I’d consider myself the babysitter of last resorts. While I quite like kids, I’m a tad anxious around them. I’m convinced that they – like cats – can see through me somehow. And let’s face it – and as confirmed by Reddit recently – they’re a tad bloody creepy.

So, in an unusual turn of events, I was looking after an 8-year-old recently. A fabulous 8-year-old, but an 8-year-old nonetheless. And being a planner by nature, I structured our day to minimise boredom. For me, just as much as her.

Kids comedy show in the morning, film in the afternoon and fried food breaks peppered throughout. Easy. And it worked and she was returned to her dad in good spirits and all was well in the world.

What wasn’t well were the two minor mental crises that plagued me during our adventures.

On two occasions I was forced to think about something that routinely preoccupies me during social situations: about whether one person’s enjoyment is impacted by the other’s.

Is our experience of a film / a meal / a concert affected by our companion’s enjoyment? Or lack thereof? If I love it and they hate it does it matter?

So there we were sitting in the Town Hall for the Mr Snot Bottom “comedy” show. And while the fart jokes and drag nonsense robbed my time and dignity, I spent a lot of time frowning around the room, wondering whether all those laughing adults had gotten into the cough syrup.

And during one presumably audible scowl my companion turned to me and asked, “Do you think this is funny?”

For my part, I don’t need my companions to love the same stuff as me or side with my loathing of Dick Smith/Bono/Richard Branson/Gerry Harvey. A shared opinion is much less important than the shared experience of going to a film together or reading the same book or being at a gig side-by-side.

What I’m much less okay with however, is the other person needing a certain reaction from me. About their contentment being in anyway dependent on mine.

Hell no was, of course, the obvious answer to my Snot Bottom buddy’s question, but would admitting so destroy her enjoyment?

Sure, this all complies well to Freud’s thoughts on magical thinking, but neurotic or not, it terrifies me that the other person’s enjoyment might be jeopardised become I’m not one of those effortlessly-pleased weirdos. Equally, my tastes for the messed up, the kinky and the traumatising surely shouldn’t negate a companion’s loathing.

And yet to fake sentiments, to people please in this context, would completely go against my (albeit very sketchy) principles.

A couple of years ago, I was on a date with a bloke who’d pre-booked tickets to a comedy show. The… performer… spent an eternity crapping on about how much he hated cunnilingus and how annoying condoms were. My date laughed heartily along with the inebriated stag/hens crowd while I restrained myself from a stab-a-thon. At the thank-God-it’s-over conclusion, my date asked why I couldn’t have at least pretended I liked it.

I don’t have a convincing fake smile.

Years ago I had subscribed to a season of Melbourne Theatre Company plays with a friend and her parents. Every performance, her mum and dad would glance over at me intermittently, gauging my enthusiasm. Post-show, my reactions (or, more generally, lack thereof) would be dissected while I honed my teeth grinding problem.

Indeed: a lifetime of this nonsense should have better prepared me for my date with the eight-year-old.

I managed an “it’s okay” – because Mr Snot Bottom was okay, if compared, say, to that time I slipped in the shower and cut my hand open on the edge of a tile and forever ruined a nerve.

Later on, we crossed the river and went to see Escape from Planet Earth. Yet another hell-ish abomination. Halfway through – and I may or may not have been playing with my phone at the time – she whispered, “Do you like this?”

And I know she was just being curious. And I know that comedy-club-date-guy probably just wanted me to be less thinky and more fun-lovin'. And I know that the friend who turns to me during every “funny” scene in every rom-com we see together is just wanting me to be partake of her merriment.

But I don’t clap when it’s not warranted and I don’t laugh when it’s not funny. Positive reinforcement only encourages mediocrity.

Equally of course, I never downplay my enthusiasm just because everyone else hates something. I couldn’t care less if the Chicago Tribune dubbed Small Wonder one of the Worst TV Shows Ever. It perfectly satisfied my primary school appetite.

Balancing my confidence in my opinions and my desire for my companions to feel their views to their fullest and most honest extent is an art I’m not convinced I’ve mastered. Pity, because if I like you enough to go to a film/eat food/see a play with you, I really do care what you think.

—

In Melbourne? On Wednesday the 29th of May at 6pm the anthology Just Between Us is launching at Readings, Carlton. I’ll be reading from my contribution “Friendship Notes from the Field”. Come along and say hello. You know you want to.

