In which I tell Richie a story, and then decide to share:

Cellycel says:
I had an ex who told me he was moving to South Australia and never coming back. So we broke up. I started dating the dude I’m dating now.
When he came back in a years time, he kept trying to get us back together.
Richie says:
gah
Cellycel says:
Like he’d get high at parties and be like “Celly can we have one last kiss?” and I’d be like “No. Stop that.”
Then, and here’s the brilliant part. He, my new boyfriend, myself and a bunch of other people we knew MOVED INTO A HOUSE TOGETHER.
Good move, good move.
Richie says:
oh dear
Cellycel says:
It ended with him getting really really mad at my current boyfriend over various (probably legitimate) things. My boyfriend is, as they say an asshole.
He’s is one of those assholes who you _just can’t hurt or visibly make feel bad_ so my ex decided he’d throw all of that anger onto me. Seeing as how he’d dated me in the past and knew what really upset me and all.
I didn’t know he was doing it for the longest time ’till a few months after we all moved out I saw him again and asked about it. He explained that whole “Couldn’t hurt your boyfriend, so had to hurt you” thing to me.
So taken a back a bit I was like… “Ummm…. So would you ever do it again?” and he said “Yes. Yes I would”
So I’ve not talked to him except for the times he’s tried to contact me on my birthdays for the last two years.
The first year he sent a message saying “I didn’t get you a physical present, but I offer you the rekindling of our friendship”
Richie says:
*barf*
Cellycel says:
So I sent back something like “If you didn’t get me anything that’s cool. But don’t go doing something for yourself and then saying it’s a gift to me. That’s like saying ‘I bought myself a roller coaster for your birthday, but you can ride it too.’ that shit doesn’t fly.”
And then he didn’t contact me until my _next_ birthday where he got on msn and said “hey” and we had a conversation never mentioning any of that business.
Richie says:
:/
Cellycel says:
This guy was the porn editor - for reference.
Richie says:
Right
Cellycel says:
he also claimed to be highly submissive. Once when I was mad at him I pointed out that for someone who was so ’submissive to women’ he didn’t seem to actually respect anything real women had to say, and asked why he had so much porn of girls gagged and bound anyway, if _he_ got off on being submissive and liked others to be dominant.
He basically told me I’d caught him out, and he knew the whole thing was a farce, but no-one else picked up on it.
(Seriously, he’d have house mates cuff him to his bed so he could feel “comfortable” knowing it creeped half the people in the house out, but really he’s just submissive and doesn’t care for playing with power himself.)
Richie says:
That’s bizarre
Cellycel says:
What he was _actually_ enjoying there was creeping out one of the housemates in particular. IRL trolling basically.
Richie says:
Bah
Cellycel says:
Another interesting dynamic in that house:
The person who got so freaked out by Mr “Please tie me to my bed while I meditate” was the guy who yelled at his girlfriend a lot and was constantly making her cry and then leaving the room while she was still crying acting like nothing ever happened.
Mr “Yelling at my girlfriend is totally cool and normal” was really creeped out by Mr “Please tie me to my bed while I meditate”
Which struck me as right odd since Mr “yelling at my girlfriend is cool and normal” had lots of his own porn about women being bound and gagged.
Richie says:
That sounds terrible
Cellycel says:
Yeah. I didn’t realize quite how fucked it all was when I was there.
I mean, I picked up on about half of it, and it was a lot more _emotional_ at the time - but I didn’t really _get_ the extent of it.

I just want everyone to feel warm and safe and happy, and loved, and comfortable and accepted and valid and worthwhile and free and respected and valued.
So much of what I think and feel is based on just not wanting other people to feel bad, and to be in bad positions.
One guy said that this was patriarchal of me because it was very motherly and a woman doing motherly things is supporting gender roles or some crap. I think I told him to eff off, which is funny and silly because I think it was a justified response but also I want him to feel happy, valid etc.

