Nipples on your face?

I’m not on Facebook, but I do occasionally post comments to friends on ManFriend’s page. After briefly flirting with the idea of twitter last year, should News with Nipples have its own Facebook page?

Whaddaya reckon?

Fame, facebook and future lives

Three pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend got me thinking about the future. I don’t mind thinking about the future – apart from that time K and I were discussing being worried that we won’t have enough super, because that felt like too adult a conversation for someone in their thirties who owns a cape and rollerskates. In fact, I often enjoy thinking about the future. I always have great boots in the future. And great hair. And I’ll be Dr News with Nipples in the future, and what’s not to like about that?

Anyway, my latest future-thinking was about young people. I don’t believe that young people are going to hell in a handbasket because they talk/dress/act differently. It’s just arrogant to assume that the way we did things was the best.

So, the first piece, by Tim Elliott – I wanna be famous – started as you’d expect, about how back in our day, kids wanted to be doctors and lawyers, but now they want to be famous. I’m Gen X. In general, we suck at self-promotion. Gen Y is much better at that, and that’s a good thing. (Check out those sweeping generalisations.)

This hand-wringing also ignores the fact that a) what kids say they want to be when they grow up is usually very different to what they actually end up doing, and b) university enrolments are the highest they’ve ever been. And it also assumes that there’s something wrong with wanting to be famous. No one would think it odd if I said I wanted to be a famous academic/writer/journalist.

A similar study in Britain last year found that the top three career aspirations for five to 11-year-olds were sports star, pop star and actor, compared with teacher, banker and doctor 25 years ago.

When my brother was five he said he wanted to be a firetruck. Kids say all sorts of shit, and I can’t see anything wrong with wanting to be a sports star (physically active), pop star (musical) or actor (creative).

Professor Wyn, who as a child dreamed of being a postie (”because they got to ride their bike all day”), believes that ”what do you want to be when you grow up?” is a boomer question for a 2000s audience. ”Many kids don’t have a clear idea what they want to be because people these days are going to be lots of things, and kids know that.”

Not only is it an outdated question, but how many of the jobs that your friends are doing now actually existed when you were in primary school? Even when I was in high school, our careers adviser (who was very good) wasn’t talking about web developing, or data managing, or environmental consulting.

The two other pieces – Peep show can claim a price by Judith Ireland, and On YouTube, all the world’s a stage by Rachel Olding – talk about facebook and YouTube being outlets for narcissism. Yawn. That is just being smug. And it misses the point that these things are just another part of people’s lives, like having a phone and using email. Besides, a journo calling someone a narcissist because they like to broadcast themselves is pretty funny.

How can this be acceptable?

In today’s Online Opinion Melinda Tankard Reist writes about a Facebook page where people can post photos of girls they reckon are sluts:

Since when did it become OK to hate women and girls so publicly and to judge them so mercilessly?

Apparently it already has a million members. One million people who don’t think there’s anything wrong with this:

One average normal young woman is standing in a front yard looking relaxed and happy in a long blue summery dress. This girl cops a torrent of abuse on the site. Because girls can’t just look or actually be relaxed and happy. They must be covering up for the fact that they’re really sluts.

Other images are of larger sized girls posted purely to be ridiculed. And they are. Condemned for being alive, though some men comment that despite their obvious hideousness, they could still manage to find some use for them.

There is even a picture of a woman with a bashed face.

Each girl or woman is analysed based on her body parts and what she is wearing. The text includes allegations of their prostitute-like ways, describing multiple STD’s, multiple pregnancies to multiple fathers, and all the sexual acts they have ever allegedly performed on multiple men.

What’s it going to take for Facebook to realise they have to stop this shit? It’s fucking disgusting. Free speech my arse. If it was about Indian students, or indigenous Australians, it would be taken down straight away. But it’s ok to hate on women. Because they’re sluts. And deserve it.

Forty years ago, Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch that women don’t realise how much men hate them. I think it’s becoming abundantly clear.

Sydney Uni – best in Australia?

In today’s Sydney Morning Herald is a little report, buried at the bottom of page 4, about the National Union of Students rating Sydney Uni as the best in Australia for “the quality of its student experience”. Wonder if there’s a massive ‘Doh!’ coming out of the NUS at the moment?

Also in the SMH is a letter from Peter McNeil, professor of design history at UTS, which says in part: “Australian colleges are protected bastions of male privilege. Women have to either find a way to laugh it off in a blokeish manner or try to fit in”. See? It’s not just the wimmens who can see this.

