Up Front by Emma Hart

I find it harder to get my rage on in the summer holidays, or when I’ve been ill for nearly two months, but if everyone else is going to write about banging, it seems only right that I should too. So let’s talk about group sex.

We’ve talked about nasty victim-blaming trials before, and we’ve examined vanilla privilege before. Yet even I was surprised when the prosecutor in a British rape trial refused to present any evidence because a woman had admitted to group sex fantasies during an MSN chat. The judge subsequently directed the jury to present Not Guilty verdicts.

The logs are not public, thankfully. Nothing in the judge's or prosecutor’s comments indicates that the logs contain anything which contradicts the woman’s assertion that she went to the home of the man she was talking to with the intention of having sex with him and no-one else. Nevertheless, as the judge in the case has quite publicly said, the content of the logs submitted by the Defence was such that “[the complainant’s] credibility was shot to pieces”.

The most damning comments came from the prosecutor – the person whose job it was to act on the complainant’s behalf:

It is right to say that there is material in the chat logs from the complainant, who is prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers, where to use her words 'her morals go out of the window'.
"This material does paint a wholly different light as far as this case is concerned.
"We take the view that it would not be appropriate to offer any evidence.

Michael Leeming was, apparently, particularly concerned about an excerpt in which the complainant indicated that she might be prepared to have sex with six Irish men.

Let’s pause for a moment and examine this in a different light. Let’s say I’m chatting to a friend and suggest that I might be open to having sex with an Irish man – Aidan Turner, for instance. Later, I claim to have been raped by someone from Brixton. Before the trial, those chat logs appear, in which I have said that perhaps, if confronted with Aidan Turner covered in aerosol chocolate mousse, my morals might go out the window. My credibility is destroyed, and I don’t get a trial.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? How could agreeing that I might hypothetically consent to sex with one man make me incapable of refusing consent to a completely different one? So why would it make any difference if it was five or six men?

At this point I feel a strange compulsion to mention that I was privileged enough to have the vanilla panna cotta at Hay’s last weekend and it was lovely.

And those of you familiar with the Guardian Comment is Free section can take a moment to play a little imagination game. Which columnist was irate enough over this woman being considered unrape-able to write on it? Now, who picked this one? As a special bonus prize you can lose weight by reading the comment thread and then being violently ill.

The rules of consent still apply in a group sex situation. Which is why it also doesn’t help when, at the other end of the spectrum, people say that women can’t consent to group sex, or will only do so under social pressure, or maybe only think they do because they’re buying into a male viewpoint. Both viewpoints assume that group sex is always one woman and a group of men. Both remove the emphasis from whether the woman said yes or no – because how can I have the ability to say no unless I also have a meaningful ability to say yes?

Many of us will have had nightmares about having something we said offhand in a chat – where it’s not even entirely public – coming back to haunt us, shorn of context and seeming to imply something we totally didn’t mean, or at least not like that. And an understandable reaction would be to simply ensure that you never mentioned any kind of sexual fantasy or fetish ever again. (“Silly woman, said all those things to someone she didn’t know and then actually went to his house, what was she thinking?”) Rather than give in to Victim Blame Bingo, however, perhaps a more entertaining strategy would be to make disclosure of sexual fantasy so commonplace (and as it normally is, rather trite and dull) that no-one would ever think to imply anything about your actual behaviour from it. So, about that aerosol chocolate mousse…

It’s a fairly safe assumption that if the Christchurch Art Gallery is going to have an exhibition called The Naked and the Nude, I’m going to go. Slightly less obvious that I’m going to take my mother with me, unless you know my mother.

It’s not all prurient interest, of course. It’s the fact that they’re dealing with the difference between ‘naked’ and ‘nude’, with the way context makes things okay or not okay to look at. Gallery director Jenny Harper says:

When we use the term “naked”, we are referring to being deprived of clothes. It’s a word that almost generates embarrassment of such a condition. We regularly speak of ”the naked truth” and ”the naked soul”, which suggests that nakedness is not just a physical state but a spiritual and psychological one.

The word ”nude”, on the other hand, carries no uncomfortable overtone. The image it projects is not of a defenceless body, but of a confident body. Culturally, the nude in art raises issues associated with the human condition: status, sexuality, eroticism and desire, feminism, objectification and, at times, voyeurism.