I don’t know. This is a useless post, and I feel useless saying “I just want everyone to be in a good situation. Wouldn’t it be jolly nice if all inequalities and whatnot went away and everyone could be free. Now lets go have some cherry”
But Jesus. It’d be nice wouldn’t it.

This dude, this dude was talking to me about how he doesn’t think much of feminism, and I was like “Well I do.” (But of course, he already knew that.)
I’d basically say that inequality makes things hard for people (Which can be a severe understatement.) and privilege gives other people an easy step up, and its not fair. I just want everything to be fair and good, and for people to feel good.
N’he was like “It’s not about fair.”
Why can’t it be about fair.

Whats so silly about wanting things to be good?

Perhaps ’cause it seems like there’s nothing I can do to help. Oh. Biting Beaver wrote something a long time ago. that she would die in the same world she was born. That she’d never see any changes, and that it upset her deeply and the day she wrote it I was like “Yes. I understand.”
N I put it as my MSN quote and got asked about it by a “friend” (Read: Jerk who later came to harass my sister.) - and told him the story and got asked why I even want to try and change things anyway. Why not just live life and igore all that bad shit.
But… I just… want everyone to feel good, and loved, and valued and safe and warm and accepted. What kind of person would I be if I didn’t want those things, and try for those things even when it seems bleak?

Inequalities n’shit. That they’re not going away, oh god how long will it be ’till… ’till just one thing is gone. Sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, ageism etc.
How long will it take to eradicate one of those oppressions let alone all of them? Fuck, this spell checker doesn’t even recognize ableism as a _word._

Yeah. I’m a pessimist. I don’t much know what to do about it but pretend some days like I’m not a pessimist and keep trying.

I didn’t mean this post to end like this. I just wanted to tell everyone I wish them well but I kept going. I’ve been feeling really bad over the past few days for unknown reasons. I was sobbing in the middle of the street today, and sobbing at home, and lonely yesterday even though I wasn’t even alone in the house, just not in the same room as my house mate while my boyfriend was out.
I should follow that “seeing a therapist” thing up. It’s probably be good for me.

I do genuinely wish everyone well.

*sobbing again*

I think I’ll go to bed.

The Prime of Miss Sammie Berg

Drumroll, please!

ahem

On March 19th I was invited to a panel debate on pornography at William and Mary College. My contact for the organizing group was Constance Sisk, who told me funding assistance could likely be found to fly me 3,000 miles across the country so I agreed to be penciled in until enough money could be raised. A call for donations among anti-pornography feminist colleagues covered airfare, and I had just enough vacation days earned at work to take off.

On March 24th I confirmed that I would gladly join the two other two confirmed panelists, on the anti-pornography side, John D. Foubert, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the College of William and Mary, and on the pro-pornography side Amanda Brooks, a former escort and sex work advocate.

Constance told me April 2nd that they moved the panel date to the 21st and the rest of April slid by without communication until April 16th when an anti-porn friend informed me that Jill Brenneman and RenEv blogged they would be on the panel. I had received no word from Constance of this and was dumbfounded that wholesale changes were being made to the panel just five days before the event without informing me. I had agreed to do the panel with John and Amanda, and I hadn’t gotten any emails saying she couldn’t attend or that they were looking for a replacement.

If they had told me Amanda couldn’t make it I would have suggested that pornographers and strip club owners are very easy to find through legal channels so they could have been asked to appear on the panel. I would have also suggested that the number of porn-using men on campus should have been able to produce just one pornsturbator willing to defend his porn consumption. Because I was under the impression that Constance & Co. were being honest with me about their intentions, I chalked up the lack of a pornographer or porn-using man on the panel to inept organizing and the extreme amount of publicity given recently to sex work advocacy at William and Mary.

