The nice guy (TM)

I was going to write something on the "the bitch made me do it" defence offered up in the trial of Sophie Elliot, but I see Anjum has already beaten me to it. Thank christ, that case was really too horrible for words.

So instead I'm going to go on bad teen movie nostalgia trip.

Zuh? You may be wondering what the hell does a gruesome murder have to do with bad teen movies.

The answer would be the "Nice Guy."

Many a teen movie is built around the idea of the "Nice Guy." There's the "Nice Guy" who wants to get things going with beautiful girl who only dates arseholes until one day she finally sees the light and they get together. ike Preston Myers in Can't Hardly Wait and poor old Duckie in Pretty in Pink if John Hughes had got the ending he wanted. Alternatively we have the nice guy who only wants the beautiful girl who is a total bitch and treats him badly until one day he sees the light and turns to his supposedly less attractive, but much more lovely in personality, overlooked female best friend. Think of Emilio Estevez hooking with up with Ally Sheedy's character in the Breakfast club or Some Kind of Wonderful the lesser-known of John Hughes teen movie classics.

We have all at some point another heard the rantings of self-professed "Nice Guys." They'll complain ad museum about how "Nice Guys finish last" and that women must WANT to be treated like shit, because he, the "Nice Guy," has failed repeatedly in relationships. Excuse me while I go hurl. It is such an incredibly arrogant thing to claim, "I’m such a good person, and she never chose me so she's the arsehole." But apparently the idea that the problem may in fact be with the "Nice Guy" never enters their head. I suppose it is because they are too busy being "nice."

So aunty ex-expat is going to offer up a valuable piece advice for all those self-described "nice guys." Being "nice" does not make up for stuff like lacking a personality, a sense of humour, confidence and humility. If you have one bad relationship after another, the only common denominator is YOU.

Also nice guy or not, if you’re in a relationship romantic or otherwise where the like where one person is far more adoring than the other, then you’ve got to expect that the results may not be pretty. From the perspective of the person who is taking, it doesn’t necessarily occur to them that they "owe" you something especially if you haven't clearly communicated your desires and expectations. You can’t really be that bitter when you’ve put yourself in a position to be trodden over. If you don't want to "just be friends", why not grow a spine and tell your object of affection that? There's a 50% chance she might say yes, but if she says no, then you've saved yourself all that emotional energy from chasing a girl that to borrow another bad movie title, just isn't that in to you.

The truth of the matter is if you’re truly a "nice guy" you don’t need these kind of excuses. The guys I know are neither "nice guys" or "bad guys", merely "guys." However, the truly nice guys that I’ve met, regardless of their romantic experiences, good or bad, are STILL nice guys, not closet misogynists looking for an excuse to cover up their own romantic incompetence (or should that be impotence?).

Honestly, I think the adage should be changed to nice guys who don't communicate their desires properly but still expect to get laid finish last.

A Big Question about Big and Important Matters

So it struck me last night when I was at a restaurant that had two identical toilets - one for the ladies, the other for the gentleman. Do we actually need sex-segregated toilets anymore?

Sure when we are talking about big numbers of people, like at airports or shopping malls, but when there are just a whole bunch of individual cubicles and a sink anyway do we need to separate the girl pee and the boy pee?

Thoughts kindly!

Quick hit: Rural Female Bachelor challengers

Spotted on Scoop:

The search is on for the 2009 Fieldays Rural Bachelor of the year. Entries are now open to single men from all over the countryside. Eligible bachelors who think they’ve got what it takes, should be aged over 18, work in the rural sector and exude understated kiwi charm.

Entries close 18 May, 2009. Following preliminary judging, just eight finalists will go on to compete for a incredible suite of prizes valued at over $15,000, the coveted Golden Gumboot trophy, and the title of Fieldays Rural Bachelor of the Year.

Fieldays Rural Bachelor of the Year takes place at NZ National Agricultural Fieldays, held 10-13 June 2009, at Mystery Creek. During the events four days; eight bachelor finalists will test both their rurally derived skills and country charisma in a number of competitive heats.

This year’s heats mark the exciting introduction of female bachelor challengers. For the first time ever, eight single women from the rural sector will be invited to challenge the blokes; in a duel of gender wit and farming skill during the Friday bachelor heats on 12 June. Following Friday’s battle of the sexes, all 16 contestants will be treated to dinner at Ohaupo’s Windy Ridge Café and Bar.
[my emphasis]

Click through for the rest.

I'm not quite clear on the role of the female candidates; it seems they exist to challenge the men? Maybe Homepaddock (who just turned one, hurrah!) has some ideas? The website mentions something about a Ladies Afternoon...

Quick hit: And this one is actually about hitting

Every wondered what Christian Domestic Discipline is? Ponder no longer:

What is CDD?

