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I Love it When a Plan Comes Together | Jun 30, 2009 11:54

It's with much pride and excitement that Up Front can reveal it has secured its first scoop. Due probably to a mix-up with names, an email intended for Ian Wishart has come to me instead. Claiming to have originated from Lockwood Smith's parliamentary in-box, the email contains a copy of the legendary Gay Agenda.

There are things about the email that indicate it might have genuinely originated from within parliament. For a start, all 320 000 recipients' email addresses are disclosed in the header. Also, the actual agenda is attached as a MS Word document. My team of elite geeks is analysing the revision history as I type, and it's fascinating – particularly the point at which the phrase 'toaster oven' is replaced in the document with 'ipod touch – the pretty purple one'.

After considering the moral dilemma at length and shaking my Sense of Ethics several times, I forwarded the email on to its intended recipient. On later phoning the Wishart household, I was informed that Ian had been so devastated on reading the document that he'd taken to his bed.

"He barely made it through the preamble and affirmation of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi," his wife Heidi told me. "He keeps thrashing about and muttering to himself. Last night he woke up screaming something about Volvos." I was assured that Ian would be publishing a scathing exposé of the Gay Agenda in his magazine Invigilate as soon as he had 'got a grip on himself'.

So my time to undermine the Master was limited. This job was so important it would push even writing Allison Janney slash-fic onto the back burner. (Coincidentally, 'Allison Janney' is item #124 on the Agenda, just after 'make John Barrowman Minister of Foreign Affairs'.)

After contacting everyone on the email list, I managed to find one person who would discuss the Gay Agenda with me – but only if I concealed her identity and interviewed her in the dark, a process which proved more than satisfactory for everyone involved. To further protect her, I've replaced her with an actor called Mark for the rest of this column.

It was, Mark assured me, all true, despite its breath-taking scope. "It's probably not too disastrous that it's coming out now when we're nearly finished. I mean, forty years since Stonewall, what could be left to do? Gays can almost get married, and it's nearly illegal to use someone's sexuality as a defence for murdering them. We figured New Zealand's pretty much sorted: why else do you think we had Helen Clark elected to the U.N.?

"We'd have got further, too, if it wasn't for the Gin and Tonic Fruit Schisms of the eighties. Things would certainly have been simpler if Fran'd had the backing of the Liminalists as well as the Lemonazis."

Not all of the agenda is as straight-forward as simply pushing, well, the agenda. Some of it is impressively Machiavellian. One item in particular was so astounding I just had to get confirmation.

"Well duh," John Tamihere told me, "of course I'm a plant. To be honest I thought we were going to get caught a lot earlier. I mean, we just kept on pushing the envelope, getting more and more puerile and ridiculous. When I made that dickish remark to Simon last week I was thinking 'this'll either bring gay marriage a few months closer or it'll blow my cover completely'. To be honest, I'm glad it's over. The strain of behaving like a drunk fourth-former all the time was really starting to tell."

Having the inside story of the Gay Agenda (or to be fairer the GLITTFAB Agenda) has made a lot of things make sense. A previously-curious lull in Kiwi gay activism is now explained by the designing and construction of Daniel Carter. "Rugby was a problem for us for years," Mark explained. "But once our insider in the NZRFU persuaded them to try to market the game to 'straight women', we were set. Why do you think they train in swimming pools? The 2.0 model was doing really well too, but it seems to have some kind of design fault in the shoulders. We're working on it."

The silent, cunning efficacy of the Gay Strategy is breath-taking. Once you know, it's quite terrifying. There are Queer people everywhere you go. They're in every business, every school, every government department. No wonder Ian Wishart's had to have a little lie down.

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A Kink in the Pants | Jun 22, 2009 15:40

I don't normally comment on criminal trials. Unless you're actually there it's very hard to get a solid picture of what's going on. And I wouldn't want to accidentally put Public Address in contempt of court or on the receiving end of a libel suit. In the spirit of not getting Russell a lawsuit as a convalesence present, I'm not saying that Chris Comeskey is a massive jerk. I just didn't call him something else a little more NSFW on Twitter, too.

