Culture Served Raw

Something odd and widely acknowledged happens at a person’s death; not only do we tend to sit through a terrifically fictitious recount of that person’s life, sobbing through the sugary fabrications woven through an otherwise dull or less-than-perfect collective memory, we actually nod reverently as if these tales were true, and eventually, out of what we might believe to be a mark of respect or simply as a human reaction to only remember the good, we begin to accept it all as truths.

It seems that every person becomes a hero after death, which in turn distorts and disintegrates the actual memory of who they were. Surely there’s some staggering irony there, in our idea of respecting the dead, heralding falsehood over reality, despite how ugly or how disappointing it might be. Idealising the dead is hardly new, both in practice and in its acknowledgement, but how does remembering the dead change now with the creation of the online presence, something that outlives us, and something that, with all its candid images, vulgar wall posts and vacuous updates, provides an honest reflection of who we are?

Social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter have been forced to deal with the sensitive issue of deceased members, with an estimation of one and a half million Facebook users dying each year. A surviving profile page can potentially add to the pain suffered by friends and relatives left behind, with reminders popping up on the sidebar for users to ‘reconnect’ with a dead loved one, and relatives are now given the option of deleting an account, preserving it as an inactive tribute page, or retaining it just as it is. The current policies by these sites require proof of death, usually with the uncomfortable provision of details, and decisions remain entirely in the hands of grieving relatives. Critics argue that ideally users should be given the options in their account settings, of what should happen to their page in the circumstance of death, but so far it is up to those left behind, to decide whether or not to transform the page into a sort of online memorial. In such a case, the memorial often remains a brutally honest portrayal of a person; from boozy pictures in sleazy nightclubs to heart-felt rants and musings in the form of status updates, everything remains untarnished and untouched, which preserves an accurate memory of a person, something irrefutable and unmalleable because all of it is right there, digital warts and all.

I remember hearing once that a good friend knows to delete your internet history when you die, and certainly many people would be happy with the expectation that the memory people will have of them after death will be dutifully manipulated beyond recognition, but with the openness and candour that now constructs the nature of the online presence, it appears that people are more willing to leave an authentic mark of themselves, ready and ambitious to share with the world at least some facet of who they are, declaring and confirming their existence with every tweet and status update, announcing every like, every dislike, renouncing every ounce of privacy in thought or in habit and summoning every excess of exhibitionism, to offer what they believe to be an accurate portrayal of who they are, despite whether it should be respectful of favourable. Considering this, preserving this digital echo of a person seems like the right thing to do, in remembering a person in the way they wanted to be acknowledged in life.

Viva La Cigarette

2011-01-11T05:10:00.000-08:00

I want to apologise first for the lengthy break from this project; the holidays offer far too many pleasures, distractions, excuses, one of which I must make another apology for, and that is the loveliness of the cigarette.

I am not a smoker, but in times of celebration and drunkenness, it seems that all of a sudden, everybody becomes one. And despite all the horror ads they show us on the television and the perpetual health warnings, there is just something irresistible about the beloved cancer stick. Oscar Wilde said, “A cigarette is the perfect type of pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” The holiday season serves as a blissful reminder of this, where unlike food and sex there is no point at which you say, “enough.” Cigarette smoking also seems to bring strangers together, more effectively than anything else. On those pauses throughout a working day or outside a nightclub, you will always see a group of people standing around leisurely, chattering and puffing away, holding between their fingers that common uniter of humankind in all its sticky, paper-wrapped glory.

But I don’t want to glamorise. Being a casual smoker, I still haven’t conquered the horrid “virgin smoker symptoms”, where after just a few puffs of tobacco I break into a cold sweat and become violently nauseous. Also, regardless of all the health warnings and the shock-advertising, all the glamorising is already taken care of. Cigarette smoking is still very much in style, from the cool and apathetic to the high-brow, Francophile intellectuals, there seems to be an accompanying lifestyle that comes inside every carton, and despite the outlawing of cigarette advertisements long ago, the tobacco industry has nothing to worry about, because they will forever have a loyal army of fashion designers, artists and celebrities to do it all for them.

Fight!

2010-11-29T15:58:00.000-08:00

“To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.” - George Santayana

This year, the astonishing spectacle of the Ultimate Fighting Championship was held in Australia for the first time. The event is brutal and very bloody, attracting thousands of screaming enthusiasts, delirious and drunk with a demonic frenzy propelled by the tall, imposing, tattooed men wrestling one another violently in a caged boxing ring. Skin is savagely torn open, to the crazed delight of the cheering audience, and competitors will often continue to fight in the disorientating daze induced by a severe blow or while covered from head to waist in streams of bright red blood. The debut of the championship, which features fighters competing in various styles of martial arts, has unsurprisingly provoked negative responses across the country, confirming for some the vulgar celebration of violence and blood sports embedded into Australian culture. Damon Young wrote a couple of days ago in the SMH, “Behind this anxiety is a simple idea: violence is always negative. It is anti-intellectual, uncivilised, coarse.” However, with such mindless savagery largely and quite swiftly condemned by its critics, there may be something surprisingly edifying, if not at least reasonable, about the impassioned celebration of raw, physical combat, and the underlying philosophies of martial arts.

The gritty expression of masculinity through violence
portrayed in the film Fight Club

While senseless combat is often associated with the likes of dim-witted brutes yet to catch up with evolutionary developments of the civilised species, I was very interested to stumble across this piece of knowledge yesterday for the very first time: according to Diogenes Laertius, Plato, one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of the ancient world, was also in fact, a wrestler. “Plato”, apparently, was not even his actual name, but rather his wrestling nickname, which translates to “broad”. So in between writing sections of The Republic, we can now imagine the robust ancient intellect taking to the local arenas to participate in some brutal, bloody violence which he also recommended for the ‘masters and scholars’ of his proposed ideal state. Plato, along with the famous philosopher and martial artist Bruce Lee, note that fighting and various styles of combat, if restrained and practiced with self-discipline and mindfulness, promote certain virtues and flourishes both character and mind. Self-restraint, self-discipline, respect, concentration, strength and confidence are some of the ideal objectives outlined by martial arts philosophy, teaching that one can exercise aggression without hatred, as well as force and brutality without cruelty.

Of course, this is combat taught and regulated in a controlled environment. The practice of throwing chairs and beer cups at cheering Queensland fans at the next State of Origin will probably not lead you on a virtuous path of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment. There is one other thing I’ve observed in physical violence, and that is the major differences in fighting styles between the two sexes. I recall in high school when two male friends would come to a disagreement and proceed to tackle one another to the ground, throwing a few punches here and there until all would be well, settled with a handshake, and promptly forgotten. Girls would always be more subtle, but deadlier. Quietly spreading rumours that would spread across the school like an infectious plague and poisoning the minds of mutual friends, perpetrators would effortlessly continue to chatter happily to the unknowing victim, a charade that could carry on for months. Speaking for myself, I think I’d opt for the bruised eye, but I should make a final note: in this day and age one must exercise great caution in condoning any form of violence, as the wrong kind of course often propels the most severe and devastating outcomes.

The Un-Getting of Wisdom

2010-11-24T19:42:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of the year again.

Students trudge around campus in their pyjama pants and doze off at the photocopying machines with swollen eyes, pinpoint pupils and coffee stained teeth. Now is crunch time, where we triumphantly mark off submission dates on our calendars, only to flip the page and discover a fresh cluster of deadlines we’d somehow forgotten about and our hearts drop miserably to the pits of our stomachs. On top of this is the grief of knowing that all that data we’d fought so determinedly to cram into our skulls will be dropped onto the exam paper and promptly forgotten. All this, at three in the morning and after twelve cups of coffee, compels us to ask the question: what are we doing this for?

It seems that the primary goal of higher education today is simply to boost the economy; with universities reinventing themselves to suit a neo-liberalist climate, they aim more at offering vocational training over education, preparing students to move directly from campus to the high-rise office building. I know that’s what I’m in here for; to serve three years, earn my certificate of graduation printed freshly off an HP laser printer and begin the rest of my life tucked away someplace obscure inside the media industry. However, while it probably isn’t necessary to write a ten thousand word thesis on Immanuel Kant, or to stand on our desks in the middle of class and declare “O Captain, my Captain!”, this approach to education, while perhaps serving us adequately in the short term, introduces the problem of practical wisdom and the inability to know when and how to use it.

