I’m an out bi man. I’m often mistaken on blogs for a gay man, because I talk about LGBT rights issues from the standpoint of someone who’s affected by them, and I have a man’s name. The idea that I might be something else is not considered. The ‘B’ and ‘T’ in LGBT is often silent or taken for granted, and from my perspective as a bisexual, we often get discriminated with in the midst of what’s supposed to be our community.

Bisexuals are threatening, both to heterosexuals and homosexuals. Sarah In Chicago writes that some biphobia in the LGBT community might come from a fear that bisexuals will be used as evidence that gay people can ‘change’. Mythago makes the comment that the lesbian communities’ biphobia is responsible for so many bi women winding up with men.

I personally have experienced curses and insults from within fellow marchers at a pride parade, calling me a slut, a fake fag, and a ‘try-sexual’. We also frequently got ignored or shunted to the side in public debates, and some times in events. I’ve been told that bi people don’t really exist, that it’s just a fad, that I’m really one orientation or another, and that I absolutley must make up my mind one day if I’m straight or gay because my partner will leave me if I don’t.

I’ve also had to deal with the inevitable bisexual/polyamory link. There’s the fear that bisexuals might push for polyamorous marriages to be legal, and that would hurt the same sex marriage movement I’m not sure if that’s biphoba or polyphobia. I know I’m guilty of it whatever it is. I’ve avoided speaking up for multipartner relationships in order to keep the conversation on track about same sex marriages. I always feel a bit like I’m betraying something when I do that, especially considering I’m polyamorous.

As bad as this makes it sound, it’s not all that bad. It’s subtle and small, like if I go into a gay coffee shop with a female and snuggle in, I get sneered at, if I go in with a man, no one notices, but if I go in with a woman, I’ve gotten asked to ’stop the display’ when we weren’t doing anything I hadn’t done with one gender or the other. PDAs with both genders at the same time get an even worse reception :-)

• Bitch, PhD discusses white privilege and the denial of racism.
• Echidne reports that when Governor Arnold recently made a big deal of personally filling a pot hole, the hole he filled had been created by city workers only that morning.
• This post at Did You Know, about an everyday encounter with racism, made Trish’s day, and then it made my day, too. Trust me, go read it.
• Amanda is bugged by this article at Salon about asexuals. I tend towards asexuality myself, and everything Amanda said is correct; yet someone I wasn’t as annoyed as Amanda was. Go figure.
• “The producers of TV’s Desperate Housewives have reportedly spent thousands of dollars digitally removing the nipples from on-screen images of actresses Teri Hatcher and Nicolette Sheridan.” Echidne has some comments.
• New on the Blogroll: The Walloper totally rocks. Lots of very smart arguments there, both feminist and progressive. Go check it out.
• Both The Walloper and Shelzebub at XX comment further on NARAL’s endorsement of Lincoln Chafee.
• LAmom calls, rightly, for more pregnancy equality. “Pregnancy is not a disease. Pregnancy is a normal human state. Any setting that accommodates people should be able to accommodate pregnant people and their needs.”
• Hey, you’ve heard of Billy Murray, right? No, not that one - Billy Murray the singer. This web page has a great collection of old 78rpm popular songs recorded in the early 20th century, some of which are great.
• Dykes2WatchOut4 quotes an interesting editorial by Cameron Lee arguing that “lesbians as lesbians have virtually no role in public culture.” I wonder if the author isn’t exaggerating how good gay men have it, but nonetheless she makes some good points. Thanks to “Alas” reader Josh for the tip.
• Live Flower Cam! Yes, that’s right - the University of Wisconsin has a live cam of a flower, in case you find watching vegetation not visibly move entertaining. But actually, it’s a pretty neat flower - for one thing, if it manages to grow another seven inches (currently it’s eight foot four inches tall), it’ll set a new world’s record. The flower, called a titan arums or “corpse flower,” apparently has a terrible smell - hence the name? - which is one reason to prefer watching it bloom via the web, I suppose. It’ll probably bloom in the next week or so. Via Althouse.
• The Sideshow asks why Tom Friedman - like so many globalization advocates - is positively drooling at the prospect of longer work hours for lower wages in Europe. What’s it called when you hope other people suffer just to prove you intellectually correct? Oh, now I remember - being an asshole, that’s what it’s called.
• Penis Closes Florida Highway, Causes Terror Alert. (Hey, wow, I guess they really are that powerful!)

This post was removed by request of the author.

This post was removed by request of the author.

I was looking at these two posts about prostate cancer vs. breast cancer from early 2003 - here and here - and noticing a huge gap that appears above the tables in both of them. This has been a problem I’ve had before, when posting tables on “Alas.” If anyone knows of a solution to the problem, could you please do me a favor and post it in the comments? Thanks.

