Public Address - Up Front (Home)

The Holland Diaries, Pt 1 | Feb 26, 2009 11:29

View the gallery for this post

It was a while before we noticed that there was something not quite right with our daughter. In our defence, it was pretty clear after her birth that there was something not quite right with me.

My midwife expressed her concerns about my seeming tired. I pointed out that I had a newborn and an eighteen month old. Surely tiredness was to be expected. She took my blood pressure. It was 60 over 40. I conceded that she might have a point, given I'd never heard those numbers without somebody yelling "she's crashing! 10ccs of technobabble, stat!".

In all the trooping from specialist to specialist and explaining that it probably wasn't depression elevating my white blood cell count, any worries about our little girl could be easily pushed into the background. In comparison with her older brother, she was a breeze to look after: a sturdy, cheerful, pretty little girl with just a slight tendency to vanish every time you turned your back.

Butter actually does melt. We checked.

Then during our daughter's standard two year check, our GP asked if we had any concerns. I looked at the top of my girl's head and said, "I don't think she can hear." I don't think I'd even thought that thought all the way to the end before I said it out loud. We weren't too concerned that she wasn't talking, because her brother had been slow to talk as well. He was one of those kids who went from not speaking at all to 'kill the succubus' without anything in between.

That was April. Over the next few months we discovered just how well the sturdy, pretty, incredibly cunning little 'princess' could fake an audiology test. You might think you weren't patterning, but she didn't need to hear the sound to know when you were going to light up the drumming bunny. Twice we were assured that she was fine. I argued. Finally we were told the only remaining option was to put her through an auditory brainstem response test. This would mean anaesthetising her, with all the small degree of risk that attended. I told them to bring it on.

She loved the Children's Ward and its fulsome supply of Fisher-Price ride-in cars. I had to pin her to the bed after she had the anaesthetic, because she was aggressively convinced she was still okay to drive.

They told us the results before she woke up again, standing in a little room upstairs. There was a point at which the doctor's voice receded, becoming inaudible under a white sea of shock. He was telling us quite important things, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't hear a word he said. I'd been right. My daughter had a severe to profound hearing impairment.

It took three more months to get her fitted with hearing aids and enrolled at van Asch. I can still vividly remember the first time we put those aids on her. She sat on her little plastic chair watching Teletubbies with her brother, fairly incurious as to why we were shoving things in her ears. And then we turned them on.

She went preternaturally still. You could see the desperate panic in her face as her brain scrambled to deal with this strange new input. She was only supposed to have the aids in for an hour or so at a time so she could adjust. She wouldn't let us take them out. She still doesn't like to take her aids out, even when she's going to sleep.

I was asked to decide whether Rhiana would be taught all in Sign, or all verbal. Making a decision of that magnitude for somebody else when I had no idea what their experience was like and couldn't ask them what they wanted was crushing. I've never stopped second-guessing it.

That was the beginning of a long, fraught journey for our family. We fought with teachers who didn't want to use the microphone for her FM system. We fought a long and ultimately unsuccessful battle to retain her itinerant hours. We fought to get IEP meetings scheduled, and for ENT and audiology appointments. Everything that should have been hers by right, we had to fight for.

We know how lucky we are. We happen to live in the same city as one of New Zealand's two deaf schools. Our daughter is extremely bright, so it's more a matter of exercising her full potential than struggling to stop her falling behind. At five she was drawing pictures of hills shaded to show how the sun was hitting them. At eleven, she's completely bloody-minded and her new haircut and general style of dress make her look like Starbuck. The new one, not the old one.

This has made me much more at peace with the word 'handicapped'. She was naturally so pretty and clever and talented that she's been given an extra load to carry, just to make it fair on everyone else.

