Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: To the Letter, in reply to Islander,
They were the love letters between my Nana and Grand-dad, Mary Matches and Tame Rakakino Mira.
Aw, that's fabulous. Though I can also understand not wanting to read them. I have one letter from my mother's first husband to her (it was undiscovered in a tin of old photographs), and it's painful in a whole different way. Just too private.
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Up Front: To the Letter, in reply to nzlemming,
Doing genealogy with/for my mum has made me aware of so many stories of people I barely knew.
I think genealogy really plays into the human compulsion to make stories. You have a few pieces of information – so, an Irish woman marries a man born in America but living in Suffolk and they move to Australia – and your brain is just compelled to try to fill in the “how does that even happen?”. We have a copy of my x-great-grandfather’s will from 1814, and it’s a bunch of stories. He made his daughter executrix of his will, not one of his sons. He left his wife his “bed with the yellow curtains in the back house chamber”. You have to specify that your wife gets a bed?
Etc.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to nzlemming,
2) if a girl is drunk and/ or flirting and/ or wearing a short skirt then she is ‘up for it’
We've had a couple of articles in local papers asking high school principals what they're doing about their net safety programs. Not one asking what they're doing about teaching consent. If you want to take someone to a movie, you ask them, right? So why does it seem crazier to ask someone if they want to have sex with you than to try to deduce it from their clothes?
The persistence of the virgin-whore dichotomy is astonishing. About half a dozen times in my late teens and early twenties I had a guy actually ask me, with genuine puzzlement, "If you'll sleep with him, why won't you sleep with me?" You're either someone who has sex - and is therefore up for it with anyone - or someone who doesn't, and you can tell them apart by the way they dress or drink or something.
Consent is not complicated. It's really fucking simple. If you find it too confusing, you should err on the side of Always Asking, every time. And we should stop pretending that talking about sex isn't done because it's dull. It isn't done because it's terrifying.
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I used to be the worst sleeper in the world. Now I'm not even the worst sleeper in the house. And I say this having had 1 1/2 hours sleep last night.
Works a treat though I know it goes counter to that advice about bed only for sex and sleep.
I can't sleep at all if I haven't read. It winds down brain and body. However, sex is worth trying, from a getting to sleep point of view. It doesn't work for everyone, but a big whack of relaxy endorphins might be just what you need.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Also, I’m reminded of one of Emma’s posts from long ago with some gaming analogy.
It was a sort of side-line in this post, and like so many things here, much better developed in the comments. Thank you for reminding me of it, because it really does relate to how I've felt this week: far too shattered by the echoes of my past to Tank on this one.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Chris Waugh,
if this bill passes then don’t we have one more tool to fight the continued victimisation of these girls and many others.
The thing is, there is no easy fix for this, not even close. And I'm really, really leery of "but this piece of legislation will fix it!", which, let me clear, I'm really aware is not what you were saying. I just want to make it icy-clear that the problem is not cyber-bullying. It's rape culture. It's rape culture that made these men think it was okay to brag about what they were doing, regardless of the format they did that in.
Changing that culture is fucking hard work. But it's not impossible, and it couldn't be more worth doing. But it's about teaching about consent, focusing on perpetrators not victims, removing shame from sex. It's not about cellphones.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Perhaps a little more impetus to passing this? I’m sure the lawyers hereabouts could have a field day picking that bill apart, but it at least seems like a good and necessary step forward.
These girls were raped, and not over the internet.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Marcus Turner,
What is appropriate on this thread? (I mean this particular thread.)
Marcus, I don't want to be too specific, for I hope obvious reasons. The closest we get to "knowing something about each other" is that those of us who've been around forever have something of an idea of each other's comment history and previous behaviour, and that will affect how we react to what they're saying now.
One of the problems with this thread is that it covers territory that is always problematic: where for some commenters the issues are abstract intellectual exercises, and for others, they're lived experience. It's not that anyone is trying to be a dick to anyone else, but someone who has been raped is unlikely to have a lot of time for a "let's come up with really convoluted hypothetical situations that make consent look incredibly complicated".
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Russell Brown,
This, from Scuba Nurse at the Hand Mirror, about what we can all do to make a difference in the face of rape culture, is really good.
Let me be even more direct.
Donate to Rape Crisis in Auckland.
Donate to Rape Crisis in Wellington - again, critically short of funding.
Channel your anger into helping the people who deal with this shit every single day. I cannot fathom people who claim they would commit assault if it was their daughter, but when it's other people's daughters, won't even do this. Chuck them a twenty. Then you can tool around on the internet debating hypotheticals all day in good conscience.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Tom Semmens,
If it was my daughter
"... the only thing that would matter to me would be looking after her, being there for her, supporting her, and making sure we did what she wanted."
I fixed it for you.