Up Front by Emma Hart

So when I first heard about the plan to re-open Cashel Mall by November, in time for Show Week, I have to admit I wasn't all that impressed. It seemed like a perfect demonstration of some pretty fucked-up Canterbury priorities. I might have said some pretty scornful things. Several times.

 As time has gone on, though, I've come to appreciate more and more that anything that makes some people feel better here, that lifts their spirits, is worth doing. I might loathe Show Week, and the idea that the height of glamour is puking in your fascinator while wearing heels on grass, but some people love it. It's an institution, and a way of feeling, no matter how shallowly, that something is getting back to normal.

 So yesterday, my partner and I went to the Container Mall. We wanted to wait until the politicians pissed off and the crowds died down a bit, and see what it was actually like. 

And let me say, in case it isn't obvious, this isn't about consumerism. It's not about getting back to a life where you can buy a jar of marmalade with Paddington on it, or a $130 garlic crusher. (I'm assuming it crushes garlic into diamonds, Ballantynes.) This is about feeling like we've got a piece of our city back – one of those pieces we always thought were public space, and which the public hasn't been allowed near for eight months. 

 Also, for some of us, I think it's about proving something. We've been told so many times that people won't want to go back into the central city, that it's too frightening. People are too scared to walk in the shadows of those buildings, to be where people died. And no doubt some people are, but a lot of us are not. We want back in. That's clear from the crowds at the mall, and the overwhelming (but surely entirely expected) response to the CBD bus tours. We want our city back. We want, quite literally, to occupy Christchurch.

 The thing about the container mall is that it's quite nice. They've taken the time to make gardens, put up sculptures, and possibly loot the CBD for every intact bench and planter. It's a place you can be, and sit, and talk – and have a coffee and a muffin if you're prepared to queue for half an hour. 

And that's what people were doing: talking. I didn't see a lot of buying going on, but every server behind every counter was talking to someone. Through the constant sound of construction and deconstruction was the washing tide of conversation. My previous ventures to the edges of the Red Zone had been marked by an eerie desolate silence. The container mall was a tiny oasis of life.

 At the eastern edge, where the mall hits Colombo Street, is a broad wooden bench around a garden. Here, people weren't sitting and talking. They were taking unspoken polite turns to stand, and stare over the fence, past the boundaries of civilisation. We want to see: to know, yes, but also to reclaim, and to bear witness. It was important to me, in a way I can't really articulate, to take my turn standing on that bench, and take this photo: 

If there's one thing I'm not very good at (there are lots, I've said many times I'm only actually good at two things) it's talking. Particularly, talking to women. Now, I can tell already that this statement is straining the credulity of some in my audience. Some of you are thinking, "I've seen you talk. I've seen you and women talking and you could not be shut up, even when you very much should have been."

 That's different. Those women are my best friends: all both of them. And if you've seen me do Champion Talking, you've seen me Drink Alcohol.

 What I can't do is make conversation. I can have conversations, for hours. I can reliably be one of the last people to leave a venue because of all the conversing. But I completely suck at making small-talk. I can't do the contentless chit-chat that makes society function. This is not in any way to brag: it's something I often wish I could do.

 It's not just face-to-face, either. Once an email correspondence has passed all the important functional information it needs to, I tend to consider it over. If I don't reply, it doesn't mean I don't like you, I'm just done.

 One of my problems is that the things I enjoy talking about don't make for safe topics of conversation with strangers. Sex. Politics. Sexual politics. The evolution of the detective novel in the Victorian Period. Also, while I'm improving, I'm still not very good at spotting when a conversational thread is inappropriate. Let me give you an example.

 Taking a taxi home from a bar one night, I got chatting to my taxi driver. His doing: if they don't talk, neither will I. Turned out this guy was fascinating: he'd been a wedding dress designer in Malaysia. So I was all being compelled by his life story. He told me about this Japanese girl he'd known, then we were talking about staying in and falling out of touch with people, so laughingly I told him a story about Facebook's recent friend suggestions for me, and why they were so appalling. He nearly ran off the road. He was all, "Oh my God, this is like an episode of Shortland Street," and I was thinking, "Dude, that's just the kind of stuff that happens to me." At least he was shocked and amused. Sometimes people are shocked and appalled.

