Posts by Deborah
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Michael, thank you. It takes some courage make a retraction like that, and I appreciate it.
That said what do you think of Wagner and his representaion of Aryan ideology? :)That said what do you think of Wagner and his representaion of Aryan ideology? :)
That's another thing about which I have no opinion. I don't like Wagner either.... 'though apparently there are some people who do. Whatever. Wagner schmagner, I say.
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Thanks, Russell. I much prefer peace, despite appearances to the contrary.
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__That's unfair, Deborah. It's a bit hard to have a meaningful discussion if I can't make an observation to the contrary.__
I feel really snippy about this, Russell, because reading back through the thread, virtually everyone was making a huge effort to avoid generalisations.
__But you put me in the difficult position of making it appear that I'm being insensitive or dismissive simply by disagreeing with you.__
Yes. I take your point, and I can see that what I wrote put you in difficult position. It is a two way street - once you had used one of my comments as an illustration of people making generalisations, it left me with no way to respond to your point about goths, sporty types, etc. which I really wanted to respond to with, "I take your point, and it's a valid one." Maybe we need to disconnect arguing about the substance of the argument from arguing about the form of the argument.
Truce?
As for modern music - it doesn't float my boat in any case, so I have no opinion about it. I'm more of a jazz, classical and opera woman. Each to their own.
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You have acknowledge the slogan "All men are Rapists" is wrong,(still held onto by Deborah)
THAT IS NOT CORRECT! I DO NOT, AND HAVE NEVER, HELD THAT VIEW.
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Here's the comment where I talked about the caricatured 'all men are rapists' claim back in April this year.
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Deborah you're saying all young men are rapists, and thereby that all men raped when they were younger - that is a really ugly and unjustifiable view of the world.
Michael, that's a complete misrepresentation of what I said. I said NOTHING like that whatsoever.
Here's what I said.
Another thought - raunch culture makes things very difficult for boys and young men too. I'm told that many, if not most, teenage boys and young men think / fantasize a lot about sex. And at the same time, here are (some, not all) girls wearing incredibly sexy clothes, sending a heap of signals that they are sexually available. So what's a young man to do? Yet some of those girls may not really want to be sexually available - they just like the clothes, or feel that they have to wear the clothes in order to fit in. The young man propositions them, and gets turned down, or comes on too strong, and the young woman feels forced into a situation she doesn't really want to be in (in the worst cases, we call this rape). Now of course this is not what happens all the time, or even a lot of the time, but I assume that it happens at least some of the time. What a terribly confusing and risky position for young men to be in.
I am shaking with shock that you could think I ever, ever said anything remotely like all young men are rapists. What a terrible view to attribute to me.
You say you are too scarred by 1970s feminism to give weight to my views. For goodness sake, that was 30 years ago. Feminism has moved a long way since then. And even in the 70s, no one claimed that all men were rapists. As Jackie said above, and I have said months ago on PAS, it was a much more nuanced, and subtle view than that. The caricature of the 1970s view, and your caricuature of what I was trying to say about the difficult position young men have been placed in, are both ridiculous.
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Some of them are. I enjoy the occasional times I still go and pick my son up from Western Springs. There is no uniform, so everyone dresses as their favourite youth cult. There are a few Paris Hilton wannabes (and it looks dodgy), but a hell of a lot more goths, alt-girls, sporty types, etc.
I have always thought that it must be very hard to be a goth in NZ. Fine in winter, when you can lurk indoors, but it must be very hard to keep up that pasty white skin in summertime.
Sure, kids are experimenting with their identity at that stage, and no doubt that's a large part of what's going on with raunch culture too. It's also why, if I'm trying to work out where raunch culture fits on some sort of sexuality / sex industry scale, it comes right down at the end, where frankly, even if I don't like it, if that's the way they want to dress, well, whatever.
I get annoyed though, when I go into Pumpkin Patch or Just Kids to get clothes for my primary school age girls, and find flimsy crop tops, and fake fur. WTF?
(I also get annoyed that they only make easy-fit clothes. I can make them fit my skinny little girls by pulling the clever elastic waistbands in, but they look ridiculous. No one makes clothes for skinny children any more....)
But this is not just about teenagers experimenting with identity. Like Anjum (?) said upthread, there's a whole set of messages about the sexual availability of women that go along with it.
It's tricky though. I choose my clothes carefully, so that I look and feel good in them. I like wearing knee length skirts and medium high heels, because I know the combination makes my legs look good. I avoid low cut tops, because actually, unlike Emma, cleavage is something that I missed out on in the genetic stakes. I like clothes that emphasise my waist, which is not too bad at all, even though it's not as firm as it was pre-children. So what's the difference between that, and dressing in raunchy clothes?
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"The young man propositions them, and gets turned down, or comes on too strong, and the young woman feels forced into a situation she doesn't really want to be in (in the worst cases, we call this rape)."
The 1970s Feminist "All Men are Rapist". Isn't accepted today as valid and is simply insulting. The "She was asking for it" defense has no standing either.
Sure. I think this is one of the downsides of raunch culture, that the sexual terrain has beocme very confused. That's the sort of thing a mature (ahem... middle aged?) adult can, or ought to be able to cope with, but a kid in his late teens?
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That's very positive of you, but even here on PAS, when some of us have been trying to express our worries, we have been told that we are making (invalid) generalisations...
That's unfair, Deborah. It's a bit hard to have a meaningful discussion if I can't make an observation to the contrary.
I feel really snippy about this, Russell, because reading back through the thread, virtually everyone was making a huge effort to avoid generalisations. They were saying, "This is my experience...", "This is my concern...", offering evidence to the contrary, clearly demarcating where their concerns lay. People have been incredibly careful with their language. I have tried to be especially careful with mine, and each time I posted, I made it clear that I was talking about issues of consent. That's a long way from making generalisations.
So from my point of view, it's really hard to engage in a meaningful discussion if I get dismissed as just making generalisations.
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Who said girls think it's grubby? Afterall, they do it too.