How much sex work advocacy has been given a voice there can be answered with the name Constance. I spoke with John Foubert for the first time Thursday and he told me that Constance is a big pro-sex work advocate on campus and she brought the sex worker show to campus the past three years. A woman named Audrey invited John to the panel because Constance didn’t think he would agree if she asked him. Constance was a guest on Jill’s radio show a few weeks ago, and Jill did a pro-sex work chat with William and Mary college folks a few weeks ago, but in her emails Constance claimed ignorance of the lengthy pro-porn and radical blogosphere debates on this contentious subject.

Constance. Constance said she was excited to have me coming and offered to let me spend Monday night at her place, where she planned on cooking dinner for a group of people post-panel. How do you think it would feel if a pro-choice feminist were invited to a predominantly pro-life campus by a predominantly pro-life group and the pro-life organizer did everything Constance did without revealing her pro-life politics to her pro-choice panelist and house guest?

Little story: Heading home from presenting at a prostitution conference I was in the airport shuttle with a middle-aged black social worker with her name tag still pinned to her blouse. I’m a young, white, tattoo-bearing woman and at the time I think my hair was blue. We exchanged delicate pleasantries and danced around how we talked about the conference until she sat up earnestly and cut to the chase, “So, are you for or against?” When I replied, “Against,” she slouched down and sighed and we grooved on the same anti-prostitution track until we got to the airport.

I agreed to do the panel with John and Amanda three weeks ago. Though it was unethical to make major lineup changes at the last minute like that without telling me and things started feeling really fishy due to the lack of notification about the event anywhere besides pro-john blogs (it’s not listed on W&M’s events calendar or advertised around campus), I agreed to debate Jill. I could not agree to debate Ren, and I don’t suppose I have to tell most of you reading this why but I’ll touch upon it a tad anyway.

Here are Ren’s thoughts on sharing a panel discussion table with me:

“So serious I am taking it very seriously. And looking forward to it in my uniquely grim and serious way. Planning and preparing with a very serious, serious sneer on my face.
And also laughing like a super villain the whole time. Why?

Once upon a time, I had a wish, a dream, a surely wank worthy fantasy of some anti-porn sex work types having to face down, in a forum, and debate those from the other side. And I wanted to be there.”

“And, yes, oh yes, I am seriously looking forward to it. I have so lusted for such an opportunity. Very seriously. And yes, if possible, I will have the whole thing on video. Get your cerebral wanking tissues ready.”

Serious serious sneers, super villain mocking laughter, wank worthy fantasies, whole thing on video, get your tissues ready.

Those are the words of a malicious person licking their chops in anticipation of a messy, humiliation-inducing scene they will relish. Those are the words of a person trying to waste my time with personal attacks when my time is best used educating audiences about the facts of human trafficking, prostitution, and pornography. The trash talk began within hours of being surreptitiously offered the spot on the panel, and that sort of smug pugnaciousness and disrespectful engagement was instrumental in prompting John to cancel his appearance on the panel and he suggested to me that I do the same. I believe we were right to cancel. I refuse to pose for the pornographically spiteful scene being painted.

What to do when a woman who says she’s happy in prostitution says, “Take me, for example” when you know if you actually do take her as her own example by quoting her own words and deeds she will complain, “How dare you make an example of me?” Say you’ll speak with her about prostitution as a global system and of all women’s oppression as the core problem but you don’t want to talk about her personally and she’ll reply, “You refuse to hear my truth.” If you talk about her personally like she insists then you’re the baddie radfem who makes it personal. It’s a lose-lose ruse.

I’d love to debate a porn-user, and there are tens of millions of them. I’d love to debate a pornographer and there’s no lack of those either. I’d love to debate a john. They don’t want to debate anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists. They want women in the prostitute supply pool to subjectively defend them against the objective mounds of testimony and undeniable data that anti-pornstitution feminists can produce proving pornography and prostitution violate women and girls human rights immensely. Most of you have seen how deftly I wield the wealth of information I’ve collected in my noodle to make the case against men’s right to economically coerce sex from others. Some of you have seen me do it before with Ren.

