At the end of 2009, 158 Associated Press sports editors voted on the Female Athlete of the Year. Serena Williams was the well deserved winner, with three doubles (with sister Venus) and two singles Grand Slam titles in the year.
The only issue with this? The runner up was a female horse.
Meanwhile over at Public Address, the normally sensible Russell Brown is incensed by the writing of Guardian columnist and self-proclaimed radical feminist, Julie Bindel.
Russell quotes her invitation to cute straight girls as an example of her patronising attitudes to those with differing attitudes to her:
Come on sisters, you know it makes sense. Stop pretending you think lesbianism is an exclusive members’ club, and join the ranks. I promise that you will not regret it.
There are many, many reasons to find Julie Bindel offensive – and to his credit, Russell does pay full attention to her ongoing trans-hatred – but teasing straight people is not one of them.
I worked with Julie for six months at the Poppy Project. Handed her job over lunch with my boss, she proceeded to alienate our alliances with women working in prostitution by fervently proclaiming her own views on the matter.
She also regularly stole our lunchtime conversations – I worked with some brilliant women – for her Guardian articles. I often wondered if she taped us, the prose was so word-perfect. Thankfully not any of the articles Russell takes issue with 😉
Let’s play politics. If you were a politician, how would you treat the domestic violence It’s Not OK campaign?
It has huge public recognition, and literally hundreds of community based initiatives with sports teams, schools, churches, community groups, ngos. Family violence reports have rocketed, Women’s Refuges see women earlier in their relationships, more violent men have started stopping violence programmes because they recognise how they are behaving is a problem.
If you’re Paula Bennett at the end of 2009, you can it, to concentrate on just one ethnicity, Maori. Such a shame non-Maori abusers fail to realise they don’t perpetrate domestic violence – Sophie Elliott might still be alive.
How about this though? The Ministry of the Environment “letting go” all 12 of its communications team, at the same time as……the Copenhagen fiasco rolls out. Anyone would think National didn’t want a well-informed public when it comes to environmental issues.
I can’t link to this, because the media did not cover it. They are still busy, it seems, buying the myth of the bloated public sector. Thanks to Pundit for these figures, which don’t include those employed by state owned enterprises:
And New Zealand’s environmental record in terms of cows and their contribution to climate change? Blown into the shade by McDonalds, that bastion of capitalism-with-a-heart, who are carrying out a three year piece of research to reduce the impact of cheeseburgers. That’s 3.1 kg of carbon dioxide per burger for all you Macs fans.
Douglas turns Roxxxy on.
But my absolute favourite weird news of 2009/10 goes to Douglas Hines. He’s made a robot for sex called Roxxxy.
The real aim, he said, is to make the doll someone the owner can talk to and relate to. “Sex only goes so far – then you want to be able to talk to the person,” Hines said.
The phrases that were demonstrated were prerecorded, but the robot will also be able to synthesize phrases out of prerecorded words and sounds, Hines said.
She’s not just a doll to put his penis in, after all. Ain’t love grand?
Which reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Warren, and his voice activated sex-bot. Programmed to love him, she feels pain if she disobeys one of his orders.
Douglas Hines better hope his fate is less severe than Warren’s in the feminist world that is Buffy. Admittedly Warren graduated to killing women.*
My resolution for 2010, more blogging.
Happy New Year 🙂
*Just for those anti-feminists with no sense of humour, while I detested Warren, he’d meet a different fate in my feminist world. He and Douglas Hines would be locked away together, negotiating the delights of mutual consensual sex with a real human being.
LudditeJourno 
