BijouBlog

It's not porn (not really a strange addiction), and it's not my strange addiction. What is it? The series My Strange Addiction on the The Learning Channel. Everyone seems to be baring privates, or in this case, mostly eating publicly what they are doing privately, on TV these days, but what I find most fascinating is the eating. Yes, people addicted to eating objects one would not consider to be food. And we aren't talking about the sexual fetishes of eating/drinking piss/cum and the like that often appear in porn movies, though, recently, the show featured a woman addicted to drinking her own urine, which sometimes tasted "lemony" (she claimed it was a type of holistic therapy for cancer).

Here's the rundown on the eating strange objects episodes, and of course you can obtain more information about these episodes on-line  (http://.howstuffworks.com/tv/my-strange-addiction) : eating toilet paper; eating chalk; eating the insides of couch cushions; eating laundry detergent; eating household cleanser; eating glass; and eating cigarette ashes. Sounds gross, revolting, and other adjectives that mean approximately the same? Perhaps so, but perhaps not that unusual, in many cases.

What's disturbing, in my view, is that many of these addicts are socially, psychologically, and economically marginalized, such as minority women or gay men, many of whom have suffered serious traumas. For example, Crystal has been eating household cleanser everyday since she was twelve; her shame, embarrassment and concern for her health have caused her to keep this a secret. She said in a later interview that she thought she was "cleaning herself out" after suffering physical and sexual abuse as a child. Adele, an African-American woman, suffers from Pica, a disorder found most commonly in toddlers and pregnant women who lack certain nutrients, causing them to crave non-nutritive substances like chalk, coins, batteries and even dirt. Sometimes this addiction is caused by stress, and Adele admits her first time happened during a very emotional period in her life, when her parents were on the brink of divorce.

Not that these addictions are solely, or ultimately, class-based cause or effect, but where are the wealthy white upper middle-class men in this scenario (the ones who still hold the power)? Perhaps they can't come out with these types of issues because of their position in the society, or they have recourse to private (and expensive) psychological assistance, or they haven't experienced the level of trauma these women have suffered (including never having experienced hunger, forgive my self-righteousness). There's also perhaps the stigma, at least in certain social strata, of divulging such private matters in any public media, much less the specific "trashy" association of appearing on reality TV.

Or, more significantly, perhaps the powerful suffer from an addiction based on power (harming others), rather than powerlessness (harming one's self). I'm thinking of Larry Craig and his bathroom escapades, or, more overtly, Bernie Madoff and his colossal ponzi scheme. Note that Craig and Madoff were involuntarily outed; Adele and the others like her voluntarily submitted their addictive behaviors to the scrutiny of the public.

The key to a possible cure in many cases of addiction that are ultimately psychological (rather than organic) is moderation, founded on a respect for the self, integrated with a respect for others, a concept that proves elusive in a culture of narcissism. Everyone wants to be a celebrity; everyone wants, and attempts to imitate, the power and fame associated with such celebrity. And it's so easy to do so.

I'm concerned that someone on youtube is already eating poisonous couch cushions for their celebrity moment. I'm even more concerned that Madoff-like schemes, like the recent "Diamond Bar PTA mom" ponzi scheme in California, continue to devastate the livelihoods, and hopes, of many Americans.

On the Television Without Pity online forum, comments about the A & E candid reality show Hoarders have reached page 941. Comic Kathy Lee Griffin was upset that someone tweeted, in her name, her love for Hoarders. She does like the show. But she also supposedly was accused of making fun of the hoarders and thus the mentally ill in one of her comedy routines. What's all this hype about Hoarders/hoaders? Or, rather, why are we obsessed with seeing others who are pathologically obsessed with stuff?