Link Link

Saturday morning I woke up to an email from a professor asking if I can come speak to a few women’s studies classes of hers in May. It turns out I can make the date. Life skedaddles on and so do I.

Sam

By writing this entry I am avoiding doing an assignment which needs doing. This is a perhaps a problem because it seems like a fairly large assignment but I know people who got it up to a pass level in two days and so I think the key word is seems. At any rate it scares me so I’m putting it off.

I was thinking I was going to write a long blog entry about meeting with Caroline. Oh gosh. Getting to the meeting point was a total mess. I got into the city an hour early and we met at least an hour late. “Comedy of errors” is the phrase I’d use to describe it.
I was going to go into a lot of detail, but somehow that reminds me of this and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.

Rather then going into a point by point detailing of everything that happened since I woke up - I’m just going to post ideas and summary thoughts of concepts discussed, and just other things I thought about, or have reflected on somewhat. In no particular order.

1. (Not a feminist one. You can skip past if y’like.) I am a child of the internet. Something I already knew, but felt pretty hard today. Hence the posting of the above comic really. Not just because Caroline and her partner didn’t spend as much time on the internet as I do, but also because in my stress and anxiety over finding the pair I needed to go to a webcafe more then once to get details from an email. When I walked into the webcafes and the scruffy internet dudes talked to me about the fees and how they had snack, and that there was a quiet room in the back if I wanted it and I felt a small wash of relaxation. These people who spent so much time with computers, these nerdy types made me feel so comfortable. I swear if I wasn’t trying to get somewhere by a time limit (and failing horribly.) I could have just sat in those chairs and relaxed for hours.
Of course, most of the nerdy dudes I’ve ever met hate women hard, so I can’t embrace nerd-culture really. Not entirely. Still. My internet communities enrich me so much.

2. As people who read this blog reguarly might know, I have a problem with defining myself - especially as a radical feminist. So often I’ve felt like I’m not a radical. Like, sure I’m anti-pornstitution, sure I want to get to the root of problems, sure I beleive in structures and hierachies and whatnot, but most of the time I don’t feel “radical.” Not because I think radical means extreme or over the top, or scary, or rabid, or “man-hating.” It doesn’t.
It might be because I disagree with some radical feminists about trans issues, and I have a hard time ratifying that, since from a radical feminist perspective the attitudes I think of as transphobic make sense. Its internally consistant.
Anyway. Thats only a part of it, other things I can’t explain have made me weird about things too.

But: After today I think I’d be much more able to identify as a radical. Talking to these radical women, and being on the level with them. Something clicked in me. I mean. Argh. It’s hard to explain. The short sum of it is that while I’ve been apprehensive to describe myself as a radical feminist before, I think the label does apply to me. I can be a radical feminist and still have confused thinking on some radical issues.
So thats that.

3. Caroline asked me how I made the jump from liberal feminism to radical feminism and I told her I’d never been a liberal feminist, and had always been radical. (Given the above point, I’ll state at the time of the conversation I used the word radical to describe myself for ease of communication, but on reflection I should use it in a deeper way in future.)
She told me about some Twisty threads which I’ve not read that talked about a debacle over at feministing, and mentioned that Twisty said things she liked about feministing - that it got women interested in feminism who never had been.
We struggled over the word for the kind of woman it got interested. Young feminists? That doesn’t feel right. I’m a young feminist and I got drawn in by the awesome radical feminist Biting Beaver. Sam of Genderberg is a young feminist, and she’s one of the most active and dedicated anti-pornstitution activists around.
New feminists? Only, I was new when I started and I came to the radical side.
Mainstream feminists was the word I think we settled on, and I suppose perhaps it was the most appropriate.

Anyway. I was asked what I thought about it, like, what are the merits of people coming into feminism from a mainstream sparklepony perspective. Did it get more people in? Was it good?
I know radfem extrordanaire Littoral Mermaid came to feminism from the sparklepony side of things, and you know. She’s an extraordinary radfem, but liberal feminists and radical feminists can be such worlds apart.