A domestic discipline marriage is one in which one partner in the marriage is given authority over the other, and has the means to back up that authority, usually by spanking.

A Christian Domestic Discipline marriage is simply a marriage set up according to Biblical standards.

Therefore, in a CDD marriage, the husband is the authority of the household.
The wife is submissive to her husband as if the Lord Himself was her husband.

The husband loves his wife as himself. He is to lead by example. He is to lay down his life for her.
The wife treats her husband with respect. She is to obey him, as long as what he directs her to do is not in opposition to God's commands.

He has the ultimate authority in his household, but this authority is tempered with the knowledge that he will answer to God for his actions and decisions.

He is to be the head of the home. She is to be the heart of the home.

He has the authority to spank his wife for punishment, but in real CDD marriages, this is taken very seriously and usually happens only rarely.

CDD is not a "magic pill", and we do not claim it will solve all marital woes. It is simply a tool which many couples feel is very effective in strengthening marriages. CDD is so much more than just spanking.

It gets better (by which I mean more absurd) but it might not be safe for work, unless you are self-employed.

Is it just me or is anyone else thinking "You Tarzan, Me Jane"?

Dusty satin top hat tipped graciously in the direction of Cynical-C.

Which type of woman is Facebook then?

If you're on Facebook, and you're still assimilating the new layout, you may have been bugged by the profusion of quiz results for your friends which are dominating feeds.

One that's been particularly irritating me is the"Which type of woman are you?" one, which seems to have produced a singular result for most of my friends. They are considered "Lovely Ladies," defined as:

You are lovely and caring. You help others and spread out a lot of sympathy. Your life aim maybe is to serve the people. But your weakness is that you forget about yourself, your own needs. All your time is hold back for your friends and family. You are always there for people in trouble. Ready for any emergency. You make a lot of sacrifices just to be a good human. But every woman has her needs, her longings and a destiny. Don't loose yourself in work or curing other people's souls. You will have your own problems in your life. Another problem is that you don't say your opinion when it's right and important to say it. People trample onto your soul if you are always so kind and lovely and helpful. They will play on you. Though you should try to relax more and enjoy your life, you should not loose the gift that was given to you to help others . Not everyone is created this way... You are uniqe and rare!

The result is illustrated with a photo of a serene younger woman leaning on the edge of the bath.

On the other hand I am an "Action (Wo)man", complete with picture of Lara Croft (who I think it is fair to say I do not resemble physically):

Wow, you are so tough! Other women admire you for this trait. They look up to you because you can keep up with the opposite sex. They want to have your athletic body, your strength and willpower. And every woman needs this - that's true. But you are unreachable. No guy could ever capture your heart. Maybe also because your heart got too hard. But don't exaggerate. Remember: You are a woman and woman reflect god's beauty and inner (emotional) strength, but not his physical strength. Show your beauty AND your strength! Sooner or later you will be in the know that inner power and self-confidence are more important in a woman's life than muscles. :) If you think you have to prove to the males that you are as strong as they are you will not only fail, you will recognize that it's comletely senseless because this is not your destiny. Men have this little bullshit growin in their head that says they always have to be stronger than the other men. Don't descend to this level. You're more worth than that. BUT: The world needs strong women, womankind needs you! Establish your strengths in the right way.

Give me, ah, strength.

I knew I shouldn't have done it, but I just wanted to see if I got Lovely Lady too, like most of my friends. I've yet to see any results other than Lara or Bathtime, has anyone got anything else? And have any of our male readers taken the quiz to reveal their inner woman?

For the 'Where do they come up with this crap? " file

Oi vey. If baby wigs to make sure our baby girls are living up to beauty standards enough to turn your stomach on the boys front we have misogyny for tots:



Which according to sideswipe is being sold in a Glenfield mall. Sometimes there really are no words.

Monday Funday: with bento boxes

Found via the March Netguide magazine, here's some amazing bento art.

My favourites were the Where the Wild Things Are box


and the gorgeous sheepy detail in the farmyard box:


And the woman who makes them also has a blog!

Women's bodies as novelty gifts II: Getting you, er, up in the morning

Last year Ezibuy had a Christmas present for the man who has everything - a pole dancing figurine which you plugged into your USB port and she twirled faster the faster you typed.

This year Jaycar brings us a Pole Dancer Alarm Clock:

The pole dancer is back! This little lady will make you wake up with a pole - in more ways than one. When the alarm goes, your personal pole-dancer goes into her routine, complete with light show and oh so funky music. A bit of wholesome entertainment for the man who has everything.

