Funhouse World

A decade ago, there was an article about a father who doped his young son so the kid could win inline skating competitions. That story came up in the context of performance enhancing drug distribution rings in the US that were being busted, as well as Tour de France doping. It was apparent that the illicit market for performance enhancing drugs was substantially larger than that for their legitimate medical uses.

Today, of course, media celebrates parents who do what East German coaches did to athletes back in the 1980s and start dosing their pre-teen kids with testosterone or estrogen and put them on a course that will require lifelong treatments that cost hundreds of dollars a pop. Media appeals to the narcissism of parents and their children and gives them a way to escape the humdrum normalcy of their actual day to day life by going to a doctor and taking an injection.

There are a million and one ways for parents, even well meaning parents, to FUBAR their children and there are many industries who happily wreck children's lives in various ways while making the opposite claims about their intentions. Are pharmaceutical corporations any different in kind or degree than other industries? Not really. Actually one of the great disservices of fiction, TV/movies is to depict evil corporate heads as really slick and fancy-pants, and implicitly rare, rather than common and banal.

When this mania passes, either because this market saturates, or harmful side effects of frequent hormone use become obvious, how many parents and grown children will regret their choice as they step out of the mania-decision-making context into the harsh light of day?

One of the great tropes of sci-fi and horror movies is the Fun House that's actually an entrance to a slaughterhouse. What an apt metaphor for this world of lies!