Posts by Emma Hart
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I'm not sure about the full context of the conversation you were referring to Emma: were they talking specifically about the job of a "wife" in a way that would be different from more generally being a "spouse" or "life partner"?
I'm honestly not sure, Tom, and I'd hate to call it, because I genuinely feel that I'm missing something there. (Mommyblogs bring me out in a bit of a mental rash.) I think so.
Paul is pretty swingeing in his criticisms of Cretans in his letter to Titus.
Was there anyone he liked?
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I understand the point Emma makes about the 'Lisa ad' and have seen it made elsewhere, but I still don't subscribe to the belief that ALAC seriously intended women or anyone else to stay off the sauce entirely or suffer the consequences. Any more than they intended for men to avoid boozy barbecues on the pain of Inevitably Throwing Kids at Walls.
I'd agree with that. I also agree with Julie (I think it was Julie, heartfelt apologies if I've got this wrong) that the other female ALAC ad, the one that features Dennis From Accounts, is just fine. Woman gets drunk and makes a poor decision you can tell she's going to regret. I've done it myself. From memory, all the male ALAC ads feature a drunk person doing something stupid. The Lisa ad differs because it features a drunk person having something done TO them. That's where it falls off the rails I think, as well as pissing off a section of its target audience.
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yeah, I wondered if they should have changed the tag-line on that one to "It's not the drinking, it's how you're acting like a total whore."
It's bad that I totally LOLed then, right?
Emma, forgive me if I've misunderstood you, but in NZ heterosexual HIV infections are a tiny percentage of the whole - you seem to be implying there is some large hidden heterosexually transmitted epidmic - this is simply not the case.
No, Michael, that's not what I said. I'm saying that if individuals take the attitude that 'AIDS is a gay disease therefore, being straight I don't have to worry', that can lead to taking stupid risks. I'm no more saying that there's a straight AIDS epidemic in NZ than I'm saying there's an epidemic of female violence.
Also concentrating on AIDS as 'a gay disease' can lead to some really nasty stereotyping. Though I've always wondered why the mentality that AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality doesn't lead to the assumption that lesbians are Gods' Chosen People.
Threadjack over?
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I feel a long comment coming on, apologies in advance.
That's why we don't see much in the way of , for example, HIV prevention campiagns targetted for straight men - they are such a low prevalence group in NZ that it is not a good use of resources
And the attitude that AIDS is a 'gay disease' is one of the reasons the rate of heterosexual infection is as high as it is, at least in the developed world.
Think of the drink-driving campaigns. The main focus is clearly young men. That focus didn't change when they ran one featuring a woman, but it did acknowledge that the problem is not confined to young men. I do seem to remember it causing some controversy. So yes, I would like to see maybe one ad dealing with female violence, one dealing with gay violence, but in saying that, I still believe the focus should be on male violence.
And on refreshing, I see that Craig's just said part of what I was going to say in response to Deborah. Yes, violence that causes a large amount of physical damage, violence that becomes murder, is more serious but that doesn't mean that violence carried out by women somehow matters less because 'weak little women don't hit as hard'.
we do still seem to accept female-on-male domestic violence, and wonder why he doesn't just get out
I don't think that is what people wonder. I might well be wrong. People still laugh at the idea of a woman beating a man, or assume he must have done something to deserve it, or wonder why he doesn't smack her back, or assume the violence is inconsequential because women can't hit hard, and he should just toughen up.
The bottom line is that we still excuse violence by women. Either it's not serious because it's not as physically damaging (same reason we're still about a decade behind in dealing with the way girls bully as compared to boys), or social conditioning just doesn't allow us to get our heads around a picture of man as victim and woman as aggressor. I have a strong belief that expanding the paradigm of male behaviour would be good for everybody.
Just as in the ads it's men standing up (figuratively, literally they're mostly sitting down) and saying to men 'it's not okay', maybe we need to have women standing up and saying to women 'it's not okay'. It's not okay to blame it on the patriarchy. It's not okay to say it doesn't matter because you can't bench-press your own weight.
When I was thirteen, I had a boyfriend, Pickles. Looking back on that relationship as a 37 year old, it was love, absolutely, an extremely tumultuous two-year relationship. We were both people who'd grown up in extremely violent households. The first time we got into a serious fight, I hit him. As far as dispute resolution went, that was the model I had.
It didn't matter what the odds were of which one of us belting the other. It didn't matter that he was two years older than me and male and therefore statistically more likely to hold the power in the relationship. And it didn't matter whether I hurt him or not. I hit him and it was wrong. Everything else is just excuses. Accepting that was what allowed me to change my own behaviour.
But let's not detract from the true focus of Ralston's dickishness.
Just out of interest, what ads are out there with a clear focus on females with regard to behaviour or thought process?
There are the 'if you get drunk you'll get raped' ads, those are great...
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Y'know, I'd been wondering what was wrong with Bill Ralston, after he had a go at the 'It's Not Okay' campaign in an otherwise excellent article on John Kirwan in last week's Listener and then again in his column in this week's. He appears to have some kind of very disturbing fixation -especially the way he keeps talking about the campaign as if it belongs to you.
For the record (I'm cooking dinner and I know I'm going to cock something up trying to express this) I have real concerns about domestic violence regardless of gender . I think that 16% from the Dunedin study is higher than a lot of people would expect, and I find the attitudes around female-on-male domestic violence displayed in the clip here really creepy and disturbing ("he must have done something to deserve it").
And none of that is relevant. That doesn't make the It's Not Okay campaign condescending, unnecessary, or any of the other things Ralston calls it. (Serious, what gives? Did nobody ask him to be in them?) One of the local organisations down here was saying that over Christmas they got more calls from men wanting help to stop hitting than they'd ever had before, and attributed that to this campaign.
Meanwhile, if violence against men or by women is such a big deal for Bill, I'd suggest he gets off his arse and does something himself instead of just carping.
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For those who can't wait, you can look at the inauguration here. Sort of.
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Fine, I shall be a git. In the nicest possible way.
The History of Doughnuts. (The story about the sea captain making the hole by sticking his Oliebollen on his wheel sounds like purest I-don't-think-so.)
Also, Wikipedia on what to do with doughnut holes.
I blame this on living in an area suspiciously high in Dutch cafes.
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Kyle, stop trying to lead me into 'history of the doughnut' pedantry, it's not fair.
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The true awesomeness of TWoK is director/(uncredited) writer Nick Meyer -- who also did the same for No. 6, and co-wrote No. 4 which is weirdly hilarious.
Ha, I was thinking that the next time they really tapped the Khan vibe was 6, with the Klingon commander swivelling round in his chair with his eyepatch rivetted to his skull quoting Shakespeare. Brilliant.
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