Posts by Jolisa
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Also: the title of this post made me think of legendary quarterback Joe Namath on the relative merits of Astroturf and grass...
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SpinItWide? Really? No disrespect, but how thoroughly did they market-test that name? The mental image is not particularly pretty:
The hippopotamus, for instance, is said to mark jungle trails by excreting a lethal mixture of urine and feces while twirling its tail like a propeller. This may explain the historically sluggish market for pet hippopotamuses.
(NB I'm a test-market of n=1; other people may have different mental images, like, I dunno, fans, and things hitting them. Or perhaps they were aiming for a sort of Spidermanesque vibe?)
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Kind of sweet that this thread began with the rallying cry "Boobs!" and has wound its way round to a collective sigh of "Mummy"...
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As long as we don't end up being transported back to 1986. I had terrible hair then.
Which was always my problem with hot-tubs, too, come to think of it. A dollar's worth of gel to get one's hair *just so*, and then all that damn humidity wrecking the effect.
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But, now it is probably time to go and focus on something that's not frivolous and fun.
That was Megan, for the record.
But I too am absolutely horrified by that story. A mother of three, doing her best to reach out and get help... Oh my god. Even getting yourself to a counsellor is a huge, huge, huge deal, let alone filing the paperwork with your name on it. Have they no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have they no sense of decency?
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Resistance is futile.
(Er, not recommending the Borg as a role model for anything other than bantering purposes. Although the Borg Queen was an interesting creature).
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You know, in that discussion, it didn't really occur to me to be offended, until Emma pointed out, by email, what was going on.
Is it maybe about the difference between "Yes, but" and "Yes, and"? To me, it seemed as though the other commenters felt that they were yes-anding you, in good faith, but -- partly because of the overwhelming consensus in the room -- it seriously wound up feeling like a yes-but? (Or a yeah but no but yeah but).
It's a fine line and so easily turned into a wall. I used to ask my writing students to do an exercise where everyone in turn would find something to say about the material at hand, which they had to introduce with a "Yes, and..." - as a way of testing the theory that you can construct a stronger and more interesting (and ultimately persuasive and encouraging) argument by steadily folding in a bunch of apparently disparate or even opposite positions.
Someone would always, always crack and say BUT! Which always turned into a lovely teachable moment about the limits of consensus.
(Heh. I said but, and crack.)
Although, you know, I think I deserve some credit for not touching this
Resistance is futile.
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Following on from the "how we're talking" thought, and Emma's off-site post on where she's coming from, I'm interested in how discussions -- and the people having them -- fluctuate between "warm" and "cool" depending on how close (or how far) the discussions are from specific experiences and hard-won wisdom. Sometimes I can agree to disagree very easily, with no sense of particular loss. Other times, I can become incandescently sad and furious and lost for words very quickly. And there's not necessarily any logic to it.
So for me, for example, Boobquake feels like a relatively "cool" topic whichever way I come at it (when your boobs have been preceding you into the room since the age of 16, you kind of have to abandon all hope of any rational correlation between how you dress and how you're perceived, and just run with it. Or not run with it, ow, ow). I can see both sides of this discussion with equanimity, and am relatively comfortable perched in the stands watching the rhetorical tennis match, albeit wincing in concern when a shot goes awry and hurts someone.
Whereas - not to raise old spectres - the Iceland thing unexpectedly revealed itself as a "warm" topic for me because it summoned back into life every lecture I'd ever been given along the lines of "oh yes and I suppose if women ruled the world there'd be no war, hardy-har-har, and no sex either, fnarr." It also pushed a few buttons I'd forgotten I had, about sovereignty, and the difficulties of translating feminisms, and the complexities of any kind of transnational feminism, praxis, and the problematic exercise of political power by women, and my own ability to hold my own in an academic discussion. At the same time, it was a well-established warm topic for others (which I should have been aware of), for equally, if not even more, valid and powerful reasons. So, yeah, fair amount of geothermal activity there.
I suppose it goes without saying, too, that temperament on any given day is not necessarily predictable, and subject to all sorts of other influences; sometimes we arrive to a discussion already warmed up or cooled off. Or somewhere in between, which seems to be where the PAS thermostat usually winds up, which makes it such a nice place to be.
Having typed all this I'm not even sure it's helpful. But I dunno, it feels like a useful extra nuance when reading the definitional and positional debates of the moment.
(Also, am fully aware that my attempt at old-fashioned transactional analysis in a hot-button thread might seem weirdly cool and Vulcan-like... sorry... just, uh, trying to open a window for fresh air, since I can't shake the feeling, or the hope, that we are all in the hot-tub together, as it were. Mixing metaphors as well as temperatures, me. OK, I'll stop now).
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As I said, I don't see boobquake as being part of raunch culture. It's a one off piece of mockery: live-action-satire, if you will.
Ditto; it's clearly satire, and Boobquake would have "happened" even if no women had dressed up. It's (as someone somewhere else said) agitprop. A satirical thought experiment. An immodest proposal, if you will.
I see the Hand Mirror discussion and others like it as the equivalent of "Gnnaaarr, but they already think we eat babies, so aren't we just playing into their hands if we pretend to??" Which is a perfectly reasonable query along the road to a more interesting discussion about how women's dress choices are always already co-opted and judged, not only by Teh Patriarchy but also by women and their own mutually judgemental (or appreciative) gazes.
while the subsequent discussion hasn't exactly been constructive
Hmm, here I'd beg to differ. It doesn't have to be constructive for all to be constructive for some, surely? Or are we using different definitions of constructive?
Looking at the Hand Mirror thread, I'm hard-pressed to diagnose passive-aggression. (I'm just one person reading it, without my antennae up, but yo, am living in the world capital thereof - it's an art hereabouts). What I do see is a great deal of caution and prevarication and qualification and anxiety about causing offence -- and it's pretty ironic that that winds up causing offence.
So, uh, it's not the talking, it's how we're talking? If we were less afraid of hurting feelings, would we maybe communicate better? I dunno. I relish the verbal stroppiness of yore but have become accustomed to being afraid to use it. Which is why it was so exhilarating to read Helen Razer's piece on Louis Nowra those few weeks ago. And it's always a joy to read Emma's writing, which comes from the heart as well as the brain.
(NB "the way we're talking" = not in any way condoning the nasty emails Emma has been getting, which seem to be in a different realm altogether, and completely unsisterly. I've only ever gotten PA-related hate mail from blokes, which is unsettling in its own way, and can't imagine how upsetting it would be to get similar from women. Sorry that you're getting that, Emma).
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It's cold as a bastard and been hosing down all day here
Meh. Here too. A wash-out. Had to be content with shapeliest long-sleeved top and jeans that actually fit.
Also, I have a persistent ear-worm. "It's a boobquake/ nothing but a boobquake"... to the tune of this, of course: