Let it buckle, let it bend

The more academic textbooks I read, the more I become convinced that the phrase "X's work has been of some small use", where 'X' is another researcher in the same field as the writer, is the academic equivalent of leaving a flaming bag full of dogshit on somebody's doorstep.

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Referenda for Everybody

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Separate But Equal

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Counterintuitive

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Bitching About Process

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Environmental Rogernomics

I've been thinking about my blogging practices lately.

Several times I've contemplated deleting my LJ. Not because I'm unhappy with it per se, just that I can't seem to summon a great deal of enthusiasm for it. Instead I've decided to experiment with spreading my blogging activities out a bit more.

With that in mind I've created Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt.* The idea is that that blog will become a receptacle for anything political I want to talk about, while LJ will be dedicated to my own personal life, random one-liners, movies and music and stuff like that. There's a lot of insightful political blogs on blogspot, and I guess this is my tentative attempt to engage with them, albeit only a little bit.

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting much about that second group of things, particularly my day-to-day life. It's not that there isn't much to write about - in the last two months I've ended a relationship, moved flats, met a whole bunch of new people and struggled mightily with University admissions. Very little of this has appeared in LJ; in fact I find it telling that I didn't even remember whether or not I'd posted about the relationship breakup! Turns out I did, but in a typical dick move, I banned comments on that particular post, which is probably why I didn't remember it.

The reason I banned comments is because leaving comments in would probably result in one of two things - a flood of 'aww that sucks' type comments, or nothing at all. The former I always find really difficult to respond to, even though I appreciate the thought behind them. I guess I'm sceptical about internet-based expressions of support, particularly LJ-based expressions. They're very ease to give, and to me that devalues them. I have no doubt that many of you would express your support personally if you actually saw me in the flesh, but for some reason that doesn't make it any better.

The latter, of course, would be even worse! So by not allowing comments I can pretend that I was going to get a huge flood of support.

Before you say anything, yea, I really this isn't very healthy. This is what's made me review my whole attitude to LJ. I don't want to engage in LJ-drama here, but it's possible that I will find that I don't want to continue posting here, that I'd rather direct my energies towards the political blog... or in fact that I don't want to post on either of them.

Hmm, this ended up being rather long winded. I certainly didn't intend to ostentatiously start announcing my maybe-departure from the blogosphere. My original point was, if you're interested in my political stuff, start reading Doesn't Hurt. I've got a few posts marinating which you might find interesting.

*Internet prizes available for anybody who can guess the origin of that name.

At midday today I attended one of the Victoria University Women's Week debates. The question being debated was 'Is pornography an affront to feminism?'

The debate took place in one of the Student Union meeting rooms. It was pretty well attended - sufficiently well attended that people brought in extra chairs. The audience was a pretty good mix of men and women. The debaters were divided into two teams of three. Each had a 'celebrity' debater accompanied by two members of the Vic debating society; the anti-porn side had Green MP Catherine Delahunty, while the pro-porn side had Rachel Grant, who is on the executive of both the Student Union and UniQ. Each team had two women and one man on it.

DECLARATION OF BIAS: I'm not a Green party supporter, so in a sense I am biased against Ms Delahunty. Similarly, I'm generally pro-pornography - or at least, while I like to think I'm aware of the issues concerning women's role in pornography, I don't see pornography as innately degrading to women. I don't go out of my way to call myself a feminist, but if I did, I would be a sex-positive feminist.* I've recently been questioning this stance somewhat because of my reading of Carole Pateman's Sexual Contract which has the most informed criticism of pornography and sex work from a feminist standpoint that I have ever seen. Up until now every feminist I've seen advocating a non-sex-positive stance has basically rehashed socially conservative arguments about the sacred nature of female sexuality and attempted to present them as feminist, which I don't find convincing. I'm not entirely sure I agree with Pateman's contentions either, but I have definitely given them some thought, and I suppose I went along to this debate as an attempt to pursue that line of thinking.

The format was what I believe to be fairly standard for a debate. Each speaker had 7 minutes to speak, alternating between the two teams, with the pro and anti sides alternating, and the audience then voting at the end as to who had won. I'm going to jump ahead now and say that when the time came for a show of hands, the audience response was fairly even. One third of the audience (including me) voted for pornography, one third against it, and one third didn't put their hands up. I was interested to note that support was fairly gendered. Not a single man voted against pornography.

I have to say I am not a huge fan of the debate format, since in my mind it tends to obscure issues behind processes (who is a better speaker, had a clearer voice, had a wittier turn of phrase etc). From a debating proficiency point of view, the anti-porn side were definitely the better team, not least because the last pro-porn speaker, a man, really cocked it up (although to be fair, he was being heckled, by Delahunty no less!). This guy really let his side down - at one point he tried to argue that male dominance of the pornography industry was not necessarily a bad thing, something that his team-mates had argued against earlier.

