Tumblr decided, in its infinite wisdom, to show me this article. (Which is apparently two years old? Whatever, it’s not like BPD stigma has changed much in the past two years.) The subheading includes the phrase “the mental illness that can lead to wild sex.”
[“dis gon be gud” gif]
It’s pretty standard stigmatizing nonsense. This one dude has a girlfriend who is really great in bed, but she also cuts herself and screams at or attempts to break up with him over minor disagreements. Ozy flinches in recognition. Pop stars are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. The phrases “femme fatale” and “intoxicating womanchild with a dark side” occur. It is explained that some common traits of borderline patients include a history of child sexual abuse, eating disorders, self-consciousness and a need for control, and giving doctors boners.
Not kidding about that last part. An assistant professor of psychiatry named Peter Freed says, “Though it hasn’t been studied, there is a sense among doctors that many patients tend to be attractive, which can trigger a vicious cycle. Being beautiful induces the world to treat you like an object, which naturally gives rise to questions about whether you are loveable, which in turn makes you long for confirmation.” I just… I literally have no response to that.
I mean, it’s pretty excellent to be classified as a femme fatale. Here I am, with hairy legs and boxer shorts and an Existentialists Do It Pointlessly shirt with a hole in one of the armpits, but apparently I’m goddamned Catwoman because of my diagnosis. I don’t even have to put on lip gloss!
On a more serious note, talking about how awesome and uninhibited borderlines are in bed is really disturbing. One of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder is impulsive and self-destructive sexual behavior. (Well, okay, impulsive and self-destructive all kinds of behavior, but sex is perennially popular.) “I’m a bad person so I should punish myself by having unprotected sex with a stranger!” “If my best friend’s girlfriend has sex with me then she must REALLY LIKE ME because otherwise she wouldn’t hurt Best Friend so much.” “I’m going to have sex I don’t want and that makes me feel sick and dirty and violated inside so that my partner won’t hate me.” “Everything hurts and the only way I can fill up the emptiness inside is fucking.”
I literally do not have words for how fucked up and creepy you have to be to write an article about how hot it is when women have a mental illness that leads them to have sex they don’t want. I mean. It saves so much energy, doesn’t it? You don’t have to abuse them! Their brains already emotionally abuse them for you! You get all the sweet, sweet coercive sex and you don’t even have to face the guilt in the morning!
It’s just the Madonna/Whore dichotomy all over again. The Whore is wild and uninhibited, she doesn’t have any of those silly ‘boundary’ things, when you fuck her your toes curl and your hands tingle and you see God. But unlike the Madonna, sweet and kind and pure, the Whore also happens to be a psycho bitch. She cuts herself! She takes drugs! She screams at you when she thinks you’re with another woman! For further examination for this interesting sociological phenomenon, I’d like to direct you to Buckcherry’s Crazy Bitch:
[Lyrics.]
Except, you know, we’re sciencing it up! Because there is an actual psychological diagnosis that if you bend, spindle, fold and mutilate it enough kind of looks like “psycho bitch slut.” And then we get to write a whole article in Newsweek, purporting to educate people about borderline personality disorder, about how psycho bitch sluts are terrible. But also sexy? So you will want to sex them up?
But, you know, I am a person, not a misogynistic archetype. I spend the vast majority of my time neither fucking men senseless nor being a psycho bitch at them. In fact, most of the ways my mental illness manifests have nothing to do with fucking men senseless or being a psycho bitch at them. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true of most people with BPD.
When I break down crying over not being able to hang up the laundry properly, it is not about your boner. When I get upset when my boyfriend leaves the house to check the mail because he might never come back, it is not about your boner. When I stop talking to my parents and family because I am irrationally terrified of them, it is not about your boner.
The articles about what my illness is like? Shouldn’t be about your boner either.
Thing of Things 
That article is pretty terrible.
Being beautiful induces the world to treat you like an object, which naturally gives rise to questions about whether you are loveable, which in turn makes you long for confirmation.
I, this . . . gah! This is everything I hate about typical feminist rhetoric about “objectification,” except presented as “just how things are,” instead of “this great evil that we must fight against.” Physical attraction and non-sexual interest are, intrinsically, orthogonal. The halo effect interferes with that, but that should make them positively correlated! “Being beautiful results in people treating you in ways that make you question if you’re lovable,” to the extent it describes reality, is describing profound irrationality, and it’s just a question of whose.
Which, I suppose, is at least partly the Madonna/whore effect in action, on both sides: (some) men feeling physical attraction and and losing non-sexual interest, and (some) women perceiving high levels of physical attraction, and processing it as low levels of non-sexual interest.
Here I am, with hairy legs and boxer shorts and an Existentialists Do It Pointlessly shirt with a hole in one of the armpit [. . .]
That’s . . . not what most men want? How odd.
I literally do not have words for how fucked up and creepy you have to be to write an article about how hot it is when women have a mental illness that leads them to have sex they don’t want. I mean. It saves so much energy, doesn’t it? You don’t have to abuse them! Their brains already emotionally abuse them for you! You get all the sweet, sweet coercive sex and you don’t even have to face the guilt in the morning!