At any rate: After thinking about how I became a feminist I wonder how liberal feminism attracts “New, young or mainstream” women, and whether they do in numbers enough to generalize like that.
I became attracted to feminism because I read Biting Beavers rapist checklist, and it resonated with me because it told me that coercing women into sex is rape, and my rape was like that. I’d always, always, always thought of it as rape - but no definition agreed with me ’till I found that. Her writing resonated with me because my issues were represented. On a deep level.

What issues resonated with the liberal feminists? I wonder? I’m not sure. The idea that you can be sexy and also a feminist might resonate with women who want to be sexy I guess. (A normal seeming to thing to want in a patriarchy. When women are valued and rewarded for being pretty and/or sexy of course there will be women who want those things. Society might actually value them and they can feel like they’re weilding the sword of power.)
Hardly gets to the root of the matter. I guess thats part of why I’d be a radical.

But my thinking is: New feminists, young feminists and mainstream women could be attracted to both radical feminism, mainstream feminism and any other kind and mixture of different feminisms. It depends on the views and experiences of each woman involved and what resonates/resonated with her. That doesn’t seem especially wrong. linked for relevance.

However liberal feminists come to their feminsim, and whatever issues resonate with them it doesn’t change what I beleive. I guess I’m committing those sins. I beleive that patriarchy opresses women with the sexy. and I beleive that sparkleponyism encourages this opression by trying to reclaim the sexy. I believe it doesn’t tackle the root of the problem. It keeps the status quo of sexy in place. It lets women and girls into the surface of feminism, but not enough to get deep into the roots of structures and systems.

Long and rambly, but its the best answer I can give.

Archive of Biting Beaver

I met Caroline Norma, the author of this article.

I also met her girlfriend (I’ve forgotten her name, even though I asked what her name was twice. Oh dear.) who was lovely, though she was quieter then Caroline or she didn’t know what to say. Caroline and I both talked about blogs, and her girlfriend doesn’t read blogs much. I was thinking I was going to write something bigger about it, and I probably will, but through the livejournal antiporn community I came across something I want to share:

One Angry Girl has been compiling old posts written by Biting Beaver, and has put them onto this blog:

The Archive Of The Biting Beaver

This womans words are so powerful. So very powerful. Argh, the treatment she recieved for speaking out against porn. It’s all so sad.
I’m reading through these eight blog posts of hers, and I wish her archives were still up. She was amazing.

A powerful, powerful voice.

Women who don’t wear makeup to work aren’t “putting in the effort” and look “unprofessional” meanwhile men who don’t wear makeup to work don’t need to worry about this shitty shit.

Ehh. I just came across this article which says that in a survey %64 of directors think that women not wearing makeup look unprofessional and %18 say they look like they’re not putting in the effort.

The effort that men don’t have to put in, by nature of their being born men in this sexist society.

Urgh.

The article goes on to say that because of this women should perhaps hire an image consultant, or a stylist. Money to hire a professional that men wouldn’t have to pay.

Oh yes - it says men should consider makeup if they have blotchy skin, or they need to appear under bright lights for stage or television or something, but you know. As it says:
“It is a fact that women who wear make-up in business generally get better jobs, get promoted more quickly and get paid more.”

Somehow I think mens careers don’t have the same “wear makeup/be attractive, but not too attractive because if you look too sexy thats unprofessional too” shit that women have, and it doesn’t say affect their promotions, their jobs and their pay.

Even those people who don’t believe in patriarchy, or hierarchies, or structures of oppression have got to look at this and say “Well thats sexist” don’t they? It’s bloody obvious. This isn’t in depth stuff.
Women have more expectations. They must put more time and effort into their presentations then men, they need to buy the products spending more money then men, if they want to do it “right” they should hire a professional paying money men don’t need to pay, they have to wakeup earlier then men do to prepare themselves - just to reach a point where they look “professional” where men basically just need to make sure their suit is ironed, and that they have a nice enough tie.

