John Chisholm, the head of the MIT Alumni Association, and author of Unleash Your Inner Company
In my mid-thirties, I accepted the fact that I’m gay. Many folks don’t see that as an asset. I disagree. It has been an asset for me in at least five ways:
• People routinely assume that others are attracted to the opposite sex. I have long known—definitely—that those assumptions can be wrong. Being gay has thus made me more willing to challenge routine assumptions and the status quo, making me a better entrepreneur.
• Being gay has sensitized me to the discrimination faced by women, blacks, and other minorities (not to mention gays themselves).
• It wasn’t socially acceptable to be openly gay when I was growing up, so at least some and possibly much of the time and energy that I would otherwise have put into dating, I put into school, sports, and career instead. Today, I tremendously enjoy the benefits of that early investment.
• By being openly gay today, others recognize that I’m comfortable with and don’t try to hide who I am, which builds trust between us.
• More broadly, being openly gay signals that I am confident enough in myself that it doesn’t matter to me whether or not people know that I’m gay.Similarly, if you genuinely cannot change some aspect of yourself—height, ethnicity, accent, childhood, or that you or one of your parents were incarcerated—find a way to view it as an asset. Please set your bar very high. If you would like to change something about yourself that you indeed can change—you smoke, are overweight, or haven’t finished a degree—please don’t use this as an excuse not to make the change.
But if it is genuinely out of your control, finding a way to view it as a strength will be hugely liberating and empowering for you and it will become one of your assets, as it was and has for me.
(Chisholm posted this quote from the book as his Facebook status for National Coming Out Day.)
There are some other big benefits. It is much easier to find sex partners. Gays can place online ads saying exactly what sexual experiences they want, and find someone wanting the same thing. Heteros are nearly always dealing with the man and woman wanting somewhat different things out of the relationship.
“at least some and possibly much of the time and energy that I would otherwise have put into dating, I put into school, sports, and career instead.”
I get the impression this is common for MIT students of whatever orientation, possibly excepting sports.
“Similarly, if you genuinely cannot change some aspect of yourself—height, ethnicity, accent, childhood, or that you or one of your parents were incarcerated—find a way to view it as an asset. … If you would like to change something about yourself that you indeed can change—you … are overweight … —please don’t use this as an excuse not to make the change.”
How unfortunate. Many a feminist will now rightly denounce Chisholm, a patriarchal (MIT) advocate of hatred of women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_acceptance_movement
Tom, the key is that Chisholm says “*if* you would like to change something” — so people who are happy being overweight are not who his message is intended to.
That being said, I get that your comment is a jab towards some extreme feminists’ excesses with regards to blaming everything on the patriarchy. Even Chisholm’s comment could be taken out of context by such an extreme feminist.
But Murali, he’s saying they can lose weight if they just don’t make an excuse for not doing it. Completely insensitive.
(I suppose it would be easy to confirm this with the simple sociological experiment of proposing and defending this thesis in the appropriate company. I would however like to ask that it be replicated at several institutions of higher learning though, for starters perhaps MIT and Harvard. Some brave soul should attempt Berkeley too.)