While I’m sure that that attitude exists, I don’t think it’s a universal explanation of the “Crazy Bitch” attitude toward BPD and BPD-adjacent pathology. I think there are several other explanations that are likely to be relevant for at least some people, possibly including the profiled dude.
The simplest is that being on the receiving end of idealization (at least, as I understand it) is pretty awesome, including sexually, for as long as it lasts. Who wouldn’t want to have a partner who thinks they shiny and sexy and perfect in every way, and acts on those feelings. That doesn’t strike me as indicating a taste for coercion, insofar as the underlying attitude is not “she doesn’t want to have sex with me, but she does,” but “she wants to have sex with me so ridiculously much!”
On a related note, and at the risk of typical-minding my own obliviousness to non-verbal cues, how likely is “I desperately need to fuck you right now so you won’t hate/hurt me” to be read accurately, as opposed to as “I desperately need to fuck you right now because you make me so horny?” Particularly given that (a) the latter is a more pleasant explanation, and hey cognitive biases! and (b) the former may not even be within the realm of possibilities that someone who isn’t familiar with paranoid delusions can grasp.
Finally (and with great uncertainty over whether mentioning this makes me an asshole) . . .
“Everything hurts and the only way I can fill up the emptiness inside is fucking.”
Anyone who would prefer that a particular person (whether their partner or anyone else) have emotional pain and emptiness, much less that that pain and emptiness be unfillable by normal, low-intensity methods (conversation, hugs, engaging in a hobby, etc.), because “that’s my ticket to sexy time!” is a raging asshole. Seriously.
But given that someone has that pain and emptiness, I do think that there is a dark eroticism to the idea of being the one to fill that void, at least for a little while, with animal rutting. Closer is not primarily a sexy song (despite what plenty of idiot Youtubers think), but there is something sexy there.
I think it’s hunger. That’s what “I’m so horny I need it now” (which, if not misread, most people don’t have a problem with) and “I need you to fuck my pain away” have in common with each other, but not with “I need to have sex with you to punish myself” or “if I have sex with you, maybe you won’t hurt me.” It’s the idea of sex as release from pain, not only a source of positive pleasure.
And maybe it’s fucked up to find that sexy. I certainly wouldn’t design the underlying pain (of either sort) into humans if I were responsible for engineering an improved version. But even in it’s darkest forms, it’s still far from abuse, because it’s about making the other person’s life better (sometimes from a very shitty baseline), not worse.
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I should add: Of course, person A’s mental illness isn’t about person B’s boner, for any value of person B (other than, maybe, person A). But if person B is in a relationship with person A, then how person A’s mental illness affects person B may well be (partially) about person B’s boner. I don’t think it’s illegitimate to discuss that, although preferably in a way less stupid way than in that article.
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I think Ozy is gently hinting that people with BPD are actual human beings with their own inner worlds, their own problems (often unrelated to sex) and their own interests to protect.
So, when we’re discussing such people, casting them as various characters in our sexual or dramatic fantasies probably shouldn’t be a central part of the discussion. Especially when “we” are medical professionals supposedly having the best interests of our patients at heart, or supposedly loving partners.
In other words, sure, it’s hot when someone really wants you. But for people with BPD, having compassionate and well-informed partners, good coping mechanisms and effective treatment options is more important.
BPD already has a huge image problem, so perpetuating the stereotypes pits sexuality against compassion and recovery.
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Related to the image problem of BPD, I think BPD is a pretty awful name for the condition.
Using the word “personality” always strikes me as easily misunderstood, because it also has a non-technical meaning in ordinary English.
I.e., people hear you have BPD and think “what’s wrong with this person is not in the genre of medical issues, or it would have non-plain-English name like schizophrenia. This person just has a bad personality.”
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I mean, I do like that “personality disorder” highlights that it is me? I am not a person plus borderline personality disorder on top, I am a borderline.
My objection is to the “borderline” part, it sounds like “almost personality disorder.”
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I hadn’t thought of it that way. I just worry that the word “personality” will make most people think that it means something it doesn’t. But I might very well be typical-minding “most people.”
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@ozymandias: Ironically, as I understand it, the original meaning is sort of the opposite: “personality disorder, but almost schizophrenia.” The “borderline” in BPD originally refers to it being on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis.
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@Nita: I think Ozy is gently hinting that people with BPD are actual human beings with their own inner worlds, their own problems (often unrelated to sex) and their own interests to protect.
Of course. I just think that “what is BPD like for someone who has it” and “what is BPD like for someone whose partner has it” are both valid articles to write, and that “how does this tend to affect one’s sex life, for better and for worse” can be a valid part of both of those articles (obviously, from different perspectives).
Now, even as a “what is BPD like for someone whose partner has it” article, that article was pretty terrible, as I noted. But I’m leery of saying “articles about X shouldn’t be about Y,” when Y is seriously affected by X, even if it’s not the most important thing affected.
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The problem is that a disproportionate amount of the writing about bpd is about partners of people with bpd.
(A disproportionate amount of the good writing is about borderlines, natch.)