While Home and Away isn’t on my regular rotation, I laughingly remember the TV ads in the lead up to the arrival of The River Boys. In place of chest hair these lads had tattoos. A clue, seemingly, to just how dramatically they’d shake things up.

And it was the River Boys and tattoos and cheap and nasty costuming shortcuts that plagued me while watching The Place Beyond the Pines last weekend.

Blue Valentine and Drive are two of my favourite films. I also quite enjoyed The Ides of March and Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Sure, there’s a Ryan Gosling connection there, but good films are about much more than any one actor. The God-awful Gangster Squad a case in point. Neither Gosling nor Emma Stone could have saved that wretched turkey.

Pines isn’t a bad film. It’s too long, and if you’re going to commit the cardinal cinema sin of randomly jumping ahead fifteen years you need a) a bloody good reason and b) a way to do it elegantly – both missing in Pines – but it was okay. Okay enough if you appreciate carnies, a dancing dog and a bit of Bon Iver on the credits.

But good God did the costuming irk me. That I even noticed this in a non-Merchant Ivory vehicle is testimony to something thoroughly bizarre going on.

The heinous Guy Fieri dye-job aside, apparently what marked Luke (Ryan Gosling) as a bad ass were his tattoos. Tattoos and moth-devoured t-shirts worn – wait for it, wait for it – inside out.

Whoa.

The character had no presence, no decent dialogue and nothing else to mark him as even slightly foreboding. So the tatts provided the shortcut.

In Drive – a logical comparison because of Gosling and because both films were premised on the what-now of a former stunt driver/rider who decides to play papa – the build up to the violent explosion was slow, steady and delivered through superbly economical writing, staging and Gosling’s perfectly paced performance. (And his toothpick).

Many corners were cut in Pines and there simply wasn’t enough meat in Luke to make his explosion believable. So his skin was inked because once upon a time that connoted something about badness. And danger. And renegade cool.

Apparently the film-marker is unaware that it’s 2013.

A conversation with a man a few months ago centered on his fetish (my word, not his) for tattooed ladies. Personally I’m neither pro-tatt nor anti-tatt: I simply see them as a commodity akin to jewellery or a logo-ed T-shirt. They’re something we can go out and buy and therefore, inferring anything more about an inked person – that they are more interesting or more sexy or more scary – is farcical.

Yet Pines was totally premised on assumptions about tattooed folk. The film needed the audience to see Luke’s ink and hastily draw conclusions. Apparently a Metallica t-shirt and some body ink is all that’s needed for audiences to have an “oh, right he’s bad to the bone” epiphany.

Statistics are flawed since there’s no registry, but lots and lots and lots of people have tattoos. Long gone are the days when ink was the branding of sailors and brutes and sexual deviants and prisoners.

So in a world where every hipster and his dog is inked, surely a costumer can be a tad more clever than this.

Other than having a grown-up job (at least if you squint your eyes a little), I lack many of the key markers of adulthood: no car, no stable coupling, no kids, no mortgage.

So when I think about things that have made me feel all adult, inevitably it’s times I’ve said no to things. Walked away from things.

As a kid it seemed like I was forever being dragged to see people I wasn’t interested in. Forced to read books foisted upon me by teachers. Roped into seeing crap films under the aegis of being sociable.

For me, adulthood has meant giving a theatrical eye roll to a lot of that.

And I was reflecting on my obvious maturity while seeing The Croods, a couple of weekends ago.

Twenty minutes of noise and garish colours and a scarcely identifiable plot – not to mention that wretched kid nearby who decided that the cinema was the perfect place to practice sing-song counting skills – and I realised that I could just leave. That I could get up and walk out of the cinema and no one would be the wiser.

Each time I do this – leave a cinema, leave a play, leave a social event – I’m pleasantly reminded that there are indeed a small handful of perks to adulthood.

And it was this knowing when to say when, to say enough, to say, I’m out of here, that I’ve been thinking about recently.

While sure, the idea applies to single sector of life, I’m focusing on films and books here. (It’s less hideous that way.)

So when do we stop reading? Stop watching? When do we decide this hurts/bores/irritates a little too much to stay?

This morning, for the fourth time in a fortnight, I pressed play at Chapter One of John Connolly’s Every Dead Thing. The first in a series about a broken down, alcoholic, former-cop-turned-PI.