I don't want to blame this hype, nor the mental illness which is now, if I may be cynical, the current mental illness in vogue, on the easy access to material goods, resulting in rampant consumerism, which easily feeds into the disorder. That's too easy an explanation, but some of the hoarders on the show seem to spend much of their time watching and ordering from QVC or hanging about thrift stores, garage sales, or Dollar General. One woman on the show showed her unopened boxes of items bought from practically every home shopping network on the planet. Scary.

Is the explanation for the hoarders' behavior thus more psychological? The presence of “licensed clinical psychologists” to help the hoarders on the show would thus seems to be a given. For example, in many of the show's cases, the hoarding seems to be the byproduct of some kind of unresolved post-traumatic stress disorder. I remember one specifically hat involved unresolved issues about 9/11. In another really sad case, the hoarder, who specialized in food hoarding, had been physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by her now dead ex-husband. She also fed her daughter bizarre dishes like mealworm cookies and chicken hearts pie. Shades of Baby Jane and her infamous fried rat?

Some of the more extreme cases seem to go beyond the frightening colossal disorganization or mounds of clutter (which one might see on shows like Clean House), but to those types of “garbage” houses that occasionally appear as human interest stories on the news, dwellings filled with adult diapers, dead cats, and refrigerators filled with rotting food. In one case in Louisiana, the amount of waste took on apocalyptic proportions. Think decaying heaps of what's left of civilization in a dystopian Mad Max scenario. A follow-up visit showed no improvement. The woman could not explain why she couldn't throw anything out. Literally, anything.

I've given you but a taste of a couple of the more horrific cases. I'll spare you the frankly unwatchable and exploitative animal hoarding cases. But I haven't really answered my most significant question. Why do we watch, other than the usual pull many audiences feel toward reality TV show drama, with its own scripted or semi-scripted climactic and anti-climactic moves, such as “here comes the meltdown”? What is the fascination with Hoarders' often indescribable decay and horror? Is the fascination akin to watching some type of horror movie, except the horror is real, in fact, mundane, which makes it more horrific? The horror of heaps of adult diapers swarming with mouse droppings. The horror of three rooms filled with nothing but the heads of dolls.

Possibly, but I do wonder if this fascination with heaps of stuff has something to do with our fascination with multiplicity in all its forms and functions. I'm not just talking, literally, about our easy access to tons of stuff and our equally easy generation of tons of garbage. Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power proposes a type of crowd that he claims “modern society” no longer believes in: the invisible crowd. According to Canetti, cultures such as the Greeks, the Norse, and the medieval Christians believed in supernatural invisible crowds such as crowds of ghosts, demons, dead warriors, and saints. The invisible world was densely populated. A multitude of angels could dance on the head of a pin. Once people cease to literally believe in such crowds, scientists discovered other invisible, but natural, crowds through the microscope, such as atoms, bacteria, and all those multitudes of sperm that come out in cum (hence the connection with gay porn). In the case of the hoards, which also resemble Canetti's key images of heaps of the war dead (like the waste heaps of the hoarders) and also heaps of abundant crops, do we once again see something like the more hellish invisible crowds made visible?

And one could even argue that invisible crowds have resurfaced in the flash mobs of the Internet, friends made on social networking sites, all those infinite bytes and kilobytes and megabytes, and their visible manifestation in another type of hoarding, digital hoarding. On Hoarders, Beverly tapes every show she ever watched on television. When VHS became obsolete, she switched to DVD. Her granddaughter is now convincing her to start digitizing all those, as her grandson sarcastically said, Phil Donahue Shows from 1982.

I'm not going to end with the “go clean out your closet” directive, which on boards discussing the show, seems to be the usual reaction to the show. Rather, the show makes me think about how it's remarkably easy to become overwhelmed on all psychosocial fronts, paradoxically, in a society that prides itself on material ease and technical efficiency. Hoarders and hoarding seems to be a most disturbing and visible manifestation of an extreme disorder which can so easily destroy our order like the invisible bacilli of the plague.

It's as if the invisible crowds of Canetti have turned on us. And now we can see the visible results in those hoards.