Showing posts with label Valerie Tarico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Valerie Tarico. Show all posts
Alternet Americans in past generations lived in a sea of religion inherited largely from the Middle East by way of Europe, with home grown refinements.

Valerie Tarico
Most still do. When Americans venture off the continent, one of the things many find fascinating is the religious beliefs they encounter. Some people worship flying monkeys, or magical big breasted dancers, or Prince Phillip.

From the outside, beliefs like these seem fantastical and unlikely. They played a key role in evoking such ethnocentric ideas as noblesse oblige and manifest destiny and white man’s burden. But if we could see our own culture from an outside vantage point, as if we were travelers, the world might look a little different. Even one of the Bible writers pointed out that self-examination is the first order of business. Why are you looking at the speck in your brother’s eye, he asked (to paraphrase), when you have a plank in your own?

So, how well do you know what your neighbors believe? How about the church to which your parents are quietly tithing away your inheritance? For that matter, how about the actual details of the creed to which you yourself give a nod?

Continue reading @ Alternet.

Test Your Knowledge Of Wild, Weird And Outright Wacky American Religious Beliefs

Valerie Tarico What happens when being injured can move us up a social hierarchy?


Note: All of us have experienced suffering and unfairness in our lives, some of us much more so than others. Many of those stories need to be told and taken seriously if we want to heal old wounds or prevent new ones. This is true for us as individuals—I say this as a former therapist; and it is true for us as collectives—I say this as someone who has spent much of my adult life advocating for progressive change. But personal healing and effective advocacy are not what this article is about. It is about how we, as individuals and collectives, intuitively adapt in a context where victimhood gains us standing and status.


Human beings are hierarchical social animals. So are all of our surviving primate relatives. This has some serious upsides and downsides. Hierarchies allow us and most other social animals to survive and thrive, by fostering efficient organization of community thought, sentiment, and action. But they also, invariably, lead to unequal distribution of power and wealth, even if that wealth—say for chimps—is simply a bounty of grubs and sex for high status chimps while those at the bottom get less.

We humans don’t always like the mixed-bag instincts that we inherited from our ancestors, even if they have had survival value. Think of physical aggression, for example, or our love of sweets, or hoarding, or awkward sexual impulses. Communities of various sorts (religions, societies, etc.) try to divert or even thwart these instincts, and over time many have struggled against our tendency to organize into dominance hierarchies.

But because we are inherently hierarchical animals, and because this has upsides as well as downsides, fixing the problems associated with hierarchy is tough. In the United States in recent years, that has led to an interesting nexus: In many places and institutions, hierarchies that have been around for centuries or millennia still dominate, with white males mostly calling the shots. But simultaneously in other places, like Seattle where I live, whole communities of people working to get rid of old hierarchies have, instead, simply inverted them. This sounds paradoxical, but as social animals, we intuitively seek status, even when our highest and best selves express a desire for something else.

Since animals at the bottom of any pecking order get pecked on—marginalized, abused, deprived and undervalued—these inverted pecking orders base status on victimhood: A history of being marginalized, abused, deprived or undervalued brings more status. This kind of status inversion is nothing new. If you want to be great in God’s kingdom, learn to be the servant of all, said an early Christian writer (Matthew 20:26). Believers have taken this to heart for almost 2000 years, and so one part of Christian culture is competitive humility. Similarly, in geopolitical conflict, competitive victimhood has long been a powerful accelerant.

How does this same impulse work in our current political environment? On the Left, the calculus is pretty clear. Status comes from identifying with or advocating for groups that have historically been marginalized. On the Right, which champions traditional dominance hierarchies, things get a bit more complicated. But because status via victimhood is part of the current cultural zeitgeist, even right-leaning white males often try to gain power by claiming victimhood. This is not as disingenuous as it seems. Changed norms and unfulfilled expectations can make people feel violated even when they may be better off than others. Also, changing hierarchies create genuine losses for some. So, associated claims of victimhood can feel or be very real.

When we, either consciously or unconsciously, are seeking status through victimhood, we want people to focus on our wounds and scars rather than our resilience or successes or the ways we may be flourishing or even advantaged relative to others. All of us have wounds and scars—as I said, some much more than others. But the fact is, anyone reading these words probably has had it better than the majority of our ancestors and the majority of humans alive today. That makes competing for victimhood in the greater scheme of things a bit tricky.

Consequently, sometimes we do it, often instinctively and unawares, by borrowing victimization to augment our own standing and status. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Here are some of the ways it can work.

(As an aside, let me say here that I don’t think suffering is or should be a competition. Somebody else’s pain doesn’t make my migraine hurt less. I shouldn’t need to be in more pain than other people for this to be taken seriously. It is where victimhood intersects with our instinctive quest for status that it becomes competitive.)

Centering Identity on a Marginalized Class or Tribe

Each of us has many dimensions to who we are. I am an Italian-American woman. I am a former Evangelical. I am short and stocky in a culture that values lanky bodies, and an introvert in a culture that values extroverts. I like to tell myself that I’m smarter than the average bear—but I have the memory of a gnat. I am married with kids, a West Coast liberal, a gardener, an environmentalist, a long-time resident of shared housing, a psychologist, a philanthropic penny pincher, a squirrel mom, and a fairly adept handywoman. I could choose to center any of these dimensions of my identity, or a number of others. But from a victimhood standpoint, the one that gains me the most status is that I’m female.

Now, as far as I can tell, I have suffered little disadvantage from being born with two X chromosomes—or maybe the disadvantages and advantages have washed each other out. Yes, I have written about my rape. And no, my father didn’t think girls should go to college. And yes, my Evangelical Christian churches did teach female submission. But mercifully, much of that simply didn’t take: I didn’t feel damaged after the rape; I felt pissed. Mom told Dad emphatically that I was too going away to college, and he acquiesced. And for whatever reason—perhaps sheer narcissism?—I thought the submission thing didn’t apply to me.

These things, all manifestations of patriarchy and sexism, were part of my life trajectory. That said, they didn’t define it. I got a degree and a graduate degree, and the jobs I wanted. I’ve had the privilege of pursuing meaningful vocations and avocations. I have health and financial security and strong opinions that can cow others into believing me even when I’m full of shit. And this is more true for me than it is for most men.