For the first three attempts, I only ever managed an hour and was bored and frustrated: who were these people? Why are they in New York one minute and New Orleans the next? Why aren’t there more bodies?

But I went back one last time because it was a recommendation and I (at least sometimes) take them seriously. And I went back because, for me, leaving a book is so much more taxing than a film.

I’ve walked out of lots of few films in the past few years: The Adventures of Tintin, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, The Other Guys.

Each time, making my way up the aisle in the dark – all emboldened by my maturity – I thought about sunk costs; nodded a quiet acknowledgement to a now-retired professor of economics whose lectures I despised.

Years ago he woke me by explaining sunk costs using a cinema analogy. And I’ve never shaken the sheer logic of it all. So let’s say you spent $18 to see a film: that’s a sunk cost now – the money is gone. So you’re in the cinema and the film is crap. By staying seated you’re not getting any more value out of that $18, oh no no no: it’s gone. By staying, you’re just sinking in more resources: your time.

You’ve gotta get up and leave, man. You just gotta get up and leave.

Economics aside, there’s an even sounder reason for departure: films rarely improve. For me, my views settle pretty quickly. Recent favourites like Drive and Another Earth and Take This Waltz all started – and ended – fabulously.

No slow and sputtering build up, no saving-the-good-bits-until-last: just solid, quality films that worked from the get-go. Hook and hold the audience early. Two hours: ain’t nobody got time for nonsense.

Books of course, are different. 80,000 words give or take, 10-ish hours for an unabridged audiobook. It’s a bigger investment and accordingly, I’m willing to put up with a softly, softly approach. The artistry of many books afterall, centres on pace.

Books often also boast a unique pay off for perseverance. I had immense trouble getting into Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault for example – a book I only even opened because it was a gift – and by the end was rewarded for what was unquestionable toil. There were so many bloody characters in JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and Stephen King’s Under the Dome – and my thumb was permanently on rewind – but on both occasions, it was well worth the effort.

I have, of course, walked away from books. Recently I’ve started and stopped Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s The Disappeared and Ted Dekker’s Eyes Wide Open and Zadie Smith’s NW. But it’s rare. And unlike walking out of a bad film and feeling all righteous, not finishing a book admittedly makes me feel like a philistine.

On the upside, I nearly missed my train stop listen to Connolly earlier: fourth time might just be the charm. My real dilemma now of course, centres on The Following. Six or so episodes in and I’ve realised that the only ridiculousness not yet exploited is a back-from-the-grave twin brother and an albino butler. It’s not going to get better, it’s going to get evermore idiotic. And yet I can’t turn away.

So I shelled out the fifty or so dollars to see Margaret Cho’s show “Mother” during the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

After a little under 50 minutes of Cho-time, the Capitol Theatre lights came up – almost abruptly – and she left the stage. The guy behind me reassured his companion, “don’t worry, she’ll come back out.”

She didn’t.

I’ve written previously about length being no determinant of value – of enjoyment – and truth be told, 48 minutes was sufficient. I’d heard quite enough about the importance of same-sex marriage – cue too-predictable hootin' and a'hollarin from the audience – and it was getting close to my bedtime.

There’s a story to be written about a billed show bearing no semblance whatsoever to the marriage-equality-ranty monologue that was delivered. I’m more interested however, in the content of one of Cho’s anecdotes.

Cho was doing a little subtle name dropping and mentioned being on set with John Travolta (presumably during the filming of Face/Off (1997)).

She belaboured how oh so flaming queer Travolta was. About how everybody in Tinseltown knows just how poofy Danny Zuko is. Of how she had to break the news of his supreme gayness to a naive Olivia Newton John.

I’ve written about what I see as the scourge of sexuality speculation before. More than mere speculation however, Cho was outing Travolta.

Not funny and certainly not okay.

Tom Cruise and John Travolta and Hugh Jackman and pretty much every handsome Hollywood leading man has, at one time or another, been at the centre of gay rumours, cast in the infamous gerbil story and had their face plastered on a gay club poster glued on a pole in my street.

Maybe because they’re heterosexual, maybe because they’re non-practicing gay – or bi – or maybe because they just fear a bloody public backlash – but whatever their reason, actors like Travolta have asserted their allegiance to the Good Ship Straight. And I think we need to leave it at that.

