Posts by Josh Addison
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Up Front: Mind Your Language, in reply to Emma Hart,
That's like the way they were allowed to say "wanker" on Buffy because it was America and nobody knew what it meant.
I've always wondered if that's actually true, or if Americans just pretended not to know what "wanker" means so they could get away with swearing on TV. Buffy wasn't the first to do it by a long shot - I remember on Married With Children how Peggy Bundy's maiden name was Wanker and she hailed from Wanker County. And I swear one of the British-accented characters on Jem and the Holograms called someone a wanker once - I remember hearing that as a youngster and thinking "you can't say that in a kids' cartoon!"
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Mike Howe,
If I am rejected by a woman and I feel rejected then that is my emotion to own.
True, but the problem, as Emma says, is that there's not a lot around to tell men what to do about that emotion, and what is there ranges from useless to dangerous.
I wrote a thing a while ago that tangentially relates to this - I guess in light of recent events I could call it "I was a 25-year-old virgin but never went on a shooting spree". I can't say that I ever learned a good way to deal with rejection, though - patience is about the only thing I could recommend...
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How do I sleep? Like shit, since I was about 18. Some years later I paid a specialist a fair bit of money to be told that I have proper insomnia and here are some drugs. (Well, not that abruptly - I trialed all sorts of solutions before settling on one that helped the most.) At best, the pills helped me to get to sleep more easily and stay asleep a bit longer, but the concept of waking up feeling refreshed and rested has always been foreign to me.
Then kids came along and I stopped with the sleeping pills, since I'd rather be sleep-deprived than be drug-addled when dealing with a baby in the wee hours...
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
And completely invisible. She hasn't landed a blow. To be fair, she isn't alone on that score. But she needs to be a bit less organised and ambitious and a bit more filthy mongrel in taking on Bennett before I would consider her for promotion to anything.
As an aside, this sort of attitude is what's turned a lot of people I know (myself included) completely off politics - the idea that it's all about scrapping and sticking it to the opposition, which culminates in the high-school-level cringefest that is Question Time.
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OK, I guess I haven't read enough about the case - I hadn't heard of the co-ordination aspect, just "lots off arseholes piling on with rape threats".
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Nicely put - I've had trouble agreeing (or at least agreeing fully) with either side of the discussion myself. One thing I'm not sure of, though:
"...tactics which are clearly intended to silence women" - I've seen variants on this phrasing used quite a bit, and it always seems to me to give the trolls too much credit. Is this sort of behaviour really the result of entrenched privilege seeking to eliminate opinions that threaten it, or is it just the action of idiot bullies who see an easy target and aren't interested in anything more than the immediate reaction? Obviously, silencing women can be the outcome of this sort of trolling, but I'm not sure that you can say it's the intent.
Not saying this is a non-issue, or not a feminist issue - the very fact that a woman becomes an "easy target" simply by commenting visibly on anything shows that that can't be true.
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A friend called Eleanor used to go out with a guy whose last name was Rigby - it didn't last long, so no chance of marriage, more's the pity.
Frankly, I think the hyphenation issue hsan't been a point of interest since the 80s - after the onscreen relationship between Michael J. Fox and Courteney Cox in Family Ties failed to turn into the real thing and deliver us a couple with the surname Fox-Cox, what's the point of anything else?
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I recall an attempt to introduce a Romeo & Juliet law here, which got shouted down as "Phil Goff wants 14-year-olds to have sex!!1!" Has anything else happened since then?
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Danielle,
Because if *everyone* is faking it...
Everyone feels like they're faking it, but I think in reality, most of us are perfectly capable and competent at what we do. At 37, I've managed to train myself to ignore that sinking "oh shit, I'm out of my depth" feeling when I recognise it, by reminding myself of all the previous times I've felt it, and how it turned out I was able to cope just fine. I still get it, I just know it's not worth listening to.
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It does seem that "not feeling like an adult" is feeling like an adult.