Also, I have had the luxury of being able to step back from my professional work to invest in parenting, with no social censure. And I have been able to pour my energy into unpaid activities that are deeply meaningful to me, again without the social censure that a man might face if he did the same. And I have been able to express my delights and fears and sorrows in healthy ways in part because being female freed me to do so. No, I don’t want to go ice climbing or join the military; I don’t have to be my father’s son. Being born female has advantages as well as disadvantages.

But that didn’t stop me from opening a debate about biblical misogyny with the words “As a woman . . .” in order to derail a male opponent. Nor did it stop me from bringing up my sex right here, right now as a way of saying, “I have some standing to talk about this victimhood stuff because I’m female.” Had you noticed what I’m doing? I’m borrowing from the broader bank account of hardship and injustice that has accrued to my sex to build status, standing and persuasive power here.

Dredging One’s Own Past

From the time my daughters were small, I let them know that if I die they should tell themselves I’ve had a very good life. I said this because I want to minimize any suffering at the loss of a parent. But also, it’s true.

Even so, if I need to, I can call upon my lived experience of sexism to establish credibility as a legitimate voice of my marginalized class: The boy who called me a bitch before I knew what it meant. My young adult battle with bulimia and lifelong residual of distorted body image (thank you, Beauty Myth). The patronizing male contractor who played my gender-based self-doubt to the tune of six figures.

If being female isn’t enough to get me the positionality I want in a given interaction, I can also call up other hardships: the crowded tract home of my childhood, the endless clotheslines full of diapers, the cramped bedroom I shared with two sisters and the mortifying hand-me-down clothes; experiencing free school lunches as an awesome treat; the gut-wrenching feel of lying awake and listening to my parents fight; my mother’s and sister’s mental illnesses; my own suicidal depression . . . We all have experiences that we can move from background to foreground depending on what serves us, including in the quest for anti-status.

It all may be side or backstory at this point in my life, none of it raw, none of it particularly relevant to my present concerns, but all the same, I can borrow against the hurts of my younger hard-scrabble self to bolster my standing. If I center this part of my past enough, if that is what my social milieu demands—again this may or may not be intentional—the psychology of narrative is such that it can in fact become raw again; it can return to define me. This is true even of stories and wounds that are not my own.

(Because what I am saying here is so easily misunderstood or misrepresented, I feel a need to state that for many people hardship is not backstory or side-story. It is present and raw and a powerful barrier to flourishing. Again, that is a different conversation; this one is about anti-status hierarchies and how they may move us to borrow victimhood.)

Blurring Here-and-Now with History

Today, on the Left of the political spectrum, victim status typically accrues based on identity markers that represent historically marginalized tribes or classes of people (gender, skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, immigration history, etc.), rather than just personal lived experience or even the contemporary experience of the tribe. This means that a person can borrow victimhood from their ancestors or even unrelated past humans who belonged to the same tribe.

By talking and writing about the struggles of my immigrant grandmother or even something more abstract, like the European and Puritan witch trials—especially if I use the first person “we,” saying this was done to “us”—I can bring that past into the present, eliciting emotions and shaping priorities. We humans are storytellers, meaning we organize information into stories that we tell ourselves and each other—elevating some parts above others to create a throughline. Stories are powerful, even fictional ones, but especially those we believe to represent some dimension of truth. The power of a historical narrative doesn’t necessarily depend on how representative it was at the time, how much similar events have cascaded into the present, or how they have impacted my own life.

You may have heard the term presentism used to describe imposing our current moral standards and agreements on historical figures: Abraham Lincoln was a bad person because his policies harmed Native Americans. Thomas Aquinas was a bad person because he wrote that females are subhuman. John James Audubon was a bad person because he endorsed slavery. (I guarantee that future generations will look back at you and me from the vantage of history and say some of the things we said or did were unconscionable.) But we also engage in the reverse kind of presentism—pulling injustices and atrocities of the past into the present in order to augment our status as victims. This was a key factor in the Balkan war of the 1990s, where Milosevic elevated grievances that went back hundreds of years, dividing Serbs, Croatians and Muslim Bosniaks along ethnic and religious lines to feed a powerful, visceral sense of outrage that ultimately erupted into armed conflict.

Allyship

When our own tribes or lived experience don’t provide much anti-status, people sometimes seek to move up a victimhood hierarchy by aligning themselves with those who are higher up. If you think about this, it makes perfect sense: People tend to ally themselves with whoever is at the top of any pecking order, whether it is strongmen like Putin, or the popular mean girls at school, or an inspiring leader like Gandhi, or in this case people who hold identity in more marginalized/victimized groups. Allies can be a lot like stereotypical religious converts—because their position can feel tenuous, they may be even more vocal and emphatic or rigid and unforgiving than the group with whom they seek to ally.

This is not to say that outspoken allies are motivated sheerly by self-interest. It is to say that when status derives from anti-status, vicarious victimhood, aka self-interest, is likely to be part of the subterranean mix of motives for allies. Much of the time our motives are more complicated than the stories we tell ourselves. This is not a matter of either/or. Self-interest can be quite compatible with compassion or altruism or a genuine quest for righteousness or, as the earlier quote from the New Testament book of Matthew described, “servanthood.” Nor do I mean to say the good that people do is inconsequential simply because their motives are mixed. In Singapore, a Confucian cultural ethic means that rich people get extra status by spending money on public works and community projects; those projects benefit the public all the same.

But let me reiterate the main point here: Victimhood hierarchies operate just like any other human hierarchy. People at the top are given more airtime, their ideas are taken more seriously, they are more likely to get resources, they are more able to hurt you. Allyship borrows on the power of those at the top. And this is true even when those at the top are, ironically, those whose identities are the most marginalized.

Violated Expectations

What about conservative straight white cis men who claim that they are now the victims—Men’s Rights Activists and incels and MAGA hat-wearers who want to take us back in time? Well, for one thing, violated expectations feel like real losses. When it comes to goodies, we tend to confuse is or was with ought to be, meaning we instinctively feel that we ought to have whatever goodies we have become accustomed to, including undue privilege or status. People who grew up expecting the social order to be a certain way can feel violated or demeaned—or personally inadequate—when things change.

