Archive for the “Articles” Category
US-based toy retailer Toys"R"Us has been reprimanded for gender discrimination following a complaint filed by a group of Swedish sixth graders about the store’s 2008 Christmas catalogue. According to the youngsters, the Toys"R"Us Christmas catalogue featured “outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive”. Thumbing through the catalogue, 13-year-old Hannes Psajd explained that he and his twin sister had always shared the same toys and that he was concerned about the message sent by the Toys"R"Us publication. “Small girls in princess stuff…and here are boys dressed as super heroes. It’s obvious that you get affected by this.” – Read the full article at The Local
Hey Koes, it’s a pony! ;) Photo made by Cheatara
I’m well aware of what kind of comments will be posted by some of our readers but I don’t really care. I’m so sick of these stupid gender clichés. You like boys to be “boyish”? Well, good for you but that doesn’t mean they want to be boyish just because you or the society expects them to be. We should get rid of the whole concept of acting masculine or feminine. The case above isn’t really special for Sweden but I’m glad to see that this Swedish attitude comes to Germany too (even if some Swedes might already be annoyed by all the political correctness ;p).
UPDATE: Boing Boing had a post about this too earlier today and the first 2 comments there made my day. Sorry America, you just got pwned ;o) On a more serious note: Stop thinking of teenagers as brainless mutants, kthx.
52 Comments »
Posted by Josh~ in Articles, Reading, tags: UK
An ‘enterprising and creative’ 17-year-old with Asperger syndrome convinced British aviation officials that he was launching a new airline. Posing as a visionary global entrepreneur — his email .sig files read ‘American Global Group, 35 Countries, 22 Languages, One Team’ — he used phony websites and human engineering to arrange meetings with airport directors and book a local appearance for the 300-person US cast of ‘High School Musical.’
Don’t get a teen boy bored. He might come up with funny ideas.
Tait, who pretended he was in his twenties, even flew to Jersey to attend a 1½-hour long meeting with the director of its airport. Their talks were considered promising enough for a further meeting to be arranged, which was due to be held next week. Other air industry bosses found themselves dealing by telephone or e-mail with Tait’s fellow executives, David Rich and Anita Dash, who proposed to launch a cut-price Channel Islands-based airline servicing most of Europe… "Some of the things he said were the sort of things that were indicative that there might have been some substance to his claims," said Coupar. "If they were real then there would have been opportunities for us to expand our business and that’s not the sort of thing we are going to ignore."
Tait also made approaches, with varying levels of success, to other airlines, including Titan Airways and Aer Arann. When he made contact with Jersey airport, his patter was convincing enough to effect a 90-minute face-to-face meeting with Julian Green, the airport’s director, who said last night: "Jersey airport can confirm it has had discussions with Adam Tait over recent weeks about an ambitious network of services between Jersey, the UK and Europe. Full article at Times Online (Story via Boing Boing, Photo via Kloland)
7 Comments »
Britain has an unhealthy Relationship with its Children
As far as annoying, hackneyed phrases go, ‘political correctness gone mad’ takes the number one slot. But every so often you come across a verifiable fact which prompts you to blurt it out, unwillingly, in the same way you yell when you stub your toe. Health and safety regulations affecting children’s playtime usually do the job. Ashburton Junior School, for instance, managed to provoke a barrel-load of Daily Mail bile when it ordered children not to play in the playground 15 minutes before class in case they get hurt last year. Today, local government leaders have called on parents not to wrap their children up in cotton wool, in a carefully planned press campaign designed to rid the public of the idea that local councils are responsible for the layers of health and safety regulations which affect children.
It’s insane and hugely depressing that we even have to talk about this. It goes without saying that children’s playgrounds should have ‘adventure equipment’ –tree houses and zip wires and the like – without councils having to churn out proud press releases to go with them. But we do have to talk about it, and it all stems from our strange and unhealthy relationship with childhood.
As a country, we have a very weird relationship with children. We have turned them into a depository for our better nature. All children are now considered innocence and perfection rolled into one. While we – adults and young adults (now known commonly as hoodies) – are the opposite: evil-minded and untrustworthy. Obviously, adults are all potentially dangerous. But we have started to consider them as if they are innately dangerous. For the record, children are usually not angels. They are, in fact, as cruel and manipulative as any adult. They’re just cuter. Some modern psychology even sees them as far less moral than adults, their social brains having not been formed yet.
Read on…
In the 19th century, a German philosopher called Ludwig Feuerbach had an interesting theory on God. He said humans have a tendency to ascribe all their best qualities – compassion, kindness, love – to God and keep all their worst qualities – selfishness, hatred – to themselves. I’m simplifying to the point of inaccuracy by the way, but Hegelian philosophers make it difficult to summarise their ideas. It sometimes feels as if Britain has done this to its children. We have painted them in absurdly pastel colours, as perfect little angels, and begun to view adulthood as something inexplicably dark and worrying. We have paid a high price. More than a quarter of England’s primary schools now do not have a single male teacher, leaving 4,587 school staffrooms populated solely by women. People in the street are extra cautious even coming into contact with children, for fear of some mad accusation being made against them. The journey to adulthood has become a schizophrenic, jagged road in which our little angels are turned into threatening hoodies, a sort of sub-human faceless tribe dedicated to beating up old ladies.
