Violin

There's a standing piece of wisdom that I increasingly feel I disagree with. It got touted a lot at the annual graduation speech-thing my high school did every year (amazingly and wonderfully, every year 12 student got a chance to make a speech, I hope it continues though they were telling us we had a minute each in our year, then politely ignoring the restriction).

The advice was thus: 'Take what you love and figure out a way to make money out of it.'

On the one hand, I still agree. I come across this problem with my fellow artists all the time, most artists get in their head that there is an inherent compromise in making money. An ever present dilemma between artistic vision and financial viability. That the only 'true' or 'good' art has to be something that drives you into the ground. Whereas I would say that if you draw the Venn diagram of 'what I want to create' and 'what people will pay money for' there will probably be sufficient overlap to keep your head above water all your life. At least in terms of concepts and ideas. You may not be able to execute. So if it referred to doing this exercise - then yeah, I'm all for this as advice - fucken enlighten yourself that your dreams are probably more viable than your fears credit them. Work that shit out on paper.

But the anecdotes told to me were: 'One of my sons friends wanted to be a musician, but it's hard to make money, but then he became a sound engineer so he gets to work with musicians and he makes a steady paycheck.' This interpretation I am less for.

Enter Geek culture, or nerd culture, or Otaku culture.

Infantilisation is a topic that seems to be out there in the zeitgeist right now, and I'd like to write more on it, but I bring in the geeks/nerds because of a different quality, not so much that they are a significant cluster of man-babies.

This is about a specific man-baby, whom I don't really want to pick on or single out, except that he judged it a wise idea to document a video of him complaining about his issues with Youtube.

So before I explain what I find distasteful about his complaining, allow me to give him a plug such that it is:

Rob curates his own Youtube channel 'Comics Explained' which was revealed to me via Youtube algorithms that cough up recommendations it thinks I'll enjoy, particularly enjoy while I sat in my studio drawing something that was easier for me to sit still and do, while playing youtube clips, keynote speeches or audiobooks so that I could get 4-6 hours of drawing done a day.

And along came Comics explained. I have a personal interest in comics, and furthermore, I'm always interested in ways to avoid reading the 90% of shit that true to Sturgeon's law makes up most of comic book publication history. (Probably actually higher, for all the pre-Alan Moore/Frank Miller years).

To paraphrase Rob himself (because I can't be bothered transcribing accurately) he 'woke up 2 years ago and realised nobody was making comics that explained characters publication history.' For those who don't have much experience within the DC - Marvel universes, you have a bajillion characters walking around, and some obscure character story can be told chronologically like this: Thor issues 272-274 (first appearance) The Incredible Hulk Vol .2 #14, Deadpool #46-49 and so on and so fourth. And it can be over periods spanning a decade or 6.

So Rob's value proposition was to piece together this diaspora into succinct videos one character at a time. Combining this proposition with his dream of being able to live off Youtube revenues, Rob seems to be living that advice. He took something he loved, and figured out a way to make money off it.

Except that's not my plug, my plug would be that I feel just as it is good to travel in order to get perspective, and not from Canada to Australia (though better than nothing) nor even US to France, but say Australia to Cambodia, US to Cuba etc. to see that other people on this planet live very different lives, normal people should look in periodically to nerd world, to observe as just as there are people on this earth that are concerned about clean drinking water and who their arranged husband will be, there are people that really care about the netcode on Street Fighter 5, and even Sony's next attempt to revive the Spiderman movie franchise.

Comics Explained is not the best lens to see the magical world of stuff nerds feel is important, but it is one none-the-less. Maximillion Dude's channel is probably a better one, he does 'Real Talk' videos that are eye-opening to me and probably to you.

But the difference is that I like Maximillion Dude, and Rob I don't.

And it was never more clear to me than when he published this video.

Even in the most progressive of internet forums it would require no trigger warnings, yet I found it so distasteful to watch that I don't blame you if you clicked the link and lost interest quickly.

The subject of the video, appears to be a legitimate complaint, as far as I can deduce. He licensed music to use in his introduction of some 163 videos, and then long down the track some automated system at Youtube flagged them for copy write infringement, shutting down his revenue streams and he was having to deal with the administrative bureaucracy.

And worse, the only way he can have peace of mind, is to go and transcribe every video he's ever made to make sure it features no music or some shit. He's going to hire writers to transcribe all his videos for him, and that's where the video gets really distasteful, because he starts to get angry about the videos he wanted to release to coincide with upcoming film releases but wont because he has to get his peace of mind back.

Now, I've watched probably some 20 of his videos, which is to say, not when he takes to his channel to talk about himself, but his videos where he explains comics. Probably more even, but in terms of time after three weeks I made the conscious decision that I was done with this guy.

My reason being, that he was basically a parasite. A landlord. He had, true to his own revelation - recognised a gap. A gap that Marvel and DC hadn't bridged. So he did.

And it is true to say that he does explain often in detail, the entire publication history of characters ranging from obscure to face-of-a-franchise. As well as detailing 'events' which have been the bane of everyone that enjoyed comics but didn't give a shit about 90% of the titles the big two put out for decades now. So that's when comic fanatics to understand what happens to Batman between this comic and the last need to also buy an issue of the reviled Aquaman in order to find out.

Imagine if you will, if some TV exec decided to understand what had transpired between two episodes of Game of Thrones, or The Walking Dead (eg. why some key character was now dead) you had to watch an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians or Dance Moms.

Comics Explains does that work for you. Succinctly.

I ditched him though, because it wasn't a service like 'Basketball Breakdown' where you are having a Basketball game 'explained' in terms of coaching decisions, tactics, plays ie. the mechanics of the craft if you will. But lengthy synopsis complete will scanned pages from the comics he is explaining.

Those scanned pages are comics that were written, pencilled, inked and lettered by professionals. Who worked hard to get where they are and are probably exploited by the Duopoly of Marvel and DC. Those pages are nothing but the IP of these companies that bought these characters and paid these artists and writers who probably put in close to 10,000 hours mostly unpaid to get the opportunity to contribute to this tradition for better or worse.

And Rob of Comics Explained who has the decency to license the music he uses in his videos, scans it, gives you a run down of multiple issues of comics with slow panning shots of the artwork and page spreads of the pivotal scenes and simply describes what happened in the story.

Explanations of the craft of writing or illustrating comics are minimal, if close to non-existent. As I stated previously I was initially interested in this channel because I felt it could save me from having to read the 90% crap. After 3ish weeks, I stopped watching it because this is the exact service it provides.

In a follow up video Rob explains something, I don't know it's here if you care about his plight with the music licensing issue. He does in the section I watched, briefly outline his rationale as to why his channel is ok - namely he is educating people and thus helping people get into comics who otherwise wouldn't.

I'm sure this is somewhat true, he could produce testimony from a subscriber who would say 'I used to only read the Alan Moore masterpieces like Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, but Comics Explained got me into reading the Fantastic Four and all the other shit.'

But I suspect the majority of his subscribers would testify thusly 'I got really excited by the trailers for the new X-men film, and in the past when I've been looking forward to a comic-book movie I'd hit up the comic book store and try and familiarise myself with the lore, I bought a copy of Watchmen off a big fat stack back in 2009, but now thanks to Comics Explained, I didn't have to hunt down and purchase collected volumes of X-men, it was all right there in one convenient Video.'

Rob said he didn't get onto Youtube to be paranoid about when they were going to take his videos away (or something like that) but he should be paranoid.

I am not savvy enough nor motivated enough to establish it, but I feel back in the early 2000s, Wikipedia provided much of the service Rob thinks he provides Marvel and DC. You could look up any comic book character and get detailed run downs of their publication history, galleries of artwork of them and now... it's all gone. Not all gone, but you can get a cursory summary of plots depending on how iconic the character is, only a few images (but for lesser characters, none) and almost never a whole page spread.

I can only assume this is not a lack of creative innovation among comic fans, but because comic-co lawyers hit up Wikipedia with cease & desist orders, or Wikipedia actually had the communal conscious to get it's current guidelines and content policies in place.

Comicvine kind of stepped into the gulf that Wikipedia left, and it does an adequate job of what Comics Explained takes (in my non-legal opinion) too far. Comicvine gives you a short text-based summary, tells you the publication history in terms of the issues any character has appeared in, and generally features a gallery of user submitted art.

I'm sure it's all under fair-use, or something, and perhaps Rob knows his 'fair use' but just on a personal level, I disagree. He doesn't really 'review' comics, he 'explains' the publication history. He claims to be an educator, but there's almost nothing about the craft, one could not learn how to make comics from comics explained (unless you were pausing it and learning to draw from the artwork he appropriates), if anything we are simply being educated as to the content of products we would otherwise have to pay for (or steal ourselves).

He may tell himself and Marvel & DC that he's introducing people to comics that otherwise wouldn't. But I don't feel he has the means to prove that this actually happens, as opposed to allowing people who may actually have bought the comics he explains to now save their dollars.

'Find something you love and figure out how to make a living off it' can work if it means draw on your love to create anew what you love in the world. If you love art, make art etc.

'Find something you love and figure out how to make a living off it' is kind of sad and pitiable when you steer dreamers who may have had a shot to just do something safer at it's periphery.

'Find something you love and figure out how to make a living off it' I must also point out, applies to selling your daughter into sexual slavery, although that may be construed as evidence that you don't love her. I guess it depends how much you weep when you cash that check. It's also illegal, mostly, and where it isn't it should be.

I'm almost tempted to try and explain how Rob is living off the sweat of the working class, and rent-seeking and economic rents and all that but I'm sure Slavoj Zizek will get to it eventually 'rock star' that he is and he'll use such big words in such a thick accent that we'll all be really impressed and persuaded.

So I'll leave with this suggestion sometimes its interesting to watch someone speak on mute. Despite all those studies that say only 7% of communication are the words we say, it's a really useful exercise to dispense with them altogether. I did this with the first video and found without the verbalised arguments and rationalizing its impossible to feel sympathy for this guy. I'd describe him but if you're curious try it and see what you see. Probably more interesting to try on Trump and Hillary.