Evangelical Christians in the US, despite their disproportionate political power, see themselves as victims—maligned, misunderstood, and marginalized. This is not only because Christianity has a multi-millennial martyr complex, although that is true and has served Christianity well (when you see yourself as a martyr, you can’t see the harm you are doing to others), but also because biblical Christianity is losing ground, both in adherents and in control over our cultural institutions.

But also, remember what I said about pecking orders? “Animals at the bottom of any pecking order get pecked on—marginalized, abused, deprived and undervalued.” All of the labels I used in the first sentence of this section: conservative, straight, white, cis, and men are quite literally used by people on the left as slurs—as a shorthand way of saying that someone is bad and undeserving. In the new inverted identity hierarchies, these words describe the people at the bottom, those whose fears and dreams and ideas count for less (and should, we tell ourselves, because people like them had it too good for too long). But people aren’t interchangeable.

Traditional biblical Christianity teaches the concepts of original sin, meaning we inherit the sins of our ancestors, and substitutionary atonement, meaning you can attain justice by punishing one person for the sins of another. Most progressives, including progressive Christians, would say they don’t ascribe to that kind of theology. The wretched life of a poor white man in the south doesn’t somehow make up for the slaveholding of his ancestor—at least not rationally. But our heads and our guts don’t always align, and the concepts of inherited guilt and proxy punishment run deep in the American psyche, where they meet up with another pesky human instinct—our desire for payback. In the absence of better targets, we don’t mind punishing proxies. And so, progressives are quite literally giving some people the experience of what it feels like to be at the bottom simply because of accidents of birth. To some degree, we provide the reverse prejudice card they are playing.

Why does it matter?

It’s worth being mindful of inverted status hierarchies and borrowed victimhood for a couple of reasons. One has to do with the relationship between victim identity and resilience. The other has to do with competition.

As individuals, competitive victimhood requires that we center the most damaged parts of ourselves and elevate the ugliest parts of our history over our loves, joys, triumphs and accomplishments. The emotions that go along with this likely include some mix of hurt, horror, grief, anger, anxiety, and mistrust. It may further require that a person subsume their unique individualism in order to identify first and foremost as a representative member of an injured tribe. As one young Black commentator discussed, it can make you feel you need to fit stereotypes to be perceived as authentic.

Exploring any or all of this can be part of a process of healing and growth. But centering or cementing victim identity can make a person less resilient, more brittle, more easily traumatized, more reactive, more vindictive, and less able to fully experience whatever goodness life may offer them. Victim identity looks backward, not forward. It is about identifying problems, not solving them. It is about the shape of our wounds, not the shape of our dreams. If the reason for elevating this part of the self is because inverted status hierarchies pull for it, if power and standing require that we convince others of our victimhood, if we are expected to make scars our calling card, then status comes at a psychological price.

At a collective level that price may be measured in loss of what sociologists call social capital. Social capital is made up of shared norms and values, a shared sense of identity, a baseline assumption of good will. In any community, whether that is a nuclear family or a network of global diplomacy, these dynamics make us more benevolent toward each other. Interactions become more efficient because we don’t spend as much energy being wary and defensive. On the other side of the equation, a breakdown of these norms, including a shift toward competitive victimhood, accelerates movement toward divorce or war.

For those on the far left, the competitive part of competitive victimhood is particularly problematic, because on the surface the left shuns hierarchy. This is so true that some progressive political groups have experimented with flat organizational structures and rotating leadership positions. So, just like the Christian seeking status through humility or servanthood, the progressive seeking status through anti-status needs to engage in mental gymnastics. Competitive victimhood for those on the left requires self-deception.

What is to be done?

Wish as we might, human hierarchies are not going to go away. Evolutionary biology literally functions by way of inequality; social animals organize into hierarchies; and human exceptionalism—the idea that we alone are exempt from this kind of social structure—is pure hubris. We need leaders. Differentiation and specialization are the fabric of civilization. Not all ideas are created equal, and human flourishing grows when our ideas and enterprises are freely generated and then subjected to vigorous competition.

But that is only one part of what’s true, and as they say a half-truth is a whole lie. Another part of what’s true is that hierarchies often become abusive. The experience of marginalized groups and individuals throughout history is vile and ugly and demands moral redress. And even if hierarchy and inequality are inevitable, we still have tremendous power (and, I might argue, moral obligation) to minimize abuse, shrink resource differentials, maintain role fluidity, and insist on dignity and respect for all.

Inverting a status hierarchy doesn’t necessarily accomplish these things; it may simply reassign the same old roles. The currency, meaning what buys a person high rank, can get switched up without the dynamics changing much at all. In our ancestral past this happened regularly as clans or tribes took and retook territory, resources, or political dominance from each other.

It takes mindful effort to counter the downside of our competitive status-seeking instinct. One of the best tools at our disposal is narrative that elevates our shared humanity. Yes, we need to talk about harms in order to understand, heal and prevent them. But when we lean away from what we have in common, we inevitably lean toward competition. In that sense, borrowed victimhood is not just a natural behavior but a symptom. It tells us that we have a ways yet to go.

Valerie Tarico
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. 
She writes about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society.

How We Borrow Victimhood To Gain Status

Valerie Tarico The conspicuous contempt exuded by some of the progressive left isn’t winning hearts or minds.


Progressives say we want to win elections and shape the future of our country. We say we want to create greater equity and broad prosperity, and we worry that climate change may swamp the whole boat. But honestly, when we talk about (or to) people who disagree in the slightest, we sure don’t act like a better future is what we’re after. We act instead like people who have given up—who have so little hope of bringing others along that we can dump on them without consequences. We act like the married person who says they are trying to fix things but who in their heart has abandoned the effort and settled on divorce and now only talks with friends who agree that the soon-to-be ex is horrible (and always has been).


