Cover Photo: Brit-knee/flickr
Brit-knee/flickr

Emetophobia and Why Purity Culture Won’t Save Us

There is a belief that healthy lives are rewards for correct behavior, and illness and death are earned through insufficient devotion.

Protect me. Help me beat this. I’ll be so good.

Did I drink that wine too fast? Is that a stitch in my side? Am I sure that chicken breast was completely cooked? Oh no! I’ve chosen the worst possible airplane seat for turbulence and there is no airsickness bag within reach and . . . WHY CAN’T I SWALLOW???

almost

I don’t believe in you,

Left Behind

On Immunity

Lives are at stake! Repent, get clean, get wholesome—save yourself!

us—

Did we who live ‘fight’ harder than those who’ve died? Can we claim to be ‘braver,’ better, people than the dead? And why is there no room in this cult for some gracious acceptance of death, when the time comes, which it surely will, through cancer or some other misfortune?

Vomiting is just a reflex,It cannot be controlled, and we are learning to accept that.

yes, and what of me now?

just one,

The most onerous forms of necessity, the struggle for food, against disease, always by means of hard labor, have been overcome. It might have been naïve to think the new human freedom would push us towards a society of public pursuits, like Periclean Athens, or of simple delight in what exists, as in Eden.

Times

It will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher healthcare costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives. They’re healthy; they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.

I have led a good life, I have ‘done the things’ in the ‘right way.’So how the fuck did I get here

Kate Shannon Jenkins is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her work has been published by NewYorker.com, LA Review of Books, Guernica, The Atlantic, and others.