My Favorite Prostitutes

"...is the first city where I can say I have my favorite prostitutes." is what I said to my date for the day as we were floating in the ocean. We were both outsiders to the city who had met on Tinder and found a day to explore together. Conversation naturally turned to prostitution.

But it's true, I had my favorite prostitutes because in the historic center prostitution was pretty hard to avoid, and had been for 4 centuries. It was practically UNESCO heritage listed. And walking through the laneways I quite naturally had done my evaluations and picked my favorites.

Which is probably true of everyone whether they are a John or not, as I wasn't. But my favorites generally worked a corner near my friends Art Studio and also some of the more interesting artisans. They had good spirits and I would catch them goofing off on what as far as I could tell, was a quite slow and boring job.

And in Italian they, like every prostitute one passes, greet you with 'ciao' and try to strike up a conversation and put a deal together. I would respond with what I can only hope was a polite ciao while maintaining the momentum to carry me on and passed their corner. But I liked seeing those working girls, and I enjoyed the exchanges.

 Then one day as I was taking this laneway, a guy came to offer me hashish. I didn't understand why he was stopping me at first. Nothing in his tone was threatening, but I hadn't picked up the words so I said 'parli inglese?' and he said 'hashish. smoke?'

But it was within earshot of one of my favorites, and it fundamentally changed our interactions.

As I passed the drug vendor she spoke to me and said 'let's go.'

And suddenly I found myself having to decline sex with one of my favorite prostitutes.

This is an anecdote about shame, but not the shame you might assume. Because I'm a cold calling market research dude. My 'day job' has mostly been calling up strangers and asking them if they got time for a survey.

And here's a secret from the inside, it is actually far worse to make a polite excuse to not do the survey than it is to just say no. Largely because it is often passive aggressive, but mostly because it wastes time having to preserve your self image that you aren't one of those people that hangs up the phone on kids cold calling.

And here I was, making excuses.

Afterwards, when I had the time and space to think rationally, I know nothing about prostitution anywhere let alone my adoptive home for 3 months. For me to say yes, would have been to accept legal risks, financial risks as well as sexual health risks that were completely unquantified. So, I mean of course you don't say yes to sex to a stranger on the street in the middle of the day.

But something about me, when somebody is offering you sexual intercourse in exchange for money it seems so much more personal. I can't remember with exact fidelity but the exchange which didn't last long went something like this:

'let's go'
'I'm sorry.'
'let's go, come on.'
'I have other plans.'
'plans change. We can go to my house it's not far.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Don't worry about the money it is not so much.'
'that's okay.'
'Come on, I will make you feel good.'
'I'm sure that's true, but...'

Then I just walked away, but lamely waived good bye and probably said ciao or someshit.

There was a time, back when I was corporate where as a reward for participating in the companies equivalent to Toyota's continuous improvement program we got sent to Sydney for a couple of days. And one night we were walking Kings Cross, which as a red light district is actually a lot more confronting than I would have expected. At one point spruikers invited us to come in and see a sex show at some establishment or possibly to check out the girls. And it wasn't the best customer service attitude of front line staff I'd ever come across and they seemed pissed off when we were giving an emphatic no.

But after that exchange I thought, no, they are right. We were a bunch of voyeurs walking through the street where people exchange money for sex. We are crowding up the shops and wasting people's time.

After walking away from my favorite prostitutes I felt similar, except this city the red light district is kind of just on top of not the red light district. Space is far more shared. So I really wasn't cruising past shyly toying with the idea of sleeping one of these women. Or was I?

My personality is such, that I couldn't sleep with a prostitute if they weren't attracted to me, even if that sounds like it defeats the purpose. I like to think that my favorite prostitutes liked me too.

The thing is, if you take body language for example, you have to discount context. You shouldn't for example think the girl who serves you at McDonalds, is into you. Because their job is to smile and engage and greet you enthusiastically and make eye contact. So you discount it, and surely with the skin trade, that applies even more so.

Except my city of Italy, who were the clientele? In my call center work, it's really cool to talk to a really cool 70 year old, but it's extra nice to talk to a young lady my age who is nice. Know what I'm saying? Compared to the other potential John's, maybe that would be an easy shift of work for them.

I don't know, and to be honest, to me it sounds too much like an act of economic consumption as an act of charity. What I really think about, is that people like me who are really in the relationship or bust mindset, probably should be the clients of prostitutes where the non-attachment of casual sex are unambiguous.

I'm just embarrassed that I didn't have the conviction to just say no. And the city was such that I'd see my favorite prostitutes wandering other streets when they were off duty, and to all extents just women being women.

Black Cat Trigger Happy

I was leaning on the balcony of my friends house taking in the view. Though I was concentrating on the steeple, the mountains of the horizon, the clouds migrating across the sky, at some point I looked down into the street out front of the house. And I noticed a black cat crossing the street. I had two thoughts of which I am no longer sure of the order in which they arrived.

One I almost always reflexively recall when seeing a black cat, or any cat, crossing a path was Groucho Marx's 'a black cat crossing your path indicates it is going somewhere' which is what I remind myself of whenever a black cat does cross my path.

The other, much more relevant thought was 'this is why I fucken hate trigger warnings.'

The first time I saw a trigger warning, the impression and execution was not too different from TV-Ratings. If you can remember as far back to when you used to watch TV, the ones that flashed up to say 'The following program contains references to drugs, sex and violence, parental guidance is advised' The emphasis of course is mine, because it's a crucial difference between trigger warnings and TV-ratings. (It's perhaps a useful exercise to contemplate why these two practices are different)

Anyway the actual first time I came across it was in a post by my friend Leah, and I made many snap judgements and formed an impression quite quickly, based on who my friend Leah is, the authority she has and whom I assumed she was attempting to reach.

Because she has written in quite brutal detail, the brutal realities of major depressive episodes. Thus at the time, and still, I would credit her with having the first hand experience to know her triggers - I also assume (though being a verbally coherant assumption, is very much post-hoc compared to the unintelligible impression I actually used) that this novel new pre-text phrase 'trigger warning' was offering people in similar situations to Leah to make the cost benefit analysis of reading this article vs triggering a major depressive episode - quite a costly thing.

I assumed she was speaking to a rarefied audience she has access to, that both has an interest in trauma and extreme sensitivities to it.

So I thought nothing of it.

Then trigger warnings came to be employed by people just throwing articles up on fb that it was much harder for me to believe as being employed in the same way Leah had.

Further more, the 'trigger warnings' began to be predictable.

Ask yourself what is 'trigger warning' going to mean? What isn't it going to mean? Excluding when it is employed for parody/ridicule eg. trigger warning 'avocados' it's not going to foretell a coming mention of avocados. It is going to probably in this order foretell content of rape, assault, suicide, self-mutilation, depression.

Now do you remember room 101 from 1984? The room that contains the worst thing in the world, which for John Smith was rats ready to gnaw his face off? No need to imagine what would be in your personal room 101, imagine instead that for fear of one day walking accidentally walking into your own room 101 you employed your friend Garry to scout ahead. And should he discover you are on a collision course with room 101, he can pop back and silently warn you with a solemn shake of his head.

It sounds like it would work, and here I have to extend the benefit of the doubt to my trigger-warning happy friends, that as far as intention goes they are trying to provide a well-intended service that is sensitive to the realities of others mental health and sparing them unnecessary pain or anguish.

Just what I would bet good money on, is that if Garry did scout ahead for you to see if you were walking into room 101, that Garry and the thought of seeing his solemn face would start to become a proxy 101. His face would start evoking some of the gut wrenching emotions that occur when you think of room 101.

Then something happened to me, about 2 years ago now. I had a panic attack. An unpleasant experience that lacking any real experience of them, was even more so distressing. The thought that I was arousing myself into cardiac arrest did occur to me. It was not unmanageable, but also not an experience I would wish on anybody.

Especially me.

I haven't had one since, and like my magic rock that protects me from bear attacks, I can't really testify that the method I employed to prevent panic attacks actually works, given how rare they are in my life. (I've had 1, possibly 2 in my life) But I did read up, I read a terribly titled book called 'i-brainmap: freeing your brain from stress' but that details (among much acronyms that make me cringe as a marketing graduate) simple and effective methods for dealing with any 'activated' state.

And the activated states are what a person is in when they have been triggered. This book urged it's readers to not invest their effort in avoiding triggers, but in confronting them with curiosity - or more accurately the unpleasant states of activation that result from being triggered. The book claimed to be cutting edge, employing new discoveries about nueroplasticity to say the existent conventional wisdom of identifying triggers in therapy sessions and devising strategies to avoid them was proving to be a load of hooey, albeit an intuitive response to unpleasantness. (My own psychotherapy has never touched on triggers, they weren't why I was there)

And this was perhaps the worst impression the book conveyed to me, because I kind of gave trigger warnings a two-year grace period, dismissing them as naive but well intentioned. The people using them simply weren't up to speed with nueroplasticity. Not understanding that they are in practice reinforcing the triggers and in fact shrinking the space those avoiding triggers can roam online by creating a secondary 'catch-all' trigger in 'trigger warning'.

If Garry and room 101 didn't do it for you, think back to something else you probably feel queasy about and that is secondary school algebra.

Remember feeling stupid as those math savant kids noticed that if you let z = (2x - c) then suddenly an equation became y = (2z - z^2)/z and seemed that much more solvable and why can't I see that shit?

Well let trigger warning = every most common triggers out there. Such that somebody whose trigger might be 'self-mutilation' now gets that state of activation from reading 'trigger warning' even if the attached link contains no mention of self-mutilation because it causes them to anticipate that their particular trigger is around the corner. Even when it isn't.