The guy's just doing his job, right? That job was defending Nai Yin Xue, and he had to do it in trying circumstances, where the public were convinced of his client's guilt before any evidence had been presented.

I understand that, and yet I remember the good old days, when you had to either be gay or a prostitute for your sex life to excuse your murder. Almost the entire defence case centred not on the defendant, but on the victim. An An Liu was found wearing only gloves and a tie around her neck and over her eyes. Therefore, she must have been into kinky sex. Therefore, a couple of other men killed her by accident, put her body in the boot of her husband's car, covered it with her husband's dressing gown, and drove the car back to her husband's house.

It's terrible to cast aspersions on the character of a murder victim, but sometimes it's just necessary. After all, as Comeskey said;

Gloves, nakedness, and the tie tied on like that?... It's the only thing it points to, isn't it?

She was trussed up in a very very unusual way, she was naked, she had gloves on, there was DNA, not only on her underpants and also on her tie.
"That has got to be a huge huge coincidence

See, she had gloves on, that proves she was into erotic asphyxiation. And if she was into that kind of thing, not like a normal person, then she was taking risks, wasn't she? Kinky sex is dangerous, it's just asking to be murdered.

Comeskey argued that An An was a secretive woman who had been awakened sexually. She was enrolled on an internet dating site and there was the wolf remark.
"If that doesn't suggest a young woman of 30 embarking of experimentation and variance, what else does?"

Variance. Nice women don't do that kind of thing. They don't like kinky sex, they aren't 'as sexually furious as a wolf', and they don't have microscopic amounts of male DNA on their clothing. An An Liu was devious, she was a liar, she was sexually voracious and kinky. She was not the sort of woman an all-female jury should be sympathising with.

None of that indicates that it wasn't her husband that killed her – a man who pursued her to Wellington with an axe, and had a previous conviction for assaulting her. Even if you accept Comeskey's remarkable construction of An An Liu's character, it makes Nai Yin Xue more likely to have killed her, not less, surely.

Comeskey didn't originate this line of defence, of course. The case was described as another Peter Plumley Walker, but it wasn't. If anything, it was another Jane Longhurst. Graham Coutts' defence for having murdered Jane Longhurst was that he killed her by accident during an erotic asphyxiation session, to which she consented. She might not have consented to being strangled to death (or having her body kept in a shed for two weeks and regularly visited), but hells, you cross the line from normal, those are the risks you take.

Auto-erotic asphyxiation is dangerous. It's estimated to cause between 250 and 1000 deaths in the U.S. every year. It's so desperately kinky it kills rock stars and British Conservative MPs. But that's auto-erotic asphyxiation – strangling yourself for sexual gratification. Despite the phrase being frequently used in reporting of the case and by Comeskey himself, that's not what he's suggesting. Where there's a partner involved, the death rate from erotic asphyxiation is much lower. Despite its being considered weird and deviant, the effect of asphyxia on sexual arousal is so pronounced it was used as a treatment for impotence.

The An An Liu case wasn't a Jane Longhurst either, though. In that case and the Plumley Walker case, there was no doubt as to who had strangled the victim. The case simply centred on why, and to what extent it was deliberate or careless. In this case, there is no evidence at all to suggest that An An Liu practised erotic asphyxiation. It is an entirely hypothetical construction of Comeskey's.

It's hard to imagine, given the paucity of the defence case, that Nai Yin Xue could appeal successfully. It's easy to imagine, from the post-verdict attitude of both himself and his lawyer, that he might appeal unsuccessfully, and we could have yet another round of victim-blaming and vanilla privilege appeals. In which case, I'll have a much harder time not calling Comeskey a jerk. Or perhaps I should just start a rumour that he likes weird sex.

