Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Did Holopac change everything?, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
er, should be - apparition (in a coupla places...)
Gah. And in the first paragraph too ...
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Megan Wegan,
But, two things. Firstly, that doesn’t mean any individual woman has a personal responsibility to dismantle the patriarchy using her own pubic hair grooming regimen. And second, that makes Bart’s point about teaching teenagers about their bodies all the more important.
Complicated situation: I had a conversation with a woman who does get Brazilians, because she likes it, it feels nice to her, especially during sex. She gets irritated by Caitlin Moran's edicts on the topic. But she's a mum -- and she doesn't want her daughter thinking that there's something wrong with the way she looks, or that waxing is the only choice.
Come on down, Amanda Palmer:
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Why is she the Queen of What’s OK To Do With Your Pubic Hair?
This was the gist of my argument. It tends to extend to not just telling women what they're allowed to do with their pubes, but guilt-tripping those who don't obey.
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Hard News: Did Holopac change everything?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Then it’ll get cheaper, so maybe in 20 years we’ll have desktop photo-realistic CGI – just make storyboards and the computer will do the rest. With a library of the world’s living and dead actors.
Or people who have never lived. The first big-stage trial of this technology was the “performance” by the Gorillaz – a cartoon band – at the MTV Europe Awards. It’s not hard to imagine amazing collaborations in the same vein, and not just in porn.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Jackie Clark,
You and I will have to disagree on this one. I know people who vehemently believe he did it. It’s one of those things where everyone has an opinion.
But it's not just a matter of opinion. It's a matter of record that the investigation breached good and ethical practice at almost every turn -- right up to Colin Eade's sexual encounters with various women involved in the case . The Wikipedia article provides a reasonable summary. See also the article on Day-care sex-abuse hysteria, which lists a string of similar controversies around the world over the same period.
Those children were abused alright -- by people in the system who have never properly been called to account. The VUW psychologist Marianne Geary has a great presentation about the creation of memories through the kind of practices they used. They are the reason there are young people walking around today believing they were sexually abused at the creche.
The sad thing is that there were other victims too. A friend's two children in Auckland were almost undoubtedly abused by a neighbour -- they even wound up with STDs. But by that time the police were so gun-shy they declined to bring charges.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Lilith __,
It wasn’t some kind of sublimation, it was just a really fun shared activity.
I've never done it (I suspect I'd lack the skill), but like a few of us here, I've experienced the sheer, transcendent joy of a Friday night dancefloor.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Lilith __,
Peter Ellis.
Gah. I could not even see that. Ta.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to HORansome,
Whilst I’ll agree that the Bain case is of a similar mould, I’ve never been convinced of the innocence of Scott Watson (although I know a few people whose intellect I respect who have their doubts).
I thought Bain was possibly fortunate to be acquitted at retrial, but I have my doubts about Watson’s conviction.
The outstanding modern example has to be Peter Ellis and the Christchurch creche case, though. There were so many things wrong with the police practice there – they withheld evidence that didn’t suit their case, over-reached and eventually had to drop charges against the other creche workers, repeatedly interviewed children till they got the answers they wanted …
And then there was this:
The investigating detective, Colin Eade, had had sexual relationships with two of the mothers after the trial and had propositioned another during the course of the investigation. He also had had a sexual relationship with one of the evidential interviewers after the trial. The mother whom he propositioned subsequently withdrew her child, the first to make a formal disclosure of abuse, from the inquiry. In 1994 Eade left the police suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.[15] Colin Eade said in the television documentary that he wouldn’t be surprised if all the complainants hadn’t recanted at some stage of the investigation.
This is the senior cop on the investigation, mind.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Tim Michie,
Ae. Not this was a marker in the sand but it was a very public case of the courts passing the reasonable doubt test (finally) instead of accepting the Police case as default guilty.
That sad thing is, it wasn’t the courts. It was a politically-ordered Royal Commission.
As I said in the post, Robert Taylor’s hard-nosed cross-examinations make great reading. He wasn’t afraid to kick some arse in the report either – it tears strips off the Crown’s scientific witness, Dr Donald Nelson, too.
I doubt that a New Zealand jurist would, or even could, have done what he did at that time.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
I made the mistake on Saturday night of proposing that Caitlin Moran might not be completely right about everything in the whole world.
Do you need a hug, darling?
I beat a diplomatic retreat when I realised what I'd done. Was outnumbered.