Of course, I don't know that this happens, I would simply be willing to bet good money that this turns out to be happening. I don't have any real triggers that knock my hipocampus out of commission and leave the wheels of my frontal lobes spinning with the resultant inability to talk to my more primative brain that processes the fight-flight-freeze response. Thus I can't personally testify from experience.

Anyway, as stated some time passed between when I learned that avoiding triggers is counterproductive to seeing this black cat from my friends balcony.

In the interim I would periodically be reviewing the works of psychiatrist Gordin Livingston who wrote 'confrontation over time makes things better, avoidance makes things worse' and Gabor Mate who in fact sites Eckart Tole when saying 'never run from your fears' and other healers in the addiction industry (the good ones, I feel, being almost universally focused on trauma) repeat this message. Brene Brown's work that went 'viral' via TED is similarly centered around the importance of vulnerability - willing to actually step into the arena and get hurt as being crucial to living 'wholeheartedly' - shame too. I'm struck by how Brene's work is more or less the same as Gabor Mate's narrative by a different name, reaching a different audience (I hope).

And it seems forgotten to me, in the public brains trust that Anxiety, Depression, PTSD... etc are debilitating conditions, that nobody wants to persist. Suffering from anxiety appears to have become normalised in my local culture (making it important to remember that 'normal' is not 'natural') and they are perhaps the one exception to my experience that most people suffering a debilitating condition will only seek a path of 'managing' the condition when beating that condition has been ruled out. (chronic pain, severe clinical depression etc.) Instead anxious people create videos about how life could be altered to suit the needs of socially awkward people. Although I do wish chairs on airplanes were unable to recline, accommodating people who live in fear of feeling awkward is a sentiment that makes me actually want to go to war with the socially anxious (it would be easy).

What little reading I've done on OCD makes me confident that 'exposure response prevention therapy' is a core practice, albeit preventing somebody from unnecessary hand washing is done in a very controlled way and OCD triggers can result from introspection, I've never heard of OCD having the kind of trigger likely to appear in an online article.

So anyway, I began to suspect that perhaps, no real authority had ever recommended that people identify their triggers and then devise strategies to avoid them. This was not a psychotherapy practice widespread enough for it to be the foundation of the online manners known as the 'trigger warning'

So I did the maximum amount of research I will ever do: I looked up trigger warning on 'Know your meme' you can see the results of my research here. Note that my research never extended to actually looking at 'Fuck Yeah Trigger Warnings' tumblr, the one mention in the know-your-meme page of 'necessity of trigger warnings. But as such, it does not appear that 'trigger warning' is indeed formally a form of manners (behavior necessary to maintaining civilized society especially in regard to treatment of strangers) so much as etiquette (behavior necessary to claim membership to an in-group). Etiquette is what gave us 14 forks and different glasses for drinking fortified wine vs. red or white wine vs. sparkling wine and every other different alcoholic beverage, and every other convoluted and expensive system for distinguishing the privileged elite from the unclean masses.

Authority is important as well, as a concept. Most people, like me, are terrible fact checkers. They base their decisions on impressions - I've seen people sign employment contracts in front of me that they haven't read. People go with the flow due to social pressure and perceptions of authority. It's why the government has to regulate that phone contracts are written in plane English and restricts how many pages they can be.

And to paint a subset of my friends with the one brush, there is a kind of people who use trigger warnings. I recently learned of the terms 'progressives' but I've never known a person to identify as one. To me it is a derogatory term, but I could believe somebody may self-identify, it's plausible. More recently I learned of the term 'social justice warrior' or sjw, which is clearly a derogatory term used by the kind of people that are derogatorily referred to as 'trolls' and also 'mras' (all links go to urban dictionary, because all the terms are pejorative and it is a friend of skepticism to see venom injected into what is meant to be a definition). I would not bet money that anybody would self identify as an sjw, except in an ironic sense, and I guess if somebody possessed both the behavioral traits that make somebody a sjw, while having the personal sense of security to own that term, they would be my favorite kind of sjw.

But mostly, in my world they remain nameless. And just because a term is pejorative or derogatory doesn't mean they aren't descriptive. There's some bedrock under the streams of venom. MRAs for example are bad actuaries, and progressives don't demonstrate epistemic humility. And that's why I don't like trigger warnings, because if my transcribe my personal prejudices, I feel most people in the world value intelligence, and the rest actually feel intelligent. And it's the somewhat intelligent people that value intelligence (perhaps because, they don't feel intelligent) that catch and spread a meme like trigger warnings.

My intuition, is that trigger warnings spread like George Costanza got the denizens of New York eating Donuts and candy with cutlery. I don't have the necessary engineering or physio qualifications to authoritatively say that using cutlery is a dumb way to eat a donut or snickers, but I'm confident that it is. But when George says 'how do you eat yours? with your hands?' with so much derision, that is him establishing etiquette, and though Seinfeld is a sit-com that in its latter seasons got increasingly ridiculous - George's malicious establishing of etiquette to serve his own needs is not so relevant as the ease with which the contagion spreads. People don't fact check in the episode, they simply see others doing it, and driven by their own aspirations adopt the practice themselves.

Similarly, if you use trigger warning primarily because you saw somebody you respect doing it, realise that's probably why they do it. And people who respect you may believe that it is the ethical thing to do, when it could, possibly be at best condescending and at worst counterproductive.

I feel strongly that the primary motivation to use 'trigger warnings' is to claim membership to a group, a community. Driven by an aspiration to stand among perceived intellectuals. It has little basis in fact as regards the intention, or how they are supposed to work.

Suppose they worked though? Have I got to the black cat yet?

I just can't respect the mind that believes setting down the path of creating an online social environment where trauma sufferers are condescendingly imagined to be frail little Lord Fontelroys of our extended social networks whom need to be protected from trigger content of articles people are posting -that people with that mindset are going to change the world for the better.

Because a trigger could be anything, anything could be in room 101 - even after you suspend your disbelief that the communist ideology that couldn't produce chocolate milk, could somehow satisfy the worst fears of any given member of their society - that takes enterprising capitalism baby.

I'm told, by a keynote presentation I cannot presently be bothered sourcing, that something anxious people have trouble doing, is thinking things through to their consequences. So the difference between me and my anxious friends is the difference between 'people are going to notice the mustard stain on my shirt, and then they are going to not care anymore.' and 'people are going to notice the mustard stain on my shirt!' In the same way, seeing a black cat cross my path can bum me out. I can get a feeling of foreboding and have to remind myself of Groucho Marx's views on the matter of black cats crossing paths.

Have those posting 'trigger warning' as pretext to articles where they actively and consciously control the stimulus they produce thought about how to apply this to every other (and hopefully the majority) aspects of their life. How for example to warn people that their cat can roam the streets while they are at work?

It is within the realm of plausibility that the sight of a black cat crossing their path could be a major trigger to some people, activating a panic attack or a depressive episode. Are we to extend our sensitivity to superstition? Eradicate the number 4 because it upsets the Chinese? Is someone that allows their black tabby to roam the streets being insensitive? Should ladder manufacturers make it physically impossible to walk under their wares? Should we start a kickstarter for a smart brolly that cannot be opened in doors? Should women be resolutely banned from playing the didgeridoo?

Triggers can be temporal too, a time of year - trigger warning - August?

More seriously what if someone's assailant wore yellow? Or reeked of Lynx Africa?

At no point do I want to trivialise how horrible activated states can be for those that suffer from debilitating conditions including PTSD, OCD (it's horrific), Generalised Anxiety Disorder, Major clinical depression etc. I just suspect that the people that actually do, for the most part dream of being able to freely interact with this chaotic world, to live a life where the smell of certain anti-perspirants do not send their body into remembering a major trauma - where physiologically they can experience the same detachment that they can rationally - not just their mind but their body knows that because the postman's uniform is yellow doesn't mean the assailant is here and that this is happening again.

Trivial or not though, the challenge before anybody with debilitating triggers is how to live in a world they can't control. My favorite soundbite of Angel Haze, comes at the end of her track 'Black Synagogue' where she says 'it takes something to say fuck it this is reality, and I'm going to deal with it.' I believe, although I have no proof, that the something the articulate Angel Haze can't put her finger on, is the something that people who recover have. I can't articulate that something either.

I will accept, indeed expect there to be dissenting views. For example there are people that identify as addicts that still in 2016 believe addiction to be a disease, or genetic. Despite no evidence to support these theories, the theories persist and were historically probably helpful in de-stigmatising addiction so that sufferers could seek treatment. Equally I could believe that despite a lack of evidence to support trigger warnings, and the presence of evidence to suggest they are counter-productive there will be people that resolutely believe in their necessity.

I don't, and I'm sufficiently confident to try and persuade you out of them.

On Brock Turner

I was called upon, not specifically but generally, as a man to pay attention to the Victim Impact Statement read out in the trial of 'The People Vs Brock Turner' and so I did. The first two instances or callings, came from male friends, and not ones that would easily be labelled or dismissed as 'progressives' or 'sjw' terms I have recently learned.

I read the Victim Impact Statement, and it is a good piece of prose, to my recollection it in itself called no general call to action. My feeling is that its power, lies in the fact that the victim kept focused in her mind while composing and delivering it, that her audience was one specific person - Brock Turner.

The statement itself, may well be, one of the great speeches of this era, certainly more memorable than anything President Obama has delivered, and he appears to be one of the few/only active politicians in the English speaking world capable of delivering a good speech. So this victim impact statement is one for the ages, but by an anonymous author because the very experiences that gave her the authority to compose and speak such words, are ones the author would never want to define her nor her place in history.

My presumption is that the 'call' my fellow male counterparts put out by sharing the statement was a call for us men to actually identify with Brock Turner, rather than like Brock Turner, avoid taking responsibility for our actions and seize any psychological opportunity to avoid being held to account.

I never presumed I was being called to add my voice to the specific injustice of the lenient sentencing Brock Turner received. The reason men needed to pay attention was for the general, rather than the specific.