 While I'm okay dealing with individual women, mostly, put me in a group of women I don't know very well and I'm completely lost. Once I went to a Book Look (like a Tupperware party, but for children's books) a friend of mine was holding, which was all mothers from the school her kids attended. I'd spent pretty much the whole day watching American mid-term election results come in, and my partner was coaching me before I left.

 "What are you not going to talk about?"

 "Politics."

 "And what are you going to talk about?"

 "Children. I don't want to go!"

 I was very quiet all night. Once, a very nice woman kindly asked me if my daughter read the Color Fairies books like all the other daughters, and I got to say no, actually, she prefers Captain Underpants. We never saw those people again.

 The other thing I'm really bad at in casual conversation is lying. I prefer people to believe I'm a terrible liar generally –and also that I can't keep a secret -  but I really struggle to tell the inclusive, inconsequential white lie. How bad is this? One of the questions I struggle to not tell the truth in reply to is, "How are you?" I've learned to say "Fine" largely because my partner is sick of seeing That Expression on the faces of checkout operators.

 So all things considered, you can imagine the state of mind in which I went to my hairdresser on Saturday. Now, my hairdresser herself is lovely, but I can only really deal with that kind of environment by viewing the experience as an anthropological field trip. Even then, when the conversation about ghosts (underlying universal assumption, ghosts are real) was punctuated by the phrase "Typical Libra", I quailed. This is, of course, because I'm such a typical Aquarius.

 So I am grateful to the earthquakes for providing Christchurch with a universal topic of casual conversation I can understand. I am also very grateful for smartphones. Though you can rest assured that the kind of text which has made me snorfle with laughter in the hairdressers has content which is Not Suitable for Casual Conversation.

I really do need to give credit to The Herald. They were, as it turns out, perfectly prepared to do the work to generate their own moral panic. They even took the hardest route, and made it out of actual thin air.

 I mean, okay, you start with a parent appalled – appalled, I tell you – to discover what their child is being taught in school. That hardly ever happens, apparently, and it's so newsworthy you can basically run the same story two days in a row. Appalling! Twelve year olds being told it's okay to touch clitorises if you have consent! Being given information before they need it, instead of much too late! This is an issue so immediate and important that people are actually phoning talkback radio to complain about it.

Okay, I got tired. Turns out, even while being sarcastic, I cannot keep up the breathless hysteria for as long as the Herald. Because the next day it turned out that it was vitally important we realise that sex education isn't a contraceptive in and of itself. About here, it threatened to stop being funny and just become cringingly embarrassing. Luckily, we weren't done. Because it turns out if talkback is news, then so is Your Views. Seriously, "here's a non-story based on the reaction to the non-story we brought you on Monday, where we get to say "clitoris" a few more times in case it ups our page views." (Who would do such a thing, etc.)  

 That was about the point at which I was going to column about this. (This also might be some indication as to how long it takes me to recover from a trip to Wellington. Yous are all so delightfully hospitable.) And then something very peculiar happened.

 I won't keep you in suspense. It was this. And we all sat around going, "Wait. What the fucking FUCK?" That's information, on sex education. It's all true. And it entirely contradicts the Week of Screeching.

 American researcher Douglas Kirby, a leading expert on the effectiveness of school programmes in reducing teenager sexual risk-taking behaviours, studied 48 comprehensive sexual education programmes and found two-thirds had positive effects.

Forty per cent delayed sexual initiation, reduced the number of sexual partners, or increased condom or contraceptive use.

Nearly a third reduced the frequency of sex - including a return to abstinence - and nearly two-thirds reduced the amount of unprotected sex.

 This is, or should be by now, in the "blindingly fucking obvious" category. Comprehensive sex education produces better results for sexual health than abstinence-only "sex education".

 Abstinence-only programs show little evidence of sustained (long-term) impact on attitudes and intentions. Worse, they show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse. Importantly, only in one state did any program demonstrate short-term success in delaying the initiation of sex; none of these programs demonstrates evidence of long-term success in delaying sexual initiation among youth exposed to the programs or any evidence of success in reducing other sexual risk-taking behaviours among participants.

 Also, turns out NOT giving kids comprehensive sex education may violate our responsibilities under United Nations Guidelines on children, health and human rights.

