Posts by Stephen Judd
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"But to back track a bit, someone (Stephen Judd?) made a comment about false consciousness."
Yeah, that was me. And it was a muddled little blurt, so let me clarify that I wasn't saying that your empowered/ironic/old-school stripper is suffering from false consciousness. I was just noting a similarity between a certain kind of feminist take and the Marxist one. The working classes are always letting us down.
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"My niece is 9, and gets changed under a towel. That might not seem much, but isn't that the start of body shame?"
That's just modesty, isn't it? I'd be more surprised at a 9 year old boy or girl who still wanted to get changed with no cover.
Most guys I know (pardon my use of cliche) do not want to have sex with boy-thin chicks. Curveacious (sp?) women are just fine, thank you. But what do women do?...
An assumption there is that "guys" and "women" are homogenous groups with a common interest in everyone's happiness. You can explain that seeming puzzle if you assume that in each group a small number are jockeying for power over the others, and one group for power over the other group.
Another assumption is that editors are concerned with the welfare of their readers. I think the facts are better explained by the hypothesis that those editors don't give a rats' about the happiness of their readers (or charitably, are deeply misguided about what might lead to happiness, and the fact the combining insecurity about your own body with the comfort of trashing others leads to repeat sales is a complete coincidence).
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kowhai: if this is the gig I'm thinking of, Josh told me that they just knew they could book out the Las Vegas for cheap - the owner insisted on having the dancers. And never mind the coldly ironic gaze, what really annoyed them was a) no tips and b) people taking photographs.
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Was I completely comfortable the time I attended a shock rock gig complete with strippers
Meat-bix? Just curious. In which case I recommend "The Raven Is The Only Acceptable Black Metal Bird There Is."
Anyway, I can't help but feel that there is something going on that a Marxist would call "false consciousness". So Emma's worry about telling other women what to do is a bit like worrying about criticising the working classes for their failure to throw off their shackles (complete with soul-searching on the one hand about just how shackled they really are, and annoyance on the other with people who wear their shiny pretty shackles with pride, and on the third hand maybe a tiny pretty thin shackle is just personal adornment... I don't know) but still, you can be undecided about that and still believe that there IS a working class and a bosses class and so on and so forth.
(Apologies for syntactic mess but I have to get back to work.)
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I was fascinated by the young, slighty alternative couple sitting opposite us at the catwalk. They were having a whale of time; grinning, cheering, applauding. It was surprisingly unsleazy.
Ah, but perhaps they were enjoying themselves _ironically__. It's so hard to tell these days.
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Keeping quiet at my desk.
OK. So Rudd gets a bob each way - he's a red-blooded male who goes to strip clubs, but it's ok if you don't approve, because it's only when he's pissed. (He gets pissed too, like a manly Australian man should!)
Also, the phenomenon of male strippers does not alleviate any problems with women stripping for men, because the power relations are not the same. Male strippers are performing in a carnivalesque mode where power-relations are temporarily inverted. It is understood that after the male stripper has left, women will revert to their normal position in society, while in the female stripping situation, the men, having paid to reinforce their status, will continue to exercise it when they leave. The situations are not inverse or orthogonal.
On a personal note, when I got dragged out to a strip club in Hamilton about 20 years ago, I lost all taste for the enterprise when I recognised one of the strippers as a girl as an old schoolmate who had already been vilified as the school bike. She didn't look very happy.
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Quite the variety coming out of BNZ/NAB.
Heh I have a fair idea of who that might be. But I'll let him out himself :)
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How rich dairy farmers get depends a lot on Fonterra's hedging strategy. Depending on that, they may not get much richer at all. And the poor old meat people are at the mercy of meat companies, who seem strangely reluctant to pass much on...
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even in the absence of overt racism
Indeed. And you don't personally have to be victimised by a racist act to be intimidated. If your mate is attacked, or you just hear that someone in your social circle has been victimised, that can have a powerful effect. Overt violence and intimidation can be quite rare and yet loom large in the consciousness of potential victims. I am sure that if one language student is abused on the way home, all their friends hear about it, and many will adjust their impressions of New Zealand accordingly. And you can't blame them either.
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"fat, ginger, short, whatever,"
Or have breasts.