• Requires 3 x AAA batteries
• Backlit LCD
• Snooze function
• Dimensions: 120(W) x 200(H) x 100(D)mm

These are their words, in the online listing for the product, with my emphasis added. You cannot make this sh*t up.

I can't help wondering; what happens when you hit snooze?

Spotted in the Jaycar catalogue which came with yesterday morning's Herald, where the wording is somewhat tamer:

The pole dancer is back! When the alarm goes, your personal pole-dancer goes into her routine, complete with light show and fucky music.

And I should note the price is much higher in the catalogue than online.

Bizkit the Sleep Walking Dog

Not strictly feminist, but too frickin funny not to share.

Quick hit: Can't read a map? What are ya? A girl?

Apparently research tells us that women can't read maps. And men can. But men can't see small irrelevant objects around them, like socks on the floor, whereas women can:

The cliches that women can't read maps and men can't see things right under their noses seem to have been explained by science.

Researchers believe the reason the sexes differ is because of their specific roles in evolution.

Men had to hunt and stalk their prey, so became skilled at navigation, while women foraged for food and became good at spotting fruit and nuts close by.

The theory emerged from a study which looked at the different way in which men and women appreciate art.

Click through for the rest of the story.

This clearly explains why when I was in Berlin with a man of my acquaintance and we got hideously lost due to his poor map-reading skills it was because he's a woman in disguise and neither of us have realised it yet. Conversely I must secretly be a man in denial, due to my superior navigation skills.

Am I the only one who is confused about why this is still the subject of so much research and media reportage, and whole entire books?

On being the butt of the joke

I was on the bus this afternoon when I got a text from Julie (my co-blogger from The Hand Mirror):

Hey is everything ok? Farrar has mentioned something about u getting arrested this week

I replied:

What? Where? Only excitement I've had this week is getting a warrant for my car

Which reflected my thought process pretty exactly.

She called me (which was really good, because I have no credit on my phone) and said DPF had twittered that he was wondering if Maia was going to be arrested this week.

I didn't think I was going to be arrested this week. I couldn't think of any reason to be arrested this week as opposed to any other week. I tried to think of a protest that I might be going on, and I couldn't think of one. I've spent quite a lot of time challenging the police these last few years. I couldn't rule out that they'd arrest me for something related (maybe DPF had a source in the solicitor generals office).

I was nowhere near a computer and I was going to get home for hours. I wanted to see the context, check the news, find out what was going on, but I couldn't.

I texted a whole bunch of people, and waited nervously for replied. One friend rang me, and confirmed about the twitter: "I also checked the news and there's nothing breaking about anything you've been involved in, or anything you might have been involved in, or anything the police might have mistakenly thought you've been involved in."

He offered to ring DPF, and I said yes. At this point I just wanted to know what was going on.

A few minutes later my friend rang back, he no logner sounded concerned:

It's all right. I should have guessed. He was talking about Maia from Shortland Street

. And so now everyone is making fun of me.*

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. Pick from the following:

1. Try and avoiding sharing a name, or pseudyom with a character on a major Television show.*
2. Try to keep up with general knowledge and pop culture, you never know when you may need it.
3. Social networking sites have more pitfalls than you ever dreamed of.
4. It's better safe than sorry.

*They might be making a little less fun of me if I didn't sort of make a habit of this sort of thing. A while ago I thought there was a serious chance of being arrested any day (I'll leave long time readers of the blog to try and figure out when that might have been). I was living alone and didn't want to get arrested and no-one know that it happened. So each night I set up a text message to ten of my friends saying: "police here, if you don't have another text message in ten minutes assume I am arrested." (You know where this is going right?) But I was tired, I wasn't going to bed early enough and I was finding it hard to get up. My alarm would go off and I'd hit the snooze button. So I stumbled out of bed, picked up my cell phone and accidentally pushed one of the buttons.

I watched the little sending message screen, and I couldn't make it stop. While I was writing a text message explaining what happened, my phone kept beeping with replies, and my home phone rang. Opps

* Talking of which, one of those arrested in the police raids in 2007 is called Omar. I watched the Wire alone, but because I like to talk about TV when I watched it I sent random text messages to my friend Larry who had lent me the DVDs. I started to worry that if the police were collecting my text messages they could completely misunderstand "I love Omar, he fucks shit up."

It's raining menz

Courtesy of Luddite Journo I stumbled this evening across the MENZ. That would be Masculinist Evolution New Zealand, in case you haven't been hanging about in the men's rights activist parts of the interweb lately.

And boy oh boy is it a strange place. Luddite Journo highlighted the post of Justin Harnish, candidate for the Republic Part of NZ in the fine seat of Wellington Central. Mr Harnish would like a Ministry of Men's Affairs, an end to child support, and no more Family Court. See Luddsie Jay's post for more intriguing detail.