And for what little it's worth, I have put some introspective effort into placing myself in the shoes of Brock Turner. That were I to possess the knowledge (assumed) that I was guilty of these crimes, were I to receive lenient sentencing it would be as the result of submitting a guilty plea. What is more difficult, is taking the inventory of my own character and to say that given how I feel about the US penitentiary system, including the sex-offenders registry - I would brace myself for the almost certainly destructive consequences of taking responsibility. I would expect no mercy.

Here, being Brock Turner's father is a harder exercise in perspective taking, on the one hand, much as I like to think that I would be able to sit in the police interview room alone with my son and say 'you fucking idiot, you've done this thing and you're going to take responsibility for it.' there I feel the genuine dilemma, of facing a justice system that appears capable of salvaging nothing and only making things worse for all. I do not have the experience of being a father so I cannot feel the bias nor need to defend the image I hold and the emotional investment I have in a son that I don't have. But would like to think I have the integrity that if the justice system will only make things worse in its punitive measures, then at the very least I would be able to tell my son that it was his responsibility to bear that cost, not the victim.

But it does pose for me an issue of reconciliation. Because outside of this case, this victim impact statement, I'm all about Norway's approach to penance. Which is to say, just about the only punitive measure to be taken is a restriction of freedom. The rest is actually a focused direction of energy on rehabilitation.

I am well aware that individuals like Brock Turner need to be interrupted. Psychology 101 is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Once you reveal yourself as capable of sexual assault (see the case details) some intervention is necessary if you are ever to enjoy the privilege of free passage through society again.

But honestly there's no part of me that feels that intervention should entail incarceration in an institution where a person is likely to be physically or sexually assaulted themselves, where the authority figures establish their authority not to be role models, but simply to be the ruling class within the facility - (ie. the prison staff are there to ensure you are not free, not to eclipse your fellow inmates as role models of civil conduct) nor do I see a program whereby you are forced and legally required to accept the identity of sex-offender somehow leading to a day where that person is going to be a low risk of recidivism.

To be honest, from the outside, and having watched enough of Louis Theroux's documentaries about life for American Sex Offenders (not to mention the Mr Show sketch 'Larry Kleist - Rapist') such a program is so restrictive and so hopeless (except tragically, for the hope of recidivism) that I see little point to registered sex offenders serving a jail sentence on top of being a registered sex offender.

Which is to say, if we were talking about the Norwegian Penal system, and a Judge sat me down and said 'okay you can serve 11 years in Norway's Maximum security facility, OR serve no time and be a registered sex-offender' losing 11 years of freedom would be less debilitating to my life (and society) than being a sex-offender under the US system. I must claim ignorance of whether Norway operates a similar sex-offender registry as the US. In short though, while I recognize a priority in protecting the innocent forms the basis of a sex-offender registry, it is also a program that I can see no possibility of rehabilitation or reform taking place, it is closer to the state simply washing its hands of undesirables.

My feeling is, that if there is any outrage to be felt over the specifics of Brock Turner's case, it is, that by the one account I have read - Brock Turner has failed to take responsibility for his actions. He also appears to live in a social environment where he is not seen as responsible, even a victim. And the Justice system has failed to get through to him that he is not a victim, with the sole exception of being a victim of his own actions. The onus is on society to actually communicate this to him, and to those who make up his social environment, and good as the victim impact statement is - based on what I have heard of the responding statements by father and friends - that message has yet to be received.

It should be acknowledged though, that here the issues of rape culture, the subset of campus rape culture, male privilege, white privilege etc. collide with all the issues of dysfunction with the US Justice system. That needs to be reconciled and what stands revealed is that not just Brock Turner, but any man has incentive to avoid taking responsibility when it also means taking with it the cruel and unusual punishments a US Justice is capable of sentencing a person to.

There was another reconciliation that I was curious about, and that was how the Brock Turner case would be reconciled in such close succession with the Orlando Shooting.

On the one hand, men were being called to own Brock Turner's case as a general issue affecting all men, however based on my past experience, the same category of people are quick to urge the same audience to not generalise concerning the actions of one Muslim to that of all people of the Islamic faith.

I do not feel any cognitive dissonance in this case, because I can apply the general rule of always identifying with and taking an inventory of any category I might share with any individual. I am not a fan of dismissing argument and debate as 'Islamaphobic' or 'racist' if you follow me. I believe there is no subject on earth that is not worthy of dissection and or ridicule, including my own core beliefs and values.

I was quite impressed with the reconciliation I percieved though, they went lowest common denominator. Both Brock Turner and the Orlando Shooter are men. This is the story that ran. It was brilliant, but useless.

Butterballs

Travelling is an ordeal in which we as human beings need to pull together in order to urvive said ordeal with minimal trauma, and for the most part, we as human beings are quite good at recognizing in eachother our common humanity and dignity.

If you don't take proper security measures you have to stay in a lot of hostel dorms before you get robbed, even though your bags can be ripe for rifling through for months. You'd have to go to a lot of public events, more than most lifetimes before being effected by a terrorist attack (even with the recent upswing in Europe).

Which is to say humans are more often truly unlucky than they are vulnerable. Most people have no trouble being considerate.

And there are cultures where the line is drawn on a side I can't stand on, the Japanese for example, are anti listening to music on public transport through headphones. Fuck that, you like to nap on trains and demand NO background noise? I'm going to be a 'foreign barbarian' in these circumstances because I can't dignify the demands of a workaholic culture that demands office workers and students get their sleep on commutes.

Last week I took a train to Milan, they had cancelled the regional train meaning the intercity was packed with people (like me) with no reserved seats. It's a bit of a pain, but basically when someone comes with a ticket for the seat I'm occupying I jump up, because they've paid a premium for this train and that seat. Really I was fortunate to get to sit for half the journey.

But I wound up standing next to a mother and child in the aisle for about an hour.

The mother being italian made a seat for her 10 year old out of their luggage.

The kid was actually pretty cute for a 10 year old. Playing a nintendo ds that he couldn't keep himself from commentating and occasionally busting into the old spiderman theme song.

Here's the thing, his mum constantly told him off, or more accurately that it was 'enough' noise wise. Eventually when he couldn't bring himself to comply, she took the DS away from him and the kid to his credit did not bust into a tantrum like a true infant.

Flash forward to yesterday, and I was bussing it from Milan to Zurich, a lower class of transport with low low prices to match. A 4 hour trip blew out into a 7 hour one and nobody was outraged because that is what we had paid for afterall.

I got myself a window seat by virtue of some garbage human being leaving their garbage on the seat such that the 80% of passengers that boarded before me, passed over it. Alas the bus was full, which meant much as I hopedand prayed that the seat next to me was to remain empty, it was not going to be the case.

And of course, near last to board the bus were the butterballs. A trio of relatives who were approaching a stature of true roundness, short such that their girth made them more circular than fat. A mother and two sons whom I guesstimate were around 12 and 14 years old.

Despite a carb on carb diet with a side of carbs and a gelati chaser, it was actually super rare to see fat people or kids in Genoa, not so in Melbourne, where I'm told being overweight as a kid is now so common it is no longer grounds to be picked on. But given the last three months there was some novelty in seing a real life German exchange student Uter, and he was full of chocolate.

So first quandry is that in this life it is actually possible to wind up in a physical condition where one cannot help but encroach on the personal space of others and who is more at fault? The kid stuffed with wurstel or the draftsman that decided how wide seats need to be in this day and age?

Personally I don't feel, or want to live in a world where such a bus ride is something a person is expected to train for, to be match fit for. The moment this kids soft rolls settled into the chair and pushed me towards my window views of the Swiss mountains, valleys and lakes was the moment I recognized that this was such a time where we recognize our common humanity, economic pressures and that 'this too shall pass'.

I was unlucky. So were two other window seat holders that scored the other family members. But that's it. The butterballs are unlucky every single time.

Australian law is very clear, you can't discriminate based on anything people can't change, or can't change easily. Meaning not only is the colour or creed of a person a discrimination no-no, but being fat is too because you can't have a barber trim that off between now and next friday. Tattoos and piercings are another matter because these are generally self-inflicted in a much more deliberate and instantaneous way than weight gain usually is.

I know this, thus I wasn't all 'fucking fatty' so much as 'poor kid' but this reaction caused me some perplexedness.

For example, if it is true that childhood obesity has been normalised, does this kid actually suffer the adverse effects of being a fat kid, or is he now, just a happy little kid? I actually don't know if having to sit on the sidelines at school aths day is that big a deal anymore? If videogames have elbowed actual sport and play out of the picture, this kid could be a jock in todays videogame currency because he pwns noobs on smash bros.

Which in turn, I'm not for the way the little darwinian beasts known as 'children' handle enforcing societal norms by bullying the non-normal kids like fat kids, but at the same time, I'm not exactly okay with this kid being under the impression that he is just 'fine'.

Picking on the fat kid is a method children have been trying for centuries and the results in both weight loss and mental health are to say the least unimpressive. I guess the ideal would be if a kid could acknowledge they are overweight with the same cold emotion I acknowledge I am physically incapable of playing in the NBA, or getting older not younger. These realizations can motivate actions without having me burst into uncontrollable tears.

But Uter was unable to cope with boredom, or low blood sugar levels. And while I'm sure both were costly unpleasant states for him, the cost was imposed on me also.

I witnessed for my first time, what happens to a kid-these-days when deprived of internet connectivity. This kid quite literally did not know what to do. It couldn't occur to him to put his tablet away, so he dicked around furiously with trying to drag icons around on the screen, and trying to make a movie from the tablets photo album (not as creative as it sounds). At no point in the 7 hours did he conclude that his ipad was not going to happen. I know at his age, I barely had any tolerance for long road trips, our family got bookish (until we got car sick) but a tablet depending on wifi would be the equivalent of me packing a coloring book and discovering I had no color pencils, crayons etc. It would ruin my seven hour road trip, for sure. It's just far less likely to happen than being blindsided by no wi-fi access. Furthermore, the old analogue methods of distraction and entertainment are being forgotten, thus a kid is far less likely to be prepared for a long haul.