There’s also a letter from Karina Scott, a student at Women’s College, saying we shouldn’t blame St Paul’s because it’s a society-wide problem, and the “residential colleges at the University of Syndey have a long and proud history of producing well-rounded individuals, respected leaders and high-achieving intellectuals” and blah blah blah. Ok, fair point about rape culture, but to say it’s society’s problem is a cop out because here we have a group of privileged young men openly saying that rape is fun and something they like to do.

I would like to point out that the members of the “Define Statutory” Facebook group were current and former residents. So clearly, St Paul’s College is turning out young men who are – or would like to be – sex offenders.

They’re also ill-equipped to deal with modern life. The college prides itself on ensuring “that men have the greatest possible amenity and can spend as little of their life as possible dwelling on mundane, domestic arrangements… to become true renaissance men in a modern setting”. Young men who’ve never had to clean or cook are certainly not “true renaissance men in a modern setting”.

Finally, check out the fabulous rant by Fuck Politeness. It always amazes me how her anger and biting humour can make me feel better.

Re-writing the pro-rape Facebook story

I wasn’t going to blog about the “Define Statutory” Facebook page set up by some male students at St Paul’s college at Sydney University. It’s a disgusting story about some privileged misogynistic wankers who think it’s cool to be sex offenders.

But what I do want to write about is the way readers’ opinions are shaped by the way stories are written. It’s an SMH story, but News.com.au did a re-write. (AAP would have also done one.)

What News.com.au left out was that the group tagged the page as “anti-consent” and “pro-rape”. Look at the comments on the News.com.au story – it’s an ill-informed debate about statutory rape because the “anti-consent” description is missing, and readers are dismissing the “pro-rape” in the headline as a media beat-up. (I guess I don’t need to point out the higher quality of the comments on the story at smh.com.au.)

The problem is that News.com.au readers – and readers of any site with an inferior re-write – will have a completely different understanding of the story, and each time it happens, readers will dismiss rape stories as just media beat-ups.

Update: Jezebel has a great piece on how Facebook allows this “hilarious” pro-rape group in the “Sports and Recreation” category, but doesn’t allow women to post photos of themselves breastfeeding.

What’s so bad about being old school?

I’m off to the Media140 conference tomorrow and Friday to see if the experts can convince me to be on Facebook and Twitter. Showpony thinks I’m mad not to be using these tools, but I just don’t feel like they’re ‘me’. I don’t own ‘i’ things.

Let me explain. Eight or nine years ago, my boyfriend (who’s now my dickhead ex for more reasons than just this one) used to give me shit because I was still using my old tape walkman that I bought in year 6 (1988 if you want to know). It was held together by a rubber band, but worked fine. And it meant I could create my own mix tapes. Anyway, one Christmas he got really excited, saying his present would take me from being old school to being new school. Guess what it was? A fucking electric toothbrush. He’s lucky he didn’t get a toothbrush enema.

When I started this blog in March, I joked with the awesome tech editor at work that I’ve become a late nineties girl. I’m always being told by other journos that I should be tweeting my blog posts. I think that’s kinda rude. What do you guys think? Is Twitter worth it, or is it just journos plugging their stuff to other journos in the hope that they’ll seem relevant?

Blaming the victim, again

In the Sydney Morning Herald today is a court story where the focus is yet again on the victim, not the perpetrator (which always sounds like a nasty vibrator). What’s unusual is that the victim is male – a cop who is now wearing the proverbial short skirt and asking for it.

When Constable Robert Hogan took Corporal Aristotelis Koutsoubos to court for biting him on the face, the other bloke’s lawyer used details from Hogan’s Facebook page to show he was a bit of a knob who liked to drink. Helpfully the paper includes two photos ripped straight from Facebook, all of which makes it a story about Hogan, not about Koutsoubos who committed the crime.

But it’s a bit further down that really pisses me off.

“In another case, Saftwat Abdel-Hady was not so lucky.”

Abdel-Hady drugged and raped a woman, and photos of him on her mobile phone were used as evidence. But he was just unlucky, right?

“After a double dose of the sleeping pill Stilnox, his victim did not remember events before he indecently assaulted her at his Mosman apartment.” This makes it a story about the victim. If you haven’t done so, check out Anna Greer’s excellent article on the passive voice.

Later, the two journos call the pictures on the victim’s phone “happy snaps”. Oh what joy, what a lark.

And then this sentence, which makes Abdel-Hady out to be the poor victim of technology:

“The evidence helped to jail him for nearly six years despite his continual denial.” I could be wrong, but I reckon most rapists deny it.