Feature Articles From The Current Issue
The Fear of Spiders: Through the Eyes of an Arachnophobia Sufferer
By Salima Virani
George Pantazis looking quite calm and collected, so long as a spider isn't in the room that is.
For as long as he can remember, George Pantazis has been afraid of spiders. Not just one specific kind, but all of them. Pantazis, 22, was diagnosed with arachnophobia at the age of nine.
“Writing that word, saying it or even thinking it [spider] still gives me chills that run up and down my spine,” explains Pantazis. “To this day.”
His parents bought him a new book and he was excited to read it. Much to Pantazis’s dismay, the book had a large tarantula on the cover and was about spiders. Pantazis had to immediately throw it away. Even though his parents were trying to help him get over his fear, Pantazis says it made him even more terrified of the creepy crawlers.
According to Dr. Donna Ferguson, phobia specialist, the fear of spiders can happen at any age and is usually triggered by a specific traumatic event involving spiders.
She says exposing the individual to the fear right away is called this shock treatment or “flooding”. It should be a very gradual process, especially at such a young age, Ferguson says.
“I do not recommend flooding, but instead developing a hierarchy in which they could step by step overcome their fear,” Ferguson says.
Pantazis’s parents were sure he would grow out of this phobia, but it only got worse. Not only had it been affecting him inside the privacy of his own home where he was sheltered and no one knew; in 2006 he had an encounter with a spider in a social context in Toronto.
Pantazis, who is now 22, has to face his fear head on at a New Year’s Eve party. He was with a few of his friends in a basement where he had his arms around a girl he liked. Everyone was engaged in conversation – talking, laughing and having a good time, until the girl he was with let out a soft scream and pointed to the spider on the wall.
“The thing was smaller than my fingernail, but to my eyes it looked like it had the capacity to eat all of us in a single bite.” He said. “The worst of it was that she and I were closest to it and the girl was looking at me expectedly.”
Pantazis was terrified. He just couldn’t kill it, let alone bear to look at the creature. His body tensed, his eyes felt wide, unblinking and panic-stricken. What was he going to do?
“I tried to keep my composure and play it cool, but inside I was wishing upon it all manner of torture – a tiny guillotine slicing of its legs was just one such imagined torture,” he said.
The girl and Pantazis got into an argument as he simply couldn’t bring himself to kill the spider.
“Then there was a hard slap against the wall. My brother who was at the party also, managed to kill the creature – much to my relief,” he said.
After that, the girl left to get a drink and never returned to take her original seat next to Pantazis. He thought he had played it cool, but for the rest of the night couldn’t even manage to look at the four walls in fear of a creepy crawly spider.
George never told his friends about his arachnophobia, until about a month ago, in mid-October. He decided to confide in a close friend who used his fear against him.
“He played a trick on me involving a plastic spider on our way to a party. He put one on the windshield of the car, and when I came out and saw it I jumped and screamed,” he said cringing.
According to Pantazis, his friend was rather amused and later on would play similar tricks on him – Pantazis admits he fell for it every time.
His family even started to worry that Pantazis would not get over his fear of spiders and it could impact him negatively in the future.
“If we are being honest, then yes, it is quite fun freaking my brother out with fake spiders. I mean what guy do you know that’s afraid of spiders,” George’s brother Theo says with a chuckle. “It’s funny and can be quite entertaining!”
Doctors like Ferguson say, arachnophobics sometimes become stay at homes.
“Many people avoid going out altogether in fear they will come across a spider and this will embarrass them,” Dr. Ferguson said.
Pantazis, who currently resides in Toronto and is an English major at York University, is afraid his fear will worsen and it will never be cured.
“I don’t want to be married and have my wife see me as any less of a man because of my fear of those creatures,” he said.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Stupid, gay… what's the difference?
By Patrick Clarke
“That's so gay!”
“That's so stupid!”
For Sandra Cunningham, 20, these statements are interchangeable. The Somalian-Canadian is a third-year student at the University of Toronto where she studies Political Science.
“‘That’s so gay’ is just another way of saying something is stupid,” Cunningham says. “It is a nicer way of saying it.
Cunningham says she started using the phrase about three years ago because all her friends, both straight and gay, were using it. She sees it in magazines and hears it on the radio and television. She does not see a problem with it because of its popularity within the media.
“To anyone who thinks that 'That's so gay' is a perfectly harmless, neutral expression, all I can say is 'Give me a break',” says Dr. Ron Smyth, a linguistics and psychology professor at the University of Toronto. “It is a very clear and overt way of being homophobic. Just how stupid do people think gay people are? How could we not be offended?”
There are people, like Cunningham, who have adapted quite comfortably to this meaning of the word gay, then there are others who are repulsed by.
“It sort of belittles [gay] people because when you say [That's so gay], essentially what you are saying is that the word gay means stupid,” says Lasith Malinga*, 23. “Gay does not equal stupid. Even if you don't mean it, that's what you're saying. It is demeaning and shows lack of an educated mind.”
Malinga says he is gay, but not completely out of the closet. He comes from a Catholic family that has little tolerance for homosexuality. Only his mother and a few close friends are aware of his sexuality. He discusses it with no one else because he fears being ostracized.
Studying at the University of Toronto at Scarborough causes Malinga to be even more fearful about coming out. He finds very little support on campus where he studies English. In March of 2008, bulletin boards with postings from the Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered and Queer Student Club were burned and the glass casing smashed. Malinga says he plans to fully reveal his sexuality when he feels the time is right.
The thin young man is about five foot five with carefully styled black hair that gives him an extra inch or two. Some of his friends compare him to Sanjaya Malakar who competed in Season 6 of the popular reality TV show, American Idol. Malakar became popular for his fancy hairstyles.
Malinga’s family first moved to Canada in 1986 from Malaysia. Malinga first heard the offensive phrase, ‘That’s so gay’, in high school, in 2001.
“I was first taken aback because I mistook what they [schoolmates] meant,” Malinga says. “Now, I simply feel that those types of phrases are indicators of immaturity and lack of respect. I feel it helps to promote an unconscious resentment to anything non-heterosexual.”
Sara Resler, 24, and Kate Spain, 18, were so fed up with people using the expression to describe something stupid that they came together to help create and monitor a Facebook group called The word ‘gay’ is not a synonym for ‘stupid’. It has 120, 895 members and growing. Resler is a college student in Spain and Spain is a high school student in Toronto, Canada, but the far-reaching effects of a derogatory phrase have brought them together on Facebook because of a common goal.
“The goal of the group is to make people aware that what they're saying is offensive and hurtful to some people,” Resler says. “It's working because there are a lot of people who come in here and tell us that they've stopped saying it, or that they didn't know it was offensive.”
Spain says she uses humour to get her message across.
“I start off by saying something like, ‘Really? Your shirt is gay? To be honest, I didn't even know it had reproductive organs, let alone a sexual orientation.’ The people who say ‘That's not what I mean’ do get what I mean.”
A lot has been said about the different meanings of the word gay.
“The slang meaning of gay meaning ‘queer’ had a tough time entering the language, and the ‘stupid’ meaning is also meeting with resistance,” Smyth says. “The word gay played upon its earlier meaning of ‘happy’, expressing pride in the fact that being gay, like being straight, can be a joyful existence. Those who would prefer to suppress queers and deny us human rights weren't too pleased.”
*(Lasith Malinga is a fictional name used to conceal the source's identity as requested.)