 The United Nations Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights... call on states to “ensure that children and adolescents have adequate access to confidential sexual and reproductive health services, including HIV/AIDS information, counselling, testing and prevention measures such as condoms,” and to “ensure the access of children and adolescents to adequate health information and education, including information related to HIV/AIDS prevention and care, inside and outside school, which is tailored appropriately to age level and capacity and enables them to deal positively and responsibly with their sexuality”

 And you know what? Yes. That's going to include information on anal and oral sex. Of course it bloody is. I cannot emphasise this strongly enough, for those parents who are a little iffy on any "education" that isn't confined to "penis in vagina" sex.

 Not all kids are straight.

 Okay? We've got that? LGBT kids are, by international convention, entitled to sex education too. Of course, in New Zealand, even if you're straight getting decent sex education is a complete lottery.

 My only real problem with that final Herald article, (okay, apart from their reporting on their "reporting") is their definition of "work" and "help" for sex education:

 International research shows good quality sex education programmes can:

* Delay sexual initiation.

* Reduce the number of sexual partners.

* Increase contraceptive use.

* Reduce the frequency of sex, including a return to abstinence.

Now, increasing contraceptive use is awesome. That's an unconditional win. But "reducing the frequency of sex"? This is like John Pagani saying he wants the age of consent for his (of course) daughter to be 30. Good sex is wonderful. I want my kids to have lots of it. I'm also fully approving of them both having a solid understanding of the clitoris. (It's alright, Herald readers. Turns out having a mother like me also "works" when it comes to sex.)

So it's been a year. Doesn't feel like it, but then when you think about it, what does a year feel like? Seven thousand earthquakes?

 This anniversary is odd for a number of reasons. Probably the most obvious is that the commemoration should be February. I can't even remember September any more, not without going back and reading what we wrote: Jolisa, Russell, David and I. There for all to see forever, and just as bloody well, because memory is a tricky bugger. For all of us here, the scale of the destruction and death and the actual violence of the shake in February eclipsed September. To me, it doesn't seem as bad now as it actually was.

Here's the word from Christchurch: five days of this shit. Cut us some fucking slack already, plate tectonics.

 Yeah. There was a discernable aftershock this morning. First one since yesterday.

For our family personally, last year wasn't even our most difficult September. A year before that, I was in hospital recovering from brain surgery. Once I got home, David and Jennifer brought us simply insane amounts of food. A year later, they camped in our lounge because we had cellphone-charging laptop-running electrickery and stable foundations.

On an even more personal note, even February's quake wasn't the worst thing that happened to me in the last year. We have these seismic experiences that in some ways bind us all together down here, and yet I have this grief that sets me apart. So many others also have these private pains that make us fit every so slightly less well in this public commemoration.

They twine together, the way the parts of your life always do. The February earthquake damaged our gazebatory. After waiting four months for a glazier to come and do an emergency repair, we had a friend demolish and remove it. (For those who loved the gazebatory, it's alright. It's gone to live on a farm, and be a greenhouse.) And last week, we spent some of my inheritance from my mother on building a new deck. Today, I planted my mother's favourite rose next to it, right by the sunny sitting spot. She would love it. And while they were there, the builders replaced our bathroom ceiling, after we gave up on waiting for someone from EQC to come and look at it. I filed the claim in December. We had no trouble getting a builder either: they're all sitting around waiting to start working as soon as the Insurance Situation is resolved.

What have we learned, in the last year? What will stay with us? Listen to Peter Hyde. Listen to the tone of his voice. These things are so obvious to us. When we had the big aftershocks in June, who organised the response? Who carried out the clean-up? The same people who did it in September. And December. And February. Ten months later, it was still volunteers, students and farmers, self-organised. You know those Civil Defence ads Peter Elliot does? I do wonder if the tag line should be, "Be prepared. No fucker is ever coming to help."

I know, that doesn't sound particularly Little Plucky Battler. Our anger, our helplessness, our fear and our stress and the limits of our coping, still don't belong in the story. The abuse people in Christchurch get from people outside – and people in the East get from people in the West – is sparse, but it does happen. You only have to look at the comments on any Stuff earthquake article. People don't want to know.

And honestly? If you haven't seen it, you don't know. That's how it was for me, anyway, when we hiked to David's house in September, when we went a block from our house in February, when we finally peered through the fences into the Red Zone. We'd seen the photos and the film, but until you stand there and you look and you realise that you loved Knox Church, that you're never going to drink in the Dux again, it just isn't real.