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Via Big Fat Blog, a news article about a clinical study (to appear in this month’s Journal of the American Dietetic Association) that directly compares a Health at Every Size (HAES) approach to a Weight Loss Diet approach. I don’t know if this is the first study of this type conducted, but it’s the first one I’ve seen reported on.

Disclaimers: The sample size is pretty small, and the study isn’ t as long as I’d prefer it to be (I think 5 year outcomes are more meaningful than two year outcomes). Nonetheless, the results are striking - and pretty much exactly what Health at Every Size advocates would have predicted.

The UC Davis study was developed to scientifically examine the effectiveness of the Health at Every Size approach compared with traditional dieting. The study started off with 78 female participants ranging in age from 30 to 45 years old. Half were assigned to a dieting group and half to a non-dieting Health at Every Size group.

Members of the dieting group were told to moderately restrict their food consumption, maintain food diaries and monitor their weight. They were provided with information on the benefits of exercise, on behavioral strategies for successful dieting, and on how to count calories and fat content, read food labels and shop for appropriate foods.

Participants in the non-dieting group were instructed to let go of restrictive eating habits associated with dieting. Instead they were counseled to pay close attention to internal body cues indicating when they were truly hungry or full, and to how the food made them feel. They also received standard nutritional information to help them choose healthful foods, and participated in a support group designed to help them better understand how culture influences the experience of obese people and to become more accepting of their larger bodies. In addition, they were encouraged to identify and deal with barriers, including negative self-image, which might get in the way of enjoying physical activity. […]

Study results:

Almost all (92 percent) of the non-dieting group stayed in the study throughout the treatment period, while almost half (42 percent) of the dieters dropped out before finishing treatments. This reinforces another message of the research — that in the long run, people are much more likely to stick with a non-diet than a diet.

When the researchers tallied the results from the participants who completed the study, they found that:

• The non-dieters maintained their same weight throughout the study. The dieting group lost 5.2 percent of their initial weight by the end of the 24-week treatment period, but regained almost all of it by the end of the two-year study.
• The non-dieters showed an initial increase in their total cholesterol levels, but this significantly decreased by the end of the study, as did their levels of LDL cholesterol or “bad” cholesterol. The dieters showed no significant change in total or LDL cholesterol levels at any time.
• Both groups significantly lowered their systolic blood pressure during the first 52 weeks of the study. By the end of the study at 104 weeks, however, the non-dieters had sustained this improvement, while the diet group had not.
• By the end of the two-year study, the non-dieters had almost quadrupled their moderate physical activity. The dieting group had a significant increase in physical activity right after the treatment period ended but had slipped back to their initial levels by the end of the study.
• The non-dieters demonstrated significant improvements in self-esteem and depression at the end the study, while the diet group demonstrated a worsening in self-esteem. The dieters’ depression levels initially improved but then returned to baseline.

In summary, while the non-dieters did not lose weight, they succeeded in improving their overall health, as measured by cholesterol levels, blood pressure, physical activity and self-esteem. The dieters, on the other hand, were not able to sustain any of the short-term improvements they experienced and worsened in terms of their self-esteem.

My guess is that this study won’t get much play in the media, but hopefully it’ll lead to future clinical trials of this sort.

Michael of the blog Christian Conservative has recently published an interview with me, the first in a projected series of interviews with lefties: Part 1 and Part 2. Michael’s idea, I think, is to give his mostly right-wing readers a sense of what sort of world leftists hope for.

It’s odd but fun (in an egotistical sort of way) to be interviewed. Of course, I doubt any of my opinions will be news to “Alas” readers (and I state them more carefully and accurately on “Alas” than I was capable of doing in a real-time interview format), but it’s enjoyable to read Michael’s readers reactions to me. Some of the reactions are pretty friendly, and some are not - like this fellow:

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good.” (Psalm 53:1)

This man is a fool, and his views are foolish and evil. I appreciate your exposition Michael as an educational tool, but seriously, what a wicked wretch.

That was the most extreme comment (and hence the funniest), but there were other, more open-minded comments, too. And Michael, whose views I do not agree with (to put it mildly), was very nice to me.

For now, at least, we’re back online. It was a server load too high issue again - something is causing the entire database to be copied to a “tmp” file, over and over again. I wish I knew how to fix it.

For now, I’ve turned almost all the plug-ins off (I’ve left the plug-in that enables the “recently commented posts” thingy on the right running), in case it’s a bug in one of them. Meanwhile, until this problem is fixed, my server retains the option of shutting “Alas” off at any point.