Prince Myshkin

Yeah, I regret it straight away. It's just too easy. In my job I go in a lot of chip shops and they are always offering me free food. When you're working a 12 hour shift starting at 4am and getting towards the end, it's so tempting just to cave and kid yourself that you need the energy.

I don't think it's any less unified than the early days when you had a significant percentage of women saying that women weren't equal and that they should know their place. I think there are more places to properly debate it and more diverse discussions taking place meaning it's broader (given intersectional feminism now exists - the fact this is widely accepted at least as an idea, though not completely, shows that there is at least more common ground than there was in many respects. I think with the wealth of information this wave of feminism brings, thanks to the internet, things are bound to look more fractured than they actually are. People will think that opinions about sport are far more polarised than they presumed, simply because there's more people shouting. There'll still be plenty of common ground that isn't focussed on in the same detail.

Then hopefully their children will grow up aware of the harms of their prejudices and make more informed decisions for their own children.

Is this a kind of unwritten rule or is there an outright obstacle in the way placed there by the universities? If it is only a trend by parents that can be ignored and isn't followed by everyone, then hopefully this will disappear in the future as people become more aware of how damaging such a practice can be, and how much of a restriction of freedom it is. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

I read a few but not many more books this year. Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution - Laurie Penny Cities of the Ancient World - Steven L. Tuck Understanding Cultural & Human Geography - Paul Robbins For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway Revolution - Russell Brand Twelve Angry Men - Reginald Rose Women of The Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism - Kira Cochrane A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity - Nicholas D. Kristof All The Rebel Women: The Rise of the Fourth Wave of Feminism - Kira Cochrane The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It - Owen Jones Interventions - Noam Chomsky Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel The Hanging - George Orwell Psycho - Robert Bloch Empire Of The Sun - JG Ballard The Lady With The Toy Dog - Anton Chekhov Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet Standup Comic - Woody Allen The Beauties - Anton Chekhov Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking - Susan Cain The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science - Norman Doidge The Clinton Vision: Old Wine, New Bottles - Noam Chomsky Side Effects - Woody Allen The Silence of The Lambs - Thomas Harris Borders: A Very Short Introduction - Alaexander Diener We - Yevgeny Zamyatin International Migration: A Very Short Introduction - Khalid Koser Primates & Philosophers: How Morals Evolved - Frans De Waal Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe Red Dragon - Thomas Harris A History of Modern Britain - Andrew Marr Germs, Genes & Civilisations: How Epidemics Shaped Who We Are Today - David P Clark A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams Penny Red: Notes From The New Age of Dissent - Laurie Penny Feral: Rewilding The Land, The Sea & Human Life - George Monbiot Talking Heads - Alan Bennett Epigenetics: How Environments Shape Our Genes - Richard C Francis On Anarchism - Noam Chomsky The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoevsky What Should We Be Worried About? The Hidden Threats Nobody is Talking About - John Brockman Crome Yellow - Aldous Huxley Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest For Global Dominance - Noam Chomsky An American Addiction - Noam Chomsky The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus 9-11 - Noam Chomsky The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks Monday Or Tuesday - Virginia Woolf What We Say Goes: Conversations on US Power in a Changing World - Noam Chomsky Experience & Education - John Dewey Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies - Noam Chomsky Case Studies in Hypocrisy: US Human Rights Policy - Noam Chomsky American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis Deliverance - James Dickey The Emerging Framework of World Power - Noam Chomsky For A Free Humanity: For Anarchy - Noam Chomsky The New War Against Terror - Noam Chomsky Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind - Noam Chomsky Class War - Noam Chomsky Coming Up For Air - George Orwell A Room With A View - E M Forster Transparent Things - Vladimir Nabokov Too Loud A Solitude - Bohumil Hrabal Hard Times - Charles Dickens Blindness - Jose Saramago Currently reading On Liberty by Shami Chakrabarti and hope to have that done by the start of next week.

