Posts by dyan campbell
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Michael Fitzgerald wrote:
You have acknowledge the slogan "All men are Rapists" is wrong,(still held onto by Deborah) but then excuse it . The excesses of these campaigns have led to murder (Gaye Oaks) & false convictions due to recovered memory etc.
Michael, how can you possibly mistake a murder of this kind as a product of feminism?? I will agree that it was situations of exactly this kind that led to both the Temperance and the Suffrage campaigns (they were inextricably linked in this country, if you care to read your history) and the situation of desperate women killing abusive husbands is as old as the hills.
You should read Katherine Mansfield's chilling little story of rural New Zealand The Woman at the Store if you want to see a glimpse of a very similar case from more than 100 years ago.
These guys are riding out to some remote place to visit some woman whose beauty just has to be seen - only to arrive and find a raddled old had with "her front teeth knocked out" who is behaving weirdly ("can you imagine bothering with the ironing out here? Obvioiusly she's mad.") and whose child is also a little creepy.
Eventually the woman's little girl draws the men a picture ("the one you said I must never draw, Mumma") and Mansfield is careful to include the shared nature of brutality, when she describes the woman savagely belting the child to shut her up as she reveals too much. Eventually it becomes clear to the men that the woman shot her husband and buried him in the garden.
This story was never nearly as popular as the her more cheerful ones, and I have to say as illuminating as I found The Woman at the Store I'd much prefer to visit the New Zealand Katherine Mansfield portrayed in Prelude and At the Bay.
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daleaway wrote:
To pick up on the Georgina Beyer question, are we all playing let's pretend? Does anyone think female-to-male transexuals are really men? Or are they surgically altered females with bodies full of chemicals? Which is not to say, of course, that they are not damned fine individuals deserving of love and respect, but biologically....
Yes, absolutely there are those of us who think of transgenger people as whichever sex they identify themselves. I agree that we can accept both transgender people who have had surgery and intersex people who decline classification and gender-assignment surgery as fully developed human beings enitled to the same rights as all of us.
There are a myriad of chromosomal and hormonal differences that can occur that render somewhere between 1 or 2 in 1000 (or was it 1 or 2 in 10,000? I can't remember) people are born as intersex and unclassifiable as to their sex. It is not one single indentifiable condition, but several differing conditions, and it can be very difficult for doctors to diagnose.
And life is pretty hard for intersex and transgender people, I have worked with many of them (in the area of AIDS/HIV outreach education) and I have to say they have almost invariably had extremely difficult lives.
There is much controversy as to whether intersex people should be allowed to choose gender-assignment surgery in childhood. Some desperately want it barely out of toddlerhood, others wish not to be classified at all. And there are the hormonal effects to consider - any surgical intervention or hormone therapy is certainly going to work better if it is done before puberty. There was an excellent article written about this in the New Yorker a few years back.
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Michael Fitzgerald wrote:
BMI had me a heavy when I was a lightweight rower. I've never trusted since
But BMI is not meant to be applied to an individual, it is a tool for statistical classifications of populations. As I've said, it does not take into account: muscle mass, bone density or ethnicity. A far better measure of obesity is a combined set of tests including: percentage of body fat, hip to waist ratio, triglyceride levels and glucose tolerance.
BMI is a statistical tool that is intended to be applied specifically to sedentary populations, not athletes. Athletes obviously are going to have a higher bone density, lower percentage of body fat, greater muscle mass and a favourable hip to waist ratio. BMI is only useful when discussion populations, not individuals. And it is also not of any use when applied to athletic people, it was intended to be applied to sedentary populations.
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Neil Morrison wrote:
asymmetry - the sex industry is predominantly staffed by females. Yes, many women do choose, but why don't as many men "choose" the same career? (and that's "as many" - there are male strippers and gigolos but far fewer, and I don't believe that the numbers would even out if society were more "liberated".
There are certainly far fewer male strippers, but I am not sure there
is that vast a difference in the numbers of male and female prostitutes, The visible sex industry is dominated by women perhaps, but there is and always has been a busy male sex industry.I know quite a lot about male prostitution. I used to work for AIDS Vancouver at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada, (the mid 80s) and many, many of our patients and a couple of our members of staff - including the volunteer coordinator and my own secretary - had been rent boys.
Male prostitutes do not tend to organise themselves into collectives, have pimps or work out of brothels. But they are to be found in every major city, and it was part of my work at AIDS Vancouver to develop outreach education to help them and their clients to practice safer sex. And I can tell you first hand that the problem with educating rent boys was not so much about imparting information but making them care about their own health, the health of their clients.
I have never met a female prostitute and possibly their stories are less disturbing or sad, but all the same, I wound up regarding the whole transaction in prostitution so disturbing that I would find it much easier to forgive a man for having been a prostitute than having used one.
