The bit that fascinates me is the diagram showing all the interlinks between extremist conservative groups in the UK – and to the US.

What might a NZ version look like, I wonder?

~

*I must point out, thanks to @graceishuman, that the UK’s definition of marriage equality is particularly lacking in its mistreatment of trans people.  It may have just gotten a little better – that article isn’t particularly clear – but still not good.

Nanaia Mahuta, MP for Hauraki-Waikato, had to take her five-month-old baby into the debating chamber late on a Friday night because 8 of her Labour colleagues apparently had far more important things to attend and no one told Chris Hipkins that this government likes to ram things through under urgency right after the Budget.

And Holly Walker, list MP for the Greens, has received kindly, compassionate words of advice from a constituent who wanted to remind her silly ladybrain that it’s a terrible, terrible crime for her to be pregnant while elected.

Mahuta and Walker just don’t understand.  Politics and parenting doesn’t mix.  They’d be well advised to look to role models like the Prime Minister, who understood that because he chose to have a son who attends a prestigious private boys’ school and chose to become leader of our country, he needed to set priorities and remember he can’t just demand that politics accommodates his choice to have children.

Which is why he didn’t attend his son’s overseas baseball game when it clashed with the funeral of two New Zealand soldiers.

Wait, no, the other way round.

Now, the thing is that Key did get some blowback for that choice – but because it was seen as a matter of his priorities, and the fucked-up-ness thereof, not because John Key’s choice to be a father is inherently in conflict with his choice to run for office.

All Mahuta has asked is that we reconsider Parliamentary rules laid down in the dawn of time when the notion of a woman MP would have been mindblowing – much less a breastfeeding parent MP.  All Walker has asked is that we, um, accept the existence of her pregnancy, and presumably make the same allowances that all working pregnant people should receive, because (a) pregnant people deserve basic human rights and dignity and (b) pregnant people are just kinda ensuring the propagation of our species and the creation of future taxpayers who are going to support all your judgemental asses in retirement thanks to this government’s short-sighted bullshit suspending payments to the Cullen Fund.

Yet apparently this is completely inconceivable, despite the point (raised on Walker’s Facebook thread) that it’s meant to be the House of fucking Representatives.  And pregnant people and breastfeeding people and parenting people deserve some fucking representation too, and if they cannot be accommodated by the institution which governs all our lives, where the fuck will they be accommodated?

~

Addendum: I note with raised eyebrow the National Council of Women‘s tweet on the matter.  Read it how you will. ETA: apparently just a case of sloppy editing.  My raised eyebrow stands.

So I saw Fatal Attraction was getting a re-run on Sky Movies this month.  It’s one of those often-cited trope-forming classics I’d never seen, and I have no upper limit on how much villainous-Glenn-Close I can have in my life.

I figured, this is going to be a problematic film.  The whole tension arises from the fact that Michael Douglas’ character chooses to cheat on his wife … he’s just unfortunate enough to cheat with a person who has erotomania.  Shenanigans ensues.  It’ll be a little uncomfortable, but it’ll be interesting.

But then.

Then comes the scene where she tries to force him to reconnect with her by saying (I suspect, falsely) that she’s pregnant.  It’s got the suspense-y music, she’s already been set up as a person who will do extreme things to get his attention, so sure, she goes for a classic entrapping-woman tactic.

And then he says “it’s okay” because … he’s willing to pay for the abortion.  Which she hasn’t mentioned wanting to have or anything – and he isn’t meant to know, the way we do, that they’re characters in a movie where her obsessive behaviour is doomed to escalate dramatically.  He just jumps to the conclusion that she’ll have an abortion.  Because despite not knowing this woman, who he’s had unprotected sex with, he’s happy to assume firstly that she should have been using contraception and secondly that she won’t want to continue the pregnancy.  Coincidentally, this second assumption makes his life a hell of a lot easier.

Then she says “I don’t want an abortion” – and sure, that’s probably because this is about getting power over him, not because she’s necessarily telling the truth about wanting to have a child and raise it on her own.

But then he says “Don’t I get a say in this?”

NO MICHAEL DOUGLAS.  NO YOU FUCKING WELL DO NOT.

This is where I stopped watching and deleted the film from the MySky.  Because it felt very much that I, as the audience, was meant to read her refusal to consider his wishes – after he’s fucked her, multiple times, without protection, assuming that she’ll carry the burden of contraception – as another symptom of the List Of Things What Show Glenn Close Is Craaaaaaaaazy.  We’re meant to see Michael Douglas as the victim because the evil craaaaaazy woman has trapped him with her evil craaaaaazy vagina.

To quote the Wikipedia summary:

She then phones his home at all hours, and then confronts him saying that she is pregnant and plans to keep the baby. Although he wants nothing to do with her, she argues that he must take responsibility.