Last week I received a phone call from my aunt informing me that my three year old cousin was sick in day care, and that she couldn’t get off work that afternoon to pick her up and take her to the doctor. I offered to do this, but when I arrived at the day care the supervisors refused to let her go with me. Apparently my cousin running towards me, squealing with delight and throwing her arms around my neck did not convince them that I was not in fact a devious child snatcher. We waited for forty minutes as they tried to reach my aunt at work while my cousin’s brow reddened with increasing temperature. While precautions are commendable, the inability for people to think outside the confines of what they know or what they’ve been instructed to do, to calculate when and how to make an exception to the rule and to improvise in order to make better moral judgements is problematic. People end up making bad decisions that often lead to disastrous consequences, and this unfortunately extends beyond individual incidences of bureaucracy gone mad.

Vice-chancellor of Macquarie University Steven Schwartz in his second annual lecture in August identified such problems in recent events such as the global financial crisis, where he notes that those involved had been highly educated graduates from the world’s most prestigious universities and business colleges who, although having the technical financial skills, lacked the necessary practical wisdom. Unwinnable wars, unsustainable industries and dangerous home insulation programs were all, Schwartz states, avoidable catastrophes, resulting from educated human beings making unwise decisions. This brings us back to education and its current aim of providing specialised and rigidly structured training, moving away from character building and creating people who think like robots.

The World Social Science Report this year published by UNESCO states, “In the face of global challenges which demonstrate that problems are increasingly interrelated, and spread fast from one part of the world to another, traditional disciplinary boundaries are being questioned.” Crises such as global warming, competing religious ideologies, overpopulation and increasing poverty need to be understood “in a plurality of contexts”, according to the report. The rigid and restricted mechanical skills held by each person cannot be enough to combat the problems we’ll be facing in the future. People will be required to make important decisions based on a broader understanding of what is essentially good and right.

The importance of practical wisdom has further been acknowledged in light of recent crises, with the BBC reporting in September that trainee soldiers in the US Army are now encouraged to study philosophy at the West Point military academy in New York State. David Edmonds writes, “In the classroom the new breed of philosopher soldiers are being taught Immanuel Kant, who thought that there were some things it was always wrong to do to other humans whatever the consequences, and without whom the modern conception of human rights is almost inconceivable.” The soldiers are given hypothetical scenarios that prompt critical reflection and train their moral instincts, helping them to draw the necessary distinctions between following unjust commands and making decisions based on their understanding of what is morally right.

Back in the safer confines of a university, Steven Schwartz proposes to allow final year students at Macquarie University to tie together the theoretical and practical sides of what they’ve learnt, studying both science and arts to broaden their education in a capstone course called ‘Practical wisdom’. The return to such approaches to education has undoubtedly met with its sceptics who point out that such an approach cannot possibly fit in with the money-driven ambitions of today’s economic climate, but considering all the calamities that have occurred in recent years, and those of which are yet to occur in the near future, such changes are no doubt essential. From the soldier who chooses to lower her gun to an unarmed child to President Obama who, before his inauguration stated, “We must ask not just ‘Is it profitable?’ but ‘Is it right?’”, the accumulation and use of practical wisdom is something to consider in these few years of our academic lives.

Published in Trespass Magazine on 8 November 2010

All Men Are Predators - Getting Over the Fear of Men

2010-11-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, the newspapers were cluttered with discussions of consensual sex and rape. Now that we’re somewhere between the end of football season and the beginning of party season, it seems it’s the right time for young women to be sit down and given the annual pep talk on the innate monstrosity of the male species and that consent is simply a given after three in the morning. With rape allegations being hurled around in every direction, members of Australia’s beloved football culture have voiced some very interesting claims. Retired AFL star Peter Everitt took to Twitter to eloquently declare:

“Girls!! When will you learn! At 3am when you are blind drunk & you decide to go home with a guy ITS NOT FOR A CUP OF MILO!”

Whether or not we agree with Everitt’s logic, such widely held opinions indicate an unrelenting attitude towards men and sex. This is not the common argument that women deliberately dress provocatively and sough out such men, especially famed and rugged football stars. The argument is that women should be aware of every man’s brutal and predatory nature. Women are lectured to avoid putting themselves into vulnerable positions, sometimes of excessive inebriation or of simply being alone in a room full of men with a drink in her hand, in order to avoid falling victim to the helpless, vulturous instincts of half the population. It is entirely a woman’s duty to avoid being placed in such situations because, let’s face it, men will be men.

The idea of women being taught to fear men and to see sex as something to be fiercely defended rather than enjoyed or even pursued is rather gloomy. Young men should be educated just as much, if not more so than women on matters of sexual conduct, but the idea that all men are helpless brutes is deeply ingrained into our thinking. Such ideas are not only grossly derogatory to men, they grant justification for the very few who do behave in such ways, and this defence, sadly, seems to cross most cultural divides.

See also: Footy Gods

Cartoon by Cathy Wilcox
in the SMH over the weekend

On Bestiality

2010-11-01T03:57:00.000-07:00

Peter Singer reminds us that not so long ago any form of sexual expression that did not result in the conception of a child was perceived to be, at best, wanton lust, or at worst, a perversion. Over time we’re seeing that, one by one, taboos are falling, and bigots and stigmatisers progressively becoming defeated. Thankfully, most people aren’t offended by the idea of more creative, alternative expressions to the traditional, “let’s make a baby and nothing more” method between two people, or by solitary practices and indulgences, which in some faiths are still acknowledged as a form of ‘self-abuse’. Things like contraception, homosexuality and pornography had all at one point in time provoked widespread moral panic and are now widely accepted with applause and enthusiasm.

The idea of bestiality in common contemporary thinking is however very different. Regularly condemned in the same arena as paedophilia, the practice of bestiality is considered outrageously immoral. Despite this, reported occurrences of humans coupling with animals are apparently not so rare. In the 1940s, Kinsey, in his famous endeavour into the private lives of ordinary (and not so ordinary) people, surveyed twenty thousand Americans and found that 8% of males and 3.5% of females reported that they had, at some time, had a sexual encounter with an animal. Among men living in rural areas the figure reached 50%.

Carved on the exterior of a temple in
Khajuraho

While there have been no solid indication that at any point in history, bestiality had once been accepted and embraced, fragments from the past certainly reveal humanity’s perpetual fascination with the concept of sexual intimacy between man and beast, depicting such transgressive acts in art, sculpture and mythology. An illustration dating back from the Bronze Age was uncovered depicting a man having sex with a large, quadruped beast of indeterminate species, a vase from ancient Greece shows a man having sex with a stag, an Indian miniature from the seventeenth century portrays a deer mounting a woman and from nineteenth century Japan, one that I find most amusing, a traditional style drawing depicts a woman tangled in the tentacles of a pleasuring, giant octopus. Today, while the subject still remains deeply taboo, there is no shortage of pornographic websites dedicated to offering people footage and images of women and men engaging in erotic activities with various farm animals, readily available for an evidently substantial demographic.

German lifestyle magazine
pushing the boundaries

If we were to take Singer’s rationalist stance, it would seem that the only problem with such practices is animal abuse, but this highlights the apparent inconsistencies in social attitudes concerning animal welfare. Take meat consumption for example: is slaughtering an animal to satisfy our taste and hunger more justifiable than having sex with an animal to satisfy our sexual hunger? This is a typical argument made by proponents of legalised zoophilia, who also point out the difference that certain animals, such as dogs, may visibility consent to such activities. But while we’ve all been in that embarrassing situation of kicking away our lustful canines from frantically rubbing up against the legs of our houseguests, the idea that such affections could ever be reciprocated remains very hard for most of us to stomach.

Should Women Change Their Surnames?

2010-10-15T05:08:00.000-07:00

Mulling over this topic in the last few days, I’ve come to learn that most people seem to hold very strong convictions regarding the issue of maiden names and whether or not a woman should renounce her surname to adopt her husband’s.