No, we might not like it, might not believe them, and we may have heard accounts like Cho’s and think we know a truth, but it’s not doing equality a service to drag people out of the closet kicking and screaming.

Sure, I’d love for everyone to feel safe and empowered and righteous enough to be their true sexual selves without fear of demonisation. Equally I’d love for homosexuality to be an attribute that people feel is worth shouting from the rooftops.

But making closet jokes – shaming people for not coming out all loud and proud – is not the way to speed this process up.

Cho didn’t out Travolta because she thought it would help him on his sexuality journey. She didn’t out him to encourage him to establish himself as role model.

Oh no.

Cho did it for easy laughs: oh how Goddamn funny it is that Travolta is so camp but thinks people don’t realise. Ha ha ha. Like so hilarious.

And she got away with it because she identifies as bi and she gets cut slack for it.

Don’t get me wrong, something bristles in me too when wives crap on to women’s mags about how very poker straight their man is. And lawsuits implying that gayness is akin to being called a war criminal or paedophile revolt me to the very core.

But surely it’s Travolta’s choice to do his sexuality as he sees fit. If it’s okay to be gay and it’s okay to be bi – and if I’m okay and you’re okay – then it’s got to be okay for John Travolta to “do” his sexuality whichever way he chooses.

I frequently find Margaret Cho hilarious. I have a poster for her film It’s My Party (1996) on my office wall and I’ve repeatedly quoted her line about her bed looking like a crime scene because of all the menstrual sex. And I did laugh, once – admittedly tentatively – during her Melbourne show quip about her father’s Virginia Tech massacre remark (“one or two okay, but 32?”)

But it’s not funny to use the sexuality of other people as fodder for a shoddily structured act. It’s cheap and it’s sad.

(On the upside, Cho’s show wasn’t nearly as painful as Mr Snotbottom. Alas, another story and another round of therapy).

Quoted in one of the many tributes following his recent death was film critic Roger Ebert’s remark: “I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them…”

I haven’t seen untold numbers of films, but I’ve seen my fair share. And like Ebert, I’ve forgotten most. Of the dozens I’ve seen just this year, I remember virtually nothing of Gangster Squad, Alex Cross or The Impossible. Hell, it’s only been days since I saw Cheerful Weather for the Wedding and it’s already wiped from memory. Completely.

Dubbing a film forgettable is quite possibly the worst indictment I could give. And yet sadly, most are. Forgettable and completely and utterly forgotten.

And it was this idea of forgettability that I was thinking about when I attended a screening of The Neverending Story (1984) at Melbourne’s Astor recently.

Generally speaking I don’t see films twice. My rationale for this is twofold:

1. I will never live long enough to see every film I want to so justifying a repeat viewing is tough.

2. Seeing an adored film a second time inevitably destroys some of that virgin magic.

My main reason for a Neverending Story repeat was that I’d never been to the Astor. That, and I hadn’t seen the film since primary school so assumed I only remembered the gigantic flying “labrador” and the Limahl song.

And yet, from the very first scene the film was as familiar as any James Patterson novel. I knew every scene. Inside out. I knew every one of Barret Oliver’s (Bastian) over-delivered lines. I was awaiting every single hokey special effect.

How?

There’s good, solid – if OCD – reason why I can recite nearly all the dialogue from The Wizard of Oz (1939), Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Grease (1978). I had VHS tapes of each and every day after school would put one on and play with my Barbies.

And yet I’d only seen The Neverending Story once and it was scene-for-scene familiar. Nearly two decades on.

Which got me thinking about why. Why did I remember The Neverending Story when I can barely remember anything beyond paying $18 to see The Company You Keep last weekend?

And no, dementia isn’t the answer.

If there were something cinematic that could make an average film memorable, the studios would have long exploited it.

Instead, I’m convinced that films that should, in all good sense, be forgotten can be salvaged through the happenings around them. That they get remembered because of the experience of seeing them.

My parents alternate between claiming that ET (1982) was the first film I ever saw at the cinema to suggesting it was Fantasia (1940).

I doubt I’ve seen either.

The first film I remember seeing at the cinema was Dirty Dancing (1987). And even at 7 I knew that it wasn’t appropriate fare for a 7-year-old. Which, of course, is precisely why I loved it. Not a good film in the way I’d judge one today, but seeing it clandestinely with an aunty who I thought was cool, made it momentous.