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NSFW | Jun 16, 2009 15:13

I know I whined about how terrible labelling is not all that long ago, but today I want to take the time to pay tribute to a label I love above all others, one that saves me time and grief on nearly a daily basis. Not Safe For Work, I love you.

I don't have to decide whether an image is porn or erotica or sexually explicit material or designed to arouse or obscene. I don't have to decide if arty shots are safer than realistic shots, or gay shots are safer or less safe than straight shots. I can just call it NSFW and let you guys make your own calls. I might occasionally help out by throwing you the odd modifier – 'mildly' or 'very' NSFW – but for the most part I accept that I can't read your mind and I've really no idea which picture you're going to find more offensive, this one or this one.

Alright, here's the trick. It's like Simon Says. I didn't label either of those NSFW. Try these instead (mildly NSFW). Nevertheless, those first two (to my mind) perfectly SFW pictures were among ones I used to deliberately offend a specific group of people.

Links are even harder to determine the safe-for-workness of. Of the two Up Front sidebar links I felt needed the NSFW tag, one of them currently features no explicit material on its front page, and the other features a completely naked man with an erection. It's okay, I'll wait here while you pop off and find out which is which.

And of course NSFW means you don't have to be up front about your own threshold for dodgy. Blame the work filters. I'd like to look but the boss won't let me. And given the sheer mind-buggery of some of the things work filters block, you can never tell whether you'd be offended or not – until you get home and you can click on things in private. Some of you are itching to get home right now, right?

Different things disturb different people. I, for instance, find this photo disturbing. Bulgy forearm veins, that's got to be obscene. Also, what the hell is with that pose? Invisible Wonder Woman bracelets? I do understand, however, why people might find this picture more disturbing, even though it shows less flesh and is more 'arty'. (Whether it's porn or not, according to some people, depends entirely on whether that standing figure is male or female.)

NSFW covers non-visual stuff as well. This ad for the British series QI is, visually, perfectly sweet and nice. With the audio on, it's one of the most NSFW things you will ever see me link to. Headphones are advised. I wouldn't drink while watching it either. Perhaps we need a new label: Not Safe For Imbibing.

And who is now planning to demonstrate that NSFW might well stand for 'now show friends and workmates'?

The label still has its pitfalls, most obviously people who haven't run across it before, or who think I'm linking to the National Schools Film Week. Then there are people who do know what it means but don't understand it. When I sent that QI link to a friend, she decided that it would be perfectly fine to watch, seeing as she wasn't at work. So she fired it up and watched it – with her seven year old daughter.

Everybody learned a valuable lesson. Rabbits can't vomit.

So here's what you'll get from me: a basic assumption that you're all adults and you can make your own decisions. That you have functioning fingers and eyelids and can choose not to look at something you find disturbing or offensive. That we can all appreciate that different people have different tastes and squick levels, and that while I'll provide warnings if I have a reasonable expectation that a link could be a bit dodgy, I have no interest in catering to unreasonable levels of being offended, and that's okay.

Just trust me, it's okay. Because really, in your heart of hearts, you want to see how NSFW things get when I feel like I have your trust.

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Newsflash: Women Have Eyes | Jun 03, 2009 13:32

In many ways, Suraya Singh's story is a typically Kiwi one. Grew up in New Plymouth, moved to Wellington, headed off to do her OE, never quite came back. She loves living in London, but Shihad's Home Again and family pictures make her homesick. It all sounds pretty familiar, right up to the bit where she gets frustrated at the newsagents and starts her own porn mag.

This month, Suraya has launched Filament, a quarterly erotic magazine aimed squarely and solely at women. In a recessing market, where Playgirl has recently gone under, it seems like a big gamble. And we all know women don't have Gaze, right? That's for men, objectifying women. So why would women want to buy a magazine full of pictures of attractive men who've mislaid their shirts?

Sorry, what was the question?