When Hillary Clinton made the comment that took her down, she was trying to say that most Americans on the right half of the political spectrum aren’t deplorable. Right-wing media edited and spun it the other way—with enormous impact—because people hate being sneered at. We hate, hate, hate it! Having someone see you as deplorable is a deal breaker. It creates a rift that may never be bridged. Marital researchers at the Gottman Institute discovered that even subtle expressions of contempt can predict which relationships will end badly. How is it, then, that activists who claim to be invested in the future, who think our causes are worthy, who say people should donate and volunteer and vote our way, have adopted the posture of denigrating, deriding, and even dehumanizing anyone who doesn’t think exactly like us? As a recruiting tactic, telling people they are stupid and immoral is an epic fail. A mean-girls strategy may pull people into line if they are already in your orbit, but from the outside it is repellant.

Let’s be honest.

Since the time that Clinton’s words were twisted so effectively to foster resentment and deepen America’s political divide, things have gotten only more fractious. Fox-clone media and self-interested politicians own the bulk of the blame for this. But while I find right-wing postures and priorities and lying and the whole MAGA phenomenon to be horrifying, we progressives often make things worse instead of better. We pretend, when they sneer and call us woke, that they are just hating our awareness, compassion and diversity. We pretend not to know that with good reason the word woke now connotes—even among many on the left—smugness, sanctimony, an attitude of intellectual superiority, and an eagerness to impute the worst possible motive to anyone who disagrees. We pretend not to recognize that we regularly use words like white and Christian and male and straight as slurs, as ways of conveying that a person is less of a person to us, and more of a symbol, and that we aren’t really interested in their thoughts or fears or pain or dreams. We spend time in activist spaces and online forums trash talking and othering whoever isn’t in the room. And then we say they should join our movement.

No thanks.

It shouldn’t take a psychologist to say this, but few people, regardless of race or sex, have so much spare mental health and resilience that they can afford to join clubs that shit on them. Any cadre of Mormon or Evangelical missionaries could tell you that’s not the way to win converts. Wait a minute, you might say. Don’t Christian missionaries tell prospective converts that they are sinners from birth, “utterly depraved” in the words of John Calvin, and in need of salvation? Yes, they do. But they also pair that with instant absolution.

To be clear, I’m not a fan of religious missionaries. We are talking about people whose worldview requires them to treat questions as hooks and relationships as a way to reel people in. Missionary work, in other words, is a long way from actual deep listening and mutuality, from risking that the other party in a conversation might change you. Instead, missionaries often fake humility and interest and friendship or cultivate these interpersonal dynamics in a way that is conditional and has an ulterior motive—a harvest of converts. (Yuck.) But much of the time, we progressives can’t even seem to get that far.

What is going on?

I think that a lot of progressives feel deeply hopeless about a better future, which is why many have seemingly little interest in constructing a theory of change. When people have confidence in their ability to figure things out, they set reachable goals and work on getting from Point A to Point B. By contrast, when people lack hope and confidence, they tend to shoot for the sky—I’m going to be a rock star, a race car driver, an astronaut, a billionaire—but they take few steps toward those goals. That is because trying to map a path from A to B would surface the huge chasm of unreality that lies between where they are and where they want to be. There is a huge chasm of unreality between where progressives are and where we want to be. And it is filled with the lives and loves of people who are different than us.

I’m not talking about the usual checkboxes—race, immigration history, sexual orientation, and so forth. I mean people who, at least right now, have different fears and worldviews than we have and, consequently, different ideas about how to get to a better future. People who aren’t a part of our club and who think they wouldn’t want to be a second-class member.

Satisfying snark kills hope.

Posting snark and righteous memes on social media to an audience of folks who already think like us and denigrating those who “get it wrong,” or focusing our ire on words and symbols (which are easier to change than are conditions in the physical world), may help fend off despair temporarily. But in the long run, cynicism about the past and despair about the future are self-reinforcing. For example, some idealists see gaps in racial equality and deny that the Civil Rights movement made any real progress. One frustrated friend in college commented that things are no different now than they were under slavery. This kind of story, one that treats slow or incomplete change as inconsequential, one that erases the efforts and triumphs of past generations and flattens the moral arc of American history, also flattens the future. It beats down the hope that our own actions matter. It makes people more emphatic and absolutist in their demands for change but also less able to tap into the curiosity and empirical analysis and passion and stamina that can solve problems and improve lives in the real world.

In a movement that is about problem solving, being able to construct a multi-dimensional map of reality including potential causes and effects and unintended consequences is key. Lived experience, what philosophers call standpoint epistemology, can be part of this, but only part. We humans have many ways of discovering, learning, analyzing, and problem-solving, and if we want the benefit of this multitude, they have to be at the table. That means they have to be welcome.

We can do better.

Real world change takes bridge building, deep listening, and taking the risk that we might learn something from someone we think of as other. The following may sound odd coming from a critic of Christianity, but two Seattle ministers, Jim Henderson and Jim Hancock, have come up with the best three practices I’ve ever seen for broadening engagement and community:

  • I’ll be unusually interested in others.
  • I will stay in the room with difference.
  • I will stop comparing my best with your worst.

Their motto is curiosity trumps certainty. And their ministry, if you can call it that, is about bridging difference divides.

There are progressive organizations that operate from the same mindset. Dream.org, founded by Black American commentator Van Jones, builds equity by making structural change at scale in low-income communities. One team works on getting incarcerated people who don’t represent a community hazard out of prison and rehabilitating them, and building alternatives to incarceration. Another works on bringing high-tech skills to inner city kids, so they won’t be left out of technical revolutions. A third works on green collar jobs in marginalized communities to ensure a just transition away from fossil fuels. They do all of this through a lens of bridge-building, finding common cause where they can, including with people across the political aisle. And it is working: Tens of thousands of people are now out of prison because of their advocacy and partnerships (including with Newt Gingrich!). Their motto is “We will work with anyone to make the future work for everyone.”

Work like this is grounded in a doggedly hopeful worldview, one that has gotten beaten down in many of us but that is worth cradling and nurturing if and as we can: People who aren’t part of our ideological circle aren’t all our enemies. Those who don’t think like us can fill in the gaps in our partial truths. Our shared humanity runs deep. There is common ground to be found if we humble ourselves to seek it, and bridges worth building. We are capable of conversations that are much, much richer than mere posturing and commiseration.

