. I find many of the same people year after year on the same free websites like Plentyoffish and OkCupid. (These are two of the largest and best absolutely free dating websites, for those of us not made of money. These are the two free dating websites that I would recommend to you.)

Here’s a hint guys and gals about what you’re going to find on these sites. There are some people who are there year after year and most of these are just after sex or else there is something really wrong with them. Now for myself, I feel like I just had to quit smoking mainly, and God would take care of the rest. I quit yesterday at 6:32 p.m. and I’m doing OK. I feel like that’s the one thing I’d been getting really wrong in my life and that God was calling upon me to do, and now I know I CAN DO IT and that everything is going to be OK.

Right now, I want to apologize to a dozen or so women I disappointed on these sites by not being true in the beginning stages of communication, or else not following through when I had started something with them. All I can say is, eventually on these sites, everyone gets to the point where when you know it’s not going to be a good relationship for you, and then the general rule is that you just cease communication and that has to be considered fair, when there are simply a lot of people you have to decide pretty fast that you don’t want to talk to (for whatever reason, sometimes just a question of personal preference). I do try to explain myself, but sometimes you just can’t be honest, as feelings would be hurt worse if you were. Sometimes it is just a question of bad timing. Anyway I’m sorry if I hurt anyone. But I haven’t done anything I’m ashamed about and I haven’t done anything that hasn’t been “done to me” five times over. The internet dating world can get pretty unappealing, and there’s a lot of dross you have to sift through before you find that one “gem”.

All I ever wanted to do is find just the right girl and settle down with her in a loving and caring relationship. I’ve found sometimes it isn’t so easy, maybe really more because I am a computer geek and spend all this time with computers instead of it being a question of the smoking. But I do feel that God has been calling on me to quit smoking. (Believe me, ladies, if you give me a chance at a relationship, my focus will be fully on you!)

I think back to one lady I loved very much from Yahoo Personals, which is a subscription site I was on back in 2007. I met a woman there at that time and fell very much in love with her. The only reason, (ironically now that I have stopped smoking) that it didn’t work out was that both she and her autistic (and quite wonderful) daughter were very much intolerant, both spiritually and morally, of cigarette smoking. And her daughter was allergic to cigarette smoke. Her husband had died from it a few years before I met her, and, quite naturally, she wasn’t going to go through that with me. And I would have died from smoking cigarettes, it was obvious that it was killing me through COPD and emphysema. I know. It killed my mother that way in front of my eyes. I was her caregiver at the end of her life, and I found her body the morning she died. So the day before yesterday I quit. I had tried the patch, the gum, the lozenges, and Chantix (which is a non-nicotine, feel-good medicine that claims it works with 44 percent of the people who have tried it), but there was just no way I could quit, until God gave me the grace to do so.

Facts About Smoking and Your Health and Quitting Successfully:

The fact is, 90 percent of the people who have successfully quit smoking cigarettes, (and there are one billion of us in the world who have successfully quit), quit successfully by just stopping cold turkey. (Listen only if you want to be successful in quitting; ignore this otherwise.) There is one website I would highly recommend to help with quitting cold turkey, and that is WhyQuit.com. It will help you with motivation and facts and techniques. Another good website is SilkQuit. There you will find, among other aids, the Silk Meter. It is a little program that starts up with Windows and monitors a.) how many cigarettes you have “not smoked” (since you quit), b.) how much money you have saved (it really adds up!) and c.) statistically, on average, how many months (or years) and days and hours you have added to your life by having quit for however long. This is a really neat motivational tool. They ask you to donate $4.95 but you can download it for free if you are poor (like me).

Another thing is, cigarettes have 454 carcinogenic additives in them, and most of those are addictive. The exceptions are Winston and Natural American Spirit cigarettes, which claim to be pure tobacco without additives. Don’t be fooled. Additives or no additives, NICOTINE KILLS. Cigarettes are designed to be the most pleasurable and addictive possible nicotine delivery vehicle that science can devise. This horrible addictiveness is what we’re up against. Smoking causes 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of all deaths from lung cancer. It also kills slowly, sucking the vibrancy and vitality from your body and leaving you out of breath, and full of a drug (nicotine) which causes an addiction described by WikiAnswers as “more addictive than heroin”. For those of us who have suffered from mental illness, such as myself, particularly schizophrenia, “data from the National Comorbidity Survey revealed that whereas the population prevalence of current smoking among those with no mental illness was 22.5%, some 41% of those reporting a mental illness were current smokers.” (Medscape) The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that “nearly 45 percent of all smokers in the United States are people with a ‘mental disorder.’” And Medscape adds that “those with a diagnosable psychiatric disorder consume an estimated 34% to 44% of all cigarettes smoked in the United States.”