MY GOD, SHE’S SO CRAAAAAAAAAAAZY.  Only a craaaaaazy person could argue that someone needs to take responsibility for his actions.*  Financial and emotional support for a child he fathered?  Craaaaaaaaaaaaazy talk.

Calling him at 2am?  That’s scary, warning-bell-ringing behaviour.  Self-harming when he says he has to go home?  That’s scary, warning-bell-ringing behaviour.

Declaring that she gets to decide what to do with her uterus?  NOT ACTUALLY SCARY.

Related reading:  Breastfeeding = craaaaaaaazy with Lysa Arryn.

~

*I must note here, for obvious reasons, that no, arguing Michael Douglas’ character has to take responsibility for the consequences of having sex is not equivalent to arguing pregnant people should be denied abortion.  The biological reality of pregnancy is that the sperm donor’s ability to control the process stops at the end of their penis.  Don’t want Glenn Close blackmailing you with her pregnancy?  Don’t have lots of casual unprotected sex with Glenn Close.

Commander Chris Hadfield is a total badass.  Here’s some of his most badass photos from his time aboard the International Space Station, being a badass.  FOR SCIENCE.

Beware the sex-work “rescue” industry.  Often, it’s oppressing sex workers a hell of a lot more than participating in sex work did.

Drugs are bad, mmkay?  So terribly, terribly bad that the New Zealand taxpayer is giving money to fucking Scientologists to preach their dangerous, ludicrous shit to our teenagers.  Hey, it’s better than having them smoke dope, isn’t it?

Idiot/Savant has the 411 on how to make a submission on the GCSB Bill.  That is, assuming the listed email address works.

Andrea Jones was denied the right to change her gender on her driver’s licence, so she got herself arrested for indecent exposure – because hey, the state of Tennessee’s going to have to decide one way or the other.

But you’d be wrong, because right now that issue is the site for the National government’s most egregious shitting-upon of basic concepts of justice.

Take it away, Andrew Geddis.

What’s a good way, you might ask, to create a policy on paying family caregivers without running the risk of it being overturned? And the answer I assume you’d give is “make sure that the policy isn’t unlawfully discriminatory, so there is no reason for this to happen.” If so, you are an idiot. Because there’s a far, far better way to respond.

You simply tell the Human Rights Review Tribunal and the courts that they are not allowed to look at the policy and decide whether or not it is unlawfully discriminatory.

I’d just like to end with a little thought experiment for the class: imagine that Labour were in power and passed any legislation – say, to plant more native trees on public land, or to make it illegal to waterboard people – and then said “but you can’t see the advice we’ve made this decision on, and you can never ever challenge it.”

Oh, and passed it under urgency.

Just imagine it.  The Kiwiblog commentariat would shit themselves.  W****O**’s servers would probably explode.  You’d hear Cactus Kate’s screams all the way across the Pacific.

Add this to Sky City’s 35-year protection clause and our whole constitution just got taken out back and shot in the head, and National’s turned the corpse into a ventriloquist’s doll and is assuring us that democracy is just resting after a rather vigorous squawk.

We are so fucked.  And the mainstream media will probably do fuck-all about it.

We’re not a corporation.  We’re a fucking sovereign nation.

(Damn, that should be the chorus line of an epic anti-neoliberal rap.  If only I were vaguely talented in that particular oeuvre.)

But the thing about the classic righty propaganda about “balancing a budget being just like balancing a chequebook” is that it says so much when they can’t even measure up to their own framing.

Anyway, Russel Norman said it better in a piece over at RadioLive.  Warning for the obnoxious use of black background/white text.

If the New Zealand economy was a business; the management team that has a business plan to increase losses to $17 billion a year while selling some of our best earning assets would be treated as rogue traders.

And yet that is what the National Government is doing to the New Zealand economy.

Through the efforts of its highly paid spin doctors and friends with vested interests, it manages to portray itself as “sound economic managers”.

But the facts just don’t back that up.

…

Finance Minister Bill English is depicted as predictable and safe. Yet the CFO of NZ Inc has been recklessly borrowing money. He started borrowing the minute he took on the job and hasn’t stopped since.

On top of this National gave pay rises (tax cuts) to the wealthy. NZ Inc couldn’t afford this dividend to wealthy investors at this time. It was seriously bad management.

The only fly in the ointment, and the truly depressing thing about all this, is that this is pretty normal business practice in many parts of the NZ private sector.  Look at Solid “oh shit, where did all this debt come from?” Energy.  Look at every collapsed, taking-out-your-life-savings-with-them finance company.

So I guess that the Nats really are running government the way they would run a business.  We just should have double-checked what kind of business.