(90 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

The Up Front Guide – How to Make a Stupid Law | Feb 19, 2009 14:27

Recent events consuming the Kiwi blogosphere may have got you thinking, as I have been, 'how could I go about making a really shit piece of legislation?'. Now, I have no expertise in copyright law, and there are plenty of other people discussing how this particular stupid law came into being. What I have done, however, is note some trends in the development of stupid law internationally, and I think I know how to go about it now. You don't have to understand law: in fact, it's better if you don't.

Your first step to creating a piece of gob-smacking shite is to get yourself an ideology. This will immediately do away with all the trickiness of moral grey areas, indecisiveness and the concept of there being two (or more) sides to an issue. Things are so much simpler when there's only Right and Wrong and you know you're Right.

Next, look around for a Moral Panic. There are usually a couple of these lying about, and while their targets change through the ages, they're basically all the same at heart. It's gangs or taggers or satanic ritual child abuse in day-care centres or paedophiles behind every website. The important thing here is to be discriminating. You need to get your timing right. Each individual moral panic won't be around for long, so you need to get one that's about to crest. You could try to generate your own, but this could be hard work. If you're okay with hard work you may as well think, in which case this column probably isn't for you.

If you can personalise your moral panic by attaching it to a recent crime, that's fabulous. The relative of a victim (always so much better copy than actual victims) will give you a crumpled emotionally-vulnerable face people will find it hard to argue with. It's pretty safe to say that Britain's Extreme Pornography law wouldn't have happened without the murder of Jane Longhurst by Graham Coutts, and the efforts of Jane's mother to find someone other than Graham to blame.

Your moral panic should come ready-equipped with a target scapegoat. It'd be especially peachy-keen if this target group is a small minority used to keeping its head down: disorganised, and not very articulate. If you've got your moral panic picked right, it may also be too embarrassing for people to speak up against you in public – who wants to say they're big fans of violent porn?

So if you've got your ideology and your moral panic well chosen, you should be not just argument-proof, but proof-proof as well. So boot camps don't work. So filtering doesn't stop paedophiles accessing child pornography. So increased access to pornography correlates with decreased violence against women. So Graham Coutts was practising erotic asphyxiation for five years before he started accessing internet pornography. So what? Jane's mother is crying. Something Must Be Done. You don't support murderous pornography do you? Do you? We can slaughter women for sexual gratification now, is that what you're saying? Result: a 50 000 signature petition calling for the banning of "extreme internet sites promoting violence against women in the name of sexual gratification" even though that's completely impossible. (Note that it's apparently still okay to bash men if that's what gets your rocks off. For moral panic purposes, women are children.)

Basically, you now have a free licence to counter reasonable practical objections with emotional screeching. It appears to be impossible to overplay this. Try to insinuate that your opponents are paedophiles as much as possible. Also, accuse them of hysterical over-reaction. That's fun. For extra bonus points, imply that the hysterical over-reaction is faked for political benefit. You know, like yours. Except they can't say that to you, because Jane's mother is crying!

Once you've garnered your media attention and got a few "OMG I need to stand for something" pollies on board, your next step is consultation. Avoid it at all costs. So if you're proposing a law that affects prostitution, the last people you want talking about it are prostitutes. They might say inconvenient things like 'this law is dangerous and impractical and will get people killed'. They're victims: they're for talking about, not to.

Once the legislative process starts and people can see fine detail in your stupid law (i.e. there isn't any, just a bunch of very vague terms open to interpretation), you will start getting more questions about specifics. This is the point at which you start reassuring people that, in practice, everything will be just fine. Say something like "We will keep a close eye on how the new law works in practice. We are prepared to look at further changes if they prove necessary. There, there. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. We'll clean up the mess after we make it, not before."

And bingo, Bob's your uncle and he won't be downloading any porn, violating any copyright, wearing any gang insignias or looking sideways at any children, just in case. If you've done your job properly, your new law should be so incoherent and scary that nobody can tell if they're breaking it anyway.

Next on Up Front Guide: how to destroy a thriving internet community. Stay tuned.

