Until the other day, I had no idea who Demi Lovato was.  Being 51 years old with no children, she is simply not on my generational radar.  We do however, both have something substantial in common.  We both suffer from the eating disorder Bulimia.  Most people have a sense of what Bulima is about.  You stuff your face and then puke it up minutes after.  Some people also use Laxatives. Most however, have no concept of the destructive nature of the disease.  The reason is that very few people come out publicly with their struggles.

It is terrible for Demi or any person to go through such as daily destructive self-image battle but if there is an upside, when someone  in the media eye, like Demi, has the courage to go public with her struggles, it puts the spotlight on a disease that is often suffered in shame and silence, much like I dealt with it when I was her age.   In reading an interview she gave on the subject,  she said something that resonated with me.

“ don’t think there’s going to be a day when I don’t think about food or my body,

That is the truest, most revealing and concise statement of the disease that anyone could make.  Bulimia  is a daily war with food and body self image.

I went through a three year brutal battle with active bulimia while a student at Penn State University.   If you think that it is a disease under-reported by men in the 21st century  try being a 18 year old male bulimia sufferer on a college campus of Forty-Thousand in 1981.

Treatment for an eating disorder is for the most part not going to be anything a male 18 year old freshman college student contemplates. I was not about to ask for medical or other help.  I did not even tell my family.  I would not have even known what to tell them. I had no idea what Bulimia was. The binge-purge cycle was simply a “normal” part of my life like getting up and going to bed  I went through daily emotional battles within myself.  There is the overwhelming feeling of shame.  I would have rather told my family I wanted a sex change than I was throwing up after every meal.  You have no context for understanding what you are going through.  You believe that once  you are thin enough to have reached your goal all your social problems will be solved.  Unfortunately the mirror tells you that you are never thin enough.

There is no doubt that in the hot-bod, infinite image explosion,  G-Q generation we live in, men have become more  aggressive in trying to emulate the male model types they see in various types of media.  I never saw it that way.  In the pre-MTV and Directv world of my college days, you were simply not exposed to those types of images to any significant degree.  I equated being thinner with being more accepted and popular.  I was not comparing myself to television and other media images.  I was comparing myself to the people I saw around me on a daily basis.  My perception going through high school was that there were no fat popular kids.  I  was not a model.  I was just your average fat kid trying to fit in and wanting to be popular like the thin kids seemed to be.  I wanted that life.  I wanted any life but mine.  In order to help my weight along I decided to get into long distance running.  I eventually worked my way up to running  10 -20 miles a day, 7 days a week.  I would run 10 in the morning and the same in the evening. I was always training for one marathon or another. When the day was over I scarf down a 2lb bag of peanut M&Ms.  I would then head straight to my next best friend, the toilet, to puke it all up.  This behavior was repeated with pizza, fast food etc. There were days that between not eating, puking after I ate and running long distances I was too dehydrated and weak to even get out of bed.  No matter how much weight I lost or how thin I became I always saw the same person in the mirror.  It was some beastly kid who still needed to drop a few lbs that had no friends.

In the span of one year I went from 230 lbs to 165 lbs at 6’2.  As appealing as that may seem to some, it was a brutal, almost deadly ride that I would not wish on my worst enemy. In my mind being thinner  was the only possible route to social acceptance.  I was not trying to reach some unattainable model goal, I was simply trying to fit in.  The problem is that regardless of why you think you need to either starve yourself or binge and purge the reflection in the mirror never ever changes until you are dead.  About 10 percent of those suffering from Bulimia will ultimately die from the disease.

While the manifestation of the disease is many years behind me, as Demi stated, the issues of self image are a daily battle that never goes away.  You simply learn constructive ways to channel them. Sometimes they are not so constructive.  My self-image battle has also involved exercise anorexia, drug and steroid addiction.  It is a daily, life-long struggle for balance.  A perfect example is that even today,  I have difficulty looking at myself naked in the mirror and accurately evaluating what I see. Good for Demi for raising awareness of the struggle.

Like most people who are very active on Twitter and know people in the social media world, I was saddened to learn of the death of Trey Pennington.  Trey apparently committed suicide.  The outpouring of sympathy on twitter was forceful and touching.  From reading the tweets of those who seemed to know him to various extents, Trey suffered from depression.  Anyone who follows my blog knows that I suffer from depression and that I came close to Trey’s fate but for the intervention of people who cared.  Not only cared but were on the ground, IN REAL LIFE, able to actually see the changes in my behavior and react quickly.

That said, and with proviso that  I am talking in generalities, knowing absolutely nothing about Trey’s personal life and struggles, it was distressing to see a mentality of surprise and “if I had only called or tweeted”  Why the surprise?  Because he did not tweet he was depressed?  He did not tweet he was going to commit suicide? He did not post it on his blog?  He did not call up any of his “twitter-friends” or other social media buds to talk?   People on the brink and truly going to end their lives generally do not announce it.  I did not explicitly announce it or ask for help. People broke down my door and took the 45 automatic off my nightstand.  Exchanging links and being ” good social media buds” is not going to give  anyone the insight to help.  The only true help comes from people on the ground, in that person’s life on a day to day basis.  They see the changes in behavior and only they are in a position to intervene.   A tweet that all is going to be ok or a “how you doing phone” call is not intervention. That is guilt relieving.