It’s one hell of an addiction, particularly for the mentally ill, who usually can afford to buy cigarettes far less than the average person, too. Make no mistake about it, cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the world today. But if you’re like me, you just can’t quit until the time is right, and then, through God’s grace, it just falls away. Not easily though. Not at all easily. The withdrawal is exquisite and lasts in the primary sense about three days of sheer hell (which I am going through now) and then about two weeks of discomfort. For me, it felt like my stomach was sucking itself inside out, and I trembled with nervousness and considered checking into a mental hospital yesterday at the time I quit. The worst statistic is that 50% of all regular smokers die as a result of smoking. And did you ever wonder why, when you smoke cigarettes, you don’t sleep so well and wake up after just a few hours? It’s true, read the MedScape article which proves that Cigarette Smoking Causes Sleep Disturbances. I think that accounts for my own history of insomnia.

Please Share this Article with Your Friends
Who Are Trying to Quit Smoking
or Doing the Internet Dating Thing

Remember back when you were a kid? How the hours went past pleasantly and you weren’t just dividing up the times between the times when you got to smoke a cigarette. The awful truth is that, when you smoke cigarettes, the only time when you are really content is when you are smoking a cigarette. That plus whatever. Wouldn’t you like to be really free of that? Free to spend your time whatever way you want to? Not simply thinking about the next time you get to smoke? And it’s even worse if you’re poor. I was at a local food bank (I’m not too proud to confess), and there was this nice English lady there who said her father always used to say, when he met a smoker: “Oh, you smoke. You’ll never be rich then….”

Sometimes, if you are going to, in the figurative sense, “withdraw from heroin”, you need to do a little methadone to ease the withdrawal. If you absolutely have to, I would recommend smoking a cigar. Do not EVER give in and smoke a cigarette. (This is my own personal technique and all the experts argue against this.) I still will smoke a cigar every now and then to make the suffering a little easier. Cigars are NO SAFER than cigarettes, and you get a LOT of nicotine, but somehow as a lifelong cigarette smoker I find they just don’t satisfy me like a good full flavor cigarette will, and they lessen the suffering of withdrawal. This is my own personal technique and all the experts are against this, so you may not want to try it. But it’s a lot easier to taper down and then quit smoking cigars than it is for cigarettes, believe me. This is absolutely true, I am certain of it. Hey comedian George Burns lived to be 90 and smoked about ten cigars a day. And you don’t have to keep on smoking them. It’s easier to quit cigars than cigarettes. I am certain in my own mind that there are lots of addictive chemicals in cigarettes that just aren’t in cigars. I know in some sense it’s a cop out, but not really. I personally find it a LOT easier to go a long time and not smoke a cigar than I do for a cigarette. The addiction just isn’t as bad for me. And now God is calling me to quit all cigars and/or pipes, too.

Won’t you all please say a prayer for me in my own journey of quitting all smoking altogether, and not just for me, but for all the 5.4 million people who die in the world each year from smoking cigarettes? We don’t need your condemnation, or your condescension, or your shunning and judgment of us as smokers. We don’t need all the ways you make it difficult for us in this life, not just where we can smoke, and when we can smoke, but also the fact that many people in the world won’t have anything to do at all with a smoker. You won’t date us, you won’t front us a fiver for a badly needed pack of cigs, and basically, you shun us as if we were evil.

We need your love, and your compassion, and your caring encouragement and help to quit, NOT all the shunning and making our lives hell. I say that totally as one who has “been through the wars”. Just say a prayer for us, and maybe do something nice for one of us that you know, won’t you?

It’s not so easy for smokers in Ohio either, since one cannot legally smoke near a public building or business within 100 feet of the door. Have mercy on the poor smokers you know. I know from experience, I wanted to quit really badly for three years before I was at all successful. The song about that below is “Grace Tells Another Story” by Mercy Me. Pray to God, smokers, that somehow he might grant you the grace to stop smoking cigarettes. Remember that 90 percent of successful quitters do it cold turkey and that those nicotine patch’s are addictive, too. You all have my profound sympathy and love. God Bless a smoker.

Heck, 50 percent of the people who have suffered heart attacks due to smoking can’t stop smoking cigarettes. Must we judge them? Do we stop being compassionate to them because they cannot stop? Would we withhold our love or aid?

Continuing on the subject of internet dating: I remember my time with “C,” the lady I met on Yahoo Personals, very well. She was a wonderful, special lady and I would have been very happy with her. I remember that when I met her in July of 2007, she had been in menopause for a year of so, and continuing through the two years of our relationship, she continued to have terrible hot flashes and other problems from the menopause. I mean, we were even engaged and I got to see first hand how badly menopause can get to a lady. I knew another younger lady who used to do drugs, she was not my girlfriend but we became close. This lady actually ceased having her period for several months and used to get bad headaches because of the drugs she did. Thank God, the lady quit drugs and is now reformed and living under God’s grace. Thank God.

