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oursinMost of this seems to revolve around a women/reproduction axis today:
Joining the 'wedding rings' from Woolworths and the threats of suicide to Harley St gynaes (pre-67): It makes sense to keep emergency contraception in the house 'just in case'. So why do we have to be so deceitful to get it, asks Ellie Levenson.
Probably this is well-known already: America has been swept by an unusual protest movement. It is called lactivism and involves hundreds of women taking to the check-in counters of US airports to demonstrate the right to breastfeed their babies (following that flight attendant who was so offended at the sight that she threw the mother and baby off the plane).
I would be more convinced by this article by Sarah Boseley, Our moral superiority about sex is proving deadly, if she didn't appear to be writing from a parallel universe: '[E]nlightened Britain, where we think we are so praiseworthily open about sex'. Duh? being 'obsessed by sex' or sex selling 'underwear, perfume, cars and almost anything else you want it to sell' is no indication of being enlightened or open. As she does point out, this is 'fantasy sex', which never dips into the darker and controversial matters of contraception or STDs. What she's ultimately saying is necessary and sensible, but it's framed in this misleading fashion. (And I'm not entirely happy with her use of the term 'promiscuous', either.)
Matthew Sweet considers that [Cinematic] sex no longer sells. Possibly, just possibly, people are no longer having to trek to seedy cinemas in the backstreets of Soho to watch smutty and badly directed movies which titillatingly promised far more than they delivered, and instead are benefitting by the video revolution to watch their fancy in the comfort of their own homes. Or of course, downloading from the internet.
And on cinema and the erotic, David Thomson on Louise Brooks and Pandora's Box. This does not sound terribly original to me...
***
And on a rather different tack: Rebecca Front, Please don't boast about things you've never done. It makes us feel inadequate. Apparently the Daily Telegraph correspondence has succumbed to that phenomenon that on lj we call a meme:
The Daily Telegraph squandered a good deal of print this week on an idea for a new club. In a letter, reader Bryan Dixon complained about the mass coverage of the West End production of The Sound of Music. He had never seen the film, and didn't intend to see the stage show either. Nobody, as far as I know, intended to frogmarch him to the Palladium box office, but if he wants the world to know his entertainment preferences, and if the Telegraph wants to publish them, everybody's happy. But once Mr Dixon's letter was printed, the entire population of Britain, it seemed, wanted to share their whimsical dislikes with the world.
....
What irritates me about this "Society of People Who Have Never..." idea is its jaunty presumption of right-mindedness. People have written in to put on record the fact that they have never eaten Pot Noodles, bought a lottery ticket, voted in a reality TV show, or enjoyed Tenerife.
Inherent in its inclusivity is exclusivity; the contributors have never done such-and-such because it is somehow beneath them. Some, though not all, of the letters contain the subliminal message: "I have never done these things because I am educated, and not a chav."
Front takes her argument in the much more appealing direction that readers of David Lodge will know as 'Humiliation' - where participants cop to not reading something that they ought to have done (in the original version, a character wins the game by declaring never to have read Hamlet, and sabotages his career in academe).
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Date: 2006-11-24 03:33 pm (UTC)This being the second time I've seen the word in the past week or two, I was about to ask for a definition of 'chav,' when it occurred to me that I should probably just look it up for myself. After reading three and a half entries in the Urban Dictionary, I now feel a strong desire to go and wash. However, I have a fairly good idea of what the word means. Yay?
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Date: 2006-11-24 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 03:33 pm (UTC)On Humiliation, many years ago, I was off school, and being well enough to come into my father’s work for a couple of hours was drawing on the whiteboard in his office I overheard a conversation about Humiliation, culminating in the famous Hamlet anecdote. Then and there, I decided that I wanted to be able to win that game. Some years later, I read Small World and was very disappointed to know it hadn’t really happened, and that my father and colleague had been talking about the previous evening’s televisation of Nice Work – though I still didn’t read Macbeth until after graduating, I never got a chance to play.
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Date: 2006-11-24 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 04:34 pm (UTC)† Well, I suppose you couldn't if you lived minus transport in a very small town or large village, but still...
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Date: 2006-11-24 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 07:59 pm (UTC)Yep, my OB has a big sign up in her exam room that says something like "Ask me about having some Plan B for your bathroom cabinet. Please." Of course, my OB kicks ass.
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Date: 2006-11-24 11:24 pm (UTC)Your OB truly rocks.
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Date: 2006-11-25 01:15 am (UTC)All OBs should be like mine -- and I think the poster was produced by ACOG, which is apparently working hard to get out correct info about birth control, now that the federal gummint's fallen down on the job so vigorously (sex causes death! Well, in the long run, yeah....;>)
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Date: 2006-11-24 06:41 pm (UTC)