Simultaneously, atsome point in childhood I learned how to space out, how to entertain myself with introspection and imagination. One saving grace was Uter didn't try to sleep on my shoulder, for all his obliviousness to my personal space.

I notice a slight implication that I hold Uter responsible for not bringing a coloring book or anything not dependent on battery life and connectivity to pass time by. Which turns to Uter's mama. All I have is inference mind you, observations of behavior.

I feel Uter was the most annoying person to sit next to on the bus, but truth be told, his mum was the first to annoy me and the impression was formed before I ever saw them. I heard her first and knew instantly that here were those exceptional people who didn't recognize our common humanity and instead pursued their own relief oblivious to the sacrifices imposed on others.

I saw Uter's butt cleavage because his mother insisted he help adjust her seat. I saw her kids during a 7 hour trip eat half a large pizza each, bread rolls and salami, gummi bears, 1.25l of coke, some pastries stuffed with hotdogs and then during a pitstop break they loaded up on fanta and lollipops.

This was the ostensible provisions for a 4 hour bus trip, not presumably for the 7 I at least did not foresee. It is hard to extend to mama the benefit of the doubt, that this exceptionally poor diet was circumstantial to travelling, a treat, so to speak. My intuition was that this family was maintaining a functional life in the grips of a severe and psychologically hereditary addiction.

As in, this wasn't a 'treat' or cheat day, nothing, particularly not the fanta purchase indicated any particular concern about nutrition, or the adverse effects of a refined sugar no fiber diet.

And I don't eat healthy myself. At all, I just flatter myself that should I be responsible for children, and greater society, I would be quite hypocritical as to what I feed them as compared to what I feel fit for my own consumption.

To some extent I can credit rising living costs, two income household driven time poverty and social isolation as contributing factors, but nothing bar addiction for me explains the phenomena of parents feeding junk food to their kids through holes in a fence once Jamie Oliver takes over their school.

And speaking of British people, David Mitchell did a radio show on manners earlier this year that featured the role of primary education in socialising children, from completely ego centric to aware of others.

At what age do we stop cutting kids slack for being unaware of others? Toddlers can behave in ways that would get my beautiful face broken and we find it adorable and endearing. But at 10-12 years old we are heading into the quagmire of 'the slap' territory. My question is honest because I forget what I was like at 12 years old. Far more prone to blunders in selfish behavior  (and nobody ever gets cured completely of inconsiderate behavior) but at least intellectually aware of manners and politeness, aware even that strangers were to be respected, perhaps more so then than feared.

Given Uter's mother encouraged him to try and get off the bus before everyone else ie. Push to the front of the aisle, I have nothing to draw upon in defence of her having any sense of manners, or others.

Even adjusted for cultural differences, the butterball family appeared to be the people that make travel a dread worthy ordeal, of which the social contract foists harm-minimizing as the only viable course of action. It isn't a prisoner's dilemma game theory wise, and the rest of the passengers to humanities credit new that meeting inconsiderate behavior with more inconsiderate behaviour is how nobody survives a 7 hourr bus trip.

I just notice Milan train mum's ability to both cut her kid sufficient slack for being a kid while demonstrating if anything, too much consideration for her fellow passengers.

I titled this post butterballs, because I feel it no coincidence that we have three representing family members in rolly poly shape, just asit is no coincidence they were taking the cheapest scummiest form of transport with me, and no coincidence they were less considerate than the train going society. It's a causal web that chases itself around, but when it comes to human decency 7 hours later upon arrival at Zurich there were 6 armed police officers to greet me at the bottom of the steps, and greet me they didn't as I moved to fish out my passport, ignoring me completely and allowing me to open up the bus and grab my (or any bag I fancied with zero scrutiny) as they picked out a nice polite Arabic man to scrutinize his visa and submit to a pat down. Where I could only remark 'oh they are racially profiling'

I'm only going to second guess the work of European Union boarder control work in the current climate but go no further. But if Isis are producing model bus travellers perhaps they should be patting down Uter.

Bareback

They say a gentleman doesn't kiss and tell, and so I won't.

Attempting only to divulge information about me, condoms are a reliable, affordable form of birth control and protection from the spread of sexually transmitted infections, as well as having side effects like prolonging the duration of intercoarse. Ribbed and studded condoms can provide all of the above and act as a sexual aide to boot.

Other novelties, who gives a shit.

I'm pro condoms, but I still find them awkward in places. Most obviously one has to  disrupt foreplay at some point to put them on, more stressful (which is to say, not very stressful) is the presumptive act of carrying them around. I have some fear in the back of my mind that should I reveal to my new old lady that I turned up packing rubbers her amorousness may run away from us.

However carrying condoms is less about overconfidence and more about underconfidence that a majority of women will not only be responsible for their own birth control and sexual health but mine too. I would say the ladies should keep their own stash on hand as insurance against stupidity of the moment, but if you're in a relationship with a man he should bear the financial burden of keeping his and your stash stocked. (I hear vaginas are much more expensive than dicks to maintain)

It's refreshing to see the main strip of my adoptive home town sporting condom vending machines, they are actually both visable and plentiful in a country that sports more cathedrals than condom vending machines and plays host to the Vatican. I'm not sure  (because I don't care) whether the current pope is down with condoms, but I like seeing that pragmatism will win out over superstition.

Equally have I been surprised in the secular/agnostic homeland of mine that the condom party seems to have dropped off.

It is one of those things that made me feel out of touch, feel like I was a sexual partner of a bygone era, like I'd been out of the game since one stared at the ceiling and thought of England.

But even women my own age have dumbfounded me with an expressed preference for sex without condoms. People who should, like me be able to remember aids scare campaigns that played during episodes of degrassi junior high, where the character of Dwayne Myers was hiv-positive.

Yes, I was subjected to a scare campaign at an impressionable age, and I accept that my own mother's 'talks' about girls who would want to get pregnant by me did not leave me unscathed.

But rest assured my fondness for condoms is a rational one, following the simple rule of risk taking: you don't risk something important to gain something unimportant. In this case your and their sexual health (and psychological health) and the health and feasibility of potential offspring, your future finances etc in order to gain the incremental pleasure of membrane on membrane action.

Fuck that shit, and if you are into bare back action, or even okay with it, that's fucken stupid. (A judgement I generally refrain from voicing during liasons, I simply insist on the condom)

I don't know to which social factor to attribute a phenomena I percieve but can't substantiate. Given I don't have sex with men, I cannot personally testify as to the general attitude of my gender and how much it contributes to womens willingness to have unprotected sex.

My first inclination is to blame a generational decay in memory. 'The kids these days' have seen the outbreak of sars and swine flu, two epidemiological non-events. Someone barely younger than me can't remember a grim reaper bowling down naked men and women on prime time tv. They are more likely to recall it from modestly successful film 'pride' than childhood.

But this doesn't hold up in the face of partners my own age. Which makes me turn to the greatest shaper  of sexual trends and sexual politics the world over: porn. It is rare to see porn performers using condoms, it may be over two years since I had a porn habit, but I cannot recall any era where condoms did feature in porno scenes.

And just as porn inflates the expectations of what acts men and women will consent to in actual intercourse (yeilding some positive liberation from sexual mores and inhibitions and I fear more negatives particularly for women who may not particularly fancy anal penetration followed by sucking the dick that was inside their colon, but you don't want Johnny-Pokemon-Go-star to say you are bad at sex to all your fb friends.)

Anyway, perhaps porn makes it look like we all are capable of managing the spread of sti's without condoms. This for me though is the most perplexing part, I've been told the measures non-condom users take to indulge their preference for bareback and I fail to see how it can possibly be worth it.

Even with rigorous testing, testing is not a preventative measure, until you test positive, then it simply prevents you from transmitting to someone else, provided you have the sudden change of heart to start being responsible.

Then I've heard second hand accounts of an over-reliance on 'plan B' I regard myself as lazy and a procrastinator (I'm procrastinating right now) but this is beyond my expertise, plus as a male, I don't get a fucking say in plan B just plan A.

Anyway use fucking condoms you fucken morons.

Love-in

There are many times one is justified even worthy of veneration when called to point out 'we're arguing semantics here' because generally semantics aren't what we actually care about. (So much as our ego) but semantics and the etymology of words can be a great source of insight. (Particularly into foreign culttures)

Now is one of those times when I'm seeking that insight, because to describe my state in the colloquial currency would be 'in love' a state I quite enjoy.

But to me the words suggest a misleading description of the state, one that is possibly not likely to mislead anyone given how universal the experience is, but nevertheless here I go.

In love seems to describe that we have walked 'in' to a new environment, a chamber, a room. Our internal state interacts with an external phenomena of love. My experience is quite the oposite, love invades my internal state changing ultimately how I interact with my environment, it colors my perception of reality.

Furthermore being salient and unashamed of this state I enjoy being invaded, I enjoy going, 'oh here it comes!' When a wave washes through me. I enjoy it, but I'm not 'In' love, there's stimulus yes, but that stimulus isn't responsible for how I feel, nothing is doing it to me. I am doing this to everything around me.

Stalkers need to learn this distinction.

I don't relate to feminism

Thanks to the tablet I write this on's penchant for refreshing every time you go back to a tab in browser or switch between applications I was given the opportunity to rethink the title of this post, originally 'why I don't relate to feminism' a hard case to plead and had me feel the slight sense of foreboding that what I was going to write would be irresponsible. But pruned of the why it suddenly became a 'of course I don't relate to feminism, I'm a white cisgendered hetero normative male who was a former prefect at a private school in a non-diverse regional city, one of the most privileged members of the most privileged class, I don't really relate to being oppressed period.

But I do have a morbid fascination with feminism, and often serious feminist articles about serious issues posted by serious feminist friends amount to clickbait to me. I go read them to experience a small exhilarating horror at how much I (potentially) will dislike the content. (Like addictive behavior it isn't the 'having' but the 'getting'.