(137 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Isn't It Romantic? | Feb 10, 2009 13:25

Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond to my survey from last week. The look on my partner's face when he saw my inbox was well worth it. It seems to introduce a pleasant reciprocity: I write these columns for you, and now you write these columns for me.

And what perfect timing as we roll up to Valentine's Day – without a doubt, the least romantic day of the year, designed to sell cards, make single people feel miserable, and strip relationships of any possibility for spontaneity. Yay.

The most romantic thing that ever happened to me was a completely wasted wino picking me pansies from the Floral Clock because he was so taken with my beautiful smile. People who've seen my face have no trouble believing he could barely stand. (The second most romantic thing was a trio of men waking me on Valentine's morning by singing 'Do You Want to Know a Secret' outside my bedroom window. This was so touching I slept with two of them.)

I mention this just to lay the groundwork for my own rather jaded point of view here. I'm not big on romance, and I'm not big on romance novels. Nevertheless, I struggle to believe that romantic novels and movies can do people actual harm. Stuff obligingly popped up this morning with a reasonable summary of the 'debate' that's been going on in the British papers lately. The basic premise is that romantic fiction creates a sense of false expectations that damages women's ability to form good relationships. The survey was to test the validity of my own response to this, which can be summed up thusly:

Bollocks it does.

Let's have a look at the experiment they used here:

To test the premise, 100 students were shown the John Cusack romcom Serendipity while another 100 watched a David Lynch flick.
In a questionnaire afterwards, the Serendipity viewers were much more likely to say they believed in fate and predestined love than the others.

That seems a reasonable comparison, right? A romcom and a David Lynch movie. They could have asked which group was more likely to say they believed in carnivorous typewriters too.

On to our own survey. The usual disclaimers about small numbers and the demographic distortions of the Public Address audience apply. (I'm just saying you're disproportionately samrt, kay?)

There was some pointed commonality in response. With only one exception, respondents said they started reading romance novels at twelve or thirteen. This seems to be an age when girls are having first crushes, first boyfriends, and are quite emotionally impressionable. Georgette Heyer was very popular, but so was Mills & Boon, and a couple of people mentioned the teen-marketed romances I read at that age: Sweet Dreams and Wildfire.

Our sample audience overwhelming said that they didn't think reading romance novels had affected their expectations of relationships, or 'correct' male and female behaviour. One common theme was a realisation that those ideals were there, without buying into them:

I think I was always pretty much aware that they didn't really represent the typical behaviour of actual real people. So although you still might daydream of someone sweeping you off your feet romantically, I didn't really believe it happened in real life.

…the men were always gorgeous, domineering, aristocratic creatures who never seemed to turn up around me. And neither did the beautiful heroines. Also, I'd been introduced to science fiction at the same impressionable age, so for every Spanish Don I read about a teleporting criminal mastermind or girl travelling in a asteroid, so the influences were very mixed

And indeed: if I could read science-fiction novels like you'd eat fistfuls of popcorn and still not expect to be serving on a spaceship next to impossibly handsome incredibly intelligent delightfully emotionally-retarded men, why shouldn't the same be true for the girls reading the pink books?

People were, however, more likely to say they knew 'someone else' whose romance-reading was problematic:

My sister, however, is an avid reader of them still, and I think it *has* coloured her idea of relationships, which conflicts with her general pig-headedness about everything.

The scariest part is when during conversations she makes reference to situations that characters have been in, or occupations they do, as if they are real world people.

This could be a symptom of "I'm okay, you're a basket-case", or it may be that a small minority of people develop a problematic level of attachment to the literature.

Most people, however, seem to be perfectly capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality:

I have a lot of culturally expectations of what relationships should look like (especially at the dating/proposing/having a wedding phase of things) that bear no resemblance whatsoever to any relationship I have ever seen or participated in.