I just want to take one teensy-tiny issue with this bit:

Unsupportive bras mean bouncing and ligament pain, which discourages women from physical activity, thereby keeping them less fit. Putting it like that makes it sound like a huge conspiracy, but

Let me stop you at “but”, friend.  No, I’m not saying there literally is a smoke-filled room somewhere where former Skulls & Bones members twirl their moustaches with glee over blueprints for The Most Uncomfortable Bra Ever, slapping each other on the back and saying “they’ll never be able to jump rope in THIS!”

But let’s think about it this way.  Capitalism requires a steady stream of workers.  Workers have to be born and raised.  Currently, a lot of the birthing and raising is done by people who are firmly identified as “women”.

(Just look at how much of the kerfuffle around marriage equality was that same-sex couples “can’t” make babies, or how men who choose to become pregnant are, well, [insert transphobic hatespeech here].)

That birthing-and-raising of productive little workers is unpaid work.  It’s not even viewed as work.  It’s considered completely demeaning for the non-birthing class (“men”) to perform it (though they will be lionized as heroes for making the “sacrifice” of taking time out to raise their own children).

Why the fuck would a group which makes up just over half of the population put up with this?

Enter bras.  Enter beauty standards.  Enter conflicting, YET VERY VERY IMPORTANT messages beamed into our brains daily about the “right” way to behave, to look.  Enter a situation where skilled, educated people are walking around with Impostor Syndrome because it’s so ingrained to believe that they’re doing something wrong.

(Enter also rape culture, which reinforces the idea that you can never ever feel safe; enter antichoice rhetoric, which is one facet of a whole system dedicated to telling you you don’t really know your own mind and need others to make decisions for you; enter economic disadvantages which push you towards heterosexual cohabitation.

Enter a neverending roundabout of diet advice, childrearing advice, all underscored with the notion that if you’re doing it wrong – and believe me, you ARE doing it wrong – you are basically a completely worthless individual who’s letting the entire species down.)

To completely appropriate/paraphrase a wise thing I read somewhere, you can’t politicise people who are starving, because they’ve got more important things on their minds.  Modern capitalism/patriarchy has worked to make sure that even when women aren’t starving, even when they’ve got huge amounts of privilege, their minds are on things which they’ve been convinced are more important.  They’re getting depression and eating disorders … not rocking the boat.

Why do you think the good old chestnuts about hairy-legged lesbians have such currency?  Because the people who refuse to shave their legs and enter heterosexual relationships and produce the next generation of good little productive workers are threatening the whole system.

It’s not a conspiracy of moustachioed men in a bunker.  But what other word do we have for such a complex, deliberate system of coercing an entire population?

Original link via Good Bras are a Feminist Issue.

Stop apologising for doing your job.

This isn’t an expression of support, I hasten to add; I’m not one of those “woo yeah fuck the [insert favourite slur here] freedom of speech fuck yeah” fans who inevitably crowd around you when, yet again, you’ve just done your job.

I’m not in any way in favour of what you do.  But I understand that, while there are people equally juvenile and petty and vicious who are willing to tune in to hear your shitty, bigoted utterances, you’re going to have a job.  You’re going to be giving a certain type of audience What They Want.

All I’m asking is that you stop trying to have your offensive cake and eat it offensively too.

When you make tweets comparing a talent show contestant to an iconic literary rape victim [sadly deleted ETA: screenshot courtesy of Daily Blog], I think you know exactly what you’re doing.  It’s part of the role, to be the person who publicly cracks the unoriginal-yet-taboo joke when you see particular names or phrases.  To get all marketing-wank about it, it’s the core of your personal brand.

All I’m asking is that you grow a pair of the gonads of your choice.

Don’t prevaricate about how the offensive joke is obviously a joke.  No one’s taking you literally.  They know it was meant to be a joke – and an offensive one.  Why sell yourself short by undermining its offensiveness?

Don’t apologise “if” people were offended, or claim you didn’t mean to offend anyone.  Your entire existence is dedicated to offending people.  Why publicly question your own success?

(And seriously, if you sincerely didn’t think a crack about Once Were Warriors was going to offend people, maybe see a neurologist because significant parts of your cognition appear to be malfunctioning.)

Don’t promise it’ll never happen again.  Of course it will.  It’s your job.

And don’t whinge when there’s backlash.  You live on backlash the way most people live on oxygen.  What is it they say about people who can dish it out but can’t take it?

Oh, that’s right.  Deep down, all you “shock jocks” are chickenshit douchebags who’ve gotten where you are in life because most of the people who really took your shit to heart either dropped you as a friend, didn’t want to make a scene, and don’t work in radio station senior management.

So you want to stay being paid and famous for telling rape jokes on Twitter … but only as long as no one ever calls you out on it … despite offending them being the entire point.

Stop apologising.  It’s just pathetic.