That's what I tell my friends who have lived here, and moved away. This experience is a limited-time thing. The longer you leave it, the more of the city becomes desolate and bare. This is, we can all hope, the most significant thing that will happen to your country in your lifetime. If you suspect you might give even the tiniest fuck, come and see. Before it's all erased.

Today, I'd like to introduce you to one of the most disappointing sites on the internet. Right up there with penisland. It's Dirty Girl Ministries, and its slogan is "Dirty girls come clean."

 And it's a Christian anti-pornography site.

 That's possibly a little harsh. They're really only trying to help women (and only women) who suffer from porn addiction. Some of these women are watching pornography, or reading romance novels, as many as two whole times a week. And masturbating while they do it, which is adultery.

 They're just trying to help women who are really struggling with their sexual feelings. An attraction to pornography, unclean thoughts while masturbating, same-sex attraction, that kind of thing. They can sell you a web filter. They can sell you a on-line course to help you break your addiction, for just US$99. And right now, you can join in the book tour for Dirty Girls Come Clean.

 I first heard about DGM last year through the Ms Naughty website, in a post which contains some related crazy that pretty much wiped it from my brain. But for some reason, the interview the founder, Crystal Renaud, gave last year has been bouncing around the blogs again. Right now, it's sitting in the corner crying while all the big mean Feminists point at it and laugh. You can always rely on Jill from Feministe, for instance:

 “She was masturbating almost daily, sometimes twice a day.” If that’s horrific and debilitating masturbation addiction — ALMOST DAILY! — I’ve got some Charlie Sheen Tiger Clit going.

 Crystal Renaud is pretty upset about it.

 Instead of writing an article about the issue of female porn addiction, the reporter’s agenda was to write a piece that pegged me as a woman on a crusade against masturbation—who was only parading around as a ministry about porn...

 Our fight is against the powers of this dark world.

 Reading the comments on that blog post, I can't help but feel a deep need for some proof this woman isn't my ex-boss, because she sounds just like her. Note the performative love-in. Still, maybe she has a point about being misrepresented.

 DGM is part of the same organisation as XXXChurch, whose leader has said, "Our view of sex is that God designed sex for a man and a woman, not a man and himself." To which I can only say, who do you think made your arms that length? So, these people are opposed to masturbation, not just "out of control sexual behaviour".

 Renaud herself is quoted as saying, "“It’s a very dangerous society that we live in,” she says, “when we’re telling women that it’s OK to look at porn.” Not "too much", or "in an out of control fashion", but at all.

 Still, to be fair, I went through the blog on the site and read the case studies there. This one is typical. (Though I should note that Laurie thinks using porn is like "using lighter fluid on your intimacy" which, even to me, sounds insanely painful.) And I don't want for a moment to suggest that the pain these women express is false, or that their problems are trivial. 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".

 A while back, I was reading a study on adapting the Sexual Addiction Screening Test to better accommodate differences of gender and sexual orientation (Carnes Green and Carnes, 2010). This test uses four criteria – preoccupation, loss of control, relationship disturbance and affect disturbance – to diagnose sexual addiction. "Affect disturbance" is how you feel about your behaviour, whether you feel guilt or depression or anxiety about it. Apart from a couple of minor niggles – the presence of a question about childhood sexual abuse, the repeated use of the phrase "men, women, and homosexual men" – one thing really stood out, something the study regarded as an anomaly. In the test groups, Clergy Women scored significantly higher for sexual addiction than College Women.

 An unexpected finding was that the sample of clergy women produced higher mean scores than women being treated for sex addiction as outpatients... In fact, clergy women produced mean scores that exceeded those of outpatient men on several scales. In contrast, student women produced very low scores on all scales...

 The explanation for this seems awfully obvious, and possibly undermines the entire idea of sex addiction. It's not what you do, it's how you feel about it. Therapy will consist of changing what you do.

 Still, Dirty Girl Ministries are well-intentioned, right, and just trying to help, so I've really just got one thing to say to Crystal Renaud. Stop cynically using sex as a marketing tool. Given your attitude to sex, it's kind of gross. It's like a homophobic youth group reaching out to the kids by using the Music of the Gays. I guess it could all be accidental, in which case you might want to look at your "therapy" of getting a bunch of women to describe their sexual experiences to you using web-cams, and wonder if you're quite as over your porn addiction as you think.