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Is that actually a problem, apart from its possibly reflecting a dearth of writing about borderlines and/or a surfeit of bad writing about partners? Granted, this particular article is definitely contributing to the latter problem.
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I’ve never noticed attractive people being particularly neurotic about whether anyone truly loves them. I definitely have noticed unattractive people being neurotic about it. I suspect attractive people only have this problem to the extent that it is human-general.
Speaking of pet peeves, the so-called madonna-whore dichotomy is not an accurate description of non-pathological male heterosexuality, and I really, really hate it when it’s casually referred to as such. It’s a clinical condition, and not even one with much of a pedigree.
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I don’t think that being attractive is likely to cause a psychologically healthy person to doubt whether anyone truly loves them, but it could indirectly exacerbate an already unhealthy person’s problems. If I were to try re-write the stupidity in question to not be stupid (based on an understanding of BPD that’s limited to Ozy’s posts on this blog, Wikipedia, and a former girlfriend’s description of her ex, so this may still be off), it would be something like the following:
That strikes me as plausible, although I have no actual evidence for it, and it could well be right. But the difference from the original statement is that “W are generally X, which causes Y, which naturally results in Z” has been replaced by “W may exert unusual effort to be X often causes [something distantly related to Y, but not really the same thing at all], which combined with a bunch of pathology can result in Z.” It’s a whole lot less essentialist.
And maybe still wrong, of course.
Since when does Freud speculating about something make it a clinical condition. But in any event, the variety of male heterosexuality (and female perceptions thereof) that I was describing isn’t non-pathological.
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Erm, that first sentence after the blockquote was meant to end “. . . and could well still be wrong.”
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Freud speculating is why I said “not much of a pedigree”. It’s a supposed clinical condition that’s been co-opted into the service of a bunch of idiotic, pop-psych generalizations about male sexuality. Sorry if your comment wasn’t intended that way; I freely admit my hackles go up every time I read the phrase.
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To be fair, I’m probably using it in a roughly similar sense to the pop-psych generalizations, just as a descriptor of how some idiots’ male sexuality works, due to bad memes they’ve either absorbed or reinvented, rather than as a generalization for how all male sexuality, due to biology. I’m not sure if that’s enough to raise your hackles or not.
In general, I’m fairly comfortable looking people saying “X means foo, bar, and baz, which clearly is characteristic of all Y” and going “actually, most Y are not X, so you’re an idiot, but X is a perfectly valid construct that is useful for describing those Y (and non-Y) that are actually foo, bar, and baz,” since I tend to see “foo, bar, and baz” as the definition of X, and “is characteristic of all Y” as merely a fallacious statement about X. You are not the first person this has annoyed.
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Ye gods, I am dropping a lot of words from text I’m typing, this past week or so. I wonder if that means anything concerning, or is just a sign that I should get more sleep.
The above should be “. . . how all male sexuality works . . .” and “. . . comfortable looking at people. . . .”
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> I literally do not have words for how fucked up and creepy you have to be to write an article about how hot it is when women have a mental illness that leads them to have sex they don’t want. I mean. It saves so much energy, doesn’t it? You don’t have to abuse them! Their brains already emotionally abuse them for you! You get all the sweet, sweet coercive sex and you don’t even have to face the guilt in the morning!
I might be reading it wrong, but I searched for a part where she mentioned the woman not wanting to have sex, or it being coercive, and I didn’t find it. I’m sometimes obtuse, but if I’m not, that’s a bad accusation to throw at someone.
As I read the article, here’s what I get from all the mentions of sex: the introductory couple were turned into each other, they lost themselves in each other, their trysts were breathless and overwhelming, and she was passionate. Then she quotes a therapist saying that BPDs have an intense erotic passion that has two causes: her intense emotions, and her need to control you. Then she quotes a social worker saying her sex drive might come from getting a sense of self from being in the relationship.
That’s all the mentions of sex. There’s nothing there about having sex they don’t want, or wanting emotional abuse to occur, or sex being good because it’s coercive.
I can sort of see that the last mention, about the sex being for comfort or an anchor or being a person because they’re in the relationship, could be construed as questionable, consent-wise. But it seems the most negative possible interpretation. Comforting sex can be good. I get comfort from sex too, sometimes, and sometimes identity-validation, but I still consider myself consenting.
And most importantly, there’s no suggestion of mens rea; the article never describes someone wanting coercive sex or emotional abuse. There just seems no way that that paraphrasing of what’s hot about BPD sex is an accurate paraphrasing of what’s in the article.
I’d maybe criticize the author for talking about how hot it is to have sex with people who have a mental illness *without mentioning* that the mental illness might lead them to have sex that they don’t want. Arguably, it would have been more responsible of her to have mentioned that.
Is it possible to write a good article about the true fact that people report that BPDs are, as a generalization, unusually good at sex? How would that article go?
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I am borderline, I really don’t like this article at all. I am also male, I know borderline is more common among women, but I think that writing about it with the assumption that all borderline people are women is as bad as writing about sexual assault with the assumption that all sexual assault victims are women.
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