I don’t remember, for example, whether I liked Ladyhawke (1985). I doubt I did. I do however, remember the Year 8 school excursion to see it at the Valhalla on a very tinny bus with a driver that looked like Michael Jackson. I remember my friend, sitting next to me, reminding me that Navarre (Rutger Hauer) also starred in perhaps the shonkiest film of all time, Blind Fury (1989).

A blind Vietnam vet, trained as a swordfighter, comes to America and helps to rescue the son of a fellow soldier.

My laughter, as it often did, got me a swift reprimand.

I don’t think I liked Inglourious Basterds (2009). It’s memorable though, because I saw it with a man who had heard me on the radio before meeting me and thought he liked me. And who I, during that screening, thought I liked too. (cue foreboding music).

The Killer Inside Me (2010) would normally have been forgotten. Forgotten except for the fact that the guy with me held my hand throughout. Lovely normally, but he kept holding it throughout a very violent rape and murder scene. Which confused me completely.

Seeing Malèna (2000) with my grandmother who apparently decided it was perfectly okay to yell things out at the screen. (Not as embarrassing as when she did this at a live Fiddler on the Roof peformance.).

Seeing 24 Hour Party People (2002) in Manchester, in the bed of a man much more memorable than the film.

Seeing L'ultimo bacio (2001) and becoming a first-time shusher when the elderly couple behind me unwrapped their 43rd package of brown-papered deli meat.

That I remembered The Neverending Story centred simply on the protracted lead up. My teacher spent what felt like a year reading the book to our class. Every scene was already underpinned by my imagination and a good dose of anticipation.

Not every film can be great – most, in fact, aren’t even good. But my love of a story – a quality anecdote – can make a flick memorable in spite of the shoddiness.

The formula for peddling luxury items has always been simple: establish a need by pointing to a deficiency and then proffering a solution. Ta daa: marketing 101.

Initially the Dove differential began as one about a soap that was supposedly more moisturising than its shelf counterparts. Years on and the difference has become centred on empowerment.

Rather than being a “women’s” brand in the standard pink packaging/floral or gourmand fragrances way, Dove’s cut-through has been predicated on their advertising. Doing advertising in a way that appears cutting-edge and of the Zeitgeist.

In a consumer savvy world where women know all about air-brushing and false promises, Dove decided to play it differently.

Rather than once again hiring a couple of supermodels to tout the physique transforming properties of their soap, instead Dove dared to claim that they care about women’s self-esteem.

The Dove Evolution campaign for example, tapped into the feminist chatter about the evils of Photoshop and offered up a spot that highlighted the behind-the-scenes toil of beauty images (while simultaneously flogging soap):

The Pro-age campaign similarly centred on the “renegade” idea that beauty doesn’t solely reside in the nubile bodies of pre-teens (while simultaneously marketing anti-ageing products):

Not for a moment do I think these campaigns are heinous. The one centred on girls and sport for instance, is both moving and distressing:

Equally moving, equally distressing, is Dove’s newest “Real Beauty Sketches” campaign:

Sketches – launched in the last couple of days – is designed to spotlight the grotesque disparity between how women see ourselves and how others see us.

In sum, apparently we’re nowhere near as hideous as we think.

There’s an effortless point to made here about hypocrisy: that the very same company who aims to fix our broken selves is owned by Unilever, a monolith responsible for brands such as Lynx: a deodorant marketed exclusively through female objectification:

Equally so, there’s an easy point about the fact that for all their empowerment guff, Dove is still trying to sell. That no matter how interesting their message, it’s still all couched in a tout.

Worthwhile also, is to spotlight Dove’s oh so well-worn “feminist enlightenment” strategy of selling women their empowerment. It’s certainly not a new strategy to distinguish a brand by flattering women through acknowledging their savvy, their marketplace choice and their power, but still steering them towards the register, peddled product in hand. This style has been around since the 80s.

My central concern with Sketches is that it is still focuses on beauty. On appearance. For all the smoke and mirrors of esteem elevation, it’s still saying that women should dwell on how we look.

Not for a moment am I claiming that caring about appearance, about the smoothness of our skin or the frizziness – or lack thereof – of our hair is a bad thing. These are preoccupations that plague even those of us who make a living from analysing the interplay between images and culture.