And to be sure I'll attempt to disclaim at this point. This post is a complaint, and while I'll no doubt through sheer laziness do a poor job of 'being specific' I am determined to follow rule number two of complaining and doggedly 'own my point of view' and point firmly that I'm talking about myself and myself only as an audience member, not on behalf of all men or 'real men' or any shit category I may belong to. My complaints are a statement of personal preference that I doubt can be expanded to people who share my myers-briggs INTP designation as much as anyone that shares my Libra star sign. Though if my complaints constitute arguments that wind up getting appropriated and repeated by loser MRAs to justify any 'male rights' etc I'll take responsibility for putting them out there but I'll never not think 'male rights' aren't up there as the most worthless things to devote energy to, speaking to the cost benefit analysis of the 'struggle'.

Which in turn, is disclaimer number 2, I devote little to no energy arguing against male rights activists (aforementioned MRAs) because I find them 'beneath contempt' in my behavioral practice though I think of them more as sad, sometimes tragic. I'm generally not in their line of fire so don't have any defensive pressure to engage either. I'll devote energy to complaining about feminist practices though because I want them to win, and step to. I'm in the audience because I want the team to succeed, though like a fan in the basketball stands for all my ideas/complaints I am not qualified to coach.

And this complaint is more or less already undone, I feel in my bones that at some point I read a quote by some civil rights leader the gist of which was 'you can't let the oppressor define the rules of acceptible resistance, that's crazy' I feel like Malcolm X is most likely to have said something to that effect, alas I can't find the actual quote and starting to wonder if I imagined it. But I feel the argument/sentiment has to be respected, oppressors need to recognise that they are only going to deem acceptable ways of resistance they don't feel threatened by and the oppressed need to recognise that oppressors are always going to try this tactic, and so here I go, read on if your morbid curiosity urges you to:

In a simplified binary world my preference is to practitioners and not academics. I've been instilled with a disrespect of academia at an early age, believing without needing a reason, that PhD's were quite useless. Now that I've grown, I have rationales to back my orientation, but my orientation hasn't changed. I've been walked through abridged versions of the history of women's rights movement once, possibly twice but the detail's haven't stuck. I'm left with the impression though, that feminism has a long standing seat in the couch of academia. 'Prominent' feminists are often academics, writing theses an impression reinforced when I read the Wikipedia article on rape culture in an attempt to disambiguafy what that actually is.

I know I'm not the first nor the last to notice that 'feminism' struggles with being an undefined term. I don't identify as feminist though if you define feminism as 'not shitting on women' ie not wanting to intentionally harm women and the simple act of committing not to doing so, then the shoe fits me. If your definition of feminism demands more, like a willingness to make personal sacrifices to stand up for the rights of women, I feel I've been tested with that glass slipper a few times in my life and I am honestly, feminists ugly step sister.

Furthermore, the most common definition I hear of the undefined term is a belief in equality between men and women. (Sometimes 'the sexes' and almost never 'genders') this definition featured on the light hearted ABC series 'Judith Lucy is all woman' and if that's the definition, I'm honestly not a feminist either, since I don't believe in equality so much as equal opportunity. (And equal opportunity may require affirmative action, which I'm all for, but don't personally believe that equality necessarily follows equal opportunity).

So I feel the least misleading and  therefore most honest personal identifier I can adopt is 'not-a-feminist' and thus far it has been my experience that it costs me nothing to do so. Like all my experiences with Johari window exercises. Symmetrically speaking though, I observe that it costs men nothing to identify as feminist too, and as such I have little respect for those that do, I have met one that I intuitively felt would actually pay the price of holding that identity at the expense of their own privelege and I respected him. Later the friend that introduced me to him revealed to me he was trans, which leads me to assume he lead his formative years without male privelege possibly explaining my intuitively extended credibility. Credibility I do not extend myself, based on experience.

I sense I've digressed but the digression has some relevance, it being how complicated undefined terms can be in creating an engaging conversation or even engaging an audience. For example, I've been told third hand that there are people that define all heterosexual sex as rape, something about 'women are oppressed by men' being the definition, Stephen Frye's unfortunate appearance on the Rubin Report (strategically a mansplaining disaster/minefield of a show no matter the intrinsic merit of any content) reported that there exist definitions of rape that include uttering the word itself, though I've never seen this definition exercised in internet land. But I have come across 'all porn is rape' firsthand and conversely there is Dick Dawkins tweet about a spectrum of rape and that there must be acceptable rape on that spectrum some where.

Dawkins probably identifies as a feminist himself, and feminism is to me sufficiently undefined that I believe he could believe it, while simultaneously fitting other definitions of misogyny, though probably not his own.

Part of my morbid curiosity with reading feminist articles like they are clickbait designed for me, comes from the carcrash/trainwreck that is the semantic civil war going on waged over these undefined terms resulting in purity tests and feminist critiques of feminist critiques.

But mostly what I'd complain about is the 'academic tone' most of the writing has. By academic tone, what I'm referring to is the degree of certainty, the 'here's all the answers, I have them and you need to listen' subtext I feel when reading these articles, often driven by sighting studies, reports and prominent academics. Which is not to say that it is the citations and practice of which I object to, its the presentation of the writers subjective reality as objective reality. Almost all perspectives are through a prism, and perspective taking is really hard, the most common hubris I find is when an author confuses projecting for empathy.

For example, the sexism of wolf whistling, has been explained to me as mens assumption that they control public spaces, hence they also assume the role of appraiser when they feel entitled to 'compliment' a woman on her appearance.

It's true, it blue my mind, and practice of projecting that women think about controlling communal spaces. I've been vaguely aware of this battle for control since I was in highschool and trying to predict the deferral rules as to who gets out of the way when students pass eachother walking home on the footpath (facial hair can trump size). It was news to me that women aren't attuned to this contest and don't play.

In an attempt to clarify what I object to tonally speaking though, is that when it was explained to me that 'men think they control public spaces' it was explained in exactly those words, which are wrong. Assuming control of some public space is for the most part no more an exercise in conscious thought than trying to get your shower's temperature just right. In fact I'm pretty sure the conscious brain isn't fast enough to handle the task, possibly why the kids formally diagnosed with aspergers get bullied so readily, lacking the social intuitons to navigate this contest.

Thus telling someone what they are thinking (deliberate oppression) when they witness their own thoughts as 'that wall looks good to lean against' to me just invites men to throw up a wall, because feminist descriptions of oppression almost never describe the lived experience of oppressing in so far as those kinds I can relate to. Admittedly the task of figuring out what thoughts drive behavior is to me impossible, but rarely do I see the concession, let alone explicit acknowledgement that the thoughts described are or are possibly not conscious ones.

Leaving a tone that I experience as descriptions of thought phenomena I know not to exist. This experience serves to explain to me why I come across educated thoughtful young men that feel inclined to share with me refutations of phenomena like mansplaining or manspreading.

Here selected with confirmation bias is a specific example of an article that possesses the academic tone I love to hate. Chosen simply because it was the first I found, and for no other reason. Though I feel I've read many articles in this exact tone, and I'm sure there are more, I would also not assert that this represents feminist writing definitively or generally, nor is the form exclusive to feminists, just that this is the domain I tend to collide with this written behavior most often.

The article 'has all the answers' I'm willing to accept that the history of male oppression of women has resulted in a felt need by feminist writers to try and present ironclad cases backed by research and citations so as to block the male part of the audience from poo-pooing what's presented much as all debaters try to preempt rebuttals of their opposition.

I discovered though, that what academics rigorously set about determining they know through years of primary, secondary research and literature reviews tends to produce poor descriptions of reality in the soft sciences.

Which made comedian Bill Burr a discovery, watch his Conan appearances on Caitlin Jenner or stand up bits about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods, or Rhianna and Chris Brown and you see a tone that I feel is more engaging and entertaining. The opposite of the academic tone.

Bill Burr suspects he is wrong, demonstrates humility regularly and quite articulately describes his struggles to hear the feminist message. I'm not quite sure how to describe his tactics, just state my own preference for listening to a dumb guy trying to figure out the answers while suspecting he is wrong than to a smart guy who is confident he has all the answers and here's what I need to know.

Hayek observed in 'the fatal conceit' that intelligent people tend to overvalue intelligence. A suscinct explanation of why I find all progressives annoying, but I suspect it can translate to academics overvaluing academia and subsequently/mathematically undervaluing practice. Yogi Berra said 'in theory, theory works in practice. In practice it doesn't.'

The rationale I believe that I do not conversely overvalue practice and undervalue theory is that I go to the martial artists for practitioner bedrock, the practices where if your theories are wrong you die and don't get to theorize.

Yes, to move from describing my complaint and owning my point of view to stating MY preferred solution, it would be that somebody write with me in mind as an audience member, somebody who likes ambiguity rather than answers and doesn't respect academia. I would be engaged if the discussions appeared to me as stepping to me rather than watching someone drown in their own hubris. Basically I want my feminism written in this tone. Aka written like a winner.

Can Conformity be overcome?

I have a confession, while overseas I've allowed many personal disciplines to slip, including but not limited to not reading my facebook news feed. And for one particular reason:

Car-crash appeal.

Aka morbid curiosity. It began with the hashtag brexit incident. For those few that have randomly stumbled across this post. I come from Melbourne, Australia as does the vast majority of my social network and overwhelming majority of what fb algorithms allow me to see in my newsfeed.

I must also confess I don't actually know the pigeonholes, but my morbid fascination was around how such a large contingent of remote and uninformed people relative to an issue felt the need to opine on it. Obviously major world news brings with it a wealth of mildly amusing memes, and if it's a 'slow-life day'* sure share a joke.