There are women who base their convictions upon solid, feminist ideals; women are marrying much later, building up a professional career attached to their original names and don’t see how a man’s name should have any more importance or significance than their own. Then there are women who nestle in the reverence for tradition, accusing others of being too radical or too sensitive, romantic or nostalgic about the idea of taking their husbands’ surnames and feeling warm and fuzzy about one day seeing their shiny, new names printed elegantly on the front of a wedding invitation.

Asking my male friends of their opinions, I’ve learnt also that there is no lack of men delicate about this issue, considering it to be deeply insulting and claiming that a woman rejecting her husband’s name would be an absolute deal breaker. This comes with little surprise of course; very few men seem to have detached themselves from the primitive fixation with marking just about anything. Climbing the Great Wall earlier this year, I remember watching almost every man in my tour group determinedly scribbling their names on the ancient bricks with thick, black marker pens. One of them, with a good humoured self-awareness, joked that he was waiting for me to turn away so that he could later pee on it. I still don’t doubt today that given the privacy, he might’ve actually done just that.

Today we see various alternatives to the tradition, with some women choosing to use their husbands’ names in their social lives and their maiden names in their professional. Some couples meet halfway and hyphenate their names, while others even blend the two names together to create an entirely new one. Then of course, some women choose to keep their maiden names altogether. However, with all these alternatives arise some very obvious complications, and as for the feminists who passionately argue (and quite understandably) that gender equality cannot be achieved until naming practices are ‘equal’, one cannot help but imagine the conundrums; how can we achieve this in a practical sense?

With separate surnames, there is the dilemma surrounding which one would be given to their children. Blended names not only require a good amount of creativity if your names are something other than Jones or Smithfield, they can also take away the resonance of cultural and ethnic heritage. As for hyphenated names, at which point would you finally stop linking name after name? Imagine a few generations down the track, signing your name on the dotted line only to have it spill right off the page. Our names, whether or not we choose to deny it, play a large role in identifying who we are, but with all the complexities nowadays, would it be so outrageous if we all just changed our names to our first names followed by the digits of our drivers’ licences?

In the end, it just comes down to compromise. At the moment, I plan on keeping my surname, not because of heated feminist ideals but because of how strongly I identify myself as being part of my family. As for the potential complications, I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

*Published in Trespass Magazine, 15 October 2010

Middle Class Prostitutes and the Blame Game - Interview with Author and Former Call Girl Tracy Quan

2010-09-30T05:06:00.000-07:00

I will admit, I knew very little about Wayne Rooney before all the hysteria surrounding his liaisons involving two very pricey call girls … and to be honest I actually still don’t. Despite the media frenzy and the staggering sensationalism, all I know is that Rooney is another high-profile sportsman who clumsily found himself somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. I can on the other hand recite every last detail about the girls involved in the affair, particularly Miss Jennifer Thompson, and thanks to the dutiful British journalists from The Daily Mail (who with a shameless reputation for hyper-sensationalising seem to constantly thrive upon the dual approach of scaremongering while titillating), I can tell you all about what kind of school she attended, where her parents were at the time the scandal had broken out and what type of car they drive.

When it was revealed that the Manchester United star cheated on his pregnant wife with sex workers Helen Wood and Jennifer Thompson, tabloid media collapsed into fits of hysteria. This, however, appeared not to be due to Rooney’s status as a high-paid, high-profile sports figure, but rather the fact that these women seemed to hail from good and stable backgrounds, thereby compelling the tabloids to demand, “What have we come to?” The slew of coverage surrounding the young, well-bred middle-class temptresses reeks of unrestrained, puritanical sermonising as if the sex profession is somehow new, and men have not been straying from monogamy and consulting prostitutes for centuries. I am not concerned with romanticising the sex industry and sex workers, but surely such sordid tales are becoming rather tiresome. I am concerned, however, with the fact that the tremendous popularity of tabloid newspapers such as The Mail – which remains the second best-selling daily newspaper in the United Kingdom – undoubtedly has an enormous influence on public opinion, and with the recent finger-pointing and shameless dehumanisation of the so-called ‘tarts’ and ‘hookers’ involved in the Rooney scandal, this reveals a rather peculiar social mentality.

Now it doesn’t really come as a surprise that the villains in this tale are the women. Of course, Mr Rooney has been labelled ‘stupid’ and ‘classless’, portrayed as the dismissible caricature of a sporting star, but the true evil rests with the young, female sex workers sporting their glittered mascara, bright pink lipstick and stiletto shoes. Mortified columnists Bel Mooney and Melanie Phillips from The Daily Mail lamented the horrors of privately-educated, middle-class girls choosing to sleep with football stars for money, with of course no mention of the moral judgements made by Rooney himself. Phillips mourns the liberal sexual attitudes of young women today, reducing the female body to a “commodity”, not merely in the exchange of sex for money, but even in circumstances of the “predatory one-night stand”. Prostitution itself, she reasons, is slavery, and she expresses her fears that the profession, just like sex outside marriage, children born out of wedlock and homosexuality, will be accepted as a “lifestyle choice”. Mooney even goes so far as to summon the spirit of the Middle Ages, claiming that, “They (the women) think they are selling their bodies. They end up selling their souls.” These women, according to Phillips and Mooney, made a deal with the devil, and while their wretched souls burn in sneering, self-righteous condemnation, the preservation of Wayne Rooney’s ‘soul’ apparently remains firmly intact.

The unrelenting presence of our archaic Adam and Eve complex should tug at the sleeves of common feminists, but instead it appears to be generating a storm of blundering attacks and name-calling towards these women, which are significantly more boorish and callous in nature than the ones made towards Rooney; who, if we’re going to be all morally righteous here, consulted the two sex workers while his wife was pregnant with their first child. The dehumanisation of the women, who are rarely acknowledged by name but rather the derogatory labels, ‘tarts’ and ‘hookers’, demonstrates that many of us feel that we somehow yield the licence to discriminate and condemn the women (not the men) who step outside the divine borders of moral sexual behaviour. While there are more ‘immoral’ occupations that wind up destroying the lives of far more people, we are often very quick to judge women in the sex industry, blaming them for the helpless errors made by men and, as demonstrated by journalists like Mooney, damning their scummy souls to hell.

I turned to best-selling novelist and former callgirl Tracy Quan to ask her about such attitudes today. Her responses detail the ways in which these attitudes contaminate not only media representations of women and sexual mores, but also various political and public arenas in respects to the sex industry, particularly in the United States.

How do people react to your attempts to eradicate the stigma attached to sex workers and the sex industry?

Prostitutes are sometimes too busy juggling their multiple lives to notice the stigma other people put on them – that’s a theme in my novels. There’s an accusation that I glamorise the industry by telling this story, mostly from people who are part of the problem – the stigmatisers. They want to be in control of the culture at all times and that’s just not possible. Social attitudes are in a constant state of flux.

As a successful novelist and regular commentator on current sexual issues, you could be perceived as the antithesis of what people expect a sex worker to be. How much truth do you think rests behind the ‘struggling women from broken homes’ stereotype that people are inclined to give to sex workers?

Well, I certainly embody those stereotypes. I was a child of divorce, ran away at 14, began work in my teens, was never good at managing money; STILL don’t feel like a grown-up. If you don’t walk around with a looooong face calling yourself a victim, people assume you never struggled. But those who struggle to survive or get ahead are often stronger and happier than those who are comfortable. Having too many choices is almost never the key to happiness, and most sex workers are managing with limited options.

Do you think the sex profession is being glamorised today?

A lot of professions are mythologized, not just ours. In Diary of a Married Call Girl, an uptown hooker falls in love with a professor – and she has to deal with the way HIS work is glamorized. Think of Wall Street. People have all sorts of fantasies about high finance – as well as entertainment and espionage. Rock star chefs and archbishops make restaurant work and religion seem glamorous. When you put all that together, is prostitution more glamorized than these gigs? I doubt it.　

Why do you think girls from middle-class backgrounds are choosing to enter the sex industry?

Middle class girls have been doing this for a long time. It’s not a new thing.

It can be to maintain your way of life – a mortgage, a car, formal education. It can also be a sign of upward mobility, wanting more than your parents have. Or they might be rebelling against middle class expectations. Perhaps the idea of being a civil servant is unexciting? I can’t imagine why.

