Spider love

It's been nearly eleven years since I moved into this house and over those years I have found redback spiders in a number of places: tucked into grooves in door frames, peeping coyly out from drainpipes, neatly hidden in the inside-underside moulding of plastic garden chairs. (!)

So you'd think, given what a haven my place seems to be for them and given the way that their amazing beauty and elegance lures me close enough often enough to make it very likely that one day I will get bitten on the nose and die a horrible death, that I would know a bit more about their habits, personalities and tastes. But no. None of the following, which I have just found at a perfectly respectable news site, has ever been visible from where I was standing:

It's long been known that the female redback who is roughly twice the size of her male counterpart, regularly eats a number of her male courtiers, although exactly what determines who gets eaten has been unclear.

New Canadian research suggests that it depends on whether the female has been satisfied by the duration of the stimulatory courtship, which entails the male vibrating the female's web for approximately 100 minutes.

I'm not sayin' nothin'.

Bonding: just some slurry in bunny ears

Mere days after the volcanic explosion of a giant and pulsating boil on the muscular Aussie arse (otherwise Sarah Ferguson's 'Code of Silence' on Four Corners on May 11, including an interview with the girl who was pack-raped by involved in so-called "group sex" with a number of players and staff from the Cronulla Sharks in Christchurch seven years ago) and the resulting dismissal by Channel Nine of former player and 'personality' Matthew Johns in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy by a TV station that has done more to promote and legitimise misogyny and sexism than any other single entity in the country (I originally mistyped 'Bonding' as 'Boning' in the title field up there)... Mere days after said explosion, as I say, with blood and pus still dripping from the walls of TV studios and football clubrooms everywhere, a Melbourne non-league Australian Rules football team has been fined $5,000 for hiring a stripper to perform before a game, as -- and this was how I heard it described by a club official on the radio -- 'a team bonding exercise'.

A team bonding exercise?

Some of us think it's more just a variation on the theme of bukkake. Or possibly not even a variation. And they'd probably think that was a team bonding exercise as well.

I mean, 'bonding'? How does that work in this case, exactly? You get together to degrade a woman; that much is clear. From the Four Corners transcript (this is a different woman, talking about another different woman):

SARAH FERGUSON: There is an even more sinister side to this technology, Charmyne claims to have been shown a video recently, by a young player on his mobile phone.

CHARMYNE PALAVI: He goes we picked up this one girl and there was like seven of us on her and everything and he goes to me, and we um, but I said you're going to get in trouble for that type of thing, like you can't do that. And he goes, please, he goes we just filmed her to say that she consented to it.

And that freaked me out. This girl was actually in her 20's and told me what they did to her. He said they made her put bunny ears on cause Easter's coming up and made her give head to all of the players one after the other. Made, like I don't understand the term, like we "made her do it."

SARAH FERGUSON: Yeah, and do you know who she is?

CHARMYNE PALAVI: No, I asked him who she was, not knowing that I would even know her, and he goes oh just some slurry from around Cronulla.

So, you get together to degrade a woman ... and that gets you together? Que? How does that work? Apparently the idea of the stripper was to 'gee them up', or, as some commentator unselfconsciously but hilariously put it on the radio last night, 'pump them up', which would seem to support what some of us have suspected all along: that sport is really only a slightly more organised substitute for the raping and pillaging that all manly-men would want to do all the time if only there weren't a lot of silly laws against it.

I was offered a unique insight into the way a certain kind of male mind works when some slurry from around North Adelaide (and a total stranger to boot) came up to me in the pub one night many years ago and said, and I quote, 'Do you f*ck?'

Not 'Where have you been all my life?', 'Hello', 'What's your name?', 'Nice haircut' or even 'Nice tits', but 'Do you fuck?' The correct reply to this, which I gave, is 'Not with the likes of you, shithead,' but I later gave this question and its wording a great deal of thought. To a certain kind of man, there are only two kinds of women. A woman either 'f*cks' or she doesn't. And if she does, she f*cks everybody. Which is, like, consent, right?

And in the meantime, given the height, weight, strength, fitness, world view and subcultural norms of most rugby players, and Charmyne Palavi's own, erm, unique take on these matters, there's one thing of which I am very sure: it's only a matter of time before she finds out what "made" means.

There must be some kind of psychoanalytic logic to this 'team bonding around the degradation of one woman' business, but I'm too tired and too revolted to work it out, so I offer Prahran and Cronulla this truly charming, subtle and hilarious little video instead. I'm sure they'll just love it, and it'll give them some great new ideas.

How not to stop other people having sex

There are some bloggy conversations being had at the moment containing jaw-droppingly stupid arguments in defence of the Pope and his transparently dishonest 'Condoms don't work' argument re the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, obviously a rationalisation of the Vatican's true line that every sperm is sacred, all contraception is bad, and a woman's place is in the labour ward.

These people are arguing, also with transparent dishonesty (or jaw-dropping stupidity, take your pick) that 'abstinence' works better than condoms (well, der; who'd have thought?), and 'therefore' condom distribution ought to stop. On the subject of how such abstinence is to be enforced and by whom, they appear to have no views. On the question of whether (as they imply but do not openly state) condoms and abstinence are mutually exclusive, they are also strangely silent.

Now I am not anti-religious, not anti-Christian and not anti-Catholic -- three discrete and quite different things -- but I really, really hate wilful dishonesty and disingenuousness, especially when knowingly intended to deceive people over whom you already have power. It's bad enough when the Labor Party does it (*sob*), but this practice of it in the name of God is terrifying. These people vote. Presumably they are the same people whose incapacity to reason through even the simplest syllogism makes them think (or claim to think) that people who are pro-choice actually want to have abortions. They also think that arguing for liberal and pragmatic solutions must mean one is living an undisciplined sex life oneself and is 'therefore' fair game for personal insult and abuse, usually of the most egregiously sexist and misogynist kind.