Wandering through the exhibition – and the gallery was delightfully busy the day we went – other things struck me. The naked bodies were honest, realistic, ordinary bodies. The arty nudes had a sense of elision about them, an idealism, the human body as it should be, young, lithe, beautiful, and beautifully lit.

And female. In general as you move through the exhibition you move forward in time, and the depictions of naked male bodies are reserved for the end. This is partially a result of the art being chosen from the Gallery’s existing collections, but not entirely. The wall of pictures of bathers is of female bathers, and something about it make me slightly uncomfortable. Some of that discomfort comes from three of the artworks having no heads visible. Some of it comes from so many naked bodies, so few genitals.

There was also a sense, though, in many of those works, that the subjects know they’re being looked at, a sort of self-consciousness, an artificial posed-ness. It hit home particularly strongly at the end of the bathing wall when I found one of my favourite paintings – Evelyn Page’s Summer Morn.

Look at that, it’s beautiful. Partly it’s the light on the water and through the trees. What strikes me particularly, though, is the confidence in the naked figure. She’s so sure in herself, so unselfconscious. Her body is for herself to enjoy, not presented for a viewer, for an artist. It highlighted the lack of that pleasure in the pictures that came before it.

(This impression is slightly undermined when you find out that the model stopped the painting from being displayed until after her death, because it made her so uncomfortable.)

The absence of male bodies continued to bother me, though. The obvious message is that women are to be the object of gaze, to be looked at. The less obvious message is that men are not for looking at. Their bodies are not beautiful, not artistic, not nude, but naked. Legitimate artistic gaze goes from a straight man onto a straight woman. Perhaps it’s a Victorian thing: Renaissance art is full of beautiful naked men.

Rounding a corner and being confronted with Fiona Pardington’s gorgeous photographs of a scarred male body was fabulous. One image in Proud Flesh kept drawing me back – that of an ear, severed and reattached. Presented as an image of beauty, it was beautiful. That part of the gallery is full of complicated problematic images of men that require a long, thoughtful viewing, like Di ffrench’s The Hunter Warrior. What that painting says about men’s bodies and the values and traits associated with them is quite different from what, say, this says about women. You’ll note, however, still no genitalia.

Naked men are somehow more indecent than naked women – an attitude Filament would find strangely familiar. These ideas about how a naked body can be presented to be acceptable, and what kind of naked body is acceptable in what context, continue to intrigue me. After ‘fine art nudes’ and ‘naked art’ come ‘erotica’ and ‘pornography’, and nowhere are the boundaries hard and clear.

The Naked and the Nude runs at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu until the 18th of April. But remember, it may contain traces of nuts.

(My thanks to @ChchArtGallery for their help in putting this column together.)

Emma Hart was trying to work out what to call Up Front Awards - Uppies? Fronties? Then realised they should be Emmies, and is now off to die of shame.

"Somebody" wanted to photograph me as an Emmy, holding up a beach ball, but I churlishly refused. That being completely out of the question, we’ll call these the Blue Moons, because that’s about how often I’ll get round to this. I also promise this will be the last List Post I do for a while, and normal service will be resumed once the Bitching and Moaning Season opens again.

These are the people who caught my eye over the course of the last year whose achievements were either so significant or so recent that I haven’t forgotten them yet.

The award for Best Perveying by Social Media goes to Filament Magazine’s Cock Drive. Filament used their Twitter account, among other online presences, to drive a fundraising effort and sold enough copies of issue one to allow them to move to a printer who was happy to print erections. You can now buy Filament off the shelf in Auckland, Wellington and New Plymouth.

Staying with the web, Thomas Beagle takes out the [Redacted] Award for Best Use of the Official Information Act. Someone at the Department of Internal Affairs is probably considering taking out a contract.

The Services to Tissue Sales Award goes to Russell T. Davies for Torchwood: Children of Earth. Or, depending on how you want to interpret that, to John Barrowman for his nude scene in Torchwood: Children of Earth.

The much-vaunted Starskey and Hutch Memorial Award for Services to Slash-Fic goes to J.J. Abrams for Star Trek. Oh, you knew, didn’t you, every time you made them stand just a little too close together, every time you framed the shot for easy caption-adding, every time they exchanged one of those long, lingering looks. And you certainly knew in that scene where Spock gives Kirk the face-groin-face eye flick. Like you didn’t know people were going to do this with it:

Still on the arts, I shouldn’t need to tell you twice that the Xerox Award for Literature goes to Witi Ihimaera. Everything about this has already been said, but it seems the explanation slipped through this column without proper attribution.