We have to remember that every girl who enters the industry is an individual, with her own reasons for doing so. There’s no one size fits all explanation just because you come from a particular class.

With the Rooney scandal, the ‘morality’ behind consulting sex workers within a marriage seems to be rearing its head a lot in the media, and people seem to point the finger at the female sex workers rather than the man in question. How do you think people rationalise such notions?

We still have the Old Testament stories rattling around in our heads, starting with Eve getting blamed for Adam’s fall. It’s not always conscious, I suppose.

What steps are you taking to legalise the sex industry in the United States? Why do you think that in this day and age it remains a significant struggle?

We’re in a defensive role because the anti-prostitution machine is really aggressive at the moment. In the US, we focus on reducing the damage new prostitution laws can do to our lives. In the state of Rhode Island, there used to be a loophole permitting indoor prostitution. Agitators campaigned to change that, and we fought against the new law – but we lost that battle. In New York State, we’re trying to get the police to stop using condoms as “evidence” of prostitution and we have the backing of the Urban Justice Center.

I think America’s fear of prostitution is very much bound up with fear of the foreign, exotic or non white outsider. Also, prosecutors have really taken over our society, and their response to every human situation is to prosecute or use the threat of prosecution. We need to take our country back from the prosecutors and redefine these people as public servants.

What are key issues faced by the prostitutes rights movement?

It depends where you live. In the US, there is a nationwide witch-hunt happening at the local level. A group of state prosecutors is going after the US websites where erotic service providers advertise. There are 21 states involved at this point. In response to these threats, Craigslist closed its adult services section in the US. Another website, Backpage.com, was pressured but they haven’t closed their section as of today. In 2007, employees of a Florida newspaper were charged with prostitution-related crimes, but they didn’t get the same attention as Craigslist. The outcome was unfortunate for the newspaper and led to the current crackdown.

Read Tracy’s article on the Craigslist shutdown, up on Asylum.　

*Published in Trespass Magazine, 30 September 2010

West Vs. East - How Do We Treat the Elderly?

2010-09-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

"A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.” – Abraham J. Heschel

In experiencing firsthand the way in which Chinese families care for and respect the elderly, I promised myself before writing this that I would renounce, or at the very least conceal, any biases that I might harbour on this matter. Summoning Heschel’s quote admittedly was not a good start, but to be fair, conventional thinking certainly nudges many of us towards making harsh comparison between the East and West when it comes down to the issue of elderly care. While Eastern cultures place enormous value on family and the aged, often abiding by complex age hierarchies within larger families, values of the West tend to focus more around youth and individualism. The traditional Asian household is far more likely to include a grandparent, whereas nursing homes in Australia and many parts of the West are becoming increasingly overcrowded. Of course it would be obscenely simple (and not to mention slightly conceited) to condemn Western cultures for their deprived treatment and attitudes toward their seasoned citizens, so I wanted to instead focus on what the East could learn from the West.

The Confucian notion of ‘filial piety’, that is, showing respect for and deference to your elders, continues to have a strong presence in Chinese and Asian families. Being in the wise company of an elder is traditionally acknowledged as a high privilege, and although ancient myths of dead ancestors punishing disrespectful children are now shared as common jokes within Chinese families, this sort of humour suggests that ancestral reverence remains important today. The problem with such values however is outlined in what psychologist Edward Shen refers to as ‘filial stupidity’, which is the notion of filial piety becoming manipulated and exploited, giving older family members the licence to act autocratic, possessive, and “demand unhealthy deference to their authority, making choices based on shaming other family members”. The arguably distorted sense of duty to elders is believed to often result in younger family members giving up their own well-being and freedom in order to submit to tradition.

Western cultural values on the other hand encourage families to balance loyalty to the elderly with individual freedom. Unfortunately however, it is very often that the latter takes precedence over the former, resulting in a lack of harmony within a family, and eroding any sense of family reliance and closeness. In the end, it is important to note that individuals from all cultural backgrounds go to great lengths for their elderly parents and family members out of love, respect and a strong sense of duty, but there certainly is a lot we can learn from one another.

Girls love Boys' Love - Why Women are Loving Homoerotic Manga

2010-09-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

In starting the week off with a reasonably light-hearted topic, I wanted to explore a bizarre phenomenon referred to as ‘boys’ love’, or yaoi. In Taiwan and various other parts of East Asia, tens of thousands of young women today are passionately engaged in the consumption and production of Japanese boys’ love manga; comic-book tales of romance and eroticism between boys and young men. Women indulge in these narratives of homoerotic intimacy between handsome young men, eagerly swapping comic books, scribbling up fan fiction and even re-enacting their favourite stories. Typical yaoi stories consist of awkward, sexual awakenings between childhood friends, erotic intimacy between stepbrothers and affectionate encounters between teacher and student, and usually end in two beautiful young men passionately engaging in desperate and enthusiastic love making. The comics are almost exclusively created by women for a primarily female audience, satisfying an apparent craving that very few were aware existed. Themes of homoeroticism are unsurprisingly provocative to the cultural conservative, but even to the open-minded it can be rather confronting, as a good number of yaoi manga explores themes of rape, incest and bestiality (not to mention, the boys are usually illustrated to look very, very young). However, unlike the lolicon phenomenon which also has a prominent place in Japanese culture, many academics and cultural observers have been quick to recognise the benefits that come with women’s fascination with homoerotic comic books.

Boys’ love manga is believed to allow female readers to break out of the submissive roles traditionally played by girls. Napier expresses the standard interpretation academics hold concerning this issue, stating that yaoi is a way for young women and girls to explore sexuality without it being too intimately connected to them. For a long time, the ‘male gaze’ has dictated how women are portrayed in the media, typically positioning young women as the objects of desire for male protagonists and audiences. Yaoi, with the absence of female characters, allows readers to select which male character to identify with, rather than feeling forced into one role, which would typically be the submissive and desired, rather than the desiring. This essentially challenges the problems surrounding male-dominant media representations of sex and sexuality, acknowledging the sexual desiring consciousness of women and considering them as being more than objects of male lust.

See also: Chasing Lolita – Sexualisation of the Child

Dog Meat – What’s So Wrong with Eating Man’s Best Friend?

2010-09-04T23:07:00.000-07:00

Before I’d set off for a recent trip to Northern China, I remember my friend pulling me aside at a dinner party, and with that slurred solemnity induced by four shots of vodka, she made me promise her that I would not eat dog meat. Thinking about the various dishes I’d sampled at local restaurants and side streets, I really can’t be sure if I’ve broken my half-hearted vow to her, but I doubt it. Dog meat, according to the Chinese side of my family, has a distinctly pungent taste and aroma. Regarded as ‘the fragrant meat’, it’s been part of a longstanding culinary tradition, known to keep diners warm in the winters and to speed up the metabolism. This however, as expressed by the pleading, wide-eyed horror of my friend, can be very difficult for many of us to stomach. While we suffer no qualms feasting on the flesh of other animals, dogs and cats are simply out of the question. A dog is no gentler than a lamb, smarter than a pig or even more affectionate than a goose (as anyone who has kept a pet goose or chicken that nestles in your lap while you watch the television and follows you keenly around the house would know), so is it really a matter of morality or cultural gap?

Rationally speaking, one might encounter some difficulty deciding why it is essentially more wrong to eat dogs than it is to eat any other creature. Some argue that dogs are bred for their companionship, but this of course is restricted to the West. In countries like China and Korea, dogs are specifically bred to end up on dinner plates. Anti-dog-trade activists claim that it is ‘uncivilised’ to eat dogs, but one can recognise the hypocrisy of this argument, coming from countries where factory-farmed livestock are crammed like sardines into overcrowded pens and blasted with antibiotics to be kept alive until they’re finally ready to be slaughtered. Dogs bred for consumption are kept in no better conditions, but with just as much self-awareness as those creatures routinely slaughtered and served up on the Western dinner table, it is very difficult to understand why treating dogs in this way is any less moral or ‘civilised’. Peter Singer, Australian philosopher and specialist in applied ethics, reasons that all animals are equal and that one cannot reasonably proscribe the eating of certain animals and permit the eating of others based on subjective, moral grounds. This however, is what has been happening in recent years, with the Chinese government allegedly yielding to the pressures of anti-dog-trade activists and Western ideals of ethical eating.

