Up Front by Emma Hart

I know I whined about how terrible labelling is not all that long ago, but today I want to take the time to pay tribute to a label I love above all others, one that saves me time and grief on nearly a daily basis. Not Safe For Work, I love you.

I don't have to decide whether an image is porn or erotica or sexually explicit material or designed to arouse or obscene. I don't have to decide if arty shots are safer than realistic shots, or gay shots are safer or less safe than straight shots. I can just call it NSFW and let you guys make your own calls. I might occasionally help out by throwing you the odd modifier – 'mildly' or 'very' NSFW – but for the most part I accept that I can't read your mind and I've really no idea which picture you're going to find more offensive, this one or this one.

Alright, here's the trick. It's like Simon Says. I didn't label either of those NSFW. Try these instead (mildly NSFW). Nevertheless, those first two (to my mind) perfectly SFW pictures were among ones I used to deliberately offend a specific group of people.

Links are even harder to determine the safe-for-workness of. Of the two Up Front sidebar links I felt needed the NSFW tag, one of them currently features no explicit material on its front page, and the other features a completely naked man with an erection. It's okay, I'll wait here while you pop off and find out which is which.

And of course NSFW means you don't have to be up front about your own threshold for dodgy. Blame the work filters. I'd like to look but the boss won't let me. And given the sheer mind-buggery of some of the things work filters block, you can never tell whether you'd be offended or not – until you get home and you can click on things in private. Some of you are itching to get home right now, right?

Different things disturb different people. I, for instance, find this photo disturbing. Bulgy forearm veins, that's got to be obscene. Also, what the hell is with that pose? Invisible Wonder Woman bracelets? I do understand, however, why people might find this picture more disturbing, even though it shows less flesh and is more 'arty'. (Whether it's porn or not, according to some people, depends entirely on whether that standing figure is male or female.)

NSFW covers non-visual stuff as well. This ad for the British series QI is, visually, perfectly sweet and nice. With the audio on, it's one of the most NSFW things you will ever see me link to. Headphones are advised. I wouldn't drink while watching it either. Perhaps we need a new label: Not Safe For Imbibing.

And who is now planning to demonstrate that NSFW might well stand for 'now show friends and workmates'?

The label still has its pitfalls, most obviously people who haven't run across it before, or who think I'm linking to the National Schools Film Week. Then there are people who do know what it means but don't understand it. When I sent that QI link to a friend, she decided that it would be perfectly fine to watch, seeing as she wasn't at work. So she fired it up and watched it – with her seven year old daughter.

Everybody learned a valuable lesson. Rabbits can't vomit.

So here's what you'll get from me: a basic assumption that you're all adults and you can make your own decisions. That you have functioning fingers and eyelids and can choose not to look at something you find disturbing or offensive. That we can all appreciate that different people have different tastes and squick levels, and that while I'll provide warnings if I have a reasonable expectation that a link could be a bit dodgy, I have no interest in catering to unreasonable levels of being offended, and that's okay.

Just trust me, it's okay. Because really, in your heart of hearts, you want to see how NSFW things get when I feel like I have your trust.

In many ways, Suraya Singh's story is a typically Kiwi one. Grew up in New Plymouth, moved to Wellington, headed off to do her OE, never quite came back. She loves living in London, but Shihad's Home Again and family pictures make her homesick. It all sounds pretty familiar, right up to the bit where she gets frustrated at the newsagents and starts her own porn mag.

This month, Suraya has launched Filament, a quarterly erotic magazine aimed squarely and solely at women. In a recessing market, where Playgirl has recently gone under, it seems like a big gamble. And we all know women don't have Gaze, right? That's for men, objectifying women. So why would women want to buy a magazine full of pictures of attractive men who've mislaid their shirts?

Sorry, what was the question?

Suraya didn't just jump into this blind. She did what any smart person would do first: she asked LiveJournal what women wanted to look at. Compared with the kind of images of men women are usually presented with, the results might be surprising. It turns out that Janet is right: women don't like men with too many muscles. They prefer more lightly-built men, with slim, feminine faces. This is, of course, an averaging of the feedback, and probably about as useful as asking women what kind of coffee women like and then giving them all that. I couldn't possibly comment. Nevertheless, it does seem to indicate a gap between what women like to look at, and what they're being given.

