I am fed up with you following me around and reviewing everywhere I go.
Every time you write up a venue, for weeks afterwards ordinary decent people can’t get a table or a drink for all the throngs of rubbernecking pleb Herald readers trying to be cool.
Piss off and ruin someone else’s life, or I’m getting an AVO.
Previously in this blog I have noted that the high proportion of complaints to the Advertising Standards Bureau that come from humourless feminazis. And today we have another story from the Sun-Herald, doing a poor impression of its Melbourne palindrome, complaining that the board dismissed more than 200 complaints against the piss-funny Nando’s Fix advertisement, which features a stripper.
Among other free publicity, the story details the efforts of the Women’s Forum Australia to overhaul the Advertising Standards Board, claiming “its decisions do not reflect the wider community’s standards, particularly on the exploitation of women”.
Watching the ad, it’s about as far from prurient or exploitative as an ad containing strippers could possibly be. And it’s obvious to anyone but the most humourless harridan that it is a parody.
The ad subverts the stereotype of women so common in ads: the all-knowing supermother - watch as she laughs off the foibles of her helpless, inferior husband and breezily juggles career and family with the aid of the judicious purchase of margarines and cleaning products. The woman in this ad is clearly playing on that image, except her career happens to be lap dancing. Funny AND clever - who could object?
Besides, any lobby group that claims to represent community standards is lying in the most breathtakingly brazen fashion. A lobby group, by definition, does not represent the majority; it represents a minority who believe, for whatever reason, that they deserve special treatment. And a group of socially conservative feminists who oppose abortion, therapeutic cloning and the sexualisation of young women has got to be just a wee bit on the niche side, rather than representing the mainstream.
So when this lobby group claims an advertisement does not meet the standards of the community, its beef is with reality, not the Advertising Standards Board. The board quite obviously reflects community standards, but those standards are not what the group would like them to be.
“We want the ASB changed because it doesn’t reflect the views of right-wing prudes who appropriate the language of feminism to promote a conservative social and political agenda,” would at least be an honest claim.
There is no doubt Christopher Hitchens’s latest book God is Not Great: How religion poisons everything is a beautifully written and forcefully argued polemic against the evils of organised religion. And Hitchens is much more balanced and accommodating than Richard Dawkins’s rigid and absolute (dare I say religious?) hatred of any form of faith.
But it didn’t take long for my faith in Hitchens to be shattered. In chapter four, A Note on Health, to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous, listing a variety of forms of sexual repression in organised religion, he says:
Orthodox Jews conduct congress by means of a hole in the sheet . . .
Uh. No they don’t, Chris. That’s a myth. And ten seconds of basic research on the intertubes would have at least cast sufficient doubt in the mind of a supreme rationalist about the veracity of that claim.
OK, a minor point to be sure. But if he’s completely, verifiably and carelessly wrong about such a basic fact - one which I am very familiar with - I have to wonder how many other points in the book - of which I know less - might also be wrong, distorted or lazily, sloppily generalised.
Which, I’m afraid, makes it very hard to believe . . .
British teenager Lydia Playfoot lost a High Court challenge against her school’s decision to ban her from wearing a silver “purity ring”, symbolising her Christian faith and commitment to virginity before marriage.
Her lawyers argued that as an expression of faith, it should be exempt from school regulations banning the wearing of jewellery and that the ban breached her human rights to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, protected by the European Convention on Human Rights.
Lawyers for the school countered that it made allowances for Muslim, Sikh and Christian students to wear items integral to their religious beliefs, but that purity rings were not integral to Christianity.
Poppycock! Who could forget the passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus is attending a wedding at Cana and his mother says: “They have no more wine. Also the bride weareth a silver ring to symbolise her belief in you and commitment to virginity, or something.”?
There are other troubling things about this case.
Whenever you hear a politician using the word “commitment”, this is code for ‘we want people to think we care about this without having to do anything about it’. Thus the Howard government is ‘committed to the environment’ and the Iemma government is ‘committed to public transport’. Much in the same way, I suspect, most religious teenagers are ‘committed to virginity’. I know I was.
Also, as a teenager, there was nothing I liked to do more than take organisations I disliked to the High Court. Unfortunately, part-time work and Austudy left a fairly significant funding gap that prevented me from indulging this pastime. Perhaps young Lydia is an interpreneur who has already earned millions on eBay. Or perhaps she was put up to the whole thing by her parents, who are high-ups in the British hierarchy of Silver Ring Thing, an American religious group which promotes abstinence.
After the verdict, Lydia released a statement which was also in no way influenced by Ma and Pa Playfoot.
I believe that the judge’s decision will mean that slowly, over time, people such as school governors, employers, political organisations and others will be allowed to stop Christians from publicly expressing and practising their faith.
Yes, those poor oppressed Christians. My palms bleed for them.
Isn’t it curious that the chaps at The Oz seem to be giving a lot more airtime to MySpace than Facebook? Especially when MySpace is pretty much old hat in the journosphere, whereas the mainstream media currently can’t get enough stories about Facebook.
In today’s Australian, we discover that Kevin Rudd has started a MySpace profile and has friends such as Naughty Amelia Jane, a 19-year-old law student from Melbourne (from the ‘whenever a story is boring, put a teenage girl in it’ school of journalism). But Big Kev has been on Facebook for more than a month, which The Oz mysteriously never covered. Yesterday, The Australian told us that although Facebook is growing quickly, it is “light-years behind MySpace’s 3.8 million Australian profiles” with only 141,000 Aussies signed up.
We can’t help but notice that Big Rupert recently spent a few hundred of his millions acquiring MySpace, whereas Facebook is still owned by its founder Mark Zuckerberg (who has refused to sell despite reported offers of up to US$2.3 billion). Not that we would ever accuse our colleagues at chez News of allowing their master’s interests to cloud their journalistic objectivity.
“Staying up all night is my habit,” Kim Jong-il told North Korea’s official newspaper Rodong Sinmun. “Do you have any idea how FUCKING busy I am?”
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