The Daniel Radcliffe Award for Growing Up goes to Daniel Vettori. Now that he’s the captain of the Black Caps, and a selector and the coach and gets to open the batting and the bowling and drive the bus, it’s time for me to admit that he’s probably no longer twelve. Still, even the beard makes him look like a twelve year old with a beard. I think we know what has to be done, don’t we, Daniel?

And the Bishop Brian Award for Sincerity in a Recantation of Homophobia goes to Beenie Man. First, he was sorry and we were mean and he deserved an apology, and then he was in Uganda singing those songs again. I’m sure it’s all just a big misunderstanding that will be totally cleared up the next time he’s talking to a non-homophobic audience. And possibly several more times after that.

The I Can’t Believe We’re Still Having This Fucking Argument Award for Services to Feminism was a tough call. It’s been a great year for feminist discussion. The Listener deserves commendation for prompting Tits Out for Ourselves Night. Without them we women would never have been able to feel a real sense of pride and freedom just by choosing our own clothes for a night out. Paul Henry did his bit to keep feminist issues in the media, and in a more personal way Clayton Weatherstone made us examine our own behaviour and how murderable it made us. But on consideration, the award has to go to ALAC for their Lisa ad, for teaching us that calculated rape is our own fault for getting so munted in the first place. Few things have managed to sustain so much rage for so long. Well done, ALAC.

Speaking of Clayton Weatherstone, he does take out a narrow victory in the Jeffery Archer Award for Sense of Self-Entitlement, narrowly pipping Roger Douglas. Sir Rog does, however, win the Nosferatu Award for Best Rising from the Grave to Suck the Blood Out of the Living. Don’t tell me I’m the only one who sometimes hears that laugh in the dead of night.

Before we get truly into the hate, let’s take a moment to spread the love. The Helen Clark Award for Best Combatting of Stereotypes is a joint award. Don Abel wins it for being a witty, approachable, charming Assistant Governor of the Reserve Bank with a great sense of humour, and Grant Robertson wins it for being a witty, approachable, charming politician with a great sense of humour and a deep love of cricket. Remember I did this when you’re Prime Minister, that’s all I’m saying.

The Best Reinterpretation of a Concept Award goes to Anne Tolley, for her performance art of the concept of ‘standards’. Next, I believe, she’s going to give a whole new meaning to the word ‘education’.

The Montgomery Burns Award for Responsible Use of Power goes to Paula Bennett, for releasing the income details of beneficiaries who criticized her. Paula solidified the award recently by announcing plans to “review” beneficiaries’ entitlements after a year, less than a week before Christmas. Anyone who’s been on a benefit knows how stressful any kind of “review” process from WINZ is – and that includes Paula Bennett.

And to end on a strong note, the First Against the Wall When the Big Gay Revolution Comes Award for Services to Bigotry goes to Simon Power, for appointing Brian Neeson to the Human Rights Review Tribunal. As Idiot/Savant points out, Neeson doesn’t even believe in human rights. In his time in Parliament, Neeson was completely unsuccessful in pushing an agenda so Old Testament it might have brought Saint Paul himself to think, “Steady on, that’s a bit much.” Now he has a whole new platform to push off from. His deep-seated opposition to the very purpose of the Human Rights Review Tribunal is a matter of public record, but it’s not him I’m awarding. That would be like giving rain a prize for being wet. No, responsibility for this belongs squarely with the people who thought it was a good idea and made sure it would happen – for reasons which are beyond me at the moment, but will no doubt make their Machievellian brilliance clear in the months to come. Simon, your name is on it, so you get the Blue Moon. Enjoy.

So I don’t want to freak anyone out or anything, but I thought I should warn you of something I noticed just recently: it’s nearly Christmas.

In the spirit of high-fat desserts and conspicuous (alcohol) consumption which permeates this time of year, I’d like to say thank you to System. To every one of you lovely little furry possums ring-barking the columns of Public Address’s writers, thank you. We couldn’t do this without our readers and commenters – particularly those of us paying for Christmas this year by selling you books.