It was this feedback, too, that led Suraya to publish in magazine form:

I asked many, many people how they would prefer to consume the product that I had in mind. They said, "Everyone else will want it online, but I'd prefer it in print."

Magazines do also, it seems, appear to be recession-proof. While major titles find their circulation dropping, niche magazines appear to be thriving.

Filament does something else as well that's intriguing - or rather, it's what it doesn't do. Filament has no dieting advice, no gossip, and no articles on women's appearance. No fashion, no make-up tips. To compare, I did a quick survey at female-marketed magazines in the supermarket on the weekend, and more than half featured a cover story about a weight issue.

So: sexy men yes, appearance bitching no. Now to find some sexy men.

"I've asked strangers at clubs and for example, messaged someone after seeing their picture on Facebook. I have only had one man say 'no' to modelling, and that was because he wasn't allowed to do that kind of thing because of his job, not because he didn't want to."

Lying around all over the place, apparently, just hanging out to be asked to get their gear off in front of a camera. Isn't this compounding a problem, though, rather than solving it? Surely allowing women to objectify men just legitimises objectifying women?

Being turned on by an image of someone exposing their body is not necessarily objectification just because you don't know that person. I thought a lot about what the difference is between the two and making sure our images are about the people in them, not just of the people in them - for example, the models often took quite an active role in designing the shoot. Additionally, our photoshoots sit alongside interviews with the models about who they are as people, for example, not what they're like in bed.

We also don't touch up our images in ways that make the models appear something they're not - thinner or younger for example. So we think we're promoting a reasonable and achievable beautifulness in men, not unrealistic ideals.

Suraya says the main criticism of Filament that she's had from women is that it simply isn't explicit enough, and this certainly gels with what I've seen elsewhere (link NSFW). She is currently, however, negotiating the difficult world of the British censor, and hopes to be able to move to more explicit images in later issues. It's a matter, too, of getting a photoshoot that works naturally, and doesn't just yell 'look, a penis!'.

Certainly the idea that women aren't visual doesn't seem to be getting in the way of women perving. It's a remarkably persistent myth, though, to the point where every time an ad or a movie features a scantily-clad man, it's suggested that it's playing to its 'huge gay fan-base', as if there are more pervy gay men than pervy straight women. It seems incredible to suggest that David Boreanaz's shirt used to come off in about every second episode of Angel because it kept the female fans happy, and yet also incredibly obvious. Eye-tracking experiments have shown that in fact, when watching sexual material, men look at faces more than women do. The ladies were all about the groinal action.

The mythology around marketing to women interests Suraya in general:

I'm not so much interested in erotica and women's consumption of it as the assumptions that are made about women by any market, broadly speaking - things like, the way you can only get women's running shoes or razors in pink, or that hi-fi headphones are only made to fit man-sized heads. I don't think it's as simple as supply and demand, because you can't demand something that isn't there.

To say that straight women aren't sexually aroused by images of men is, in fact, to imply that it's not okay: that if you're a woman who is turned on by erotic pictures, there's something wrong with you, and that side of your sexuality is best suppressed. It's oppressive. I don't mean to imply that every woman likes ogling, or that girl-perving is somehow in itself a 'feminist' action, but allowing women to be honest about expressing their sexuality, and having a society that admits and encompasses female desire, can only be positive.

There is so much popular mythology about what women want, both sexually and out of life. These myths are often used to form what the market decides to give women and therefore puts parameters on our lives. Mythbusting is a wonderful pastime; everyone gains from it

---

Image credits Filament Magazine and Lesley Malone.

After a week in which I had to deal with someone who found the idea of a gay couple dancing too repulsive for her to be around, I've come to a decision. I'm no longer going to argue for gay marriage. Screw it, I've had enough.