The sexism is pretty blatant.

Carnival of Allies: Call for submissions

The Angry Black Woman is hosting a carnival of allies. A place where allies, people with privileges can try to outreach to other people with their same privileges who are well meaning but just don’t know about the systems and hierachies of oppression that they’re unwittingly participating in.

All the detals are here

I’m going to try and write something - if you’re an ally perhaps you can too. Or perhaps you can submit something you or someone else has written that you think is relevant to the carnival.

I didn’t even know April 3rd was blog against sexual violence day.

I found out from reading this post by Witchy Woo.
It’s terrible stuff.

A woman was raped in front of her children by a pair of teenagers. A video was made of her rape and put on youtube. She reported the crime late, after a friend of hers came across it. She has now been arrested and could be charged for having sex with a minor, and that good old “perverting the course of justice.”
Like that woman who was arrested for “perverting the course of justice” after she reported a rape for the second time in her life and so was clearly a ‘wicked liar’ as though there’s a limit of one time and one time only that a woman could report rape.
‘Cause you know. It’s not like there are women and girls who have been raped by over 200 men (With only one of them being arrested.)

Perverting the course of justice. Women who report their rapes can be fucking arrested if they can’t prove it. And you know, it’s a hard thing to prove.
There was a video made, put on the world for all to see, but still the police have arrested that poor woman. Oh, and her poor children have been put through this abuse too. It’s terrible and it’s terrible that she’s been a-fucking-rested.

On another terrible note:
On the morning of international womens day this year in Brisbane city a woman was raped by 10 men. Detailed here by Maggie Hays.

So I don’t know what to say about sexual violence. Just… just stop it! I wan’t to scream “STOOOOOP” to all the rapists and molestors, but of course they’d never listen.

Give us that 24 hour truce in which there is no rape. Just 24 hours without a woman raped. That’d be fantastic.

I was trawling on the internet and I came across this article talking about the response from the Advertising Standards Board to That Nandos Advertisement

Here’s a copy paste:

“Nando’s Australia Pty Ltd (Cinema pole-dancer)

(EXTRACT OF RULING JUNE 2007)- Complaint Dismissed

EXAMPLE OF COMPLAINTS

“The ad is almost as repulsive and sordid about men as it is about women. It exploits the current stupid notion that sexual exploitation is “empowering” for women in order to use sex to sell chicken. It is not empowering to see women represented as lust objects, nor is it remotely funny. It is just unspeakably demeaning.”

THE DETERMINATION

The Advertising Standards Board (“Board”) considered whether this advertisement breaches Section 2 of the Advertiser Code of Ethics (the “Code”). The Board noted that the advertisement had been classified M by CAD which meant that it could only be shown after 8.30pm and during the week from 12-3pm. The Board noted that the advertisement had only been shown at the cinema prior to an M classified movie which means that the movie is recommended for persons over the age of 15. The Board also noted the diverse issues raised in complaints about this advertisement.

The Board noted the complaints about the inappropriateness of stripping or pole dancing being shown in conjunction with images of a happy family and the disconnect between poledancing or stripping and family values. The Board considered that poledancing was not incompatible with family values and that there was no breach of the Code in this depiction.

The Board noted complaints that the advertisement vilified men by depicting the man at a pole dancing show, paying for the woman to dance. The Board considered that the man was depicted in a very sterile manner and not in a way that made him appear sexist or sleasy. The Board noted that the advertisement also depicted a man as the father with his family. The Board considered that the advertisement did not vilify men by showing a man enjoying a pole dancing show.