Which part of 'Other people are going to have sex whether you like it or not, so as a society we need to find ways of at least mitigating at least some of the consequences' don't these people understand? Yes, of course abstinence works. It's preaching abstinence that doesn't work.

Anyone with any kind of classical liberal education knows that the connection between religious nutcasery and sexual repression, leading to truly terrifying beliefs and behaviours of the evangelical or crusading kind, is very close and very old. Abstinence has its own dangers. But every time I see someone speaking or acting out of that nexus I get kind of terrified about the amount power and influence they still have over the way the world is governed.

Obscenity

We has it.



Found via Hoyden About Town.

This is just wrong in too many ways to count, but here are four to be going on with:

1) False advertising. A woman the size and shape of the one in the photo doesn't 'need' to wear this or any other torture garment. I am of an age to have spent the first year of my adolescence being forced to wear 'foundation garments' (then suddenly they invented pantyhose -- stockings had hitherto been kept up by girdles, and if you were over fourteen and left your legs bare you were a slut -- and the world changed overnight) so I know whereof I speak.

2) Allegedly to minimise 'figure faults' and maximise 'assets', this garment has a (porno)graphic subtext, not particularly sub, that fetishises the arse in a way that makes crotchless 'panties' look innocent, normal and sweet. I have my own ideas about where this growing arse/anal fetish is going. Between it and the various charming customs around the place -- mass abortion of female foetuses in countries where of course everybody wants a boy; large-scale rape of babies and toddlers in the belief that it will cure AIDS -- the global overpopulation problem is already well on the way to being sorted.

3) This 'body shaper' underwear craze is bringing back the quaint locutions of the 1950s, isn't that sweet? Do a quick prac crit / close reading / fisk of these corset manufacturers' advertising some time. 'Body shapers' = 'Your own uncorseted body has no shape, ew, men won't like it [*makes child-frightening bogeyman noises*], so put that self-esteem in the garbage right now and spend money instead.'

4) OK Girls, Break Through the Surface of the Primeval Slime or Die Trying department: this garment is a patriarchal instrument of torture. Do. Not. Wear. It. Or anything like it. Ever.

Those who don't understand (or don't want to understand) that 'patriarchal' can apply in a situation like this where women appear to be willingly doing these things to themselves are being literal-minded essentialists who don't understand what a patriarchal society is or how it works, and no correspondence will be entered into on this subject because I spent 17 years explaining it to fresh crops of newbie students every year and that is enough for a lifetime. In a nutshell: when you say 'Yes but women want to do this to themselves' I will reply 'Yes indeed, many of them do. Why is that, do you think?'

I know there are men out there who deliberately Google 'patriarchy' so they can turn up at strange blogs for the first time and argue the toss, and any such (instantly recognisable) comment will be binned. Go here if you genuinely want to understand this concept better than you do.

You never know where you'll stumble across some homespun

Call me unimaginative but I would not have predicted that a 'novel' by 'Belle de Jour', author of The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl, would prove to be so densely stuffed with pithy and useful observations about Life.

This one, for example: 'Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.' Now what you have right there is a recipe for a happier life. As mantras go, combine it with 'This is not about me' and you'll never find yourself reaching for medicinal brandy or indeed any other spirit or combination thereof (another beauty from Belle*: 'I'm so bored of** cocktails. Made for people who don't like the taste of alcohol: in a word, children') for therapeutic purposes again.

I particularly liked this one because I myself have been intermittently stomping round the house shouting 'S/he's got to be either malicious or stupid, it has to be the one or the other, there's no other explanation' for several decades now. Despite the facts that (a) I am old enough to be her mother and (b) she enthuses about a number of sexual practices that I find icky or, worse, pointless (why would you want to ... Oh never mind), I think Belle and I would get on.


* See what I did there?

** Can anyone pinpoint the year people started saying 'bored of' instead of 'bored with' or 'bored by'? Was it around 2000? Some kind of millennial prepositional transformational thingy? Unusually it appears not to be nation-specific but rather to have sprung up spontaneously and simultaneously right across the English-speaking world.

Celibate men say no

Strong words on hospitals and abortion from the Catholic church today in the Age, threatening to close Catholic hospitals if proposed law reform goes ahead.

Actually, I agree that no doctor should have to perform an abortion against his/her will, and surely it couldn't be too difficult to allow for that in the legislation. Even the referrals business could be negotiated.

But this bullying, bluffing absolutism isn't really about that. It is about power and the exercise of power.

I mean, look at that man's face. Just look at it.

And given the Catholic church's record to date on the care and nurturing of unwanted, rejected and/or parentless children and the damage, sorry, "evil" done by its institutions in that respect over the centuries, you'd think they'd have done some sort of cost-benefit analysis by now.

I've been arguing the toss about abortion for decades and not once, not ever, have I heard any member of the so-called pro-life brigade come up with an argument -- not just a decent argument, but any argument at all -- about the "evil" of allowing embryos to develop into foetuses that become unwanted children born into a world that doesn't or can't make proper provision for their care. And about the "evil" of shunting priests who are known sexual abusers of these and other children from one parish to the next and then covering it up, we hear, likewise and strangely, nothing.

There's no point in asking a pro-lifer to justify the unspoken basis of his/her position, which is that a woman is basically a sort of centrally-heated wheelbarrow, because if you say that they'll just look at you like Well, der, yes; what's the problem?

So one must use their own alleged priorities in argument, and ask about the welfare of the child that has been allowed first to become viable and then to be born. And I have never yet heard anyone even take that argument on. They just go straight back on-message, projecting all refusal of logical engagement onto the hapless Almighty, and replying with the faithful's equivalent of 'Computer says no'.