I'm not going to do it. I shouldn't have to justify taking a position against discrimination. You want to continue to refuse genuine equality, you give me a reason.

Simple, really. One good reason to refuse gay marriage. One. One reason I have to think about at all to refute. And it can't be that hard, right? This argument's been going on at various pitches up to and including 'fever' for years, so there must be some good arguments on the 'anti' side, and I just haven't run across them.

So I went and asked the internet. Yes, I know, I have no-one to blame and send the therapist's bill to but myself*. Still, it didn't seem too crazy. Surely, out there in the whole wide net, there must be one reason to oppose gay marriage that holds up?

Not so much.

So instead, here's a point by point refutation of the least-crazy arguments I could find. You can check out the sources of some of these, and some more pearlers I couldn't bring myself to reproduce, here, here and (ick) here. I particularly liked 'gay partner benefits will drive hard-working small-business owners bankrupt'.

Marriage is a Christian Institution
Dead right. That's why they don't have marriage in China or India. Marriage is a secular legal contract. The only thing with any standing is the signed form. You can stand up in church all you like without it, you still won't be married.

It Says So in the Bible
Only acceptable from people who wait outside businesses on Sundays with a big pile of rocks, support polygamy and slavery and never shave their sidelocks. Even then it's irrelevant – see above. By all means don't let pre-verts in your church - or disabled people, it says so in the Bible.

Marriage is for Raising Children
There is no fertility test for marriage. We let the old and the infertile marry. Nobody actually believes that people shouldn't be allowed to marry if they can't have children – unless they're contravening the 'one penis and one penis only per marriage' requirement.

Gay Marriage Destroys the Fabric of Society
I get the feeling the other side would desperately like this to be true. Pity it isn't.

The study by researcher Darren Spedale found that 15 years after Denmark had granted same-sex couples the rights of marriage, rates of opposite-sex marriage in those countries had gone up, and rates of opposite-sex divorce had gone down

What a shitter, ay? But that's just the Scandies, maybe in the U.S…. oh wait. Rate of divorce in Massachusetts? 2.2%, the lowest in the country. Rate in Alabama? 7%. Christians have a higher divorce rate that atheists, too.

Gay Marriage is Bad for Children
Again with the reality getting in the way of a really good theory: it's not true.

The picture that emerges from research is one of general engagement in social life with peers, parents, family members, and friends. Fears about children of lesbian or gay parents being sexually abused by adults, ostracized by peers, or isolated in single-sex lesbian or gay communities have received no scientific support. Overall, results of research suggest that the development, adjustment, and well-being of children with lesbian and gay parents do not differ markedly from that of children with heterosexual parents.

That bunch of whiny pinko liberals was the American Psychiatric Association.

Governments Shouldn't Interfere in Personal Relationships
Excellent. Before you leave the playing field, would you mind levelling it?

The Paedocestiality Argument
Legalising gay marriage is a slippery slope and will lead to legalising paedophilia, or incest, or bestiality. Some kind of screwed-up depraved sub-human orgy of degradation, anyway.

Well, except in Denmark, or Sweden, or the Netherlands, or Spain… or any other country with full gay marriage. Don't fret, I'm sure it'll happen any day now. And just suggesting that a loving gay relationship is the same as raping a child or an animal is hardly offensive at all.

Marriage is a Traditional Institution That Needs to Be Preserved
Basically, we can't have gay marriage because we've never had gay marriage. To which the only answer is 'give me back your wheel'.

You've Got Civil Unions, What are you Whining About?
Separate but equal, yay! Oh, no, wait. Straight couples get a choice of how to formalise their relationship: marriage or civil union. Gay couples don't. One doesn't equal two.

Gay marriage matters just as much as straight marriage does. If you're happy that civil unions are 'the same' as marriage, we don't really need marriage, do we? If you hold the view that civil unions are good enough, and you're married, I'd suggest a quick trip to the registry office. Or you could just take the word of people to whom it matters that it matters, and stop patronising them.




There is an argument I take notice of, though it's not an argument against gay marriage. It's that we couldn't get a law passed, that too many ordinary people are opposed, and it would never be worth burning off the political capital to try it.