Ironic under-cutting aside (yes, that is causing me physical pain, thank you for asking) you guys are choice. Throughout the year I have been collecting my favourite System comments and tucking them away for now, just to show you (as if you could possibly not have known) just how wonderful you are. I’ve had to do some whittling, because there were a dozen pages of them. For many, you just had to be there. Some of my very favourites (the textes conversation, or the ‘comma man’ jokes) are unreproduceable because of their sheer scope – not so much a tennis match as a room packed full of drunk people and a beach ball.

The comment that still makes me snigger the most is “That c**t Bollard better stay off my turf”, but for the sake of more general LOLs, my official comment of the year has to be this one. It’s just kept on giving throughout the year, quite selflessly.

Just goes to show you who the perverts are. Normal people don't do that kind of crap and so don't know of the other meanings.

There we go. Don’t say James Bremner never does anything for you.

I’d also like to prostrate myself before the fabulous Amy Gale, whose imitation of popcorn popping only loses out to her contribution to the Great Food Controversy:

The people's pizza base ain't bread
It's more a scone-type dough instead
Inside your Sunday roasting pan
With pineapple out of a can

So bake that pizza, bake it good
The people's pizza, like you should
And though a kilo's far too dear
Some cheddar cheese is great on here

We do not want bourgeois legumes
Nor basil pesto's garlic fumes
We do not trust your foreign cheese
Just honest kiwi tucker, please

So bake that pizza, bake it good
The people's pizza, like you should
Through Gio's flinch and Danielle's tear
We'll keep the red spag flowing here

Ian Dalziel, too, found himself (or at least the bits of him on my hard-drive) only in competition with himself. Filtering through the Binge-Thinking, I’ve chosen this contribution, but pretty much anything he typed all year could have made it here:

Unfortunately my 'Blasted Heath Cliff Notes' doesn't have a handy 'Bronté-saurus' at the end (moor's the pity), so much of Ellis Bell's gothic prose is a mystery to me - (though obviously "Thrushcross Grange" is a Yeats inflection)... Still it could have all ended much 'moor' happily if poor Heathcliff had been able to dry off by a Cath-heater!*

*(Tubular bowels anyone? he said,
taking the pith yet again...)

There have been times when members of the community have had to quietly reprimand others for the good of all of us. Thank you, Joanna:

Dear Craig: please don't ever mention Paul Holmes in a thread about kinky sex ever again.

Yours,

The entire world.

We reminisced about ‘the old days’, when everything was better, dodgier, or just whiter and straighter.

Giovanni: Remember when turning to page 94 of The Listener used to give you smallpox? *Sigh*... those were the days.

~~~~~

Russell: Although [Chris Trotter] certainly has the answers, assuming the question is "How can the Labour Party be made unappealing to members and voters alike?"

~~~~~

rodgered:Modesty forbids me from saying anything other than to ask Nat Torkington about the time he walked into my house, demanded to know "How many goats did you have to sacrifice to make this happen?", and then wrote the evening up for Usenet consumption.

We speculated. We speculated really a lot.

Lucy: I'm semi-tempted to go over to the marine biology labs and break in, as I will no doubt find cackling PhD students force-feeding puffer fish to sea slugs, then mailing them to Auckland in a calculated campaign of eco-terrorism.

~~~~~

Mark: We could always license drinkers instead of outlets...and have automated doors that only let micro-chipped, licensed drinkers in.

You'd report to the testing station when you turn 18, knock back a dozen RTDs, then they'd monitor your behaviour and interview you on a range of topics.

If you didn't come across as too much of a dick, you'd pass. If you wet your pants, punched someone, fell asleep, or voiced your support for ACT, you'd be stood down for a year before you could try again

~~~~~

Robyn: I'm not sure why, but this makes me think Hadyn wants to use the Henry clip like this:

Person A: Hey, shall we see if Hadyn wants to join us for a curry?
Person B: Good idea! I'll give him a call. [phones Hadyn]
Hadyn's phone: I'LL DEMAND ANSWERS.
Person B: WTF? Hello?
Hadyn's phone: I'LL DEMAND ANSWERS.
Person B: Hadyn? Dude, are you there?
Person A: What's going on?
Person B: It's weird - it sounds like someone's there, but I keep hearing this Paul Henry clip.
Hadyn's phone: I'LL DEMAND ANSWERS. I'LL DEMAND ANSWERS. I'LL DEMAND ANSWERS.
Person B: Hadyn, if you are there, do you want to join us for a curry or not?
Hadyn's phone: Oh, yeah. OK.
Person B: Cool. See you later.
Hadyn's phone: Hey, you know earlier - did you think it was Paul Henry on my phone?
Person B: What? No.
Hadyn's phone: I'LL DEMAND ANSWERS.
Fin

As David Slack said at the time, That’s a funny. On a lady.