There are some other bad problems women can have, cervical cancer, breast cancer, endometriosis (which affects 5 to 10 percent of women and can be very debilitating), and other conditions which affect women more frequently than men, like fibromyalgia. Not to mention the traditional “curse” of menstruation and the fact that Hebrew society felt that it was necessary to blame women for the downfall of man in the Garden of Eden. And life in a very sexist society.

The point is, we as men can never understand the difference between the sexes in terms of how women suffer just because they are women, anatomically. And then, historically, men have acted like women were the inferior sex. The Republican Party and bibilical conservatives still generally maintain that either “a woman’s place is in the home” or that she should be “subservient to the man” in marriage or that women are the “inferior sex”. Men growing up in society just can’t know what it’s like. Not at all.

But my heart goes out to the many ladies I have known as I dated, and most especially to “C”, with whom if luck had been at all good to us, I should have quit smoking for her at that time and then I’m sure we would have made it. God Bless you all, and may the Lord hold you in the palm of his hand as you make your way through this sexist, elitist, money-buys-happiness wrong-headed society that we live in. I would not have it so. Love, Paul

May God Bless each and every one of you, and may you somehow through prayer and love find the strength to make it in this world, and also to quit smoking or other “wrong” substances. I truly wish each of you well.

Email Paul and Say Hi!

See Portfolio.com’s article on sexism in the workplace and elsewhere.

Songs About How It Must Be for a Woman,
and also a Couple About My Life:

"What It Feels Like For A Girl:" Bad Girl Madonna singing her hit. — 4:31

"With Or Without You:" U2′s Bono sings his heart out. Dedicated to my old love “C”. — 5:30

"Bad Reputation:" Joan Jett, another “bad girl” sings her rock and roll favorite (not that I have a bad reputation, I just like the song and identify with the “underdogs” in this life). — 2:42

"Cold Turkey:" Beatles great John Lennon sings his outrageously right on hit live in New York City. — 5:44

"Early Morning Rain:" A live performance by Gordon Lightfoot in Chicago in 1979 of a song that Peter Paul and Mary made famous. — 3:24

The Biology, Morality and Politics
of Addiction

 

The FreeDomain Radio Interview:
Gabor Maté, M.D.
Visit Dr. Maté’s website

"The Biology, Morality and Politics of Addiction:" Dr Gabor Maté caringly explains the truth to us in this long, but worthwhile and rewarding interview for our understanding. — 48:53

This may well be a very special interview, since I strongly believe Jesus led me to it in terms of having something very on target to share with you. Just so we’re clear, I’ve been addicted to cigarettes. I never in my life ever tried anything that wasn’t prescribed for me except in the distant past I used to occasionally smoke marijuana, but no longer do so. ~ Paul Evans

"Grace Tells Another Story:" Christian rockers Mercy Me sings their heart out in this heartwarming and uplifting track. — 3:34

"Beautiful Day:" U2 sings their heart out on ABC’s Good Morning America live from Fordham University. This is my very favorite song. — 4:14

One of the ideas I was trying to convey here with this article is that it is more important for me to be concerned with helping people than it is for me to be concerned about “how I look”. I mention directly my mental illness, which is looked on very negatively in our society, and there are a few negatives in my experience of internet dating, which at this point I pretty much think happens to anyone who tries this method of dating.

The fact is, if you want to conclude something negative about me because you are going to view me through a lens of “mental illness” or schizophrenia, I can’t stop you. But I do condemn you if you are apt to judge me that way. Mental illness is best viewed as a set of symptoms, and not a reflection on the decency, caring and soundness of a person’s thinking, am I not right? Sometimes, those symptoms can constitute a reason for holding a negative view on a given person’s soundness of thinking, and I KNOW from bitter experience that almost none of you are going to have read my internet dating or smoking cessation stories, without viewing them through a lens of “he’s mentally ill you know.”

You’d be wrong to so judge me, but judge me I knew you would (most of you). As I said, it is more important to me as a writer and as a caring person, to express hopeful and helpful ideas to people, and convey a message that I felt might help people, than were at all important to me any negative ideas you might have because I am honest and open and do not hide my illness. Look at my website. Conclude if you will: who is ill here, me, or the world?

I don’t feel like a “mentally ill” human being, I feel complete, well and without any symptoms, just so we’re clear. Mental illness in the majority of patients is like diabetes. If you “self-monitor” and take care of your “diet”, (get enough sleep, take your medicine, and the self-monitoring is important), the chances are most of the time the disease will be in remission and you will be without symptoms. Part of this whole experience is being monetarily poor and feeling powerless that way. If you actually care, feel free to donate a little cash via PayPal. If you care.

Incidentally I deliberately included some “punk” or morally negative songs on the short list above. That was sort of to dare you to think badly of me. Then you were supposed to come to the last song, Mercy Me’s wonderful and uplifting piece, and see that no man is beyond God’s redemption, that God’s love can heal and make right any “wrongness”. As he has for me.

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