Well, here's what

I believe. There are a small group of people passionately opposed, and a small group passionately in favour, and like any issue, a huge mass in the middle who just don't give a crap one way or the other.

Just after we moved here, one of our councillors turned up on the doorstep to 'welcome us to the neighbourhood'. My first question was 'where do you stand on gay marriage?'. It's a question I'm going to ask and ask. I'm going to be the Little Yappy Dog of Gay Marriage until we get there. I'm going to do whatever I can to keep the issue on the table and in the right ears until we grow enough balls to do what's right.

But I'm not ever going to try to justify gay marriage. I'm done.







* My therapist's name is Ms Tanqueray

I have to make yet another painful confession. I'm a Trekkie. Every instinct I have screams at me to deny it, but I simply can't. As a teenager, I had one wall of my bedroom covered in pictures of George Michael, and another in pictures of Spock. One can draw obvious conclusions from this, among them that I had a perverse taste for men who were really never going to be interested in sleeping with me.

The guy you were crushing on at twelve is always going to have a special place in your heart. (My daughter fancies Spike. Yes that does freak the hell out of me.) Spock was perfect: handsome, intelligent, tight-trousered and completely emotionally unavailable. Star Trek was my first obsession, long before the Whedonverse or Battlestar Galactica made my conversation unbearable.

That didn't mean I wasn't aware of its flaws. All Trekkies are, that's part of why they love it. One of the first presents my partner gave me was The Nitpicker's Guide for Classic Trekkers. I watched The Next Generation through my fingers until it Grew the Beard, which Voyager and Enterprise never did and Deep Space Nine did but didn't need to. Still, if Enterprise and Nemesis were anything to go by, it was probably time to stop flogging the rotting zombie horse before any more bits fell off.

And then they made another movie, and I was terrified. For a start, you know what J.J. Abrams has made that I enjoyed? Nothing. Second chilling detail: this would be Star Trek XI. Eleven. Eleven is an odd number. Still, my belief was that the NextGen movies had removed the Curse of Star Trek by all sucking, even the evens. By the time they announced Simon Pegg's stunt-casting as Scotty, I knew I was going, but I was still expecting to be kind of annoyed.

I loved it.

Abrams appears to have learned a couple of things from Joss Whedon. One: lens flare is great, leave it in. Hell, light scenes for it deliberately. All flare, all the time. Two: big flappy coats are sexy. Still hasn't taken the Master Class, though, because he still appears to believe you create dramatic tension by tying a camera to a bungy cord and swinging it round and round your head, then editing every third frame out of the result. The opening sequence in particular is the cinematic equivalent of tossing a frozen turkey into a wood-chipper.

And yes, there were moments when my internal voice went "Wait a minute, that doesn’t make any sense… ah screw it". Worse were the moments like this:
Trek-Brain: Hey, Delta Vega doesn't have a Starbase. It just has an automated lithium cracking station, that's why they tried to maroon Gary Mitchell there in Where No Man Has Gone Before.
Rest of Emma's Brain: Shut up, god, you're embarrassing us.
Two words: alternate universe. Abrams' predecessors should have been so lucky.

I guess what I was expecting was a big dumb action movie in space, pretending not to really be Star Trek. Instead, I got a whole bunch of in-jokes. The woman two rows behind us was also a Trekkie. I could tell, because we fell over laughing in the same spots. When Pike first sits in the Captain's Chair, he gets a strip of Kirk Light across his face. Zachary Quinto does Spock's raising one eyebrow thing. Karl Urban gets to say 'I'm a doctor, not a…' and Simon Pegg does the whole Miracle Worker thing. A guy dressed in red dies really, really stupidly. Russians still apparently can't pronounce their vs, even Russians called Pavel Andreivich Chekov. My favourite line was a completely dead-pan 'out of the chair'. Leonard Nimoy name-checks one of his own books. There's a freaking Green Orion not-slave Girl.