10 year companionship: Man and his goose near
Ijburg in Amsterdam after enjoying a swim in the ocean

During the Beijing Olympics in 2008, official ordered dog meat off the menus at local markets and in the southern province of Guangzhou, where dog meat is widely consumed, vendors were reportedly warned to stop selling dog meat ahead of the Asian Games which will be held later this year. The Chinese government has signalled a willingness to completely ban the sales and consumption of dog meat on a national scale, and harsh penalties are allegedly being considered for individuals and businesses that are found violating this impending law. The move is certainly controversial, with spectators claiming that the ban is tantamount to succumbing to foreign prejudices, and in disregarding the long culinary tradition of consuming dog meat in China, it does appear to be a classic example of cultural imperialism. Despite this, it is only natural for our emotional bias to take precedence over proper reasoning, and once such bans set in, many of us will raise our voices in triumphant cheers while heedlessly stabbing into our Sunday roast.

See also: Bizarre Trends in Pet-Keeping

Who Needs Men Anyway?

2010-08-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

The topic of single motherhood has popped up over the last few days, with celebrities accused of glorifying the decision to select a sperm donor over a man, rendering the male species disposable and threatening to dissolute the sacred institution of the nuclear family. Despite the dramatic nature of such claims and the absence of impassioned women rallying down the streets and setting their bras to flames, there might be reasons for concern. Echoing the feminist verses of Gilman (who envisioned an ideal world where women spontaneously reproduced and lived in an all-female society of perfect peace), a recent study has suggested that society may not really need fathers at all, concluding that “despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution.” Furthermore, it’s been reported that men could even lose their role in the reproductive process itself, after human sperm was first created artificially in a laboratory. Such scientific developments, along with discreet forms of contraception (the pill) and the widespread accessibility to abortion in the Western world trigger a whole new wave of feminism. Women now have control over their lives, their bodies and their uteruses, but it appears that with this control comes an attitude that dismisses the opposite sex as simply a nuisance that gets in the way. Freedom and self-empowerment come with the pill, courage and independence come with single motherhood, but blatantly disregarding the male species should not come with feminism.

Hit Me Baby - Sexing Up Domestic Violence

2010-08-16T05:33:00.000-07:00

Famed photographer Steven Klein's series Domestic Bliss features high-profile celebrity couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in a violent and aggressive love affair

Marquis de Sade declared that “sex without pain is like food without taste,” and if we’re restricting such philosophies solely to matters of the flesh, then all that can be said for this is to each his own. Pain in love is also a concept that seems generally acceptable; love is often devastating, disappointing, confusing and terrifying. But what can be said for the concept of violence in love? The new music video featuring pop music giants Rihanna and Eminem alongside gorgeous Hollywood actors Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan has come under fire recently, accused of glamorising domestic abuse and giving it a somewhat sexy, romantic edge:

The intense, passionate and dysfunctional relationship portrayed by two stunningly gorgeous actors expresses a quiet though very present beauty in a mutually abusive love affair, and with a pop star who’d recently made headlines sporting a bruised eye and swollen lip from her former ‘intense and passionate’ lover singing the words “I like the way it hurts,” the storm of criticism is unsurprising. But rather than accusing attention-hungry celebrities of endorsing violence and domestic abuse, it might also be worth considering the possibility of young artists offering a brutally honest picture of an often multi-faceted situation.

How to sell a suit, according to Duncan Quinn

The idea of ‘loving hard’ isn’t new or as scarce as we’d like to believe, despite countless campaigns condemning violence against women or the public scrutiny of ‘wife-beating’ public figures like Chris Brown and Mel Gibson. Our media seems to condemn violence as much as it seeks to glorify it, with filmmakers and photographers exploring the more seductive side of intense, dysfunctional relationships, and high fashion advertisements weaving erotic and romantic undertones into the display of physical abuse and violence. I remember a conversation I had with a girl who was experiencing difficulties coping with her boyfriend’s infidelity, and when I suggested that she'd confront him, she smiled faintly and said that he would hit her if she did. That wild delusion in her eyes mirrors a bizarre belief that passion and intense love is demonstrated by furious battles and the infliction of physical abuse by a loved one. Violence in love is arousing and unpredictable, and seems to be acknowledged by many as evidence of real, unrestrained love: our love is grander and more than most. We just love harder. The idea is not unlike the myth of the ‘tortured artist’, something with more romanticised fantasy than actual truth. Rather than the notion of art imitating the tragedy of life and love, is it more likely that instead it is breeding a monster?

A Universal Symbol of Hate

2010-07-30T19:18:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, in its annual tally of hate crimes against the Jews, the Anti-Defamation League announced it would no long consider the swastika as a symbol of anti-Semitism. “The swastika has morphed into a universal symbol of hate,” explained Abraham Foxman, national direction of the ADL. “Today it’s used as an epithet against African-Americans, Hispanics and gays, as well as Jews, because it is a symbol which frightens.”

The swastika, despite its almost comical simplicity, is both chilling and provocative. With its sacred origins in Eastern and Dharmic religions as an ancient symbol of spiritual victory and human existence, it is horribly ironic that today most of us identify it as an emblem of hatred, violence and death. Adopted as a symbol of German nationalism, Adolf Hitler instilled a more sinister meaning, outlining in his Mein Kampf that “in the swastika (we see) the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.” Now, 65 years after the end of the Second World War, the swastika still retains all its potency, conjuring images of pain, terror and murder associated with the Holocaust. The swastika commands a very sudden and solemn acknowledgement of dangerous human hatred, and due to this bewitching quality, “the swastika is shorthand for every racist and bigot on the planet.”

The move by the ADL to classify the swastika as a “universal” symbol of hate will undoubtedly meet with a backlash. While the symbol continues to represent peaceful spirituality and existence for hundreds of millions of people outside of Western culture, proponents of “reclaiming” the swastika will hardly be impressed. The unsuccessful attempts to ban the swastika emblem in Europe met with fierce calls for the awareness and understanding of its alternative meanings, but due to the overwhelming effectiveness of the Nazis’ interpretation, a change in perceptions seems unlikely. As long as hatred will reside in the hearts of the ignorant and deluded, the perverted translation of the peaceful swastika will carry on with all its current vigour.

Culture Served Raw will be back in two weeks!

Hooked - The Thrills of Body Suspension

2010-07-27T03:38:00.000-07:00

For those who seek beauty in the macabre, there is one spectacle you simply cannot miss. Late last night, I was brought along to witness a quiet ritual in a friend’s studio referred to as body suspension. The ancient custom involves suspending the human body by hooks (in this case, shark hooks), which are pierced through the flesh. After spending a few minutes brooding over his options, he calmly opted for the ‘suicide’ position, in which the hooks are placed in the upper back to suspend the person upright, thus giving the appearance of a person being hanged. When he pulled off his shirt, I remember seeing the grisly appearance of back. Blistered and savagely scarred with some wounds still raw from recent trauma, his skin displayed the frightening marks of what had been almost three years of enduring the bizarre practice. The sight of the suspending body was surprisingly serene. There was no self-loathing, heavy metal music blasting through the speakers, the room was neat and sterile and the air smelt of fresh coffee and antiseptic, faintly redolent of a dentist’s office. With his skin stretched to impossible lengths and his head lowered in what almost seemed to be a sincere spiritual reverence, the vision seemed to at first spill over the brink of realism, until eventually exuding both stirring terror and numbing beauty. It is extraordinary to watch, let alone to experience, though I don’t plan to be able to offer a description of that anytime soon.

