Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Launching into raunch | Feb 26, 2007 11:01

World's Francis Hooper told the Sunday Star Times that, "as a fashion designer I'm being humorous and irreverent" in creating a toddler t-shirt with the legend "Future Porn Star". No he wasn't: he was being tacky and unoriginal. And a child's body is not a billboard for adult irony.

But Hooper acknowledges that the shirt was a dud: World only ever sold three of them, which does rather raise the question of whether it deserved a front-page story under the banner 'Toddler T-shirt outrage'. The story anchored the Star-Times' feature on the rise of "raunch culture", which tended to magnify a lot of small things for dramatic effect (as grotesque an idea as the teeny pole dancing kit was, I suspect it generated more agonised opinion pieces than it actually sold units) and to rope in elements in such a way as to depict a terrible and growing momentum towards the pornification of culture.

Auckland university's Rick Starr is quoted saying that "Things that would virtually have resulted in an honour killing a decade ago, now just result in increasing people's celebrity," citing, among other things, the Pamela Anderson sex tape. Dude, that was 10 years ago.

I'm certainly not comfortable with the dry-humping that passes for many a pop video: I don't think girl children in particular should be immersed in an aggressive culture of sexual display. I'd rather that there was daylight between marketing and actual porn. But I'm not sure the whole thing answers to a classic feminist critique either. Perhaps we shouldn't be looking for political meaning in scantily-clad promo girls because perhaps there isn't much of it to speak of.

The parental advice reproduced from the website of the American Psychological Association seems sound, and the APA's new report on the sexualization of girls certainly reaches some troubling conclusions. But there are social indicators that run the other way: young women attain and achieve as they never have before; the incidence of sexual offending continues its long decline - in New Zealand, anyway.

And even porn itself - more available than ever before - doesn't all fit the tight, alarming characterisation offered in Australian writer Anne Manne's essay (NB: the version in the Star-Times is edited so as to give the impression that Manne is making the claim below herself, where in the originally published version, she is clearly quoting Rae Langton):

One of the most important elements in the debate over pornography is the possible effects of favourable depictions of rape, the endorsement of the idea that 'no' really means 'yes'. Rae Langton, a philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed a nuanced argument in a series of articles about the influence of porn on what she calls "sexual language games". Those language games carry powerful presumptions about what women are like. They may be very difficult to contest in a highly charged sexual situation. Power is involved in determining whether our utterances are taken seriously. And porn, Langton argues, casts women in a certain light, enabling assumptions about women's nature – that they all like rape, or forced or rough sex, or that 'no' means 'yes' – to be seamlessly embedded in interactions.

But where does that leave Suicide Girls, I Shot Myself or the portly couple who share their amateur videos with anyone who cares to look? Not all of this answers to a single, linear critique.

The SST's editorial on the matter (not online yet) is sincere, but it might have been courageous if the editor had looked a little closer to home. How many weeks a year does the front page of About Town feature post-adolescent popsies in tiny tops? How many scantily-clad promo girls get their pictures inside? Could Bridget Saunder's diary dwell any more than it already does on salacious detail and faithless sexual behaviour?

Moving on, Richard Easther kindly alerted me to Sean Carroll's blog post on Conservapedia, the new free encyclopaedia launched to provide an alternative to the "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American" Wikipedia. Or, as Carroll puts it, "to ensure that future generations of conservatives grow up really dumb."

Richard found the entry on Albert Einstein particularly amusing, but everyone seems to have their favourites. The entry for New Zealand is somewhat reality-challenged (the history page is entertaining also). Then there's the Talk page on The Theory of Evolution. The site was created and is run by two members of the family of prominent US conservative Phyllis Schlafly, who have quite a track record on Usenet and some the articles appear to be written by Andrew Schlafly's own students. Feel free to have a poke around and tell us your favourites.

No Right Turn finds the herald on Sunday apparently having trouble with numbers on carbon emissions.

Anyway: work to do. Hopefully I'll have time to write up the weekend in Christchurch for tomorrow.

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Itinerary packed, bags not just yet | Feb 23, 2007 08:35

Hey-ho. I'm off to Christchurch, city of vice, for Dramfest and some other things. Our itinerary is packed, my bags not just yet.

Perhaps you could have a gander at the Idealog blogs, or Theyworkforyou.co.nz. Instaputz has the commentary on Glenn Reynolds' most recent fits of putziness, and if you haven't been over to NZBC for a while, you oughta.

How many more days do you reckon the Wellington-based media can wring out of the tedious sooky-Aucklanders-can't-handle-an-earthquake narrative they've come up with? And are they overcompensating already?

And if only our newsreaders had as much personality as Jeremy Paxman.

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The Arguments | Feb 22, 2007 09:12

The relevant question about the CYFS Watch poster who wants to hurt Sue Bradford isn't "Is this the sort of person who opposes her bill?" Because, clearly and overwhelmingly, it isn't. Rather, it should be: "Is this the kind of person you would trust to define reasonable force?"