Valerie Tarico
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. 
She writes about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society.

You’re A Stupid Greedy Racist, And You Should Join My Club

Valerie Tarico ✏ Unexpected pregnancy? Wrong time? Wrong partner? Wrong circumstances? Too bad. That’s the attitude of Christian Right fundamentalists, and conservative politicians who think that sucking up to fundamentalists will get them reelected.


Most people—including religious people—including Christians—don’t think this way. But fundamentalists and their lackeys are doing their damnedest to make pregnancy the price of sex by outlawing abortion while also driving down birth control knowledge and access. If they wanted to, they could make abortion almost obsolete by broadcasting information about the most reliable birth control methods and making them cheap and easy to get. They could also fund research on even better methods, including options for men. Instead, they spread misinformation about modern birth control options, shout about risks while being zipper-lips about bonus health benefits, and falsely claim that the most reliable methods work by turning your body into an abortion factory. What does that tell you?

One thing it tells me is that this isn’t just about abortion. ( See:  Children as Chattel–The Common Root of Religious Child Abuse and the Pro-Life Movement) Another is this:  Spreading accurate information about birth control options is an act of defiance.

So here goes the list. It’s organized from most trustworthy to least, because some methods are literally 100 times more reliable than others. But first, some quick comments:  

  • With regular unprotected sex, 85 out of 100 couples will get pregnant within a year. Unless you are trying to make a baby, unprotected sex is pregnancy roulette.
  • Bedsider.org has the most accurate, up-to-date birth control chooser on the web.  
  • No one method fits (or works) for all of us, and none is perfect.
  • How often contraception fails depends a lot on how much effort it takes, how often.
  • Lastly, apologies in advance, guys: Your non-permanent options stink; you deserve better. In the meantime, if you have sex with females you should know what they are using and what options they have.

Implant (3-5 years) —The implant is a flexible rod the size of a matchstick that goes in the underside of a female arm. From there, it slow-releases hormones that prevent eggs from developing. It is the most reliable method currently available, with a 1 in 1000 annual failure rate. Another way to say this: If you used an implant for 1000 years, you could expect one pregnancy. That is because long-acting contraceptive devices like the implant or IUD flip the default setting on fertility to off making pregnancy “opt-in” instead of “opt-out.” Downsides: Costly up front if not covered by insurance. May cause irregular periods or hormonal side effects like headaches or sore breasts, especially at first. Upsides: Quick outpatient insertion. Get it and forget it for up to five years; quick return to normal fertility whenever removed. Safe for smokers, people with hypertension, and diabetics. Ok while breastfeeding. Bonus health benefits: May reduce PMS, depression, or endometriosis symptoms.

Hormonal IUD (3-8 years) —An IUD is a T-shaped bit of plastic that fits into the uterus; it is the birth control method most preferred by gynecologists for themselves and their partners. (Some people even turn samples into earrings.) This IUD releases a local micro-dose of progestin; and the female body responds by sealing off the cervix like it would during pregnancy, an internal barrier. Like the implant, it has a 1-in-1000 yearly failure rate. Downsides: Insertion, though brief, can be painful. May cause cramps at first. Some bodies spit that puppy right back out. Upsides: Get it and forget it. Lighter periods or none at all, so good for athletes or people who suffer from anemia or strong menstrual cramps and bleeding. Can reduce endometriosis. Quick return to normal fertility. Good while breastfeeding.

Vasectomy or Tubal Ligation (permanent) —A vasectomy is the only truly dependable method that lets a man control his own fertility. As in a tubal ligation for women, a tiny tube in the body is snipped so that gametes (sperm for males, eggs for females) can’t travel to the place they would meet. Both methods are almost as reliable as the implant or hormonal IUD. Downsides: Requires a medical procedure, and you can’t count on reversing it if you later change your mind. Upsides: One and done. No medications, no potential side effects, no repeat medical visits.

Copper IUD (10+ years) —Thin wires wrapped around the arms of this IUD release copper ions that make it so sperm can’t swim. The amount needed is so small that a copper IUD can work for a decade or more as an internal, hormone-free spermicide. (I had mine for 23 years.) Once settled into place, it has a 1-in-100 annual failure rate. Downsides: Insertion, though brief, can be painful. May cause cramps or backaches. Usually causes heavier periods during the first few months, so not good for women with anemia. Upsides: Get it and forget it till you want to get pregnant or menopause kicks in. Hormone-free for those who don’t do well on estrogen or progestin. Immediate return to normal fertility upon removal. Normal periods for those who want them. Good while breastfeeding.

The Shot (3 months) —The Depo-Provera shot suppresses ovulation–no eggs released to meet up with sperm. The annual pregnancy rate is 4 in 100—almost twice as good as the pill but a lot worse than IUDs and implants. Downsides: This is the only method with documented weight gain for some users. May cause irregular spotting. Can cause hormonal side effects like headaches or depression. Requires quarterly medical appointments. Upsides: Effort free for 3 months. Shorter, lighter periods. Works for people who don’t tolerate estrogen in birth control pills. (Note: Self-administered and six-month versions of the Depo shot are in the works.)

The Ring (1 month) —A soft, flexible ring around the cervix delivers the same estrogen-progestin combination as some birth control pills. Out of 100 users, 7 will get pregnant in any given year. Downsides: Must be changed out every 3 or 4 weeks. Same side effects as similar pills. User needs to be comfortable inserting and removing the ring with their fingers. Upsides: Benefits of pills without having to remember every day. Lighter, less crampy periods, less acne. Monthly periods can be skipped if desired. Some protection against bone thinning, ovarian and endometrial cancers, anemia, and some infections.  

The Patch (1 week) —Similar in look to a nicotine patch, an estrogen-progestin patch works pretty much like birth control pills except you only have to remember once a week rather than every day. Like the shot, ring and pill, it keeps eggs from being released. Out of 100 users, 7 will get pregnant in a year. Downsides: Need to swap out weekly. Potential hormonal side effects. Upsides: Lighter, less crampy periods, less acne. Monthly periods optional. Some protection against bone thinning, ovarian and endometrial cancers, anemia, and some infections.  

