Learning to my surprise that “dragon’s blood” was not a novelty scent made up for head shop incense sticks in 1972, but an actual exotic resin known since ancient times
“China produces more rainbow flags than anyone. My nightmare is there is a factory with nearly slave labor, forced to live within the factory complex and get up every morning and have to churn out more and more rainbow tchotchkes.” He says he didn’t create the rainbow flag in order for others to profit off of “rainbow junk”.
He is horrified by some of the things he has seen. He says, “Walking down Castro Street, I can’t pay my rent, but I see rainbow dildos in the shop windows and rainbow keychains, rainbow rings, rainbow candles and so on.” He said it is similar to when the best music ends up as elevator music. He is gratified that the power of the rainbow caught on as rings, but that power can be diluted by over-commercialization.”
“As a significant “feminised” category of mental illness, however, HPD
was superseded in the DSM-III by the introduction of the controversial BPD, a label which has been increasingly applied to women, with around 75 per cent of all cases estimated to be female (Becker 1997 : xxii–xxiii). Seen as a milder form of schizophrenia and lying on the “borderline” between neuroses and psychoses, the concept has been used in psychiatry since 1938 (Decker 2013 : 196). Like other personality disorders, BPD has a notoriously low reliability level even by the generally poor standards of the DSM, and even within the profession is considered by many as yet another “wastebasket” category (though as Bourne ( 2011 : 76) ruefully remarks, the ambiguity of such personality disorders makes them particularly useful in policing deviance in the new century). One member of the DSM-III task force stated at the time of constructing BPD that “in my opinion, the borderline syndrome stands for everything that is wrong with psychiatry [and] the category should be eliminated” (cited in Decker 2013 :199). The chair of the task force, Robert Spitzer, admitted with the publication of DSM-III that BPD was only included in the manual due to pressures from psychoanalytically oriented clinicians who found it useful in their practices (Spitzer 1980 : 31–32). Such practices have been documented by Luhrmann ( 2000 : 113) who describes psychiatrists’ typical view of the BPD patient as “an angry, difficult woman—almost always a woman—given to intense, unstable relationships and a tendency to make suicide attempts as a call for help.” Bearing significant similarities to the feelings of nineteenth century psychiatrists towards hysterics, Luhrmann’s ( 2000 : 115) study reveals psychiatrists’ revulsion of those they label with a personality disorder: they are “patients you don’t like, don’t trust, don’t want … One of the reasons you dislike them is an expungable sense that they are morally at fault because they choose to be different.” Becker ( 1997 : xv) reinforces this general view of the BPD label when she states that “[t]here is no other diagnosis currently in use that has the intense pejorative connotations that have been attached to the borderline personality disorder diagnosis.” A bitter irony for those labelled with BPD is that many are known to have experienced sexual abuse in childhood (Ussher 2011 : 81), something they share in common with many of those Freud labelled as hysterical a century earlier; a psychiatric pattern of depoliticising sexual abuse by ignoring the (usually) male perpetrator, and instead pathologising the survival mechanisms of the victim as abnormal”