But to pretend that Dove is doing something revolutionary or groundbreaking with its newest campaign is ridiculous. The campaign still puts the focus on appearance. Worst still, on judgment.

The premise of Sketches is that women are “more beautiful than they think”. How is more determined in the context? By other people: oh, she has really warm eyes, oh, she has such the beautiful smile.

If self-esteem is to be buoyed solely by what other people think of us – about the compliments and validation from peers and the faux-flattery of advertisers – this establishes a vicious cycle that contributes absolutely nothing to healing or to lasting self-love.

Sure, I’d pick a Dove campaign over a Lynx one any day. And sure, I got a bit teary watching the Sketches campaign. But to pretend that this is more than moving units of soap or more than telling women that their appearance is their most important asset, is wishful thinking at best.

Aside from seeing it at the drive-in – in bad weather albeit with good company – I only remember two things about The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, a fortnight on:

1. The use of the song Abracadabra (“I wanna reach out and grab ya” [insert predatatory clawing motion]

2. The repeated use of the phrase “mind rape” [as in, “this magic show will rape your mind”].

While I’ve finally shaken off that Steve Miller Band earworm, “mind rape” is still plaguing me.

I’m not often offended by words. Pussy and panties might make me cringe a little, but there’s only a handful I find truly offensive. Cunt tops that list. Douche comes in at second. (Afterall, if a vagina reference is an acceptable insult, hell, why not also deploy an apparatus used to clean one?)

The word rape however, is a difficult one. While nobody is doubting the egregiousness of the act, is the word that big a deal?

I recently wrote a chapter on euphemism. I discussed how rape victims often use hedging phrases like “he had his way with me” to moderate the impact of what happened to them. Historically newspapers have similarly dodged the linguistic bullet, instead opting for phrases like “attacked” and “assaulted”.

In my chapter I quoted from Anthony Neal’s book Unburdened by Conscience (2009) where he recounted an interesting story:

A revered historian of American slavery once asked me, “Do we need to be told again that white men took sexual advantage of black women during American slavery?” I replied, “Not exactly. Depending upon how we interpret the phrase ‘took sexual advantage of,’ it could mean anything from a euphemism for rape to a misleading mischaracterization of it.”

Sure, politeness, avoiding offence and political correctness might explain the appeal of euphemism, but in avoiding the word what actually happened becomes fuzzy.

Rape has impact, it has punch, and for these reasons I think it needs to be used with pinpoint precision.

So when Steve Gray (Jim Carrey) in Wonderstone promised to “rape your mind” with his Criss Angel-type schlock – or, for that matter, when climate change blatherers bleat on about raping the planet or raping the soil – the feminist in me bristles.

In common parlance, rape is about forced sexual intercourse. Sure, the dictionary will also list definitions pertaining to plundering or seizing, but in popular usage, the violent sexual connotations aren’t ever forgotten: mind rape still has unwanted penetration connotations; Steve’s promise to mind rape was intended to be gratuitous – that’s the point. The chracter was supposed to be a moron. But does that make everything okay?

While I was unsettled by the use of rape in Wonderstone I realised, there’s limits to my high-and-mightiness: I can’t even apply my reasoning universally.

In a scene from one of my favourite television shows – Arrested Development – Tobias (David Cross) reminded his wife about his short-lived career as an analyst-therapist:

I laugh at this scene every time I see it.

So is the idea of an analrapist any less offensive than a mind rape?

Are there credit points available for laughing at something like an analrapist if we simultaneously acknowledge that we’re doing so while standing on very treacherous political terrain? Is this, in fact, part of the appeal?

Am I simply willing to cut David Cross slack simply because I find him hilarious while Jim Carrey’s sole redeeming feature was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotlight Mind?

Language is tricky and offense – like humour – is thoroughly subjective. I would however, question the funniness of a gag that is exclusively predicated on referencing sexual violence as compared, say, to wordplay.

When everybody was reading 50 Shades of Grey, I resisted: a) if I’m seeking prose to masturbate to, I don’t need a whole novel, and b) from my sketchy knowledge of the plot I’m pretty sure that I’ve been there, done that.

More recently, everybody seemed to be reading Gone Girl, and I buckled. Crime sucks me in everytime.

Stylistically similar – although I’d argue, substantially less satisfying than Elizabeth Haynes' Into The Darkest Corner – it tells the story of unlikeable Amy – the gone girl of the title – and her equally unlikeable husband Nick.