There are a lot of Trey’s  out there.  Help the ones you can really help with “in-force” action, not “how ya doing”  tweets, phone calls and  Facebook messages.  100k Twitter friends are not going to save anyone.  Real friends can.

As this is Holocaust Remembrance Week, I am re-posting an open letter I wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg concerning the presence of Holocaust Denial groups on the Facebook Site.   The letter received quite a bit of attention. Unfortunately, not much has changed at Facebook in terms of transparency.  How they define and administer what they determine “hateful content” under their Terms Of Service is shrouded in secrecy.   A non-transparent, subjective and arbitrary process.  Please keep in mind that this is not a 1st Amendment issue.   Facebook is a private company.  Facebook has rules. Those rules prohibit the posting of “hateful” content.   Holocaust Denial is anti-Semitic.  Antisemitism is hateful.   It does not stop there.  You can find content hateful towards Muslims, Gays, Hispanics etc. on the site.

May 10, 2009

Mark:

The last 7 days have seen much debate on the issue of Holocaust Denial Groups on Facebook.  There has been a lot of focus on the issues of free speech, open discussion of controversial issues and Facebook Terms Of Service(TOS).

While I have made it clear that I would like to see these groups removed, I have done a poor job in articulating why. I attempted to take a short-sighted, back door “lawyer’s approach” with Facebook by alleging that Holocaust Denial was illegal in other countries and, therefore, a violation of Facebook TOS.  While at the time, these were legitimate issues, I should have focused on the real issue.  The issue of the proliferation of Facebook groups that promote hatred of religious and ethnics groups and the hate speech those groups perpetrate. While you may have your doubts, I submit that this includes those who promote the fringe revisionist theory of Holocaust Denial.

The Holocaust Denial movement  is nothing more than a pretext to allow the preaching of hatred against Jews and to recruit other like minded individuals to do the same.  Allowing these groups to flourish on Facebook under the guise of “open discussion”  does nothing more than help spread their  message of hate.  Is this the kind of open discussion that Facebook wants to encourage?  Is this really where you want to draw your line?

It is undisputed that as a collective , Holocaust Deniers are overwhelmingly antisemitic.  One cannot be separated from the other.   They use a fringe, discredited historical theory as a pretext and rallying point to perpetrate and promote their message of hate using Facebook as  recruiting ground.   By allowing these groups whether they number 1 or 1000, Facebook is not promoting open discussion of  a controversial issue.  It is  promoting and encouraging hatred towards ethnic and religious groups, nothing more.

By claiming open discussion as the rationale for allowing these groups to exist, Facebook is playing games with semantics.  Facebook is taking form over substance to protect their imaginary subjective corporate line in the sand they have drawn.

If Facebook is serious about encouraging open discourse on controversial subjects,  let’s start with Facebook itself.  Let’s talk about the controversial decision to allow Holocaust Denial groups.  Let’s talk about transparency.  Sending out canned email answers or spouting canned corporate-speak in an interview is not transparent.  I would like to see transparency on the specifics of how Facebook went about arriving at this controversial decision.  I would like you to address the following questions:

In a CNN interview,   Facebook representative Barry Schnitt stated:

“It’s a difficult decision to make. We have a lot of internal debate and we bring in experts to talk about it,” Schnitt said. “Just being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook. We want it [the site] to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones.”

Mark, I would like to know who at Facebook was involved in the “internal debate”  that resulted in the decision that Holocaust Denial does not constitute hate speech.  Were you involved?  Do you offer any input in these types of discussions?  How does Facebook define “internal debate”? How many people were involved?  What was their expertise to discuss this issue?  Did they bring their personal beliefs to the table?   What safeguards were employed to ensure objectivity in a decision that is innately subjective?  Were attorneys consulted that have experience in such matters or was it general counsel?  Do you agree that something can be legal but still constitute hate speech?  Was the final decision yours?  Did the buck stop with you?

I would also like to know what experts were consulted on this issue.  Were any Holocaust Denial experts consulted?  Were any experts on antisemitism consulted?   Were any hate speech experts in general  consulted?  If so, I would appreciate it if you would identify these experts spoken of by Barry Schnitt in his CNN interview.

Finally, Mark, in an interview for the CNET blog “Technically Incorrect”, Barry Schnitt stated:

“One thing to consider that someone actually mentioned in the thread was the idea that there may be a benefit to having these ideas discussed in the open. Would we rather Holocaust denial was discussed behind closed doors or quietly propagated by anonymous sources? Or would we rather it was discussed in the open on Facebook where people’s real names and their photo is associated with it for their friends, peers, and colleagues to see?”

Is this an official corporate statement from Facebook on how Holocaust Denial should be addressed in society?  What kind of open discussion was Mr. Schnitt talking about?   How was he defining  “open discussion”?  How does Facebook define “open discussion”?  What experts did Facebook consult in coming to the conclusion that “open discussion” was the most appropriate way to deal with this subject?   Are you aware of the Jewish/Holocaust historical significance of such a statement Mark?   I sent an email to Facebook asking for clarification of his statement but received no response other than the canned ,”we received your email”.

Mark, I hope you will take the time to respond to these important questions and issues, not just with regards to the Holocaust Denial issue, but with regards to transparency in how Facebook subjectively comes to these types of decisions in general.

Sincerely

Brian Cuban

©2009 Brian Cuban