I had previously neglected to email our survey to the Republic Party candidates (laziness strikes again), so if you'll excuse me I'll be off to rectify that now.

So Krgyzstan then...

Undoutedly you all know about the stickers you put on your car to tell fellow drivers that you have a baby on board, are a learn driver or disabled. Apparently Krgyzstan has gone one better on the sticker front highlighting the dangers of teh ladiez drivr brining you this:



H/T Janes Daily Blah

Why are people dumb?

Campbell Live just ran a story about a young woman who'd had her puppy impounded and couldn't afford the $200 to have her pet released. At the end of the story, John Campbell advised that the phone had been ringing off the hook with people offering to pay the $200 on behalf of the puppy's owner.

If this young woman can't find $200 to release her puppy, she'll struggle to feed the growing dog, let alone pay its vet bills. I guess the people offering their money didn't think of that.

In the supermarket, I've regularly noted that the SPCA pet food donation bin is full, while the foodbank donation bin is pitifully empty. Why is that?

Monday Funday - with skirt-wearing sons

This is truly weird. It's all kinds of homophobic, woman-hating and mostly also pretty incoherent. But I don't think it's a parody...



Anyway, sometimes laughing at them is the best medicine for us all.

Found here.

Daddy sez, no bois in ur bed til u wed

I like to think of myself as reasonably liberal when it comes to the subject of sex. I believe that people to should be able to have sex with as many or as few people as they want, the should be free to have sex with people of either gender or any sort of prop they desire, they can even choose to not have sex at all if that is their thing. Quite frankly what goes in other peoples' bedrooms is none of my damn business. But every so often I see something on the internet that makes me think 'eewwh that's so weird and wrong and actually really creepy.'


Before I get accused of spending far too much time in the seedier parts of the internet, I first saw the story about Purity Balls in the New York Times a few months ago and have been meaning to write about it. But after Time magazine published their take on this weird phenomena I decided it was time to rant.

So what's a purity ball? Here's the basic gist of it: girls aged between about 4 and 18 get dressed up and attend a ball with their fathers.* They talk, they eat, and then the fathers read a vow "before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity." But wait there's more! After dinner comes a ballet performance, where ballerinas clad in white tutus drag in a large wooden cross, which they they then drape in white material and a crown of thorns. This is the point where the fathers and daughters process under crossed swords to kneel while the girls place a white rose, representing their purity, at the base of the cross.

There are many things I despise about the concept of purity balls but here's the worst one, the idea that a little girl is a delicate flower who needs male protection from the big bad world. WTF? I thought that feminism had flushed out the idea that fathers have ownership of daughter's bodies or has the Christian community been overrun by so many erect teenage penises that fathers feel they must shield their daughters from them?

Or could the actual problem not be with teenage boys or in fact teenage girls but with their fathers? In the articles the founder of the purity ball concept was not so much about daughters but about fathers who 'didn't know what their place was in the lives of their daughters.' I suppose on some level I can actually appreciate the sentiment of the fathers. As misguided as it seems, a big part of the evening is acknowledging that some fathers (for reasons that are sometimes beyond their control) often fail to have any meaningful involvement in their daughters' lives.

But the answer to this lack of involvement can't be found through trying to reassert patriarchal control over their daughters' sexuality? Surely there are other aspects of their daughters identity that fathers could use to connect with their daughters. Taking an interest in her ballet classes, rugby games or the books she is currently reading is a far more conducive to establishing the bonds needed to raise girls with the confidence, self-worth and street smarts to only go as far as she's ready to when her brain starts getting jolts of teenage hormones and huge helpings of peer pressure.

And what if she fails to remain pure? While the NYT article at least states that many teenagers who say they will remain abstinent will end up having sex before marriage, and they are far less likely to use condoms than their peers, Time seems relatively unconcerned since the girls are twice as likely to graduate from college albeit with a nasty case of herpes. Moreover what if girls 'purity' is sullied through rape? Doesn't the usage of the term 'purity' (as opposed to abstinence) with its associated stigma of the 'unpure' make that horrific experience so much worse?

But the biggest question I have in this process is where the hell are the mothers and sons? If staying a virgin until marriage is seen as being so important why is it only promoted to little girls? Oh that's right. Despite the whole she-bang being symbolically centered on the daughter's body, it's so clearly the men who are unable to keep it in their pants. As one of the dad attendees of the ball said,

"It inspires me to be spiritual and moral in turn. If I'm holding them to such high standards, you can be sure I won't be cheating on their mother."

It must be such a sacrifice for you to not cheat on your wife. So glad you're on top of that now despite all the other indiscretions you might have had before.

* Or step-fathers or even more freaky, their future fathers-in-law. Don't worry son, I got you a virgin!