Rachel Wright opened for the pro team and I have to say I was impressed by her. Rachel is/has (I'm not quite sure on the details) a sex worker and porn actress who feels that her own work has done nothing to disempower her as a woman - indeed, that it has done quite the opposite. Although I felt a little sorry for the opposing team, who obviously can't match her personal experience in the area, it did make a pretty forceful point. One of the main issues that both sides repeatedly touched upon was the empowerment of sex workers. Nobody on either side wanted to do anything to impede the ability of sex workers to be able to choose their own destiny, which is fair enough, but I felt that the anti-porn side's attempts to express this were tokenist. They didn't really have an answer to Rachel's charge that their condemnations of sex work were disempowering for her and her co-workers. Of course simply saying 'I don't want to disempower sex workers' doesn't mean you're not. That being said I do feel somewhat sympathetic to the anti team on this point. Most anti-establishment political theories involve the idea that people don't always act in their best interests, but it's really hard to tell them that to their faces - to say to somebody telling you 'I am empowered' with 'no, you're not'.

Rachel and her fellow pro-porn types talked a lot about 'choice' and I think that the anti team could have gone after them on this point to a greater degree. Rachel talked about the need to avoid liberal/centrist formulations of feminism, which I think is very important (and was possibly a jab at the Greens), but the idea that because a woman has entered sex work without coercion this is a genuine choice is a fairly centrist, and certainly liberal, idea.

The anti-porn side mentioned the 'male camera' which could have been a really insightful statement about the intrinsically male act of viewing in a patriarchy or a fairly facile statement about the vaguely phallic shape of some camera apparatus - they didn't elaborate. Delahunty also raised the 'pornography/erotica' distinction without defining it, which annoyed me - she was of course, pro-erotica, but the fact that she didn't explain what erotica was means that her entire argument was on quite shaky ground. Another anti-porn speaker said that while she didn't feel viewing rape porn would make men rape women, she did think it might make a husband 'go into the bedroom and show his wife what's what', which sounds a hell of a lot like rape to me - and if it's something less than rape, I wonder what her problem with it is?

Rape porn was brought up by two of the three anti-porn speakers. I feel they did themselves a disservice, because rape porn is unquestionably the most obnoxious form of pornography, is not something that the pro-porn side was trying to defend. Also, while I have no statistics to hand, I don't think that rape porn is actually that common - it certainly doesn't show up in sex shops or video stores (the internet of course is another matter). I would have been really interested if they had implied that rape fantasies are problematic in and of themselves, but they didn't go that far.

There was some interesting interchange on the idea of 'rough sex' and whether showing women enjoying it is something that contributes to a reclaiming of the 'bad girl' stereotype or bringing it under male control. There were also some good points made on the anti-porn side about the formulaic nature of many porn films, the fact that the scene usually concludes with a male orgasm, and that women often only appear during the sex act.

Notably, neither side made any reference to male-male pornography. I realise that this is a debate about the effects of pornography on feminism, so it's defensible to exclude gay male porn from the discussion, but given that so many of the things that degrade women would objectively seem to degrade men too, and that gay male porn is a pretty major part of pornography as a whole (certainly a larger part than rape porn), I for one would have liked to have had heard the anti-porn side address its existence, if only briefly.**

As I've observed tends to happen during the porn debate, the two sides tended to talk past one another a bit (another feature of formal debates I don't like, actually). The anti-porn side tended to talk exclusively about pornography as it is now, focusing on the male dominated nature of the industry, the formulaic nature of sex scenes, etc. The pro-porn side tended to talk about pornography as it could be - they acknowledged that there are problems with the industry as it exists, but that they are not universal and that the best thing to do is improve pornography, not throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is defensible, since focusing the debate on features of the industry that could be changed with relatively trivial effort does not make for a strong critique, but I'm not sure it's decisive - to base one's advocacy of pornography on some idealised future pornography is to avoid the question of exactly how likely that idealised future pornography is, and why, with pornography in its modern form having co-existed for so long with an active feminist movement, this hasn't happened yet. It can also be argued that a lot of the supposedely 'good' porn is good in only a superficial way - women have owned brothels as long as there have been brothels, female pornstars are not the only female entrepreneurs to be in charge of the profits of their work, and women actively seeking and enjoying pornography are not necessarily acting in their own best interests. Personally I've never understood why burlesque is considered so pro-women while mainstream porn isn't, but it was probably hoping too much for the debate to touch on this.