Well this thread was humourous to a limited extent but it's potential was sorely missed after it was hijacked from the first reply. I don't have a particularly healthy relationship with food. When I get stressed or bored I tend to overeat so I have to actively work at eating healthily. I still live at home with my parents and fortunately they only ever make healthy meals, so my only problem is when I'm out the house and temptation gets me. I've never had any problems with starving or making myself sick as I know that's not the way. The only time I've lost weight is by exercise and eating healthy (usually eating more than I did when I was eating crap stuff) but I have to be in the right frame of mind to see it through and put the effort in because I find it too easy to crumble and eat something bad for me. This wouldn't be a problem if I wasn't an all or nothing kind of person, in that I either have to be strict on what I eat or not be paying attention at all - as soon as I have one bad thing I don't go back to eating healthy again - I tend to just eat crap again for a while.

Nah, banning make up removes the choice. It can be a form of expression for all genders and for many it can make them feel a lot more comfortable - regardless of the reasons behind them feeling this way it would be unfair to remove the carpet from underneath anybody and say they can't do that. The problem comes when it is expected of people. If it was purely a choice it would be less of a contentious issue, unfortunately you get situations where employers pretty much demand their female employees to wear make up if they are involved in working with the public, which is incredibly distasteful. Like I said, ideally it would be an open and fair choice on whether a person wanted to or not. Unfortunately at the moment societies norm dictates a lot of people's actions, and this is a shame. Things are changing though, gradually. But things will have gone wrong if make up was banned.

Hahaha, I was just about to check how I did. Oh well :)

Also, I've recently started to create a list of paradoxes I've found with societies attitude to those who identify as women (and of course these stretch further than just that): Those who cling to free speech as a defence for their threats and abuse of women with a public platform turn a blind eye to the deep levels of silencing of speech and expression that their threats and abuse generate. Women are taught that if they get drunk, go out alone at night, wear revealing clothes or generally live a life of freedom then their chances of being raped are increased and they should therefore curb such behaviour. Meanwhile the law and the media push forward a systematic suspicion and dismissal of victims of the very same rapes that women are told is awaiting them if they act outside of the expected behaviours. Women are expected to conform to positions of desire, appearing to be sexually available and subservient at all times, whilst at the same time appearing virginal and unsullied. Any woman who is seen to enjoy her sexual freedom or to take control of her own autonomy is viewed as a slut and shamed. The ideal women most commonly promoted by the beauty industry are also the ones we are led to believe are the most open to (and most deserving of) sexual assaults and the ones that men are systematically taught do not deserve their respect.

In response to above, my comments on sex education is that most young people are getting their sex education from pornography, and whilst I'm not anti-pornography it does need contextualising for some people. Not everybody believes porn to be the be all and end all of all sexual endeavour, and just because the majority of pornography is framed with huge amounts of misogyny it does not mean that all people who watch it will replicate such actions, but according to statistics there does seem to be a definite influence that pornography has on society, to certain levels. I remember reading a statistic (which I will not try and guess at as I can't remember the specifics and don't want to mislead and post something untrue) that the percentage of women who had received facials (as porn terms it, or in plainer English, having the guy ejaculate on their face) without agreement or prior warning when sleeping with a particular man for the first time had risen a great deal. This is something to worry about. If such behaviour is being normalised (without consent - there is of course nothing inherently wrong with the practice if both involved are happy with it) then I personally think that the only thing driving that new 'standard' of sexual practice is pornography. I think such things should be explained to both boys and girls alike, to both prevent them from being taken advantage of and inadvertently taking advantage of somebody else, simply because you aren't aware of the consequences of your actions (much in the same way that when I was younger I was a lot less aware of how I facilitated sexism in society by refusing to speak up, and idiotic things like presuming that if somebody wore revealing clothes then they were a slut - simply because that was what I had heard).

Cool. I'm good thanks. Debating buying something illegal. + a Radiohead tshirt. Got any plans for the day?

How is everybody?

Just had a long nap.

It's cold here too. The heater at work also started blowing cold air, so now I'm home I'm straight back under the covers. I hate 6am starts. How are you? I'm Greg.

That'll be timezones.

http://www.girlonthenet.com/2014/01/29/do-i-hate-men/ From a sex writer who normally writes on feminist issues. A decent read. (Also, feel free to quote back to this whenever the next moron comes on saying the 'wow a whole thread on women when everything is already equal' bullshit surfaces again - about 4 months time)

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/01/29/3222151/important-facts-college-sexual-assault/

Damnit why don't you bite?

I used to get adverts for Christian dating sites.

Partay.

May is years away!

I'm glad I've not had homework for years.

Thread moves fast. What is everybody up to today?

.pmuB

Hello.