A foundation of the argument against the removal of the Section 59 defence is that every parent knows the difference between a simple smack and an assault. I think that's patently untrue. I'm not talking about the Delcelia Witika sort of assault - that's something else - but about the far larger number of kids who cop it hard because their parents believe they are within their moral and civil rights.

Perhaps we do need to remove the official sanction that allows that to happen. Other countries have done it without the sky falling or innocent folk being hauled in numbers through the courts.

I'd be dishonest if I said I was completely comfortable with Bradford's bill. On principle, I'm wary of laws whose enforcement is a matter of prosecutorial discretion. On the other hand, I'm obliged to pay attention to the moral argument Bradford makes: is there in fact a good justification that we should sanction - in whatever detail - an act against a child that we would not sanction against an adult?

One argument I will not countenance in any way at all is the one that seems to motivate the bill's most vocal opponents - Biblical justification. No, no and no again. No more than I would indulge a man who believes his religion allows him to keep his wife in line with a loving smack.

Not everyone who opposes the bill believes this, of course. There are parents who regard smacking as bad practice who still don't wish to see the risk of it being classed as assault. Again, we come back to the boundaries that aren't as clear or universal as they might seem.

So, on balance, I think the bill is the right thing. It specifically doesn't stop parents using force to ensure the safety of their child or others. It does remove a defence for parents who believe in smacking as a cornerstone of correction, but it won't result in the odd smack being criminalised. It removes a defence that has seen unacceptable actions against children successfully defended in court, and probably, dissuaded police from acting in other cases. I think it will move the goalposts about the social acceptability of such actions.

I'm also inclined to pay attention to child welfare agencies such as Plunket and Barnados, who are far closer to the problem than I am. When I asked the Family First spokesman on The Panel yesterday how he explained the unanimous view of those agencies that the bill was necessary, he answered: "government funding".

In other words, that those agencies were saying things they knew to be untrue about child welfare in order to get money. Like all conspiracy theories of its kind (another example is the belief that cancer doctors ignore miracle cures because they are in thrall of drug companies), it is a means of both avoiding the actual argument and of denying the deep professional commitment of those involved. That's not good enough. And it certainly wasn't good enough to change my mind.

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Testify! | Feb 21, 2007 09:36

The Fundy Post saves me the trouble of commenting on the Exclusive Brethren's claims to have been persecuted and Brian Tamaki's cry of treason.

It might pay to check in on how Bishop Brian's promise to overthrow democracy and control the country within five years (a bit on the treasonous side, surely?) is progressing. He's nearly halfway to his time limit and I'm not really seeing a lot of action.

Meanwhile, demonstrating an absence of psychological middle ground between victim and bully that can also be found in a number of local bloggers, three members of the Brethren have been handed suspended jail terms over what an Australian judge slammed as the "extraordinary and appalling … emotional abuse" of two children.

The campaign to keep the children from their father flouted court orders and was funded and directed by the church leadership. I keenly await the response of our local winger apologists.

Last week, a former Brethren member was sentenced to five years' jail, bringing to an end a squalid saga in which a young girl's sexual abuse was prolonged through repeated inaction by the church and its members. The abuser appears to have taken advantage of the fact that the little girl's father had been forced out of her life by the church.

It is my humble opinion that an organisation that pleads persecution in such circumstances has a bit of a nerve. People and the communities they form deserve the respect we should accord to any human as a default. Bullying cult leaders don't.

The Herald is doing quite a nice job of following what it calls God in 2007. New today, Tapu Misa (returned to God later in life), Brian Rudman (heathen) and Clay Nelson (Anglican priest from America). Also, the readers' views.

And today's Herald editorial concludes with some twisty logic:

Ironically for both sides in the debate this week, a national statement on religious diversity is an essentially Christian statement. Secularists seemed not to realise that the more a national statement downplayed the country's Christian heritage, the more true to that heritage it would be. Destiny Church, the Exclusive Brethren and other evangelicals who want Christianity to receive some form of official recognition appear unaware they would deprive their religion of one of its prime distinctions.

If the object of the exercise is to reassure Muslim and other immigrant groups of their religious acceptance, the first task is to ensure they understand the place of religion in Western liberal societies such as this one. That understanding is not advanced by arguments that Christianity is in any sense a state religion. The distinction between moral and legal authority is not easy for others to grasp, but it has to be realised if adherents to different spiritual and moral guides are to observe the same laws.

Christians can be content that their religion remains the mainspring of our Western civilisation. No national statement can alter that.

Can I get a "hell yeah!" for the Enlightenment too?

Anyway, I'm happy to report that I spent a highly enjoyable Monday evening in the company of sodomites and epicene women.

And 12,000 people sang, danced and testified last night. Our holy photographers captured this religious leader in the very act of ascension:

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