The Pill (every day) —A variety of birth control pills offer different combinations of estrogen and progestin, or just progestin (called the mini-pill), which let people try out which formulas work best for them. Out of 100 users, 7 will get pregnant in a year. Downsides: Hard to remember—85 percent of women miss three or more doses each month. Potential hormonal side effects. Upsides: Lighter, less crampy periods. Monthly periods can be skipped if desired. Estrogen-containing pills reduce acne and protect slightly against bone thinning, ovarian or endometrial cancers, anemia, and some infections.  

Condoms (every time) —The condom is the only nonpermanent option for men who want to manage their own fertility, and it is the only method that protects against sexually transmitted infections. But as birth control goes, condoms aren’t very reliable: Thirteen out of 100 couples relying on condoms will face a pregnancy within a year. Downsides: Can reduce sexual pleasure, high effort, easy to get it wrong. Upsides: inexpensive, no prescription required, no side effects, protection against STIs.

Periodic abstinence (one week every month) — Some couples, for religious or other reasons, prefer simply to avoid sex during the female partner’s fertile days. Periodic abstinence has been used to avoid pregnancy for generations; now a variety of tools can help to track monthly cycles or even detect signs of ovulation. On average, these methods result in pregnancy each year for about 15 in 100 couples, but tracking tools are getting better. Downsides: Requires careful monitoring, effort, discipline, and a certain kind of couple. Substantial pregnancy risk. Upsides: Inexpensive, no prescription or side effects.   

Diaphragm, female condom (every time) — Diaphragms and female condoms are barriers made from silicone or rubber. Inserted before intercourse, they block sperm from reaching the uterus. Around 1 in 5 couples relying on these methods will get pregnant each year, half again as many as those using male condoms. (My mom had five diaphragm babies.) That said, the female condom is the one female-controlled method that protects against STIs. Downsides: Substantial risk of pregnancy. Takes practice to insert consistently and correctly. Can irritate the vagina. Upsides: No side effects, condom offers STI protection, diaphragm reduces pelvic infections.

No one method works for all people. Some, like me, have medical conditions that mean they shouldn’t take hormones (in my case migraines). Some have personal or ancestral trauma and don’t feel ready to have a healthcare provider put something inside them. Some trust shots; others hate them. Some can remember to take a pill at the same time every day for years on end, while most of us can’t. Some want lighter, less-frequent periods while others like their monthly cycle. For any given person, one or more of these considerations may be worth a higher degree of pregnancy risk. We all make trade-offs.

But to do so, we need to know what we are and aren’t trading offEveryone who doesn’t want to be pregnant right now deserves to know their options. How well does each birth control option stack the odds in favor of—birth control? The differences, as I’ve already said, can be huge: A couple relying on condoms is 100 times more likely to face an unsought pregnancy and a potential abortion quest than a couple relying on an implant or hormonal IUD.

Abortion rights and sex ed and contraceptive access for young people are under siege in much of the United States. Some Christians and politicians think the price of sex should be pregnancy roulette and then parenthood, however unwanted or mistimed. Women are being treated like moral degenerates or criminals because they chose not to incubate an unsought or unhealthy pregnancy. In other words, the stakes are high, and spreading accurate information is an act of defiance.

So do it.  

Valerie Tarico
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. 
She writes about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society.

What Every Red State Resident Should Know About Birth Control Options

Valerie Tarico ⚡But this regression is coming from the Left.


Imagine that you went to a doctor for athlete’s foot and they said, “We have fifteen different treatment options, and I’m going to present them to you in alphabetical order.” Imagine that the doctor did this despite the fact that some of the methods worked ten times better to fix your condition. Even for something as minor as foot fungus, that just seems like bad medical care. You know your body, but they know the world of medicine. It’s their job to differentiate, and after checking for possible allergies, lifestyle patterns and so forth, to recommend whatever is most likely to get the job done. Now imagine that there were five kinds of COVID vaccine, and some worked ten or even 100 times as well as others, and the doctor presented them to you in alphabetical (or random) order. You might think that was incompetence or malpractice.

But that is how some reproductive health providers treat birth control options.

Consider, for example, the generally well regarded Reproductive Health Access Project, which supports clinicians who provide contraceptive and abortion care, and miscarriage management. Among other tools in their store is a “patient fact sheet” titled Your Birth Control Choices that they promote and sell. Their website describes the fact sheet thus: “This patient fact sheet compares different birth control choices in a colorful and easy-to-read chart. . . . Ideal for health centers, doctor’s offices, and school clinics.”

But the sheet doesn’t lead with the methods that are most likely to help patients seeking birth control actually attain their top goal, meaning those that work best to prevent unwanted surprise pregnancies. It’s in alphabetical order. And it just so happens that alphabetical order puts some of the very least reliable methods at the top, where people might normally expect the best. To make matters worse, all of the most trustworthy and genuinely modern methods—various kinds of pills, IUDs and implants, are relegated to the back side and don’t even show up if someone is just scanning their website.

Take a look.


If you squint, what you’ll see is that the leading methods are condoms and diaphragms—methods that are now more than half a century old, and each of which can be expected to fail for somewhere between 10-20 percent of users each year.

A few years ago I was cleaning out my mother’s house so that she could move into a retirement community, when I came across a small blue box tucked into the headboard of her bed. I’m the oldest of six children, and when I opened the box what I found was her diaphragm—and five little maternity ward baby bracelets.
Mom’s Diaphragm with Five Baby Bracelets

Five diaphragm babies. And sixty years later that is what the Reproductive Health Access Project is showcasing top-of-the-fold, Page One.

Three years ago, before Your Birth Control Choices was revised, it aligned more with what one might expect from a menu of medical options—it led, as people generally trust their doctors to do, with the stuff that was most likely to work. Now the opposite is true. And because we know that people are modestly more likely to choose from the top of the list when they don’t have a strong preference, this new exception to standard medical practice means that more people are going to end up with a mistimed or unwanted pregnancy.

What is going on here?

