Posts by icehawk
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I’m honestly not sure what the factors are that ensure some girls and women are constantly slut-shamed and some never are.
A friend of a friend in the USA was studying what caused high school girls in the US to be labelled as "loose" (or a "slut" or etc) by their peers.
Her main result (when mostly through the PhD thesis) was that they did things in the wrong order. A girl who went off into a corner for some mutual groping with a boy without dating them first and going through various other steps was "loose", even if she only did it once and never bonked anyone. But a girl who went through the correct social steps in order could have a dozen sexual partners in a school-year and be considered fine.
But the USA's dating rituals are bizarre, so I've no idea as to transferance of this to NZ.
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a $1.5M house in Mt Victoria costs 65 times median income in NZ.
Let me be clearer to avoid pedants:
A $1.5M house in Mt Victoria costs 65 times median income of a taxpayer in NZ.
But not all taxpayers earns wages and salaries as many are retired, or full-time students without a part-time job, or etc.
A $1.5M house in Mt Victoria costs only 40 times median income of a taxpaying wage or salary earner in NZ.
And to be fair to Mt Vic, it has some tiny little 3-bdr cottages on tiny sections that go for as little as 25 times median income of a taxpaying NZ wage/salary earner. Aren't we the egalitarian society?
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Individual income is not a great indicator of class / socio-economic group. So NRT's figures are valuable, but the more interesting one is household income after tax.
Even then it's dodgy. Part of what Emma is seeing is that income tends to rise with age.
Which relates to confusion about social mobility. Someone who works in the uni bookshop part-time age 25 while finishing their MBA may be a highly-paid CEO aged 50, that doesn't mean NZ has high social mobility. Comparisons of parental income with childrens income shows much less movement than tracing simple individual income mobility over a few decades.
Also class relates much more to wealth than to income. I'm ludicrously rich by my standards. Absolutely bloody rolling in it. I earn close to 4 times median income in NZ, and on a good year I've earned more. But that wouldn't get me a house in Mt Vic or Roseneath - a $1.5M house in Mt Victoria costs 65 times median income in NZ.
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But then you see "Firefly must be sexist because it doesn't pass the Bechdel test"
I love Firefly. And it's great that it's got some competent female characters with real roles. It's a vast step forward beyond much complete dross on TV. But it's sexist.
"less sexist than most" - sure. But still sexist.
Your 4 female characters are: the little-sister-victim-being-taken-care-of-by-big-brother; the follower who does whatever mr-cap'n-tightpants says; the whore; and the anti-social engineer whose character arc is that she's serious, seriously in lurv with Simon.
Decisions? They get made by Mr Cap'n, sir. Or by the preacher. Or by Simon. Or by Jayne (I didn't say *good* decisions). The wimminfolk in Firefly aren't the leaders or deciders, the power dynamic just doesn't work that way.
I'm sorry Emma, but just because we really, really like it doesn't make it "not sexist".
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Lets talk about art.
People really often make this mistake about what is and isn't art.
They say "that's not art" when what they really mean is "that's bad art".
If you push them they'll say that of course not all art is good and of course bad art exists. But then they will happily go back to trying to reclassify stuff they think is bad as "not really art".
Ditto feminism. -
Re the Bechdel test (and despite what the video says it's not "Mo's movie test", Mo doesn't enter the DTWOF comics until a year or so later):
Surprisingly rarely passed. Firefly - written by someone who talks a lot about advancing feminism and the importance of strong female characters - rarely passes it.
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I know what "merchant banker" and "Berkshire hunt" are rhyming slang for
Though since the credit crunch in London the merchant bankers prefer to be called by the less abusive name of "fucking wanker".
[shutting up now]
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Articulated. Absolutely. I remember that about you.
The way you articulated at uni did make you very persuasive.
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Jolisa,
I like my 8-year-old's nightly reading homework from Northland School (that's the suburb Northland in Wellington, next door to Karori). My daughter's supposed to spend some time reading a book each night. Any book. Her choice. Many available from school if she wants. Just read.
Strangely, National Standards gets far more attention than the new New Zealand National Curriculum, which was slowly phased in over the last few years. The curriculum devolves many options and choices to schools as to exactly what to teach, as long as broad goals are reached. It was developed because of research showing that a great strength of NZ schools is teacher-driven choice.
I've seen the American school system, though not recently. What I saw as a kid was standard exercise books, the same for every class in the city, all students filling in the same problem sets. Standard textbooks used by every teacher, with standard lesson-plans, standards posters (and now standard powerpoint presentations, I'm sure) for each class, all written a thousand miles away for some generic class of generic kids with a generic teacher. Except for those lucky gifted kids, who might get the same "extension" exercises as every other gifted kid in the, coz they're all the same right?
New Zealand's schools are among the best in the world, and we do while spending a lot less on education than the Americans do. We do it by having teachers plan their own lessons, use their own resources, use their own ideas and fit them to their own class. Our new Curriculum was carefully thought out to support that. How the hell a flexible curriculum is supposed to mesh with National Standards has not been thought out, because the first was based on careful research into the strengths of NZ schools and the second on knee-jerk implementation of imported ideology.
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Under what circumstances should it be illegal to look at a picture of something it is legal to do?
The legality of doing it is utterly irrelevant.
Watching and disseminating kiddie porn is illegal because of the (alleged) effects it has on the viewers. "Fake" kiddie porn where no real kids are used (either via some weta-digital-like effects or actors who just look really really young) has the same effects. Even though it's legal for an incredibly-young-looking 16-year-old to have sex.
If you want to argue that there should be no censorship, go ahead. I'll disagree, but I think there's a coherent case against censorship even if that case is wrong. But the idea of censoring only images of acts that <i>are</i> illegal, and not images of acts that <i>appear to be</i> illegal, is silly.