But the amount of people opining and attempting perhaps to inform me about the brexit honestly baffles me and makes me a little sad. Flash forward not a fortnight and I woke up to the close of polls on election day, a process I'm sufficiently removed from that I've really enjoyed not having to hear anything about the election at all. The early election is a holiday bonus to me. And please don't worry about educating me on our nations preferential voting system and campaign contribution for first preference votes and all of that, I know it, and I am still glad to be spared the inconvenience of voting, in much the same way as buying cheap shoes in a foreign country is a perk above the sunk cost of spending hundreds of dollars on a flight.

What I ravenously picked over my newsfeed for was that which would satiate my appetite for conformity. And I found it in the democrasausage. The overwhelming coverage given to its presence or lack of at a polling station was the common thread to my newsfeed.

Now I'm often described as a cynic or at the very least cynical, whether I accept the charge or not, I get pegged with it and functionally it means that my opinions and observations can be immediately dismissed because everyone knows cynics are bad and that Oscar Wilde quote.

But for the record I'm aware that democrasausage is just a bit of good fun, an accessible way to celebrate Australian irreverence during the solemn duty of voting. At worst celebrating a sausage in bread, and how united everyone is in doing so is a slippery slope argument for Australian Nationalism. I don't think the progressives though are going to slip down that slope though. They'll be back on the streets of Fitzroy looking for 'authentic' Kim Chi before the votes are tallied.

What fascinates me is the inability of technology to transform our lives. We should be, thanks to social media living in an unprecedented age of self awareness, and perhaps we are. What sparks my curiousity is that we behave as if we don't.

Fb changes are most often unwelcome to fb users, and full disclosure, my battle to not install fb messenger is still ongoing, and I'm still hashtag winning. One change I did welcome though was the little box in the upper right hand corner of browser based fb that told me what was trending.

It was a handy salient guide on what not to post about. If the number one trending topic is the x factor finale then that box told me it was covered, for the first time in history (as far as I know) I had something that informed me what topics my opinion was most devalued on. Imagine if you will, planning a holiday overseas and seeing a table of currency exchange rates. Like a true economist lets assume you are indifferent to which country you holiday in, you can see plainly that your money is worth 10 times as much in China as it is in the UK (even post Brexit vote).

The foreign currency market is actually a shitty analogy because it is far more complicated than what 'trending' tells us. Trending tells us how many voices are talking about the same shit, I'm asserting of course that despite all the marketing material out there, social media is not where conversation takes place. Trending tells us what people are shouting, not conversing about. It tells us simply on what topics our opinion is worth dick all.

I don't feel like I was ever particularly prone to posting topical world news related status updates, but admittedly I'm not going to go validate that feeling by trawling through my data. What I'll simply say is that I appreciate the reminder 'trending' gives me to keep statuses personal or fantastical.

I've sited many times the fantastic art/social anthropological project of exactitudes
The Amsterdam based photography project exploring the phenomenon of why people in expressing themselves wind up dressing exactly the same.

This is what I see in the newsfeed, and the interesting paradox offered by the trending/self-awareness age we live in. So I'm a contrarian, my behavior is pretty predictable, whatever people on aggregate find most interesting I find least interesting.

Attention being focused though, as a practice it's easy to determine what is most interesting to the aggregate, but the inverse doesn't really work, there's a multitude of thing people aren't interested in at all. Just like there's millions/billions of people who shae the title of 'world's poorest person' vs the one title holder of 'world's richest person'

What though if there was conformity around contrarian thinking. If you reading this were persuaded to follow my practice of never posting about anything that was 'trending' and this idea went viral?

Well nothing could ever be 'trending' if everyone was anti-trend. Which historically has been a trend before with the rebellious hippies (who all dressed the same) and the punk rockers (who all dress the same) and returning to the springtime of my youth - grunge (who all dressed like lesbians still do) which is to say that being anti-conformist generally results in conformity.

Alternatively though, if everyone actually just kept their status updates and tweets personal, local and possibly non-topical, the trending threshold could be theoretically set real low - like 3-5 people discussing the same thing could be the trendingest topic in the world (presumably all the guests at a dinner party)

But if I can wax cynical, that low threshold is probably only ever going to be a theoretical one. My suspicion is that we are actually on average, not very self aware.

When we watch a Jon Oliver or Seth Myers clip on youtube explaining the Brexit to us, feel a swell of emotions and log onto social media to share that emotion, we don't seem to catch ourselves and laugh saying 'oh gee whiz, I'm acting like a 12th century village peasant running to the town square/tavern whatever to repeat the news I just heard out on a country road, and not like a person living in the 21st century who watches entertainment content not even intended for me as an audience from half a world away through means available to 98% of people I can personally reach in a medium that applies algorithms to ensure that not only I but everyone connected to me tend to see content that already agrees with their opinion. What a quaint waste of my time.' 

It doesn't happen and it probably won't. I will remain fascinated by conformity in the light of self-awareness though because there is no answer and I can't relate to those who derive some small pleasure or comfort to conforming.

I'm sure also there is an exactitudes set for me, my tribe of people who have somehow wound up all dressing the same despite no coordination whatsoever. I'm sure this post has been written and posted by people other than me over recent weeks and years also.

I'd just rather spend an hour writing this than 30 seconds posting a link about the brexit or how my vote is never wasted in the Australian Federal election.

And I'm going to eat whatever the hell I want today. My vote's going towards hamburgers.


*a day where nothing of particular interest happened in your daily actual or mental life.

The Interview

A disadvantage of taking a flight at 2.40am out of Melbourne is that when going through customs you get 'randomly' selected for everything they can throw at you, because you are just about the only person going through customs.

One thing I've never had before is a police officer stepping out after I clear customs and he asked me a bunch of questions about my trip. I was wondering as a lone traveller with occupation 'artist' etc if I fit some profile, and it was the only time in all the 6 month lead up to my trip this officer was the first to question what I was doing.

Afterwards, assuming that I had passed the test, whatever it was and I should have because I have no other agenda aside from exactly what my trip is.

It occured to me though that nobody had questioned my trip on psychological grounds. I mean, I had a good life, sitting in a studio eating doritos and watching tv, taking it easy for 8 months a year and working intensely 4 months a year, which is ideal for me. I had good friends, an easy job. Shit was going on. I'd worked hard to get that life.

Then last week I basically dismantled it, left my studio, my job and flew out of the country to spend my savings. Hitting the reset on the whole thing. I mean I don't anticipate losing my friends. But why? Nobody questioned my sanity. I was able to say, that lacking responsibilities I was able to answer the why question. But really was it sane for me to do what I'm doing?

My rationale is that the comfort of my life was getting dangerous. That old philosophical problem of when a few stones become a pile. It isn't one, or two, or three, but eventually you get an ambiguous number of stones that make up a pile, but even if you empirically literally added stone by stone until somebody said stop, that number you had would not be a definitive answer.

So too, at 32 there was no real problem with continuing my lifestyle, as is, for anotyher day, a few more weeks, a couple of years maybe. But one day it would have become sad. I had to blow it up, and I was never going to make that call for myself. No, tohm of 6 months ago had to make that call for myself.

So when I come back, I'll be changed, probably slightly, and I'll have toi rebuild. Hopefully something better.

Collaborated

Today is a new day. Today I am someone who has succesfully collaborated with another artist. It is a weight off of my mind.

Age of the Anxious

Today, needing something to get me to sit at my studio desk for the last ten minutes to get the last drawing of the day done, I started watching the series 'Luke Warm Sex' on ABC iView ('A' for Australian in this case)

I like it, and I like the host. Having just seen anomalisa Kaufman's latest film, I've now seen two things in quick succession that are positively dealing with people who are awkward at sex.

Now, I should disclose, I have a gripe. I'm tired of awkward protagonists. Put them away. My overwhelming feeling after I watched season one of Mr Robot, was that the main character was shitty, more so than the shitty twist (spoiler alert it's Tyler Durden) in an otherwise entertaining and interesting show.

I found that character shitty because he was a drug dependent dude that had social anxieties. But I understand the rise of these anxious protagonists that are only going to populate TV screens as much as they dominate slice-of-life indie comics now. Because we live in an age of anxiety, and it doesn't seem like the one-eyed-man is king.

Interestingly, this podcast from YANSS corelates the sudden explosion of interest in mindfulness to the rise of the smart phone - and posits that it has become a necessity because we for the first time in the western world we have an anxiety inducing addictive device in our pocket at all times. Which was interesting.

To jump about again, (and I don't know if I'll be able to circle back) I was watching a clip from the Late Show with Stephen Colbert where he took a Myers-Briggs personality test. Nothing about that is relevant except that it reminds me of a common failing of personality tests - Myers-Briggs describes the stable behaviors that make up a 'personality' being that 'we are what we do' and as such it measures preferences. The common failing of having your own personality described is that you focus on your personality whether it is one of the 16 nuanced personalities of Myers-Briggs or one of the more general 4 personalities of most quick-and-dirty and generally reliable personality tests administered in many business settings - is that it's just preference, it's how you tend to behave. That's what your personality is, it isn't a medical condition other people need to be sensitive to so if a test describes you as a task-oriented extrovert, doesn't mean everyone else should get the fuck out of your way.

What it means is that you are going to get tripped up in predictable ways if you fail to adapt, which is to say, work on adjusting your non-preferential behaviors in order to accomodate other people's preferences. That's where a lot of personality tests fail - to really drive home the point that you need to adapt your behaviors where your personality lets you down. Everyone will have to even with the weakest preferences.

In the same way consider this:


This video, like Mr Robot, left me with a shitty impression. Because even though I too wish that Airlines would fucking get rid of the reclining capacity of any cattle-class seats, it's perplexing to me both that these features exist and how adamant passengers can be on reclining as soon as their ass hits the seat. As a person who can be awkward but would never use the word 'awkward' to describe myself - the world should not be catering to awkward people. Awkward people need to actually engage the world until they aren't awkward anymore.

Conversation is a skill, a practice, it can be practiced and you can get better at it over time. Joining a group is a skill that can be learned, everything social can be learned. 'Neuroplasticity' the amazing scientific breakthrough that discovered that practice results in changes in the brain. Resulting in us having a fancy name for the word practice.