What’s going on is a misguided attempt to avoid anything suggesting that healthcare providers have opinions or preferences when it comes to what kind of treatment or prevention they deliver. It is precisely because people are somewhat more likely to choose the headline option, that long-acting IUDs and implants (the kind of contraception most often preferred by reproductive care providers for themselves and their family members, by the way) are no longer there. Some advocates in reproductive justice nonprofits conflate leading with LARC (long-acting reversible contraception), with nudging, with pressuring, with coercing, with forcing—with the unconsented sterilizations that took place during the early part of the 20th century and that disproportionately affected Black women.

Reproductive coercion is worth worrying about. Throughout human history women have been pressured, threatened, and raped into bearing children—as economic assets for their husbands or masters, as foot soldiers for the state, and as devotees to the gods. They have been sterilized or forced to use fail-safe contraceptives when someone else decided that their tribe was too degenerate or prolific. With America in the middle of a racial reckoning, this history and this threat are front and center.

The folks who decided to alphabetize birth control options are swimming in this sea. And no doubt they genuinely mean to protect reproductive freedom. But if so they should remember that even in their own movement, it’s not the thought that counts—it’s the effect. Leading with a diaphragm that will fail almost 1 in 5 women during a single year over an implant that will fail 1 in 2000 leads to less reproductive empowerment, not more. One might think of it, in fact, as a form of stochastic coercion: You don’t know who is going to get forced by contraceptive failure into a baby they didn’t want, but you know for sure that someone will.

Some social justice advocates have become so focused on fixing conversational dynamics and social standing—what words we use, who sits where in which pecking order—that they have lost interest in the practical tools that build equity and opportunity—things like education, and living wage jobs, and reliable family planning.

With the Religious Right trying to force pregnant people to act as incubators and then give birth, with GOP appointees stripping away the safest and most effective forms of abortion care, one might think that the Left would be deeply invested in letting people know about the most trustworthy contraceptives around—and in broad uptake by those who find their interest piqued.

One way to reduce unmet need for abortion is to reduce need for abortion. And the most powerful means we have of doing that is to ensure that everyone knows about state-of-the-art contraceptives that take human error out of the equation for months or even years at a time until a person decides they want a child. Birth control is a personal decision, and no one method suits everyone. But trustworthy birth control is power. People deserve to know that some options drop the risk of an unwanted pregnancy to near zero–and others don’t. That information is right up front at Bedsider.org for example, which provides up-to-date information about birth control to the general public.

Bedsider.org Explore Birth Control Options
Why is their chart organized the way it is? Here’s why.

Two years ago one of my friends was diagnosed with brain cancer. When she talked to her doctor, she wanted to know all of her options. But she sure as hell also wanted a medical opinion about which course of treatment would best stack the odds in her favor. Alphabetizing is for people who have long lists of information to sort through. It’s for finding things in a hurry when you know what you are looking for, and it works very well for that. But it is no substitute for thoughtful input from a medical professional, one who explores what you are trying to accomplish and then offers their knowledge of what might work to get you there.

Valerie Tarico
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. 
She writes about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society.

Abortion Isn’t The Only Part Of Women’s Healthcare That Just Lost Half A Century

Valerie TaricoBeing excluded activates the same brain pathways as physical pain.

5-December-2022

A few days after Thanksgiving 2022 a sad little article flitted across my newsfeed. After a group of friends removed a 13-year-old Italian girl from their group chat (as a joke, they would later say) she killed herself. The story was haunting—the senseless bullying, the senseless tragedy, the familiar pattern of cruelty inflamed and enabled by social media. The girl’s reaction was extreme. Young teens tend to think in absolutes, and emotions can swing wildly. The present moment can feel eternal. But a young teen’s anguish at being excluded is something that we all experience in shades.


Posted on December 5, 2022 by Valerie Tarico


Why shunning can feel unbearable. 

We humans are social animals, instinctively forming identity groups that bind us together based on kinship, geographic proximity, religious beliefs, physical appearance, and other much more arbitrary allegiances like fandom or club membership. We depend on each other for the very basics of wellbeing: food, shelter, knowledge, and protection from predators and other humans. In our ancestral environment, being banished from the tribe or kin group was often a literal death sentence unless the banished person was taken in by another group. (Many other social animals also die when they are driven off by their group.) So, we are wired to be hyper-reactive to shunning.

Psychologist Kipling Williams has dedicated much of his research career to studying ostracism and social rejection. When he put experimental subjects in MRI machines and then had them engage in games where they were or were not excluded, he found that being excluded activates the same brain pathways as physical pain. This relationship is so hardwired that exclusion amplifies the experience of physical pain, and the psychological pain of exclusion can be reduced by taking the medication acetaminophen.

An ancient form of social control. 

For thousands of years, polities and religions have taken advantage of this relationship between shunning and pain and have used shunning as a form of social control. The word ostracism comes from an ancient Greek practice, voting to banish a person by writing their name on a shard of clay, an ostrakon. Still today, Amish communities have a formal process for deciding whether a renegade should be shunned, and many other religious groups use shunning more informally. In the modern era, Islam may be unique in prescribing death for apostates, but social death sentences abound in Christianity.

One of my psychologist colleagues works with people who are leaving various kinds of Christian fundamentalism. A person’s path out of fundamentalism is often a one-way street, because once you see the scientific and historical errors or moral and rational contradictions in your belief system, or once you see the human handprints on, say, the Bible and Christian history, it becomes impossible to un-see them. But the social transition can be really hard. One of my colleague’s clients retracted their doubts and returned to their religious community after they found the shunning by their friends and family and broader familiar community of co-religionists to be unbearable.

Social media’s infatuation with cut-offs. 

Outside of traditional religions, most people today rarely use the word shunning, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped wielding silence and separation as social tools. If anything, a growing number of us are deploying cut-offs of one kind or another when a relationship with a friend, family member or colleague feels problematic. As political divides become deeper (and as they are increasingly framed as moral divides), we withdraw from relationships across the aisle as a way to express disapproval.

The internet is full of self-help memes and video clips encouraging us to cut toxic people out of our lives and praising the bravery and self-care of those who do. In the public arena, cancellation and social ostracism have become common expressions of outrage—not just for de-platforming neo-Nazis but for dealing with internal disagreements in progressive nonprofits.

