Posts by Lucy Stewart
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OnPoint: Other People's Wars, in reply to tussock,
Solution: send our regional team of murder specialists over, with strict orders to not murder anyone. Wink, wink, nudge nudge. Like those English paratroopers sent to Northern Ireland back in the day.
Requirements: orders not to murder anyone, plenty of murdering, and confirmation that no one is murdering anyone. Lots of winking, guided tours for the tame journalists, guided missiles for the native ones.
From both a strict legal viewpoint and a common-usage one, repeated use of the word "murder" here is...not entirely accurate.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Max Rose,
The West may have reduced social and legal sanctions against nonmonogamy during the last few generations, but it's still seen among otherwise liberal people as a moral/ethical failing or at least a character flaw.
Insomuch as that's true, I think it's because of a failure to distinguish between nonmonogamy and cheating, two overlapping but different things. Breaking trust in a relationship is a moral failing. Nonmonogamy is not, but you also have to be able to negotiate it, and to find people who are comfortable negotiating it, which most people aren't.
I'm also a bit chary of the whole "monogamy is a plot to suppress sexuality" thing, because, true, it doesn't work for everyone, and society needs to find ways to work with people who aren't monogamous but still have relationships, children, and so forth - which is lots and lots of people.
But it's also true that monogamy does work pretty well for quite a lot of people. I'm absolutely confident that it works for me. Historically, too, monogamy has absolutely not been a requirement for upper-class men, in lots of societally-approved ways - but lots of them were monogamous all the same. I think the picture is more "monogamy works for a lot of people, but not everyone" than "people are only monogamous because society tells them to be". Like any aspect of sexuality, it's a continuum - and not necessarily a static one over a lifetime.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Lilith __,
That's a really good point. I just find all this stuff so deeply depressing. So depressing I may have to go and look at some porn.
I've seen first-hand how much people can be screwed up by that attitude to even the most boring vanilla sort of sexual fantasy, let alone anything even remotely kinky. It's Not Cool.
And the results...well, Utah has the highest rate of pornography usage in the US, especially kinky porn. Draw your own conclusions.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Emma Hart,
It wasn’t all bad, to be fair, B. The medical concept of hysteria did lead to the invention of the vibrator.
It always surprises me how adroitly avoided this piece of medical history tends to be, considering...well, everything.
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My issue is that, at base, the problem is that they’ve been taught to feel guilty about their natural sexual feelings, which Renaud frequently describes as “perverse”.
At my most cynical, I can’t help feeling that this sort of thing keeps going because if there’s one way to ensure that you can make everyone feel like they’re a sinner in need of saving, it’s to focus on masturbation and sexual fantasies. At some level arousal is an autonomic function; it’s like condemning eating or breathing. Everyone (except asexuals, I guess, though I don’t know anything like enough about asexuality to determine how much this does or does not apply) experiences sexual arousal of some sort. Get them to feel guilty about it and you’ve got them forever.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to BenWilson,
He worked at that sale for about 90 mins going well beyond what I have come to expect from any shop salesperson, and I thought giving him $50 was fair enough.
That's very generous and kind of you, but when you have no cultural context for it, really confusing. The guy's probably wondering what you mean by it, what you want, if it's okay/legal for him to accept it...I feel a little sorry for him now, actually.
(I have absolutely no problems with tipping, and have, in countries that don't underpay people who get tips and where it's an accepted practice. I've tipped in NZ on occasion. It's the twin practices of underpaying and trying to make it mandatory that I dislike.)
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Russell Brown,
The tipping system always seems to me like a form of social control.
It fits perfectly into the US's whole blame-the-poor-for-their-poverty system, perhaps the most particularly direct expression of it.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to B Jones,
But you can make it illegal for formally trained midwives to attend homebirths, which mainly means only unlicensed ones do it. I’m not sure if we have, or want, that kind of choice here.
No, we don't! I meant that more to illustrate the *lack* of choice in the US (or, rather, how some choices are made far more unsafe than they need to be.)
Also, my Internet died temporarily before I could edit, but upon reflection I remembered that the fencing club's tiff was with the *Cambridge* University fencing club, who definitely got there before us as the CUFC. (UC is still not Canterbury University, though, no matter how many times the Press refers to it that way.)
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I think service should be better but my comparison is with the States because one does see great service from one who is relying on your tip. We don’t have that here.
If the cost of good service is putting people's ability to earn minimum wage on any given evening at the whim of the people they're assigned to serve, then it's too high. You get amazing service here, but it makes me a little sick every time.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
There’s a former FE college called Canterbury Christ Church University.
I think that's the one. I always thought it was a bit odd they'd gone for the fencers and nothing else, but I vaguely recall there being some dispute about the age of the club - the argument was that they'd been the Canterbury University Fencing Club for far longer than we had. Whereas I don't think snowboarding was very big in Victorian England.
<i>In my experience there are a range of approaches within midwifery (and obstetrics) from highly-interventionist to hands-off and a much wider range of options available to women, within a hospital or elsewhere, when giving birth than many people realise.</i>
A lot of the discussion (online, anyway) is driven by practices around childbirth in the US, which,.as someone said earlier in the thread, is just a totally different ballgame from the situation here (home births are illegal in a lot of states, for starters), and much, much messier, especially piled onto the financial mess healthcare entails over here. It's always been my impression that the New Zealand system might have its own problems but at least you have *choices*. (And, you know, no-one shaving your pubic hair without your permission. AFAIK.)