But it has also been on the backs of discovering the brain is more changeable that many people assume. Such that I posit that 'Awkward people' don't exist, just people who got discouraged and gave up early on the necessary practice required to attain social competence and confidence.

So I don't like Mr Robot's sexy protagonist that does drugs to stave off his depression and anxiety while working for psuedo-anonymous hacker group trying to take down corporate something something-blah-blah. Interesting TV yes, good for my mental health no.

But I don't mind an awkward person like Luke McGregor hosting Luke Warm Sex, it's perfect because he's actually getting homework and shit to practice and doing shit to get comfortable with sex and have better sex. That's better than the ABCs other show 'Redesign My Brain' interesting though it is, featuring a handsome can-do go-getter amassing a carbon footprint to demonstrate in seemingly the most expensive way possible that neuroplasticity is actually just practice shit and you'll get better at it.

It's hard to say that watching a successful graphic designer supposedly improve his creativity is more therapeutic than luxurious, whereas watching Luke meet a group of nudists and how often he apologizes during a ten minute segment for who he is and for wearing clothes or not wearing clothes or not being in shape etc. It's clear that this guy is doing what almost nobody I feel, is recommending, which is rather than accommodating anxiety, overcoming it.

Anti-Porn

It is hard to defend the porn industry as it exists, and I certainly would throw in with those who advocate individuals quit porn. However, I am not generally a consumer activist. To me, pornography is simply a good habit for an individual to break. I could almost expect some period of porn curiosity to be indicative of healthy sexual development, particularly in young teenagers. The caveat attached to almost is that the standards of pornography are not static, I personally feel the on camera misogyny has increased over my lifetime of pornography consumption.

I got told by a friend that some study had found that close to 100% of pornographic video depicted some form of violence against women. I would refute that from personal experience, but only if using a narrow definition of 'violence' include spitting (even for lubrication purposes) and manhandling and yeah, pretty much 100%. It would still be very high if you narrowed the definition to include violence that appears part of 'rough play' because even as play, it doesn't matter, you are depicting violence.

But consumer activism I reject, also an end goal of eradicating the supply of pornographic content seems unfeasible and impractical. Addressing the existing problems of the porn industry, is going to be really difficult one way or another. Consider by analogy the problem of music piracy, I don't believe that abolishing digital theft is ever going to be feasible. Providing legal alternatives to piracy like iTunes thru to Spotify style streaming services are not ideal but are going to be similar forms of solutions to those that are the problems of the porn industry.

For example the post-porn pornstar career. As far as I can discern as an observer, the biggest improvements made regarding the negative legacy of being a porn star, have been in de-stigmatizing the adult industry. (a process that comes with it's own new problems). But I'm sure I'm repeating myself blog wise, but for me the porn industry calls into question the entire concept of consent. Putting on my economist hat (for illustrative purposes, economists should generally not be listened to) trying to figure out the wage at which a young actress should book a shoot at is quite a difficult undertaking.

You'd need to consider your industry appropriate working lifespan, and then forecast your post working income requirements. Also your medical expenses given a calculation of the occupational risks. Potentially you could offset this by the expected value of fringe benefits derived from your celebrity - basically your ability to profit from your fan base. Reducing the stigma of being a pornstar may for example increase the expected wages earned in your post-porn career, meaning that pornstars of the future may accept less wages. Then you would have to figure out the supply and demand premiums of specific acts you are agreeing to in shoots.

I would extend full credit that most young actresses intuitively understand that work as a porn actress should be compensated at much higher rates than work as a waiter. But as an economist my suspicion is that earning $1500 for a days work as an 18 year old, is actually not much money. But I have no idea how much money for a shoot is enough to compensate an individual for the costs/risks of doing that shoot. I sincerely doubt an 18 year old (or 17 year old making bookings for their 18th birthday) is capable of figuring out these complex equations.

And that's just the money, economists in reality simply assume that the market has determined the most efficient wage that all the rational individuals mutually consent to. We as a species though, are all afflicted with a really poor ability at 'affect forecasting' or predicting future emotional states. It's why we believe our new car will make everything better forever, but after two weeks we stop noticing any of the differences between it and the old one. Or why so many marriages end in divorces. It's also how a lot of young girls sign up to star in porn, and 6 years later are anti-porn advocates. Mainly though, to me it throws a cloud over the concept of 'consent' because it fundamentally questions whether an individual knows how the decision they are making is going to affect them emotionally for the rest of their life.

Here is a string of spaghetti I will throw at the wall as a suggested fix. Make the porn industry, or agents, cover the healthcare costs of the actors and actresses they employ including mental health cover for up to 10 years post their retirement from the industry. Or if not outright, at least the health insurance. The target being not just to improve the welfare of those working in front of camera, but to erect a cost to exploitation. At the moment an agent can recruit a large number of vulnerable teenagers, book them solid until they are used up or burnt out, at little to no cost. They can treat their talent like light bulbs.

Better yet, utilise the same accreditation/regulation scheme for mental health as they do sexual health. I would suggest, have a mandatory requirement that all adult industry actors complete 6 months to a year of psychotherapy before they can shoot. And similar to sexual health, if an actor is found by their therapist to be a sadist or self-destructive etc. It should disqualify them from shooting just as syphilis would.

Consider the current industry. Somebody of age and that can prove a clean bill of sexual health can book a shoot for tomorrow to star in a 'gang-bang' scene. That means it is an open avenue to people who are vulnerable because of finances and also vulnerable due to trauma or mental health issues. That many adult actors have histories of abuse I don't doubt. But again as the stigma reduces I find it increasingly possible that more women may enter the industry with no history of abuse. Here is one of the points where I find Anti-porn campaigns make a common tactical error, they will have former industry members report that 'almost all' actresses and actors have histories of abuse, and 'almost all' are often high and dissociated during their shoots.

Doubt is all that's sufficient to change the viewing experience, and I personally feel it would be much more effective if former adult-industry anti-porn campaigners spoke exclusively for themselves. That one self-medicating former abuse victim can enter the industry substantiates a problem that needs addressing, it is not a stronger argument to generalize.

I feel even with non-nude modelling careers, it would be interesting to see a study that tried to identify from the photo output at what point the models start depending on cocaine to perform their job. Prior to quitting porn myself, I feel there were a few actresses where I could see written into their facial features a dependency on some drug of choice.

Thus the current industry has a current solution to the problems that arise from affect forecasting leading young people into consenting to unforeseen costs. Self-medication through drugs. There's an interview with former porn actress Jessie Rogers that is actually not good enough to embed here, largely because the interviewer did more talking than asking. But she did make some succinct illuminating statements. The first being that to earn the kind of money touted by the craigslist ad she responded to an actress would more or less have to book shoots every day of the month. Also that that was only possible with an agent, however the agent would take a cut of your fees, meaning the figure was still inflated (yet, that inflated figure was used to recruit her into the industry). The second major point was that she was still paying medical bills from her brief time as an adult actress.

Thus despite the high wages, given the equally high workload, the high incidence of medical expenses (in the US's admittedly terrible health care system) meant that she acquired debt rather than savings as a result of her work in the industry.

My hypothetical reforms, would no doubt drastically change all the equations currently used in the industry. However being that they represent drastic changes, they are highly unlikely to be adopted, and they still have limitations.

Though an advocate of psychotherapy, I would earnestly say, it is pretty ineffective. Where it is of great effect, is in making salient our issues rather than resolving them or relieving them. To me there is a huge difference between being an alcoholic and not being aware that your are and being an alcoholic and being aware that you are one.

Also, such reforms inevitable create demands for workarounds to reduce costs. Thus maybe you wind up with a sudden influx of 'specialist' psychologists, that are great at doing bullshit sessions and signing off on forms for a small fee. In much the same way that Australia's permanent visa requirements fertilised the ground for a bunch of bullshit 'schools' to certify people in whatever helped them land a visa at exploitation prices.

The thing is, the current porn industry is problematic and unethical in practice. I can't jump on bandwagons such as 'all porn is rape' and many anti-porn arguments to me seem so fallacious as to be counterproductive. I also simply believe that the demand is clearly there, and attempts to eradicate such an industry no matter how better off we'd all be in its absence are unlikely to succeed. Or by comparison, as likely to succeed as the war on drugs.

Thus we are left with moving porn to ethical porn, and I'd rather see this achieved through top-down regulation rather than grass roots consumer activism. Simply because consumer activism is where you drive demand for vague and poorly defined non-legally binding terms like 'certified organic'. I know there are production houses engaged voluntarily in making ethical porn. I do not personally know enough to vouch for it having produced many successful prototypes.

But just because ethical porn may not exist, and the industry does not produce it, doesn't mean it can't exist and can't be produced by an industry. The challenge is in finding means to enforce ethical standards on producers in a manner that is more appealing than ignoring those standards, or going black-market. In other words its shifting costs around, to create an ethical practice and incentivise ethical behavior, without threatening profits sufficiently that the industry collapses.

For example, assuming you like me feel moving the cost of injury to the actors off the actors themselves and onto the production companies is a step towards ethical porn, say California introduces this as a legal requirement but Florida does not. Adoption of this standard will eat into the bottom line of the production companies, they then need to decide to pay the cost of being ethical or paying the cost of relocating to Miami. I would dare say you are comparing some relatively negligible one of cost of relocation, vs a not insignificant ongoing cost. And the US is fucked because State rights mean it's hard to get a coast to coast regulation on a non-constitutional issue.

Having said that, I believe it to be the best way to address the problems inherent to the porn industry.

As for 'consumer activism' I'm never going to believe in having conversations to try and mobilise bazillions of nodes in a network of consumers to all switch off a product as the best and most effecient way to address real world problems. What I can say is that any individual is simply intrinsically better off without porn in their life. It is a behavioral addiction, and the adverse effects are in my own case quite noticeable. By contrast quitting porn (insofar as one can in the western media culture) has had quite noticeable benefits. I'd recommend it.