The practice of body suspension dates back to the ancient tribes of India, the Middle East and North America. These were performed as part of a sacred ritual, typically as a right of passage, healing rituals, penance, rituals of worship and spiritual ascension. The Modern Primitivism movement saw the resurrection of this practice in contemporary Western cultures and today, while many will participate as a form of deviance or entertainment, the objective of attaining a new level of spiritual consciousness is still one of the primary reasons for undergoing this procedure. My friend explained that body suspension was his personal way of proving to himself that he was more than his body, and despite his cowering shoulders and bleeding flesh, the spirit in his expression certainly reveals a rare glow of self-contentment. However, according to the other suspension enthusiasts, this prolonged state of bliss is not always the outcome. Many people noted that instead of the euphoric, floating sensation many claim to experience, they endured terrible nausea and panic attacks as their mind and body wavered between a state of shock and extreme pain. Personally, the thing that inevitably caused me to refuse the generous offer of having shark hooks pierced through my flesh was pure and utter vanity. Spiritual ascension or not, the scars, boils and blisters left in the skin are enough to easily ensure a lifetime deprivation of backless dresses. I think I’d opt for meditation instead.

Torturing the Artist

2010-07-24T01:43:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. I’m not scribbling away manically on yellowing pages, cramped in a dim-lighted room, starved of food and human interaction or weaving tragic verses about the harrowing ruins of life and humanity. Also, I have showered. It would seem then that there is very little room for me beneath the frothy definition of an ‘artist’. Award-winning painter LeslieAnn Butler observed, “It seems that one has to be sick, depressed, weird or tortured to be thought of as an outstanding artist”, and looking at the continuing prevalence of this gloomy cultural myth, she might be right.

The devastatingly romantic idea of the ‘tortured artist’ will either make you swoon or cringe. It is wildly seductive and fantastically inspiring and at the same time, nauseatingly cliché and downright pretentious. The construct of the troubled genius lamenting the supposed ignorance and superficiality of the rest of the world can understandably become a little irritating, and the self-destructive tendencies associated with all of it – alcoholism, drug addiction and self-mutilation (not to mention a blatant disregard for personal hygiene) – is certainly unsettling. Still, many hold onto the grim understanding that writers, painters and musicians must be hopelessly tormented by grief, frustration and turmoil to create great pieces of work. So what is it about a person blowing out their brains or slicing off an ear in the spirit of artistic suffering that immediately grants them the divine title of tortured artist?

The exhausting list of brilliant though miserable artists undoubtedly contributes to the twisted glorification of the ‘tortured-artist syndrome’. Franz Kafka, Oscar Wilde, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolfe, Frida Kahlo, Beethoven, Hemingway, Van Gogh, and Poe were all known to have endured all sorts of tragic circumstances, and – as the story goes – were thereby compelled to throw themselves completely into music, painting or prose to create all of the wonderfully tragic masterpieces we adore today.

Even now, the romantic idea that creative people must suffer for their art is a frequent theme in popular culture. The media love to focus on high-profile individuals who fit the tortured artist stereotype, hailing the likes of Kurt Cobain, John Lennon and Michael Jackson as tormented musical geniuses. Even actors like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Heath Ledger are painted with the same deliberation, glamorising the early deaths of troubled performers as some sort of tragically poetic discourse and of course, promptly immortalising them to the status of iconography. Such attitudes become highly problematic for some very obvious reasons. While we make fierce attempts to combat drug and alcohol abuse, it is simultaneously glorified everywhere else we turn. Depression, suicide and mental illness, all rapidly growing problems in Australia and the Western world, are romanticised as a poignant necessity for aspiring artists. Recklessness, instability, self-loathing and even poverty are the jewels that crown a true artist, and there is simply no room for happiness. But is pain an absolute necessity for good art, and do artists really suffer any more than the rest of humanity? Can one work on deadlines and self-discipline in the comfort of their living rooms, or must they work only on whims and inspiration, soaked in a pool of alcohol and urine?

Distancing ourselves from Romantic idealism, the strictly clinical answer would be ‘no’. It has been concluded time after time that there is really no evidence that the most accomplished artists are mentally unstable or derive from unstable backgrounds. Also, to be extra drab and clinical and begin summoning statistics, it is estimated that 80% of people between the ages of 17 and 22 will undergo a significant mental health episode, creatives and non-creatives alike. Modern researchers on the topic collectively argue that there is just as much art derived from joy and happiness as there is from despair and torture, but that the expression of misery and madness is easier to identity and to understand. There seems to be a greater demand amongst art dealers and aficionados for works of rage and anguish, and people tend to be more drawn to and fascinated by all things macabre.

The distorted idea that all great artists work through pain is constructed by a chronic fixation on the personal lives of the ones who had openly suffered, because these individuals were far more interesting. The image of the mad genius and tortured artist therefore becomes very convenient for an aspiring creative, and definitely seems to lend them the necessary street cred required to be taken seriously in the art world. The catastrophic behaviour and habits that supposedly come with the image are furiously exciting and certainly sells, but how far should reality imitate art?

There are many perks to pursuing the tortured lifestyle in the name of art, but surely the detrimental side effects are hardly worth it. As long as the sombre myth continues, capturing the hearts of young and sensitive hopefuls, the havoc of self-destruction will remain a noble celebration of artistic heroism.

*Published in Trespass Magazine, 24 July 2010

Top 10 Sexiest Men (Under Five-Feet-Five)

2010-07-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

Society’s chronic overpassing of the shorter man is, as many other unfortunate habits of human behaviour, explained with all the authority of Darwinian reasoning. Apparently after all this time, physical dominance in males still determines who sits at the top of the pecking order, and women are still searching for able-bodied mates to provide for them and offer protection. Shorter men earn less than taller men, and are less likely to be elected into a position of power; a tall man as leader is seen as being strong and assertive, whereas a shorter man is commonly viewed upon as being a pushy tyrant, accused of suffering a sort of Napoleonic complex (remember Lord Farquaad in Shrek?). Heightism however extends beyond ‘comical’ discrimination, manifesting itself in more severe forms around the world, cited as one of the underlying causes of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Close to one million people were murdered, and it is believed that one of the reasons that political power had been conferred to the minority Tutsis by the Belgians was because they were taller, and were therefore considered superior and more suited to governance. More recently, the Vietnamese Government launched a $40 million programme, vowing to make its population taller, and therefore more ‘beautiful.’ Women are never cooing over the ‘short, dark and handsome,’ but is this really because of our biological wiring? The idea of glorifying men according to their physical stature seems outrageously primitive, and it may be possible that shorter men are instilling self-fulfilling prophecies constructed by the subconscious prejudices of our societies today.

Our beloved presidents and captains of industry rarely exhibit the broad shoulders, chiseled jaws and Herculean bodies supposedly required for a position of power, so it is very likely that it is not the stature of a person that presents the problem, but rather the constructed bias directed towards the shorter man. Discrimination experts point out that the vast majority of us harbour deeply rooted feelings of negativity towards shorter men, and that heightism is burdened with the same weight as other very important biases such as race bias, or gender bias. When we are young, we become exposed to the discourses of tall boys deferred to the image of maturity, while shorter ones are quickly dismissed as being childlike. The connection between height and status is even embedded into our very language, with respected men of ‘stature’ being ‘looked up to’ amongst his lesser peers. With such ideals forcible instilled into our subconscious, it’s no wonder that many men begin to act accordingly. However, things do appear to go either way. Is it a coincidence that a seemingly disproportionate number of our brilliant thinkers, artists and creatives have stood shorter than the average male? Whether or not as a means of compensating for their apparent shortcomings, shorter men have often made up the greater part of the more interesting personalities in history, and even the unfortunate examples of Charles Manson, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and the Marquis de Sade (of which, to me, the lack of ‘fortune’ is quite debatable) do not prove otherwise. The appeal of the following men, all of whom stand under five-feet-five, certainly surpasses the mere incident of being 'cute':

10. Woody Allen

The notorious yet fascinating American screenwriter and director offers a very distinct style to the world of cinema, and is heralded as one of the most influential directors of all time.

9. Ludwig van Beethoven

German composer and pianist Ludwig van Beethoven contributed some of the most stirring compositions, lingering between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music. How would we know drama without Symphony No.5?

8. Pablo Picasso

Co-founder of the radical and influential Cubist movement, the Spanish painter created some of the most moving and terrifying pieces of artwork and is unsurprisingly one of the best known artists of the twentieth century.