It is in this context—recognizing the psychological power of shunning and recognizing its current popularity in both the personal and public spheres—, that I would like to examine the idea of toxic people and whether we should shun them.

Toxic people? Maybe, maybe not. 

Let me start with a disclaimer: There are times that another person is so harmful that we have no choice but to physically remove ourselves from them (or to remove them from contact with society more broadly). This world includes women who burn their children with cigarettes and men who beat them with belts. It includes people who believe they speak for gods and people who simply have god-complexes. It includes people who get pleasure out of psychologically toying with others. It includes people who are exploitative and parasitic or incessantly petulant, or worse. Sometimes people are so damaged and damaging that all we can do is cut them off or lock them up.

But only cartoon characters are two dimensional. Even the worst among us spend much of their time behaving in ways that are constructive and prosocial. Conversely, even the most helpful, compassionate, kind-hearted or inspiring of us do harm sometimes, either intentionally or not. Most relationships mix good and bad, aspects that nurture and support wellbeing and aspects that can wear people down. That is why videos, memes, books and other discourse about “toxic people” often fall short of reality; they are too simplistic to reflect the complicated nature of human beings and our relationships with each other. The “toxic people” conversation is stunted and, consequently, can be stunting.

Shunning means stuck

Most of the time it would better—more fair-minded, more accurate, and less dualistic—for us to talk about toxic interactions or toxic dynamics or toxic behavior patterns or even toxic traits. When we frame things in terms of toxic people and proclaim the need to excise them as if they were cysts or tumors, we embrace a form of fatalism. We are saying that neither they nor we are capable of growing in ways that would allow us to obtain whatever potential goodness might be desired in that relationship. Sometimes that is true. But sometimes it is just giving ourselves an out.

Using the cut-off as an easy out is at odds with both the best of conservative thinking, with its emphasis on forgiveness, and progressive thinking, which emphasizes restorative justice. Earnest people, whether they are conservative or liberal, embrace compassion and the value of fresh starts and second chances—often even for those who have committed murder. They recognize that, mercifully, we all are more than a compilation of our worst moments or worst characteristics, and this opens up possibilities that can—often but not always—function as alternatives to shunning.

Internal vs external boundaries. 

When a person comes to therapy to sort out relationship problems, a good therapist (unlike many internet memes and advice videos) doesn’t start from the assumption that the client should get out of the relationship. Nor do they start from the assumption that the client should stay. The therapist’s job—by listening deeply, asking hard questions, and bringing to bear the experiences of other people—is to help the client listen to both their emotions and rational self, open up options, reduce internal and external obstacles, and clarify possible outcomes from different courses of action. When this process works well, people are freed up to live more in alignment with their values and goals.

Sometimes a client is able to prepare for courageous conversations that lead to another person seeing and changing noxious behavior. Sometimes a client is able to strengthen their own sense of self so that the other person’s behavior, even if unchanged, doesn’t get inside them in the same way. Either one of these can allow the client to get whatever goodness is available in that relationship without having to take in so much of the bad. When these two options fail or a person is simply too worn out to try them—or when the bad outweighs the good regardless—then, yes, the only course left may be to sever the relationship. But even then, after weighing the pros and cons of a tough marriage, for example, or a disrespectful boss, a person may decide to stay in a mixed-bag relationship for a short or long while for reasons that actually make sense.

Internet self-help advice often skips this whole process of inquiry and jumps straight to amputation, which is then celebrated. That can work to end whatever felt toxic, and it can feel like a triumph of healthy self-care. Sometimes it is. But because we ourselves and the people we banish are all social animals, as I said earlier, a cut-off comes at a cost that may be unnecessarily high when something less drastic might have worked.

Self-help or silent bullying. 

Another dimension of self-reflection that gets skipped when we look to the internet for advice—is the sometime-humbling exploration of our own motives and the awareness that we ourselves are capable of doing damage. Shunning does psychological harm, even to people who are powerful, even when we tell ourselves that we are punching up or that they deserve it. Remember, shunning is one of humanity’s most powerful tools for social control and punishment. It activates physical pain pathways. And we humans like inflicting pain as an act of vengeance. Revenge feels satisfying and righteous (even when it isn’t). So, it is worth asking ourselves: Would cutting off this person be an act of self-care or an act of getting-even or both? Am I engaged in a proportional response or an escalation? Am I actually taking the high ground or is this really just tit for tat?

Many of us, when we are centered in our better selves, are trying to reduce—not escalate—toxic behavior. We are trying to be the change we want to see, and that means ripple effects matter. What do I want for the other person and for my world? How do I balance that with self-care? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to questions like these, which is why memes and tweets and video clips or religious and social pat answers often offer little insight if what you are after is health and growth.

Beyond the binary. 

Family systems therapists call cut-offs “rupture” and in general, because the cost of rupture can be so high in the long run (not only for the person who is cut off but also for the person doing the cutting), they typically work with clients to explore other possibilities. “I’ve rarely just signed off on rupture,” says Seattle psychologist and author Laura Kastner. Kastner reminds clients there are alternatives to all-or-nothing relationships. She talks about concentric circles of closeness based on trust and warmth and mutual benefit. A young progressive might have an old Trump-loving second cousin in circle 15, choosing to see them only once or twice/year—and yet still feel like that connection is worth maintaining. One trick is learning to navigate the landmines, says Kastner. Which parts of the other person are you drawing out—those that let you connect in your common ground or the hot buttons that ignite the worst of your conflict? What do you do when they bait you? When might you need zipper lips? Not everything you think and feel has to be said for a relationship to be valid and worthwhile.

Diplomats and conflict negotiators know that to find shared interests they have to stay away from certain topics. Our most intimate relationships, built on love and trust and mutual enjoyment are particularly precious. They are our inner circle. But by maintaining relationships with people in those outer circles, relationships with healthy internal and external boundaries, we build “social capital” and resilience in ourselves, the people around us, and our communities.

Valerie Tarico
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. 
She writes about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society.

Shun, Exclude, Expel, Ostracize, Exile 🗡 The Power of Silence and Separation 🗡 And Staying Engaged