The problem with sex as a commercial transaction is that the dynamic is changed from something two people do together to something one person does to another. I'm not suggesting this is a problem that can be solved, but I do find the purchase of one person by another for sexual purposes depressing.
There is a great story called The Student by Anton Chekhov where a young man accompanies his classmates to a brothel to celebrate the end of their exams, but the fellow, who has been under enormous strain from his exams and is already emotionally fragile, is not only unaroused by the women in the brothel, he is profoundly disturbed by them, and all he can feel is pity and empathy.
A few years ago there was a case in California where college students had been paying homeless people to fight, so they could film the "bum fight" to show their classmates and have a laugh about it. This was shut down pretty quickly, and most people found it pretty disturbing. But how is this different from prostitution? The participants entered into the transaction voluntarily, and they were paid. And if you ask most people "would you rather be hit or fucked by someone you don't know and don't find attractive?" most people would say "Oh hit, definitely".
International Observer wrote:
Well possibly yes, actually. I guess I am guilty of being judgemental. I think if you want to have sex with stick-thin 18-20 y.o. models who shave their pubic hair off so they can look even younger then I am going to think less of you. (But if they're neatly trimmed models with an appropriate BMI then by all means go for it).
Do girls really shave their public hair to appear younger? The average age for public hair to appear is 11.8 years (in industrialised countries at least). Just how young are they trying to look??
As for "appropriate BMI" that's hard to determine for an individual. BMI is a tool for statistical classifications of populations not individuals. It's meant for population studies, not for individual cases. It does not take into account bone density, muscle mass or ethnicity. A more reliable measure of whether someone can be classified as underweight, healthy weight or overweight is by looking at the percentage of body fat, the waist to hip ratio, glucose tolerance and triglyceride levels.
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You guys, I'd bet on this, the killer is the bad date that Libby and Clare both knew - that fellow Clare and Kieran kidnapped and beat up for scaring Libby and Clare.
Fiona - I love your From the Couch updates, keep them coming!
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I think the term "Banana" is a play on the term "Oreo" referring to the same situation about African-American people in the USA - and this has been around for a long, long time. No doubt everyone here is too young to remember the show Mod Squad but I'm pretty sure I remember Linc saying it to someone who wasn't a plain clothes cop, as the Mod Squad were. And certainly it predates that, probably from someone's standup routine. I know it's a really perjorative term to use in the USA and Michael Steel (the Governer of Maryland) was pelted with Oreos by disgruntled voters, as he's a really right-wing, racist politician for anyone, let alone an African-American. He supports the death penalty, for instance. The Oreo pelters were trying to offend, not amuse.
As for Chinese families who choose not to educate their children in any Chinese heritage - language most obviously, as language is culture - the members of my family who made this decision did not do so lightly. Growing up in Canada - which is a racist country once you scratch the surface - my Aunt Valerie (Cantonese heritage, born in Canada) choose not to let either of my cousins study Cantonese, though it was offered locally and for free.
My Uncle Hugh (Scottish heritage, born in Canada) really wanted Barbara and Carolyn to take the classes, but their Mum thought it would only make them targets for prejudice. She was whitening them up, just as my Metis (half French half Cree) Mum did with us, and as my husband Paul's Maori Mum did with her children. They thought they were sparing us racist treatment. I can remember my Mum saying how lucky I was I could pass for white - and my Dad saying "Don't put racist ideas in the child's head" and her replying "That's all very well from your lily-white perspective, Ian".
My cousins and I have speculated whether we admire fair hair and blue eyes so much because we were indoctrinated with the idea by our white-fixated mothers or if it's an actual genetically driven preference. The writer Sherman Alexie has written brilliantly on this in his essay Why I Hate Tonto. Someone wondered why anyone would try to appear whiter than they were in another discussion, well, this is why.
Before anyone objects to me calling Canada "racist" I would have to say whatever effort Canada has been making, you don't have to look very deep to find racism there. though I had forgotten that, having had to deal with some pretty repellent comments when I first arrived. Canada is much, much more circumspect when it comes to saying things out loud, so to speak. My cousin visited me here, and I was complaining New Zealand was racist (I think I may have said "white kook capital of the world") and she said it seemed to her that Canada and New Zealand were equally racist, it's just that it seemed kosher to be racist and out in New Zealand. On reflection, remembering my Mum's treatment for instance, I had to agree, though coming from a culture where any whiff of racism is much, much worse than any political correctness, it doesn't prepare a person for the the social norms in New Zealand where the reverse is true.
But then if it hadn't been shocking to a Canadian sensibility, I wouldn't have had the pleasure of watching my Dad's shock and horror at some of the the tv ads he saw here, and I have to say there are few things funnier in this world than a really shocked old white guy.