7. Charlie Chaplin

The interesting life of Charlie Chaplin undoubtedly came with becoming the largest screen legend of the silent era. Regarded as the "only genius to come out of the movie industry," Chaplin succeeded to bring comedy to a war-torn world.

6. Voltaire

Writer of the biting French satire Candide, the witty writer and philosopher of the exciting French Enlightenment advocated civil liberties such as freedom of religion and free trade, and is up there (so to speak) with the likes of Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu.

5. Martin Scorsese

At the forefront of contemporary American cinema, Scorsese captures beauty in violence and reason in madness in his exquisite and provocative films.

4. Harry Houdini

His mysterious acts crafted the Hungarian-American magician into no less than a legend. Living and breathing magic, he became a worldwide sensation, and the source of guidance and inspiration for every magician after him.

3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

As the most enduringly popular composer of classical music, very few could disagree that Mozart’s symphonies rest upon the brink of godliness.

2. T. E. Lawrence

Otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia, the British Army officer is famous for the dashing role he played in helping the Arabs against the Turks during the First World War.

1. John Keats

England's young, nineteenth century Romantic poet bewitched later writers with sensual imagery and an elaborate choice of words. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute." - Yes, Keats definitely deserves first place!

"They’re not Aborigines, they’re 'Indigenous Australians'" - Tales of Political Correctness

2010-07-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever attempted to perform the stale and tiresome task of writing up an Australian History essay, chances are you’ve heard the pestering righteousness of straight-laced professors: It’s not Aborigine, its Indigenous Australian. Such brash, panicked corrections don’t end there, so just so we’re clear, readers, it’s not Black but African American, not half-breed but multi-ethnic, Advanced Learners rather than Gifted, Special Needs rather than Handicapped and (my personal favourite) Chronologically Advantaged rather than Old Person. Australia is often accused of being a racist country, and with recent scandals surrounding football players throwing around offensive racial slurs, it’s time we jumped onto the political-correctness bandwagon.

Unlike our friends in the United States and United Kingdom, political correctness has not had a very strong presence in Australia until recently. A few days ago when I’d misplaced my cousin somewhere inside a local Borders bookstore, I was offered assistance by a perky staff member, and asked her if she’d seen a tall Asian girl. She responded with a few nervous glances around the store, struggling for an answer until, very carefully, she offered, “The tall one, with…long black hair…the tall one that you walked in with...I think she’s in the Fantasy section.” I realise now that it had been terribly sadistic, but at that point it was too irresistible not to lean in slowly and whisper, “But was she…Asian?” Impressively, the determined assistant struggled on, flinching and squirming, and finally answering, “I hadn’t noticed, but she’s tall, with long black hair, and she’s wearing a black ACDC t-shirt and a bright blue necklace.”

Today, teachers are discouraged from writing negative feedback on students’ report cards, journalists are pressured to choose their words carefully, Santa Clause is ordered to swap his cheery “ho ho ho” with the less vulgar “ha ha ha”, Baa-Baa Black Sheep is now Baa-Baa Rainbow Sheep, and team-mates who are in the habit of taking regular jabs at one another are made to exercise special caution for their mates of non-Anglo heritage. I admit that I often shudder when somebody uses the dreaded gender-specific job titles (actress, waitress, stewardess), and there is no doubt that people can often go too far with blatancy and insensitivity, but it appears that the prodigious flight of political correctness has rendered people to the unfortunate habit of fighting ignorance with even more ignorance. If the girl at the bookstore had noticed the bright blue necklace and the ACDC t-shirt, chances are she would’ve also noticed that my cousin was in fact Asian. It is, as the Brits from the Daily Mail put it, “political madness gone wild”.

Academics have argued that political correctness thwart liberal ideals of free speech, reducing the phenomenon to the likes of cultural Marxism and totalitarianism. Scientists state that the alleged “correctness” of it all is characterised by emotional, rather than rational discourses. But, what do those pompous, uppity geezers know? Here are some helpful suggestions on how you can become more of a decent, politically correct citizen:

Abortion - Near-Life Experience

Alcoholic - Anti-Sobriety Activist

An Immigrant - a newcomer

Assassination - involuntary term limitation

Bald - follically independent

Body Odour - nondiscretionary fragrance

Cannibalism - Intra-Species Dining

Censorship - Selective Speech

China - Porcelain

Chronically Late - Temporarily Challenged

Corpse - Permanently Static Post-Human Mass

Dead - Actuarially Mature

Dishonest - Ethically disoriented

Fat - horizontally challenged

Fictional / Mythological - ontologically challenged

Frog - amphibian American

Gang - Youth Group

Garbage Man - sanitation engineer

Gas Station Attendant - petroleum transfer technician

Hamburger - Seared Mutilated Animal Flesh

Homeless - outdoor urban dwellers

Housewife - domestic engineer

Hunter - Animal Assassin

Ignorant - factually unencumbered

Incompetent - Uniquely Proficient

Insane People - Selectively Perceptive

Lazy - motivationally dispossessed

Loser - uniquely fortuned individual on an alternative career path

Off - energy-efficient

Paper Bag - processed tree carcass

Prostitute - sex care provider

Shoplifter - Cost-of-Living Adjustment Specialist

Someone who has no other reason to park in a handicapped zone - morally handicapped

Trees - Oxygen Exchange Units

Unemployed - Involuntarily leisured

Football WAGs

2010-06-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

I will be honest – it is no coincidence that the negligence of this site just so happened to begin with the dawning of World Cup fever (these things are inherit, blame my Chilean heritage). So in these last few weeks while our living room sofas provide merciless substitutes for our beds, some of us may have noticed a curious gaggle of silicone blondes claiming their share of newspaper headlines. The Wives and Girlfriends (WAGs) of our beloved footballers have basked in much of the spotlight surrounding the event, so much so that many managers have banned the stylish beauties from staying anywhere near their vulnerable players. Coined by the British media during the 2006 World Cup, the WAG embodies superficiality at its very worse – and we cannot love it more.

The lavish lifestyle is simply irresistible – reality television shows offer coverage of the women’s extravagant shopping sprees, websites are dedicated to the tireless occupation of tracking the women wherever they go, and mainstream media never fail to point to these supposed distractions, regularly blaming the WAGs for their husbands’ embarrassing on-field blunders. The enormous rise in female bankruptcy has been attributed to the glorification of WAGs and their indulgent lifestyles, with young women demanding the hairstyle, wardrobe, beauty treatments, cars and holidays enjoyed by their much wealthier idols, eventually drowning in debt before they’ve even landed a regular gal’s salary. But perhaps what’s even more interesting is that today many women aspire to the sole occupation of sponging off their husbands’ success, pursuing the extraordinarily shallow existence of shopping, pampering and partying.

There is little doubt that we have carelessly stepped away from the empowered working women of previous generations. The WAG phenomenon was created by the media, and happily lapped up by the public. The extent to which the media is able to manipulate our sense of direction and purpose is something else to look out for in the last remaining weeks of the World Cup.

Football - Constructing Identities with Sport

2010-06-12T05:25:00.000-07:00

And so the games begin.

The 2010 Soccer World Cup kicked off in South Africa last night with all the colour and vivacity expected for an event that draws a larger worldwide audience than the Olympic Games. This is a very exciting time. Sensibility is swamped with a frenzied patriotism, anthems are sung with a delirious passion, and deep inside our swollen hearts, we discover the surprising ferocity of our inner racism (yes, Italy, we still have not forgotten that penalty). Romantics dream of an unlikely victory for host nation South Africa, after a decade of conflict, and the easily-amused anticipate a politically-charged blood fest between the two Koreas in one of the knockout stages.

Soccer brings people together. On the Christmas Day of 1914, British and German soldiers in the First World War trenches put their guns down to play together in a friendly game. When British soldiers in Afghanistan and southern Iraq wanted to befriend the locals, they also played a soccer match. On the darker side, soccer fans have died as a result of their devotion, where in 1985 at Heysel Stadium in Brussels, 39 people were killed in one of the ugliest soccer riots in history. Football fever surges through the veins of humankind, or at least for most.

