Posts by Emma Hart
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Some highlights from last night. (Yes, I am hung-over, and yes my phone battery died before the night was out, yes I am still catching up.)
Surprise highlight of the third reading: Maurice Williamson.
Kevin Hague also made me cry like a little girl. I've seldom been prouder of my partner than when he sidled up to Kevin after the select committee hearing and apologised to him for the shit he'd had to listen to that morning.
The ayes voting paper and the nays voting paper. The number of proxies is... a thing. Two MPs changed their votes - David Bennett from no to yes, and Rino Tirikatene from yes to no. Nobody seems to know why in either case.
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Up Front: Gathered Together, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
On the other hand I wonder just how may same sex marriages there will be as apparently not may went into Civil Unions (anybody know the figures Google doesn’t seem to know)
But, as Craig said, it doesn't matter shit. Some laws are about standing up and making a statement about who we are as a nation. They're bigger and far more important than their on the ground practical effect. This is one of them.
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Something I forgot to mention in the post. I spent some time yesterday reading stuff from the passing of the Civil Union bill, and a question came to mind.
What happened to Destiny Church? Where are the black-shirted incredibly-aggressive marchers? Are they now just holing up and putting all their money into canned food and shotguns?
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Up Front: Gathered Together, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
The likes of Bob McCoskrie and Evil Namesake may be disingenuous, lying fuckbags but there are people who would be perfectly justified in getting their panic on if what they were being told had any relationship to reality.
Yeah, this. I had this conversation with my partner last night, when he thought perhaps I might be getting a little too gleeful. There are people who have been lied to, who are now genuinely fearful, and I feel for them.
But let me be perfectly clear. Those other people? Fuck those people. The ones who did the scare-mongering. The ones who stood up at select committees and said I wasn't fit to raise my children? Fuck those people. Who equated loving consensual same-sex relationships with various forms of rape? Fuck those people. Who cast themselves as the victims in all of this? Srsly, fuck those people and their crushing lack of self-awareness. I don't have to feel sympathy for them. I don't think it's fair to require that any LGBTI person behave with grace towards people who have treated them with hate.
I also don't think it's necessary to lash out at them. The cold gray loveless mean-spirited world they've made inside their heads is punishment enough.
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to Russell Brown,
As Sacha notes, the Lizi Patch column is worth reading. It’s impossible not to feel sad at an 11 year-old boy losing his innocence – and knowing it – because he was pressured into watching a sexually violent and potentially abusive scene by his peers. I don’t think that’s irrational. So what do we do? Or, rather, what do we say?
I read it, and yeah, I agree. I thought the parent handled it really well. There was a pre-existing relationship where the child was prepared to (eventually) talk about what had happened. I don't really think you can do better than that. (One reservation I have is that the nature of the content is never really described. It could have been the most stomach-churning of what's out there. Or it could have been uncontextualised consensual M/f BDSM. I can't tell from the column.)
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm keen to see what you make of the show. I thought our two panelists were pretty high signal-to-noise at the recording tonight.
Heh, you might have to wait a couple of days given what else is on tomorrow night.
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to BenWilson,
Isn't the art of the ancient world jam packed with nudes?
Indeed. I wrote this a couple of years ago, and the rest of the posts in the Porn Tuesday series, partly because I was so tired of hearing that sexually-explicit material was something new.
There’s a tendency, when we’re not thinking about it very hard, to assume that our history has been a constant drift towards increasing liberalism, but this simply isn’t true. The older state is “sex in the public square”, absolutely in front of the children. Censorship was imposed on that, and we’ve now come to a point where, instead of justifying why something should be banned or restricted, the debate is entirely focused on justifying why things should be allowed to be seen.
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to BenWilson,
Emma, Emma, wherefore art thou?
But y'all know what I'm going to say, right?
"Sexualisation" of girls is a concept that buys into the idea that girls are not naturally sexual. Which is a lie. That paradigm is the same reason this debate always ignores the sexuality of boys: because all boys are total horndogs, all the time. Which is a lie.
Censorship is part of the problem, not the solution. Censorship stops sex from becoming normalised, when it's normal. The solution is education - comprehensive education that starts in kindergarten - and positive portrayals of the full diversity of sexuality.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I don't know to what actual extent the tearing apart of the body politic was a direct consequence of neoliberal reform (and to what extent the preceding egalitarianism is in fact a myth)
I was thinking about an aspect of this the other day, when I realised that, as far as structural assistance went, it was easier for my mother to walk out of an abusive relationship and survive financially under Muldoon than it would be if I did it now. Benefits were at much higher levels in real terms, penalties for earning extra money weren't as high, she could capitalise the Family Benefit and get a govt-subsidised 3% mortgage, which meant she could buy a home for herself and her four children on what she earned working part-time in the laundry of a geriatric hospital.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Rob Stowell,
At a guess, one of NZ's few crime novelists?
Yeah, probably not the guy who just won a Feminist Porn Award for "Friends with Benefits".