And you guys, including the guys who are also women, were just pretty damn funny.

Paul: I would have made a similar point, but I have been busy in the Public Library re-titling the books in the Crime section: Unlawful Killing on the Orient Express; Murder, She Alleged; and so on.

~~~~~

Craig: I just threw myself on the first vagina I came across. Right as rain in two minutes flat.
Russell: Heterosexuality: you're doin' it wrong. It's meant to last twice that long.

~~~~~

Kyle:http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/2549554/Tests-confirm-St-Pauls-bones-Pope.

Wait, he did what to the Pope? Does god know about this?

~~~~~

TracyMac: I'm so glad I came out in the mid-80s though - my toaster oven is great, and I don't really like the sound quality of an iPod. What's pissing me off is that my cupboards are starting to fill up with waffle irons from all the recruits proteges I've enlisted. I like waffles, but not that much.

Obviously, there are hundreds of brilliant moments I’ve omitted, and these are biased towards comments on my own threads. Do please share your own favourites in the comment thread below. And in a touching sort of Thought For The Day way, I’d like to leave you with the words of Rich Lock, on being reminded that “life is 3D”:

Yeah, but the graphics aren't much good. And I only get one playable character. And he's a bit of a dick.

Before I left for our Tour of the North, I’d been going to do a column on the ghastly British reaction to Belle de Jour’s coming out, and particularly the bizarre “facts” being touted about prostitution in New Zealand. I never quite found the time, though, and there are great responses here and here (both these sites have very NSFW pictures in the sidebar, but the writing itself is perfectly safe.)

And it turns out that now I’m in far too good a mood. Yes, Tanya Gold thinks she knows more about prostitution than prostitutes do, but it’s a brilliant Canterbury summer day and I’ve just had two weeks of Good Things and Great People. I just can’t raise the Rage, or even the Sarcasm.

While I met a host of lovely New People, I have to admit that one of my chief pleasures has been seeing all my Old People. It probably seems a little sad from the outside, but we all do it, right? Get together with old friends and tell the same stories we tell every time we get together. Nostalgia is exactly what it used to be.

At one point, after about a solid hour of this, a friend turned to his wife at dinner and said, “I’m sorry, we’re boring you with tales of our sordid pasts.”

Having a Sordid Past is excellent. Not only does it give you wonderful – if slightly embarrassing – stories to tell, but it’s also, by definition, past. When you’re no longer living it, you can leave out all the angst, all the crying and crockery-smashing. The point becomes the funny sides, which sometimes weren’t even visible at the time.

And with the fading of the angst and grudges goes the once-intense need to keep certain things secret. More than once on this trip the phrase, “You slept with who?” has been uttered, sometimes by me rather than at me*. The reunion for our year of KAOS that I’m organising for January should test the ability to leave things behind to its limit. It helps to be in a good place, and I’m now more convinced than ever that I’m in a very good place. Though those of you who attended the Christchurch launch should bear in mind that David’s tales of my Testing Times on this trip were scurrilous exaggerations.

Nevertheless, I’ve been home since Sunday and I’m still giggling in the supermarket and dancing in my lounge and forgetting to get dressed after yoga. I’d like to be able to share my extravagant good mood, because I know from experience that it isn’t going to last.

So here’s what we’re going to do. I’ve loved these tales of Sordid Pasts so much I want some more. Tell me yours. Tell me someone else’s: Tom’s retelling of Megan’s ‘cut links’ story damn near killed me. Do it in comments or by hitting ‘reply’. And the Sordid Tale that makes me laugh the hardest will win a free copy of Not Safe For Work, which I’ll know will be going to an appropriate home.

*You can tell 'by me' because then it's the unbearably wanky 'You slept with whom?'