Australia previously had very little interest in the game until the Socceroos wowed us all in the last series, prompting us to drop our cricket bats and join in the spirit of the rest of the world (at least until we stop qualifying). The moment our young, parochial and geographically isolated nation receives any sort of global recognition, we jump up and down like a child given a shiny gold star. Americans are not so big on the game either, preferring baseball to the world’s dominant sport. It is often said that sport reflects culture, and scholars reason that Americans scorn the fact that feeble teams can often win a game of soccer simply by concentrating on defence, which is thought to be absurdly unfair. It’s frustrating also that one-third of games result in a tie (there should always be a winner), and that star players like David Beckham are traded like horsemeat from one team to another, often showing disloyalty by abandoning their home countries. On the other side of the field, Europeans and South Americans snicker at the facts that a national sport like baseball could alter its rules to suit television, that lousy teams are permitted to continue in the league, and that the draft system dictates which team a player can join. Szymanski and Zimbalist write, “Americans and Europeans have absorbed the structure and rules of their sports into their psyches, turning the arbitrary rules of nineteenth-century administrators into a way of life.”

Despite the separation of soccer from our national sports, I’ll still be watching. For however long it lasts, the excitement of being part of a global event that entails such intoxicating spirit and brutal passion is extraordinary.

Gay People Are Allowed to Eat Hamburgers

2010-06-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of probing curious television advertisements, McDonald’s France has released a new ad campaign, nobly entitled “Come as You Are.” The following ad targets gay teenagers, and features a handsome teenage boy, sitting with his father at a McDonald’s restaurant:

How touching it is to see the international fast food giant welcoming gay youth into their stores with warm and open arms! As the compassionate acoustic melody drifts tenderly in the background, McDonald’s assures us that homosexuals (or at least, the closeted ones of perceptibly normal appearances) can be comfortable sitting down at one of their trusted franchises to relax and enjoy a Big Mac. In all honesty, I’d never realised how difficult it had been for homosexuals to eat at McDonald’s prior to this ad, let alone the unimaginable dilemmas of eating at all the other restaurants that apparently don’t accept gay people to “come as they are.”

Such campaigns undoubtedly mean well (forgetting for a moment the obvious profit-boosting agenda), but the portrayal and general message of the ad seems to further separate the gay community from the rest of society. The last time I checked, we all ate the same foods. It’s amusing to watch the clumsy attempts of large corporations at striving for political correctness, positioning themselves to somehow believe that those of a particular sexual orientation require their own special type of advertising campaign. The fuzzy declaration by McDonald's demonstrates the bizarre trend of self-congratulating ourselves on not endorsing mindless bigotry, or perpetrating sordid hate crimes. The worldwide applause for this particular advertisement reveals the depressing reality of people feeling uplifted by the simple incident of anti-discrimination. Since when did people (and corporations) receive medals and verses of praise simply for doing the right thing? A better option for McDonald’s perhaps would’ve been to depict a gay couple, alongside various other couples, without singling them out as an entirely separate market. I wonder what our reactions would have been if we had an ad depicting a black, disabled or Islamic customer, also branded with the joyous tagline: “Come as You Are."

Life is Short. Have an Affair.

2010-06-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

A controversial online dating service has provoked the latest nationwide furore, when two nights ago the following advertisement was screened for the first time on Australian television:

AshleyMadison.com has already stirred commotion in the Unites States, having one of their provocative ads rejected for a time slot in last year’s official Super Bowl program. The website (assisting over five and a half million users to date) pledges to unite married men and women for discreet, extramarital affairs, shoving down our throats a hoard of miserable statistics, openly condemning the “myth of monogamy” and allegedly shredding apart families, and crumbling away the sacred institution of marriage. Now there is little doubt that one will go without Ashley Madison to pursue forbidden liaisons and indulge in illicit intimacies outside of their marriages. There is little doubt also that many people will suffer no qualms about taking the opportunity to cash in on the pain and devastation of others. What is disturbing is not that there is a service that provides an open route to adultery, but rather that there is one that openly encourages it.

Most of us can identify with the tremendous hurt inflicted by infidelity, the same way we can equally understand the often staggering temptations of straying. Monogamy may not be embedded in our DNA, but it certainly is embedded in the constructions of our morality, and the establishment of Western society. The value of monogamy of course varies in different cultures where, for example, the alleged affairs of French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy met with little more than the apathetic shrug of the shoulders from French citizens. In comparison to the excessive coverage on Bill Clinton, Mel Gibson and Tiger Woods’ extramarital rendezvous, it remains clear that according to Western constructs, the strength of modern families and marriages depend largely upon the faithfulness between committed couples.

Given the overwhelming statistics, there are many of us who reject the notion of monogamy, and based on very understandable grounds. What is rather unsettling is that while certain set values remain firmly intact, people are condoning dishonesty, disrespect and potential destruction to the lives of those we’re supposed to love. To me, it seems simple enough. If one’s partner has a certain expectation, regardless of whether it may be a product of constructed discourses of normative relationships, the honourable options are either to adhere, or to leave.

How to Keep our Women Clean

2010-05-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

Two days ago it was reported that The Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is now considering legalising the practice of female genital mutilation, in an attempt to cater to particular cultural traditions. These operations have been illegal in the country since the 1990s, but the number of children being admitted to hospitals with ruptured bladders and severe haemorrhaging as a result of illegal backyard surgeries has compelled the community to rethink the ban, and provide a “less severe” form of mutilation. Unlike male circumcision, female genital cutting offers no health benefits, and procedures are known to cause severe bleeding, difficulties urinating, and later, potential childbirth complications as well as newborn deaths. There is no doubt that the traditional method of female circumcision is an exceedingly traumatic experience for the child involved, who is likely to be aged between infancy and fifteen years old. There are several cultural and religious reasons for this practice, but my personal favourite was explained by a notable Egyptian physician, who explained that female circumcision keeps girls clean, and prevents them from running after men. Women will suffer a decreased libido, and will therefore resist any “illicit” sexual acts. When a vaginal opening is covered or narrowed, it is trusted that the fear of pain from opening it will discourage women from pursuing premarital sex, seeking extramarital sex, and, well, enjoying sex in general.

Popular in the Middle East, female circumcision is frequently described as an “age-old Muslim ritual.” Funnily enough, there is no mention of it in the Koran, and only receives a fleeting mention in the authentic hadiths. In fact, there are no religious scripts that prescribe the practice at all. In Sudan, nine out of ten girls undergo the most severe form of circumcision, where the entire clitoris is removed, as well as most of the labia. The sides are then sutured together, often with thorns, and only a small matchstick diameter is left opened for urine and menstrual flow. After marriage, women are then forcibly penetrated by their husbands, but, thankfully, there exists special “honeymoon centres” in which the bothersome screams of virgin brides cannot be heard.

So rest assured. We, as a diverse, tolerant, and noble country, are willing to endorse blatant child abuse and excessive discrimination against women in order to meet the traditional requirements of separate cultures. While we throw up our arms and attack the bigots who try to ban the burqa, the ritualistic maiming of children on the other hand seems fine.

The Casanova

2010-05-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

“Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I never found any occupation more important. Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite of mine, I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.” – Casanova

Forgive my enforcement of stereotypes, but, being half Chilean, this article is inspired by the handsome guaperas in my family. According to the impassioned sermon delivered to me by one of my cousins last week, there is no greater thrill for a man than the sport of seducing women. In describing his various tactics and strategies – careful caresses, daring whispers and frothy promises – I could not help but become intrigued by the surprisingly intricate components of his game plan. “But you’re a good looking guy,” I interrupted, “surely all the time and effort isn’t necessary.” But, according to him, this is the best part. The notorious womaniser Giacomo Casanova explained that the ideal liaison offered elements beyond just sex, and was known for devising lengthy and complicated plots in his pursuit of women. The glorified labels of “womaniser,” “player” and “ladies’ man” extends beyond describing the man who simply cannot commit. These are supposedly great men - equipped with a specific set of skills and a relentlessly sturdy ambition. We love players. From the mythologised icon of Casanova to the irresistible creations of Don Juan, James Bond and Captain Kirk, these serial heartbreakers have charmed their way into the hearts of women for centuries, and despite being associated with elements of insecurity, immaturity and chronic dissatisfaction, it seems unlikely that the glamorisation of the womaniser will subside any time soon.