This reminds me of a very memorable family thanksgiving dinner where my sister's extremely opinionated elderly New York Jewish mother in law was a guest, and at a table full of my Japanese, Chinese and Cree relatives - all named Campbell and related through the Scottish side of the family - she loudly opined to my sister "SHIRLEY YOU SHOULDN'T WEAR YELLOW... IT MAKES YOU LOOK SO 0RIENTIAL"
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Thanks for that, Russell. Smote that troll
or is that smite that troll?
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I think the reason this guy was weirding everyone out was because his trolling is not motivated by any interest in the issue or desire to debate different points of view, but rather in a taking a kind of perverty pleasure in baiting women with an offensive point of view. And if this is genuinely his point of view, then he is one disturbing weirdo. The thing is, his point of view was weird enough that we (the women here) knew better than to engage him in any way - the intellectual equivalent of making eye contact.
There is plenty of room on Public Address for robust, intelligent debate, and in fact this is the aspect of this forum that appeals most to me. But Ron/Ross (and they both did have the same social-warning-beacon quality to their posts) did not seem to want to defend his point of view as much as he wanted to offend and intimidate women here. I think this is why he was making us uncomfortable, and, on a shallow note it was really quite satisfying to see Russell get rid of him. Thanks for that, Russell. Smote that troll.
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3410 wrote:
I think one point has been overlooked. Nico's statement is not about the difference between making money from your art and not, but about the inability of the financially secure person to have much insight into the human condition.
Wealthy people (at least those who have never been poor) generally make worthless "art" because everything that they experience in life is filtered through their position of financial superiority over other people. In short, because they can buy anything, they do not appreciate the value of anything. Thus, their musings on life will almost certainly be utterly corrupted.-
Everyone's experience in life is going to be filtered through their circumstances - wealth is no obstacle to being capable of observation and insight.
Ivan Turgenev, for instance, was very rich, yet his book about the lives of serfs A Sportsman's Notebook was moving and powerful enough to influence Peter the Great to abolish the system of feudal heirarchy and emancipate the serfs.
Turgenev's experience of the serf's lives was from the point view of the son of someone who owned serfs, but his position as the son of a wealthy landowner did not affect his his ability to observe and understand the misery of the serf's situation - even if his or her owner is a kind and benevolent owner.
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The bowl for breakfast to dip the stale bread in or whatever, is French in origin, as for putting milk in (carton milk), usually to the black left-over from whenever before for breakfast
This is true, though the milk-and-bread is actually baby food.
But the bowls of chocolate, or warm milk (with nutmeg, sugar and vanilla) and cafe au lait ( "children's coffee") are all meant to be drunk from bowls. We used those bowls for breakfast drinks as children (my Mum was Metis).
The demise of the North American cup of coffee - because coffee in Canada is just as sad as it is in the USA - was actually brought about by the "bottomless cup of coffee" which means that at any restaurant anywhere, you only pay for the first cup of coffee and all subsequent cups are free.
In the olden days when coffee was cheap, they made it strong, but as coffee got more expensive (in the late 70s early 80s) coffee got progressively weaker until it became the undrinkable swill that is served everywhere now. And as the normal cup of coffee became weak, tastes changed and now many people like the weak stuff.
Coffee has always been in NZ as far as I can tell - I have a cookbook entitled Colonial Cookery which is from around 1905 or thereabouts, and there are all sorts of wonderful dessert recipes using coffee, and coffee was the standard post-dinner drink, while tea was for breakfast and the rest of the day.
Actually there are some amazing recipes in that book, though some just too weird to believe, such as Mock Turtle Soup ("...find an old boiling fowl, a goats head with skin removed, cut skull into nice sized pieces...") but that's another topic.
My NZ (from the Hokianga) mother in law told me that coffee had pretty well always been in NZ but no one liked it until iit suddenly rose in popularity - along with gum, chocolate, cameras, face cream, dry cleaning, nylon stockings, junk jewelery, bubble bath, portable gramaphones and record collections, and the sort of slang that is coined and constantly changed by young people - when the US soldiers came to NZ in the 1940. They shocked the locals by desiring a "cup of java" or a "cup of joe" much more than beer.
Anyhow, I am just old enough (50) to have witnessed the demise of the decent cup of North American coffee. In the late 70s coffee lovers mostly switched to the "pay by the cup" fancier coffees - cafe au lait (in a bowl) or the Italian latte (always in a glass) and the Cafe Vienna (very rich, half very strong coffee, half French style chocolate where hot milk is whisked in with ganache) topped with whipped cream and shaved chocolate curls.
But the death and extinction of decent coffee in my hometown Vancouver is especially sad - I am told Starbucks came in and would buy up premises near a popular coffee house and (literally) open several branches within a few minutes walk of the established place, and in the late 90s the last of the great espresso places died, even the old, old Robson Strasse places like the Mozart Konditori and the ironically named Danish Tea Rooms.
So if you go to Vancouver, ask the locals where to get coffee - there are always one or two little places limping along - but mostly coffee in North America is very sad and quite undrinkable.