Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Jackie Clark,
discovering new women writers
Basically my job at The Lady Garden, linking to stuff Clarisse Thorne has written.
Time parents fought flawed system
Absolutely it is. The sex education curriculum should be standardised across all state schools. Just like the rest of biology.
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Quick, everyone, go and read this. I’ll wait here.
No, seriously. I love Clarisse Thorne. There’s a lot there I can’t relate to, because we had such very different sexual upbringings, but a lot of it chimes so hard for me.
“I’m columning, I’m columning”
I love a good columning.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Tamara,
Wow, we must be the same age! Jareth in those britches...
The number of times Hoggle is standing next to Jareth, ergo the camera is justifiably at crotch-height...
ETA: Also, this may be relevant to your interests. (Not Safe for Actual WORK.)
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Russell Brown,
Also, my teenage self would like to warmly thank Cosmopolitan magazine.
My friend Susan and I were recently discussing covert reading of Lace as a rite of passage for women our age. That and fancying David Bowie in Labyrinth, it's like carbon-dating.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Max Rose,
I guess that’s something I missed out on: we didn’t have an extended family in NZ, so it was just the nuclear family and friends.
My mother’s friends, my ersatz aunts, were of far more value to me than my actual biological aunts and uncles. I wrote half a column about them in the wake of my mother’s funeral, but it was far too soppy.
For years, my son role-modelled hard on our friend Andrew, which was delightful from our point of view. (This is assuming you’re okay with your son growing up with a huge love of Lego, science-fiction, and other men. And we are.)
Anyway. It’s never too late for Dodgy Uncle Max and his advice on post-coital cuddling. They've survived their Aunty Megan.
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I'm a big believer in the essential value of "uncles" and "aunties" for kids. It's always worked particularly well in my family where there's about a ten-year gap between the generations in one branch from the other, so every kid's had a "cousin" old enough to be considered responsible but young enough to not be "parental".
Having had my children ten years earlier than my peers did, I take a special pleasure in making sure I leave some kind of impression on the young'uns.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I’m sort of hoping that any kids I end up having will be enough like me and my partner that we can just leave books around the place and they’ll do the research themselves.
I wrote a book and left it lying around a pub. That worked. (It’s only just struck me that the column “words of advice for young people” is book-only. Maybe I should post it.)
But seriously. Websites. Something like Scarleteen. Then they can ask questions if they have them, and they have access to non-vanilla stuff, as everybody should, because how do you know if you’d like something if you don’t even know it exists?
Books about sex tend to not actually be about sex. They're about puberty or reproduction. Not the same thing.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Stewart,
I take great exception to the anti sex-ed campaigners that abrogate their responsibility as parents for teaching their own kids - about sex, about anything!
It is ironic, if hugely predictable, that the people most insistent that teaching sex education is their job as parents are the ones least likely to actually DO it.
Sodomy and buggery *and* tautology. Evil.
Oh, that tautology is really going to smart in the morning.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Max Rose,
It takes no account of the emotional and spiritual dimensions of the sex act, the means by which two, a man and a woman, can become one flesh.
I actually really hate that, when you wake up in the morning and discover you've become one flesh. It's really inconvenient. Also, you have to admire the efficiency with which he's told us how many people should be involved, AND their correct genital arrangement.
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Field Theory: Rugby World Cup stories, in reply to Kris V,
When I was a young lass of about 13, I cut out a picture of David Kirk from The Press & pinned it to my bedroom wall. He was holding the Webb Ellis trophy above his head after the Baby Black's triumphant campaign.
Kris, my story is completely different. I was fifteen. Far out. Kirk went on the aspirational portion of the wall above my desk, right next to the photo of the RX-7. Later on, I learned to dislike both the whine of a rotory engine, and right-wing economics.