I want to refer again to my non-support for the Green Party before I say this; I was really unimpressed with Catherine Delahunty. Her speech was well put together and she made some good points, but she acted with a peculiar sort of arrogance that I've come to associate with Green politicians and supporters. In an informal talk before the debate began, she talked about how she looked forward to the debate because it would provide a civilised forum for discussion of issues, unlike Parliament, which was, she told us, full of rude, unprincipled people who interjected, made ad hominem attacks and talked past the issue (she didn't say it explicitly, but I assume we were meant to come away with the impression that the people who did this weren't Green MPs). She then proceeded to interrupt the pro-porn side, talk past the issue and make ad hominem attacks - she at one point interrupted the male pro-porn speaker by telling him he only believed something 'because he was a man'.*** This is, as I say, typical of the Greens - they want to be seen as above the petty aspects of Parliamentary politics, but they seem to feel that their purity in this respect is something that's out of the question, and don't seem to examine their own behaviour very much in this light.

*I'm using this term in its more restrictive sense. I've noticed lately that the term has recently become used so widely that some people's definition seems to capture all feminists who think that under some circumstances heterosexual sex can be positive - i.e. everybody but a sub-group of feminist separatists. While I realise this is probably a more literal translation of what 'sex positive' means than the one in the wiki article, it is also, in my opinion, so incredibly broad as to be meaningless.*

**I realise this could be seen as a 'What About Teh Mans' argument, but I don't think it is. YMMV

***I wouldn't go so far as to say that she wasn't raising a potentially valid point and the fact that, as I pointed out earlier, the vote at the end showed a clear gender bias tends to imply that men are predisposed to certain views. However, the organisers of the debate presumably considered having a women-only debate (which would have been entirely defensible) and chose not to, and I think she needed to respect that. If she really thought that a man couldn't give a useful opinion on the subject, fair enough, but it would have been better to express this at the get-go, rather than use it to refute a point she presumably had no other way to counter.

I am so incredibly sick and tired of hearing about zombies

How long will it be before, when somebody refers to 'The Pope', it will be clear that they're talking about Ratzinger, not Wojtyla?

WTB second White Rose Movement album

It's usually my practice in tutes to begin by talking about what's been in the news politically in the last week. The thing that everybody's wanted to talk about in the last week is the Auckland supercity. I'm kind of agnostic on this - my instinct is generally for more centralised government, but I'm not sure that creating an Auckland superstate would necessarily be a good thing in terms of centralisation. The Mayor of Auckland would potentially be the second most powerful person in the country, and there would be real tension if the Auckland Mayoralty was governed by a conservative party and the national government a leftist one - or vice versa. Of course some people would say that that tension would be productive. Again, I'm not sure where I stand on the issue.

However, I think the situation is creating an opportunity (surprise, surprise) for some pretty hysterical commentary. Here's one from famous right wing talking head and Auckland native Matt Hooton:

Auckland has always been ripped off by the rest of New Zealand, paying far more tax to Wellington than it has ever received back, even including benefits to South Auckland.

The city’s infrastructure has never been a priority. Reefton had electric street lighting before Auckland; the first telephone call was made from Roxburgh; Auckland had to wait for STD to first be rolled out in parts of National’s provincial heartland; and its roading network was never completed because of political priorities in marginal electorates.

Today, the city’s roads remain shambolic; electricity supply is not guaranteed; cellphone calls can’t be maintained driving from Queen St to the airport; public transport is more primitive than in Queen Victoria’s London; Cath Tizard’s opera house stands at the wrong end of town; Auckland couldn’t competently respond to Trevor Mallard’s offer of a free rugby stadium; it idiotically runs a major port at the foot of its CBD, separating the city from the sea and with no possibility of ever achieving streamlined transport links to the country’s manufacturing base; and its kids were recently at risk of losing their elephants because politicians couldn’t agree about funding for the zoo.

If Auckland were some Pacific island, we’d call it a failed state.

I don't know about Mr Hooton, but when I think of the problems of failed states such as Afghanistan or Somalia, let's just say that poorly located opera houses, lack of elephants in zoos and spotty cellphone coverage are not in the top ten most pressing issues.

So Hayley and I broke up. As you'd probably expect I've got a lot of thoughts and feelings on this subject but none of them I really feel like discussing here. I'm doing fine, although if anybody knows anybody who needs a new flatmate I'd really appreciate letting me know.

My homework for today's life lesson is to listen to Let Love In on repeat at high volume until I fall asleep.

I went to sleep at 7PM last night and didn't wake up until 11AM.

I also haven't been eating very much.

Yes, these two facts combined do worry me.

I'll be the first to admit
This is a bright but haunted age
- British Sea Power, 'Atom'

Way back in 1999, when if you'd said to somebody 'All your base are belong to us' they'd have thought you'd just had a stroke, some friends and I set out to agree on the best musical albums of the 90s. It was a fraught and, as you could probably guess, fairly subjective exercise, and one that fell apart because we all lost touch with one another due to diverging lives and large physical distances around the turn of the millenium. But the closest we came to a mutual agreement was that the 90s were so all-over-the-place, musically speaking, that it was hard to come up with an album that defined the decade in a way that, say, Dark Side of the Moon did the 70s, or Sergeant Pepper the 60s.