Suraya didn't just jump into this blind. She did what any smart person would do first: she asked LiveJournal what women wanted to look at. Compared with the kind of images of men women are usually presented with, the results might be surprising. It turns out that Janet is right: women don't like men with too many muscles. They prefer more lightly-built men, with slim, feminine faces. This is, of course, an averaging of the feedback, and probably about as useful as asking women what kind of coffee women like and then giving them all that. I couldn't possibly comment. Nevertheless, it does seem to indicate a gap between what women like to look at, and what they're being given.

It was this feedback, too, that led Suraya to publish in magazine form:

I asked many, many people how they would prefer to consume the product that I had in mind. They said, "Everyone else will want it online, but I'd prefer it in print."

Magazines do also, it seems, appear to be recession-proof. While major titles find their circulation dropping, niche magazines appear to be thriving.

Filament does something else as well that's intriguing - or rather, it's what it doesn't do. Filament has no dieting advice, no gossip, and no articles on women's appearance. No fashion, no make-up tips. To compare, I did a quick survey at female-marketed magazines in the supermarket on the weekend, and more than half featured a cover story about a weight issue.

So: sexy men yes, appearance bitching no. Now to find some sexy men.

"I've asked strangers at clubs and for example, messaged someone after seeing their picture on Facebook. I have only had one man say 'no' to modelling, and that was because he wasn't allowed to do that kind of thing because of his job, not because he didn't want to."

Lying around all over the place, apparently, just hanging out to be asked to get their gear off in front of a camera. Isn't this compounding a problem, though, rather than solving it? Surely allowing women to objectify men just legitimises objectifying women?

Being turned on by an image of someone exposing their body is not necessarily objectification just because you don't know that person. I thought a lot about what the difference is between the two and making sure our images are about the people in them, not just of the people in them - for example, the models often took quite an active role in designing the shoot. Additionally, our photoshoots sit alongside interviews with the models about who they are as people, for example, not what they're like in bed.

We also don't touch up our images in ways that make the models appear something they're not - thinner or younger for example. So we think we're promoting a reasonable and achievable beautifulness in men, not unrealistic ideals.

Suraya says the main criticism of Filament that she's had from women is that it simply isn't explicit enough, and this certainly gels with what I've seen elsewhere (link NSFW). She is currently, however, negotiating the difficult world of the British censor, and hopes to be able to move to more explicit images in later issues. It's a matter, too, of getting a photoshoot that works naturally, and doesn't just yell 'look, a penis!'.

Certainly the idea that women aren't visual doesn't seem to be getting in the way of women perving. It's a remarkably persistent myth, though, to the point where every time an ad or a movie features a scantily-clad man, it's suggested that it's playing to its 'huge gay fan-base', as if there are more pervy gay men than pervy straight women. It seems incredible to suggest that David Boreanaz's shirt used to come off in about every second episode of Angel because it kept the female fans happy, and yet also incredibly obvious. Eye-tracking experiments have shown that in fact, when watching sexual material, men look at faces more than women do. The ladies were all about the groinal action.

The mythology around marketing to women interests Suraya in general:

I'm not so much interested in erotica and women's consumption of it as the assumptions that are made about women by any market, broadly speaking - things like, the way you can only get women's running shoes or razors in pink, or that hi-fi headphones are only made to fit man-sized heads. I don't think it's as simple as supply and demand, because you can't demand something that isn't there.

To say that straight women aren't sexually aroused by images of men is, in fact, to imply that it's not okay: that if you're a woman who is turned on by erotic pictures, there's something wrong with you, and that side of your sexuality is best suppressed. It's oppressive. I don't mean to imply that every woman likes ogling, or that girl-perving is somehow in itself a 'feminist' action, but allowing women to be honest about expressing their sexuality, and having a society that admits and encompasses female desire, can only be positive.

There is so much popular mythology about what women want, both sexually and out of life. These myths are often used to form what the market decides to give women and therefore puts parameters on our lives. Mythbusting is a wonderful pastime; everyone gains from it

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Image credits Filament Magazine and Lesley Malone.

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