YOU have to wonder about all these people accusing pop culture — and now high art — of sexualising teenagers. Were they never adolescents themselves? Did they never play a saliva-charged game of spin the bottle or slip a tentative hand down the front of their pants in shame and wonderment?
Because, like it or legislate [...]
Archive > October 2008
Bad puberty, evil puberty
Find of the month
As the culture wars, the black armband wars and the whether-or-not-to-memorise-nine-times-tables-at-school wars rage on, one venerable Australian institution is quietly breathing new life into the study of history.
The National Archives of Australia’s main brief is to preserve Federal Government records. While this may not sound particularly titillating, a closer look at its colossal collection reveals [...]
Pimp my penal code
THE law books of most countries are like crumbling inner-city terraces: their lino curls, their chimneys sag and their walls crack into hellish abysses whenever there’s too much rain or not enough.
Thanks to a mishmash of additions and subtractions, the average legal system is best described as a quaint little fixer-upperer and is in [...]
The Rapid Data Rapidman 1208LC to the rescue
AUSTRALIAN schools are supposedly under attack from a swarm of sinister postmodernites armed with educational photos of Elle Macpherson’s underwear.
These Foucault-snorting punks have no respect for traditional Rs such as reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic and ‘rictly ‘ronological history. They won’t rest until Shakespeare is removed from high schools and replaced with a couple of spam mails.
[...]
All funged up
AS a teenager in the rainbow region of the NSW north coast, I binged briefly on new age mysticism, the hippie adolescent version of alcopops.
One unforgettable weekend in the early ’80s, I attended a reincarnation workshop where everyone discovered they had been an axe murderer or the victim of an axe murderer in a previous [...]
Wanted: One nanny state
IF you’re downwind of Doug* you can smell him before you see him.
Partly because the main road he sleeps beside is one of those icy, inner-city wind tunnels, but mostly because he reeks.
If Doug’s seen a roof over his head or bar of soap lately, he’s hiding it well.
Everything about him is black: his minced [...]
Let me leave in peace
DEAR sections 18 and 31c of the NSW Crimes Act,
The other night my toddler let off one of those midnight poo missiles that sprayed detritus as far as the nose could smell. There was poo in her pyjamas, poo dripping from Elmo and poo smeared cave-girl style over the bedroom wall.
Scraping up someone else’s shit [...]
The love that dare not vroom its name
I’M in a destructive relationship. I know it’s selfish and immoral and not doing anyone any good but I can’t help it. Every time I try to break it off, the thought of living without the object of my love and lust feels impossible.
So my oversized inner-city car stays right where she is in my [...]
Bad brain days
WE live in skin city, a place where no billboard, bus rear or fried chicken protest is complete unless someone (usually someone with a Pam-tastic set of knockers) gets their kit off.
Yet in the peep show of contemporary pop culture, one incredibly sexy organ remains coyly hidden from view. Its not allowed out of the [...]
Titty bar politics
ONE of my favourite Sydney watering holes has decided to try to improve business by hiring half-naked bar staff.
It’s hard to miss the towering, new “lingerie waitress” sign out the front. But the drum-playing academics and pierced L-plate lesbians who usually inhabit Pub X still look shocked when redheads in rectal-floss G-strings suddenly materialise [...]