Of course, time lends homogeneity, and with a vantage point of ten years the nineties don't look so diverse, nor the decade's musical movements so baffling. So now, as the noughties come coughing, hacking and staggering to a close amid widespread predictions of financial and environmental gotterdamerung, the solemn musical innovators of the 90s look about as impressive as the Y2K bug. This means that I am, with great effort, shoving aside the temptation to cop out now as I did ten years ago and claim that the noughties are impossibly to summarise musically, and presenting to you my own picks for the best 10 albums of the noughties.

Every single one of the albums below was, if not a little musical revolution in itself, highly musically significant both for me personally and for music in general. Some, such as Franz Ferdinand and Kid A, initiated or bookended musical movements in and of themselves. Others, such as Kick or A Weekend In The City, didn't have such a wide ranging impact, but will, in my opinion, stand out as major musical highlights when the refined eye of retrospection is turned back on the era.

Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand
Queens of the Stone Age, Songs For The Deaf
Editors, The Back Room
Kasabian, Kasabian
Bloc Party, A Weekend In The City
British Sea Power, Do You Like Rock Music
The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
White Rose Movement, Kick
Muse, Absolution
Radiohead, Kid A

Honourable mentions:

The Killers, Hot Fuss
Kaiser Chiefs, Yours Truly Angry Mob
Silversun Pickups, Carnavas
The Veils, Nux Vomica
Cat Power, You Are Free
Babyshambles, Down In Albion
The White Stripes, Elephant
The Hives, Hate To Say I Told You So
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus
David Bowie, Heathen
Primal Scream, Evil Heat

I should probably also say something about 24 Hour Party People, which, while not even being a music album, had as much impact on popular music as any of the albums I've just listed.

So I went to see The Who in Auckland on Saturday. It was a pretty cool gig. 'Nuff said.

What I really want to tell you about is my bus-stop encounters this week. It seems that I can't wait for the bus on Willis Street between 3 and 4pm anymore without attracting the attention of eccentric characters. On Tuesday I got a little old lady who, on seeing me reading a biography of Catherine De Medici, asked me if I'd read Margaret Thatcher's autobiography, and proceded to launch into a rant about how awesome Margaret Thatcher was, how much she hated Gordon Brown and how conservatives rule and socialists suck. I was not at all surprised to find she was a former chairman of the St Pancras conservative party. She'd even met Winston Churchill once, and cooed on about how affectionate he was to Lady Churchill (although her 'I don't know about that' when I asked her whether it was true that Lady Churchill remained a member of the Liberal Party all her life) was pretty amusing. I'd just come from a tutorial so I was still in 'respect people's political views no matter how much you disagree with them' mode. I was horrified to find she was catching the same bus as me, so I actually missed it and caught the next one. Luckily for me the next one came very soon, and the one she caught broke down. This is proof that god hates conservatives.

Yesterday I had the experience of sitting next to a triad of American hipsters who spent half an hour babbling about some costume party they were going to go to. To give you an idea of how perfectly they fit the mold, the guy wore aviator shades and had a fuzzy 70s style moustache and short mohawk, and the girls both wore geek glasses. I was seriously tempted to take a photo of them with my camera phone and send it in to Stuff White People Like in the hope that they could find some use for it, but I couldn't think of an excuse for doing so. Thankfully, they had no interest in regaling me with tales of their victories, so I was able to watch them lope off in a self-satisfied manner when the Mt Victoria bus came.

Still, I do wonder what will be in store for me next time I catch the bus. Maybe an Australian conspiracy theorist or a French environmentalist.

Today's poll was a bit more reasonable - 33% Labour, 33% National, 18% Green. That's about what I'd expect. I don't know what's with that other class, perhaps I should try winding them up by making a lot of anti-Labour statements.

I'm finding tutoring quite stressful. I supposed it's not that surprising, it's a new job and starting a new job is always stressful. But I find myself analysing what happened and not being entirely confident that I did as much to encourage conversation as I could. I think this is a problem with the tutoring system, it's pretty hard to get feedback.

I don't usually do this, but I think you guys could be really helpful. In the tutorials you've been in, what have tutors done to encourage discussion?

I ran my first tutorial today. I thought it went reasonably well, we got some discussion going, although I may have talked too much. But one thing I feel the urge to share is the results of the 'election' I ran. This consisted of getting all seventeen students to write down the party they would give their party vote to if an election were held today and tallying the results. Here they are:

Labour 12
National 3
Greens 1
New Zealand First 1

Make of that what you will.