And oh my god, Zachary Quinto. He is Spock. There's some fair-haired guy mugging around and crotch-displaying too, I think, somewhere in my peripheral vision. In this sense, Star Trek perfectly recreated my experience of the original series. Also, sorry, but I still can't see any sexual tension there. No doubt the internet will prove me wrong.

What they do with Uhura is incredibly cool, but a bit spoilery for me to talk about. She is, however, even more obviously the crew's murlfriend in this incarnation – mothering and snogging and ordering about her pack of lads.

And boy, is this massively set up for a sequel.

I had expected to review this after everyone else had seen it. Instead, what I've discovered is that most of my Trek-friends are still battling their trepidation. So take it from me, someone who burst into tears when they blew up the Enterprise in Search for Spock, it's okay. You can go. This isn't five. It won't break your heart.

Unless I'm a lying devious bitch who made all this up.

The last couple of weeks I've been busier than usual, moving Bardic Web onto its new platform. While our office has only ever been virtual and all our files electronic, this is still a major pain in the arse. I found I was picturing myself stacking white file boxes and manila folders onto an office chair and pushing it through a cold blue corridor into a massive room where all the windows were too high up to see out of. My virtual world is a tad depressing. Neal Stephenson would be deeply disappointed in me.

And what files they are. There are records of user disputes, and staff disputes, going back eight years. I wonder sometimes if we're doing ourselves any good keeping them. Do those objects and memories you hold onto from the past do you any good, or do they just stop the wounds from closing?

We do keep them for good reason. There are times a user will reappear after years, and we'll think, didn't we ban her? Did we ban her? And what for? A quick look through the records and we'll know if she pushed us too far, or successfully toed the line of just being completely annoying.

I used keeping records to improve my work, too. For a couple of years, I kept a copy of every email I sent out in a stress situation. I'd go back and re-read each one after a month had gone by, and see if it still seemed proportionate, or if I felt embarrassed by how aggressive I'd been. What I learned from this was to hone my sarcasm to such a razor-sharp edge it was barely noticeable.

There's a down side, though, and it came home to me again this week. Those nasty files are like Kiwiblog comment threads: you know you shouldn't look, but it's just so hard not to.

Those files include a fifteen hundred word slew of personal abuse I received from my then-boss. There are two sides to every story, but I'm struggling to think of a story where it's okay to call one of your employees 'the bisexal bitch from hell'. (I don't know what a sexal is, but apparently I have two of them, and the odds are I'm not afraid to use them.) I should give the woman her due, she did explicitly give me permission to

have 5 husbands and 10 wives and have sex with them all out in your front yard at noon everyday

Not today though, it's bloody freezing out there.

It's not just those files. I have a box of old objects that remind me of past events and people, and they're not all happy happy joy joy. What the hell am I supposed to do with my last-time-round wedding and engagement rings? After two divorces, my role-playing character had them all made into a wind-chime. Possibly the healthiest thing I ever did was burn all the cards and letters from one of my ex-boyfriends, but do I really want to slough all those things off and pretend they didn't make me what I am? They're talismans: I pick one up and probably the first thing I'm going to say is 'god, I'd completely forgotten…'.

These days I think I just keep all those things because one day I'll die, and my kids will find the box and be totally flummoxed as to why I have a bunch of old beermats with equations all over the backs of them. The odds of them working out that drunk people were trying to calculate the speed of light in Moro bars per micro-fortnight is pretty much nil.

Anyway, the point* is that, even though she was completely wrong and it's all over and done with and I now work in an environment where I am actually allowed to have principles, reading that letter from my old boss all these years later still hurts. It triggers the emotions I felt at the time, the anger and the pain. If she can still hurt me, hasn't she won?

On consideration, the answer is still probably no. She lost way back at the point where we were playing 'every time I see your IP number stalking my blog, I'm going to post gay erotica'. She lost again when I decided not to call this column '[Redacted] is a Scum-Sucking Bitch', making it the top Google result for her somewhat unusual name. It's enough to know that should I ever decide to use my powers for evil, I would fucking rock at it.

*I use the term loosely.