The Board noted complaints that the advertisement vilified women by depicting the woman poledancing and therefore as a stripper or a prostitute. The Board considered that the depiction of the woman pole dancing was not a depiction of a sleasy or overtly sexual woman and that there was no suggestion that the woman was a prostitute. The Board also noted that poledancing is becoming more mainstream with it currently being a popular form of exercise. While noting the change in attitude towards pole dancing the Board agreed that this change was probably not widespread in the community. Regardless of this the Board considered that this depiction of pole dancing was fairly clinical and not overtly sexual and was therefore not vilifying of women or inappropriately sexual.

The Board noted complaints that the advertisement’s reference to ‘nando fix patches’ amounted to a stereotypical portrayal of sex workers as addicts. The Board agreed that most members of the community would not see that there was any such suggestion in the advertisement.

The Board noted many complaints about the depiction of a mother and wife as a pole dancer/prostitute and considered that this vilified women. The Board considered that this advertisement depicted a strong in control woman who went about her work in a professional manner (wearing a suit to work), enjoyed her work, enjoyed being ’sexy’ and enjoyed time with her family. The Board considered that this advertisement depicted the woman as being a strong and empowered woman. The Board considered that the advertisement did not vilify women by portraying a woman in both roles or in a manner that demonstrated that she was ’sexy’. The Board considered that such a depiction was not improper as a depiction of someone who was also a mother and wife.

Lastly the Board considered the pole dancing scene and the woman’s near nudity. The Board noted that the woman’s breasts were covered (albeit by her hands), and that her nipples and genitals were not shown in the advertisement. The Board considered that the depiction of the woman pole dancing was fairly ‘clinical’ with no overtly sexual music and no touching by the man. The Board noted that even when the woman pokes her bottom out, the viewer sees this from the side and there is no actual nudity or inappropriately sexual views. The Board noted that the advertisement is rated M and is therefore not directed to small children or children under the age of 15 without parental supervision.

On this basis the majority of the Board considered that this part of the advertisement did not breach any of the provisions of the Code. The minority of the Board considered that this part of the advertisement was a breach of community standards in relation to sexuality. All members of the Board noted that the advertiser certainly meant to create an advertisement with some shock value and that this had been achieved. The Board agreed that the diversity of opinion within the Board about the advertisement was likely to reflect community views on the advertisement. Finding that the advertisement did not breach the Code on any grounds, the Board dismissed the complaint.”

Point of interest: “The Board noted complaints that the advertisement vilified men by depicting the man at a pole dancing show, paying for the woman to dance.”

I’m interested that MRA’s complained about this advertisement depicting men badly as being cheif buyers of stippers/prostitutes. Frankly men are primarily the people who buy strippers and prostitutes. I suppose depicting it might villify men seeing as the sex trade is encouraged by these men, and encouraging the sex trade is pretty inhuman since it encourages sex-trafficking and rape.

Also: The board considered the woman in the advertisement STRONG and EMPOWERED. So I guess the advertisement wasn’t pandering to men after all. Amirite?

A first step.

For awhile I’ve thought I should see some sort of counselor or therapist or something. As a few people might have picked up on I’m not exactly the happiest and most stable person around. I get sad a lot, like a lot… for no reason.
On my livejournal I wrote an update on the situation with my mother - Tekanji read it and told me that she was abusive and violently so, and perhaps I should see a therapist about it.
N’you know. It’s not like thats been the only traumatic thing thats happened in my life.

So I told her that when I next went to see the doctor I’d ask him about it, that happened tonight.

He suggested I call a bunch of different places, like people under the psychology section of the phone book. He also suggested I talk to friends, ask if they’ve ever seen anyone and to see if I can get a good recomendation. He told me a lot of counselors do medicare and bulk billing, which just sounds fantastic. I was scared that sort of thing would cost a lot of money.
Thankyou Australian healthcare system!

To be able to get medicare I’d need to do some 20 minute ‘healthcare plan’ at the doctors, and thats after I’d have found someone good.

I don’t know. Asking the doctor seems like a good first step.