The UK now regularly appears at the bottom of Unicef tables for child well-being across industrialised countries. Paradoxically, we have made our children less safe. When we distance childhood from adulthood, when we create a sterile space in between adults and children, we dis-incentivise well-meaning strangers from looking out for children in public. We make well-meaning adults think twice before they look after children walking down the street on their own. We prompt suspicion and mistrust in communities which previously did a perfectly good job of looking after children themselves.
Paedophilia – the outrage from which all of this emanates – is, scientifically, a kind of sexuality. It’s a very tragic sexuality, but a sexuality nonetheless. It’s unclear whether it can be treated, for many of the same reasons we cannot turn homosexuals into heterosexuals or visa-versa, even if we wanted to. We can enforce psychological counselling, and in some cases instigate pre-emptive incarceration if we believe someone will act on their urges. In many cases – but by no means all – the sufferer will be strong enough to resist their urges. What we cannot do – or should not do – is hand the issue over to the braying impulses of the mob. This can take the form of actual mobs, like that we saw when the News of the World irresponsibly published the names and details of convicted paedophiles in 2000, or the mob mentality of shrieking tabloid over-reactions. These merely simplify the issue and put children’s relationship with adults further into deep freeze. Parents become paranoid and that, in turn, ultimately makes children less safe.
Children are part of our culture, even if they must be protected from certain aspects of it. I’m the kind of person who generally believes Britain has much more to teach Europe than Europe has to teach us. But in this, we should take a lesson from how they go about things on the continent. Remember your last holiday in Spain or France or Italy? How children played outside in the restaurants and cafés at 11 at night, with their parents happily drinking wine beside them? In Europe, children are part of life, not a divorce from society. New parents do not withdraw into a parallel world where no fun can be had and late nights are a thing of the past. And childhood is not treated in the naive, improbably perfect way it is treated here.
When we talk of children like angels, and turn all adults into suspects, this is what happens; insane health and safety regulations, a reduction in male teachers – with all the absence of positive male roles that entails – and an increased danger to children from sexual predators because of the overly cautious approach adults now take to the young. The path we’ve walked down has taken us to a very strange place. There is a better way. We just have to get over our strange attitudes and incorporate children into society. They are not angels. They are just us, but earlier. We need to protect them. But we also need to stop losing our sanity over how perfect they are.
This comment was written by Ian Dunt for politics.co.uk and does not necessarily represent my opinion on all points he mentioned.
14 Comments »
Gaming companies are struggling with the issue of how to control the content in their games, without silencing a vocal minority of gamers. In many states, gay and lesbian couples can now marry, but they can’t talk about it online if publishers censor the very words used to describe their sexual orientation.
Why is the issue of sexual orientation so explosive that the very act of saying the word "gay" or "lesbian" is sometimes against the rules? Bioware found itself on the wrong end of this controversy when a community manager gracelessly began locking threads that discussed the issue, and then claimed that there simply were no gay or lesbian characters in Star Wars. Maybe those words don’t exist in galaxies far, far, away, but the characters often do: Bioware themselves created a game with a character who laid down with another woman as with a man. Sony was a part of a similar controversy after the words "gay" and "Jew" were edited out of Home, the company’s social online service for PS3 owners. And Microsoft made headlines when the company banned a player who self-identified as a lesbian, claiming any notice of sexual orientation was against the terms of service.
In some ways it’s unfair to take the world of gaming to task for its immature handling of gay and lesbian issues. After all, it’s hard to find a game that takes any kind of relationship seriously. This is an art form that knows how to show two people killing each other nearly perfectly, but seems to turn into a bunch of fifth-graders when dealing with a kiss, much less when that kiss is between two men or two women. It’s clear that something has to give, although companies only seem to pay attention after receiving the wrong kind of attention for their policies.
Read on…
4 Comments »
In a new trend spreading across America, teens are sending nude or semi-nude pictures to one another on their mobile phones in a practice called “sexting”. But what started out as risqué fun among adolescents has spread fast, and is starting to lead to serious consequences. Recently, teenagers have been arrested on child pornography – Read on…
Research conducted by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy last month revealed that 20% of teens in the States say they have sent or posted lewd photos or video of themselves. According to the national study, most teenagers who were sending the explicit messages were sending them to boyfriends or girlfriends, while others said they were sending the pictures in a bold move to secure a date, or to someone they had got to know online.
