Posts by TracyMac
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@Isabel - as long as PASer doesn't elide from Pas'eur to poseur. (I'm sure it might in the minds of the nay-sayers)
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And thank you and the rest of the crew, Emma, for making it a place of much thought-provoking and ROFLnui-ing.
I'm just going to head out and bleach my brain of thoughts of Paul Holmes, kink AND olives. Maybe some waffles will be comforting...
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Regarding Jack's remark about the putative sleaziness of middle-aged men who might announce they're "poly", meh, I find it's a label that most people don't dick round with past A Certain Age. Yeah, sure, there are people who self-describe as poly who mean it as "I like to screw around with no thought for the consequences", but I've met them in both gender-flavours.
As for the poly, but no orgies plz, yes, "traffic control" is a good explanation. As is, now I think about it, my being incredibly squicked by witnessing people having sex, whether aurally or visually. Obviously I haven't been outright squicked in my group sex experiments, but my lack of enjoyment of it probably isn't unrelated.
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@Kaipara Possum, I could have done without the slight tinge of ad hominem in your reply - "pink-tinged binoculars" indeed.
There is a hell of a difference between a govt whose polices you don't agree with, or individual greed, and endemic corruption in a legal sense. Comparing NZ to India in that sense is a joke.
Actually, I lived in NZ exclusively for the first 30 years of my life. It's not perfect, and certainly less perfect with this govt, but you show me a place where there is more probity in public life, except perhaps the Scandinavian countries.
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@Kaipara Possum - have you actually lived/done business anywhere else in the world? NZ is AMAZINGLY uncorrupt, even with the "mate's rates", "things falling of the back of the truck" and other dodgy deals. It's pretty distinctive compared to Australia - you only need to look at the current NSW state govt.
While there's plenty of low-level fraud/thievery and outright incompetence in NZ, it's not like Australia, which is not that high up in the corruption stakes in a global sense, but which had to invent the word "rort". Then there are the probable majority of countries, where if you want to get anything done, you have to provide "incentives". Or "governments" that purely conceive of their populace as an income source, and "entreprenurial" Aussies/Kiwis get all shocked and horrified when places like Dubai rip off those who try to get in on schemes there. Frankly, I have no sympathy for those who try to cash in on the misery of others.
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Oh, and I forgot. I was conceived in a brothel. You can't get much more sordid than that.
Famous Flora's used to hire out rooms-by-the-hour in the late 60s. And that's where my sailor-father and my mother made me. Bless.
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Oh, the whole Guardian line on prostitution, with Tanya Gold leading the charge, makes me very tired.
I had a go at an article that Zoe Williams wrote last year concerning Belle deJ, which basically said that if you want to patronise prostitutes, you're doing it pretty much because you get off on the desperation of oppressed women. I think that's fairly far down the list of motivating factors, myself. I didn't particularly like her assertion that proper feminists wouldn't ever be able to find anything redeemable about the industry either.
As for my own sordid deeds, there was the rather fraught school-term when I screwed my three best friends (um, all same-sex) within weeks of each other, more than a decade before I decided I was polyamorous. Then there was the time that two of the aforementioned friends and I went to a women's music festival. One of them and I got it on in the wee van we were using as a quasi-campervan. When the other one came by after the music finished to kip down in the van, we tossed her sleeping bag out and invited her to sleep in the communal tent instead. I still cringe about it now, 23 years later.
And that's before all the drunken (ok, there may have been some pot involved) and/or kinky and/or multiply-partnered exploits I've got up to subsequently. One thing tho', I'm poly but not into threesomes/group sex. What is up with that?
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@PeterAshby - I didn't see your response to my comment for a while, but frankly, you can get stuffed. As Danielle said, you do not have the right to diagnose me over the internet.
I go to the gym, I ride my bike, I don't puff when I walk anywhere. What might have worked for you will not work for the entire world. Perhaps it might, but that's what -research- should determine, not unsolicited drive-by evangelising diagnoses.
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Just to wildly retangent back to the original topic, Trotter is exactly the kind of fuckhead who kept me from becoming interested in the Labour party as a young'un.
Yes, I remember those sexist pricks who wouldn't hire me when I wanted to get into the printing trade (I eventually got there another way). I remember the old school wankers who didn't want the women in their union chapels.
I remember all that class war shit that went on about elite "identity politics" while denying the fact that, hello, there are working class women and gays as well. And some people wonder why I ran off into the middle classes as soon as I could get my aspirational butt onto that slippery pole.
Um. In the metaphoric sense, of course. Good lesbians didn't do that kind of thing in the mid-80s. *cough*
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And to continue the fatness discussion, there is actually a difference between eating disorders, metabolic disorders, and simple fatness.
With the genetic component, some people are simply going to be overweight/fat no matter what they do. Someone like me, who is fit enough, strong, healthy and has a hip/waist ratio of .76 (supposedly near the "ideal" for a woman) is within two kilos of being "obese" according to the bullshit of the BMI.
Then you do get the people who are eating disordered or who genuinely are completely ignorant about good eating, and who eat themselves into a unhealthy physical state. That is what should be treated. As too the conditions that cause the unhealthy weight gain - PCOS being one. Although there is plenty of medical opinion that opines that PCOS is caused by women becoming overweight. It's a sad state when medical researchers can't agree on which is the cart and which is the horse.
One of the things that bothers me about singling out "obesity" as a health issue is that, as in the case of PCOS, cause and effect are incredibly vague. And too often, peoples' health issues are blamed on the fact of their fatness, when much of the time the causation is not at all demonstrated. A friend was refused knee surgery because her knee pain was supposedly due to her obesity. When they finally did an MRI (two doctors later) and found the torn meniscus that had resulted from the fall she'd had (and told the doctors about), then suddenly surgery was back on the cards. After 6 months of pain and vastly reduced mobility.
I have a problem with gastric reflux, and they wanted to check out if there was an ulcer or helicobactor infection. Nothing was found, and the doctor performing the gastroscopy told me - after looking at my chart and seeing the BMI written down - that losing weight might help in the case of no apparent cause. See above where I discuss my hip/waist ratio as a size 14 - there is barely any weight on my stomach! It certainly didn't help modify my impression that weight is often used as a diagnosis of convenience.
Sure, treating the fat, and the underlying syndrome or eating disorder, if it's causing a health issue is an important step in primary care. But I bitterly resent that I'm deemed as overweight when I am actually average for my height and age (and not a "modern fat" average either - does no-one look at pre-70s pictures of women any more?). And too often that cause is not positively identified.
To get back onto the broader issue, when do you stop handing out health care? Sure, the pie is not unlimited. But do you not treat someone who is "too fat"? Do you tell George Best to piss off with his liver? Do you give the 90-year-old spinster the hip op that lets her spend her final 5 or so years of life mobile, or do you leave her stuck in that wheelchair? Where do you draw the lines?