Posts by Emma Hart
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Ban needles?
I need those needles, dammit. They're for perfectly legitimate cross-stitch. And mending, yeah. You can take my needle from my cold dead hand.
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Badly done, Emma! My injuries -- and indeed the generally precarious state of my health -- are no laughing matter. I take such things very seriously indeed, and I don't take kindly to fun being poked at them.
What made you think I was laughing? You can't see me laughing from there, right? Those comments were intended as sincerely as anything I ever say.
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I think we should just dedicate this thread to David Haywood from the get-go, but I guess someone has to warm the crowd up.
The funniest injury I ever witnessed was a good friend of mine dislocating his shoulder while dancing at a party. I laughed so hard I got to spend the rest of the evening in A&E with him.
The funniest injury story in my family was my brother, cleaning out an old 40-gallon drum he'd found at the dump. It smelt a bit fumey, so he tossed a match in, and then leaned over the drum to see why nothing had happened. He lost a fair amount of skin off his face, and I hear it wasn't funny if you were there. But I wasn't.
I once cut my daughter's finger half-off when she put her hand on the chopping board while I was cutting herbs.
But I've spent the last six months on a diet of physio and anti-inflammatories after injuring a hip doing yoga. It aches in the cold which I think officially pushes me into the ranks of Old Bastard. Unlike any of my previous idiocy- or alcohol-related injuries, this substantially interferes with my... enjoyment of life.
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Cheers, Deborah, that was a lovely post and I agree with pretty much all of it. I'd just add a couple of caveats.
I think gender does matter, I think it does make us different, and I think that's great. It's one of a number of things that makes us different, and I think any discussion benefits from having a number of different points of view contribute. (Though for me it's sort of more about brain gender because that's what's helped me understand what makes me different from a 'typical woman'.) I do think it's achievement that matters, but I'd like to broaden our definition of what achievement is, because I think it's still very focused on money and career, and that sort of 80s shoulderpad feminism did very little to change that.
And the other thing is, and I do feel I'm harping on this a bit but I also think it's important, that it's not just 'white boys' who attack outsiders. Women do it too. From what I've seen when I was at school, and again through my children, bullying of girls at school is done by other girls. My memory is awfully fuzzy, but weren't there one or two cases earlier this year of Myspace bullying by Kiwi girls? I do think it IS hegemonic, that girls construct their own little power structures and then fight to preserve them. You have to be 'in power' to do that, so it doesn't happen on male-dominated sites but does on social-networking type sites like Myspace.
And... I do think Women's superior ability to walk away from a pointless unpleasant fight is a strength, not a weakness. This is only sightly tongue in cheek.
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Due to...um...factors, I couldn't really tell her an answer to either...
Well, it's hard to talk with your tongue in someone else's mouth.
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There have been times I've been very glad that I live in NZ, and the effort required from the odd freak who can't tell me from my role-playing character to seriously RL-stalk me is prohibitively huge.
I don't think anyone wants to trivialise real-life physical violence: at least with on-line harassment, you always have the option to switch off and walk away. But the damage done by verbal harassment is still real. I once got an email so amazingly abusive it made me cry for three days. From a woman, who was employing me at the time.
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Erm. Insert the word 'go' into above post so it actually makes sense...
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Contrary to Emma's view, I think the contributions by women to this thread, including her own, have been revealing and important
Never actually said I didn't think that, I don't think...
Emma is at one extreme of liberal feminism (sorry if you don't count yourself as a feminist at all Emma! Everyone's on some kind of spectrum, unfortunately)
Felt kind of ambiguous about the tag since run-ins at uni with a particular strain of loud, aggressive feminism. Example off the top of my head: a girl screaming abuse at a friend of mine for about ten minutes because he held open a door for a large (mixed-gender) group and she happened to be in it - she wasn't even first through the door. Prefer 'equalist', but also don't want to abandon 'feminist' to people like that. And believe me, in my life I've witnessed and personally experienced a power of the crap men can do to women, it's just not something I'm personally comfortable talking about in a public forum.
But. For about five years now I've been an online admin, and in that time, I've seen some really appalling things said to people. Sorting that stuff out is part of my job, and sometimes it's utterly soul-destroying. The tie for most gut-wrenching crap I've had to deal with would be stuff from the comments back when I was working on Tim Barnett's blog, directed at gay men, and a horrible harrassment campaign at BW, directed at a woman - by two other women.
I've copped it myself sometimes, but dealt with it okay because I was on sites with strong policing, and I had friends to help me out. But that's not to say I wouldn't absolutely freaking apeshit if it happened to my daughter.
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Tze Ming, don't give up. I reckon you should start a new chicks-only thread & and get back to business. :)
Oh good grief, can we not? I assume I fit in the 'girls and ladies' category, and I like the sparring. What I don't like is abuse, no matter who's driving it or who it's directed at. I don't need a special little protected corner of the internet where I don't have to come in contact with the big nasty boys.
So far I think what we've managed to establish is that girls who DO comment on pol blogs don't know why women who DON'T don't. Big surprise. And that the reasons some women don't like to hang out at Kiwiblog are curiously identical to the reasons some men don't. Ditto.
If I do ever get picked out, mentioned, linked to, whatever, I want it to be because of the content of my writing, not the contents of my trousers.
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so... what we have here is a site with usual, liberal, left-leaning guys chatting. and i'd like to think that women are more than welcome to chime in, exactly the same as they would be if we were out socially.
Heh, System reminds me of hanging out in the Lower Common Room at varsity: very bright, mostly left-leaning people, interspersing high-level discourse with total and utter bollocks. That too was a group where the ratio was about 2:1 male to female. Rest assured the only scaring-off of females was done by females: the straight guys were desperate for more chickies.
I read what's worth reading regardless of who wrote it, and I have a network of sites I check daily. Pol blogs I only comment here, Span, and NRT: that's because the level of discourse is civil and intelligent, and especially here, witty. I feel perfectly welcome to chime in. Of course, I also feel complimented rather than oppressed when people whistle at me.