A new trend? Are you fucking kidding me? OK, I’ll let the Captain Obvious thing beside and focus on WTF!? We have talked about something similar in the milkboard just yesterday and since I’m a lazy butt I’ll just copy & paste what I’ve said there: First of all I think it’s strange how everything with someone under 18 is called child porn in the US & UK. I mean a 17 year old boy isn’t a child in any definition. I don’t know exactly about other countries but in Germany you’re called a "child" by law as long as you’re under 14. Besides that I see nothing criminal in a 15 year old boy making nude shots with his mobile phone for his girlfriend – but still he can get in trouble because he produced so called "child porn".
How is this protecting the boy? What’s next? Getting jailed for "self rape" when you get caught wanking? They tell you they want to protect the children but what they do is criminalizing them, it just makes no sense at all.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
But why, you will ask, are the politicians doing bullshit like this nevertheless? Well, here is a theory: Because they fear them. I read about that in an article in a blog written by a BBC reporter where the author cites a Finnish study about youth crime (the study isn’t accessible anymore unfortunately):
The argument is that economic globalisation has substantially eroded a state’s capacity to govern directly and so "intervention in the lives of socially deviant children" emerges as a "mechanism whereby the state attempts to establish or sustain its political authority". To put it another way, politicians demonise children in order to disguise their own weaknesses.
The youth, which still knows the meaning of freedom, could bring down the government, even the whole political system if they don’t suppress them and their lust for life? Are they creating a new era of Victorian prudery because they fear to reap what they sow by exploiting the whole planet to enrich a few while millions starve. Vilifying sex to protect the globalisation? Yes, it might sound melodramatic but in makes sense in a creepy way.
55 Comments »
Prolly not. The “initiation rituals” in this school are a little bit… strange, but to call it a “Sex Scandal” seems a bit over the top.
Concern over ’sex games’ at Swedish high school: Chocolate covered torsos and co-ed banana eating are just a couple of things troubling officials about new student initiation rituals at a basketball oriented high school in northern Sweden. — thelocal.se
Read the full article here.
I would say they had more fun in Denmark ,o)
No Comments »
Die traurigen Streber
Wo sind Kritik und Protest der Jugend geblieben? Die Angst vor der Zukunft hat eine ganze Generation entmutigt.
Artikel lesen
Als Rebellion noch möglich war
Von Athen und Sparta zu Lifestyle und Drogenproblemen:
Eine kleine Kulturgeschichte des Heranwachsens zwischen Anpassung und Widerstand
Artikel lesen
4 Comments »
The Telegraph reports that 70 students from the Queen Elizabeth School in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria, were joined by over 100 other youths to celebrate an end of term party by “having unprotected sex in a village square.” I wish they could have fun by replacing the alcohol with condoms *sigh*
Witnesses said that around 200 youths gathered in and around the village hall in Wray, Lancashire, which is a few miles from the school. The event, to celebrate the end of Year 11, had been organised by pupils, although the village hall committee had understood that an adult had taken responsibility for the booking. Alan Day, the village hall chairman, said: “All hell let loose at this event. The children were drunk to the eyeballs. They were having sex in the village square standing up.”
Read on…
1 Comment »
Chile’s disaffected ‘Pokemones’ don’t care much about politics. They’re too busy having sex – says Newsweek.
The teens call their public orgies ponceo. On a typical Friday afternoon in the Chilean capital of Santiago, hundreds gather in a leafy urban park for a few hours of sexual experimentation. Surrounded by passing strollers, they trade partners multiple times — mostly engaging in anonymous rounds of oral sex. When the party is over, no contact information is exchanged. Same-gender interactions are commonplace, as the lines between hetero- and homosexuality are blurred, partly by the alcohol and drugs consumed, but also by shifting social mores held by Chilean youth, in contrast to their conservative parents. “Ponceo is about having fun,” says Natalia Fernandez, a 15-year-old with pink hair and a pierced chin. “This time I had seven partners.
Read on…
6 Comments »
Posted by Josh~ in Articles, Reading, tags: Cuba
There is a Castro who is fighting to introduce radical changes in Cuba. It is Raúl Castro’s daughter, Mariela Castro. As head of the government-funded National Centre for Sex Education, she is trying to change people’s attitudes towards minority groups in the community. She is currently attempting to get the Cuban National Assembly to adopt what would be among the most liberal gay and transsexual rights law in Latin America. The proposed legislation would recognise same-sex unions, along with inheritance rights. It would also give transsexuals the right to free sex-change operations and allow them to switch the gender on their ID cards, with or without surgery.
Read On…
6 Comments »
I just found an article about ephebophilia on Times Online. The conclusion might not be the one I want it to be but at least mainstream media begins to tell people there is (and always was) something like ephebophilia and it’s not just some kind of paedophilia.
By contrast, to have sex with somebody who has passed the age of puberty is merely to defy a law of Man — and a pretty arbitrary law at that. We cannot agree between one border and the next at what age a boy or girl is emotionally developed enough to give informed consent: Malta and The Netherlands think 12, Canada and Italy weigh in at 14, cautious Greece holds out for 15 and the good burghers of Iceland go as high as 17.
Read on…
6 Comments »
|