They should: being able to tell what's real and what's not is a pretty good measure of whether or not you're batshit crazy. Part of the appeal of fantasy is that it allows us to go beyond what we'd actually be prepared to do in real life – you can both desire something inside your head, and be aware that you wouldn't really want it if it offered. As evidence, I simply offer up Mr Darcy. "Yes honey, what I really want is for you to stand around being broody and arrogant. In britches."

Nevertheless, romance reading still comes with a high degree of stigma attached. About half of respondents said they were embarrassed about their romance reading habit, and others said that while they didn't feel any shame, they were aware that other people would think less of them if they knew. Self-service library issuing was spontaneously mentioned more than once.

So, in response to the contention that somehow Notting Hill is dangerous to the psyche in a way that, say, Die Hard 3 isn't, a hearty flibble, and perhaps a protracted discussion about who you'd rather boff: Colin Firth or Hugh Grant.

(164 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Girls Can Do Anything. You Just Can't Watch. | Feb 03, 2009 13:10

As I think I've mentioned before, I love cricket. I'll watch anything cricket-related. Beach cricket, club cricket, kids in the park after school, whatever. When I'm old and my family are all dead, I'll be that weird woman always hanging around at strangers' games. "There's that crazy old cricket lady," people will say, "the one showing the inappropriate amount of cleavage."

When the kids were little, we used to take them to women's cricket games out at Lincoln. This was only partially to counter my son's idea that women couldn't play sport because "their lumps would get in the way". You could go and watch two international teams play, for free, while sitting on grass, with an actual picket fence and everything. In the gaps between overs, our daughter would get up and dance next to the speakers. She can't hear anything under 60dB, so the volume was perfect for her.

Right now, the White Ferns are playing the Southern Stars. This year's Rosebowl series is a Big Deal. According to Cricinfo;

One of the biggest years in women's cricket - if not the biggest year - begins with two giants of the game taking on each other in the Rose Bowl series.

The Women's World Cup kicks off in Australia in just over a month, so if one of these two top teams can get an edge over the other in the Rose Bowl, that's obviously going to tell. On top of that, the White Ferns haven't actually won the Rose Bowl since 1998.

So it's nice to see that Cricinfo knows the series is important. That article is the only way you can tell, because currently they're offering me live scores for an England-South Africa under-19 game. Radio Sport is talking about yachting, because currently there's no sport on. Sky Sport is showing highlights of the Cycling Tour Down Under and a replay of Middlesborough vs Blackburn Rovers.

For the first game in the series, I managed to track down live scoring on BlackCaps.co.nz, and that's what I'm 'watching' now. That first game was tight, and I ended up sitting here compulsively refreshing to see if Amy Satterthwaite was going to get her fifty before the White Ferns won the game. She was stranded on 49*. I still don't know, though, why Abby Burrows only bowled seven overs when she took wickets and didn't go for many.

Right now, the Ferns are 120/5 and Satterthwaite has just come out to join Haidee Tiffin, her captain. For those as are interested in that kind of thing, Tiffin has a blog at Cricinfo, along with a selection of other international players.

Women's cricket is caught in an awkward position. It can't get coverage because people don't watch it, and people don't watch it because it doesn't get coverage. For all the whining about the lack of coverage women's sport gets, when people turn up it gets televised – look at tennis and netball, because you can. People just don't go to women's cricket matches.

Perhaps they need to sex it up a bit. Do a calendar. Adopt Australia's 'lesbians only' selection policy. Play in bikinis. Follow in the men's footsteps and use fielding as a strip-tease – something you can see here, here and here. Sprint in beige bodysuits. Something.

In the meantime, the Ferns and the Stars will be in Hamilton on the 6th and 8th, and at the Basin Reserve on the 12th. Imagine how they'd feel if someone actually turned up.

---

Meanwhile, if there are any of you out there who are, or have been, big romance novel readers, or moderate romance novel readers, drop me an email. I have a couple of questions for you. It's okay, it's just knowledge, bro.

(88 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!