My interest, my angle, into this novel is an aspect of the he said/she thought mentioned early on. Early on – before the shonky twists, the turns, and before Gone Girl became the Bold and the Beautiful of crime novels.

In a coming soon chapter, I write briefly about the day after the love interest and I arrived home from a trip away. First email of the morning: him asking for my bank details to deposit his half of the hotel bill.

A classic he said/she thought moment.

Me, and I reacted as though he’d just left money on my nightstand. I expressed a controlled version of these sentiments. He responded – puzzled, and offended – that he just didn’t want to look like a cheapskate.

In Gone Girl there are quite a few of these moments. The ones that piqued my interest centred on memory.

On the bloke forgetting stuff, on the woman finding this really personal, really offensive, and him dismissing her as self-indulgent for even caring.

Nick describes one of their anniversaries: a treasure hunt Amy had organised. The clues were all obscure and recollections about things she found sweet and wonderful. Most of which he had no memory of. Nick tells us she reacted badly and we believe him: Amy spends an awful lot of time on emotional management – I won’t get angry, I won’t be so female, I won’t guilt-trip him: an explosion has to be imminent.

The forgotten anniversary is, of course, a very well worn trope. Essential for any hapless TV husband is forgetting a wedding anniversary. Or twelve.

I think about this issue a lot – not forgotten anniversaries so much, but on the caricature of the guy who simply cares less. On one hand advertising’s consist parade of incompetent men – who can’t empty the bin, can’t plait their daughter’s hair yadda yadda – is offensive, is boring. But Gone Girl made me question: is pop culture’s forgetful dolt just a moron, or is he a reflection of real-life nonchalance?

Of men really not giving a damn about the small stuff. The domestic stuff. The emotional stuff. The details-stuff that arguably make up life?

Not exclusively because I once got a 17% mark on a biology test in Year 10, but biology – the natural sciences more broadly – aren’t my strong suit and aren’t my way of understanding the world. Rarely for example, will I resort to an innate-sexed-difference as an explanation for why men do/why women think.

Generally, in fact, I’m hostile to the idea of things being fixed, encoded, and too often “natural instinct” is a thorough cop out. Everytime we put on clothes, remove unwanted hair, poison weeds, we’re giving The Finger to The Natural anyhow.

My decades of exposure to film and advertising and sitcoms point to some stark differences between how women care and how men care. My 32 years of living amongst our breed substantiate a lot of this.

Women sweat the stuff routinely considered small and trivial. Men tend not to.

I’ve often wondered why men don’t complain about their media stereotyping the way that women have about their sexualising, their objectifying.

Is it because this stuff is considered small, trivial? Because it’s just not worth caring about?

If so, what actually makes the list of stuff worthy of our attention? Where could my academic efforts be better spent? A question, of course, at the very heart of the natural vs social science wars and a topic that bristles enough with my feminism to often keep me awake.

The Rubensque bloke dressed as pharaoh – who stripped down to his nipple tassells and gold G-string – was my takeaway moment from the Victorian finals of Miss Burlesque 2013.

I was however, attending not merely as a crinkle-browed, feelin'-pervy member of the public, but as a scholar, a thinker, watching in a room of Amy Winehouse/Betty Page/SuicideGirls understudies.

I live in Melbourne. My 99% black wardrobe is a pedestrian illustration of this; a better one was collected last week. A giant, angular piece of polystyrene foam had been shoved into a bin in my street. Gone are the days when I could have dismissed it as trash: a week on and I’m still wondering whether it was street art.

And whether burlesque is art – and whether such a categorisation is even useful – was one of dozens of different debates raging in my head during Friday night’s competition.

So, while watching contestant after contestant go through the ruse of “seductively” removing gloves with their teeth and taking the slow boat to the bare-boob-jiggle, I was brainstorming.

If burlesque is art, should it be judged? (A question, needless to say, that I asked at the release of the first Stella Prize shortlist, and that I ask at every mention of every art prize).

Is it a kind of drag? If it is drag – defined as the performance of gender along the Judith Butler lines – does the fact that the majority of performers are women mitigate some of the feminist concerns about femininity being mocked or parodied in such shows?

Just because burlesque is (one version of) female sexuality performed in front of an audience, does this mean that it’s a performance for the audience? If the audience is mainly women, does this discredit radical feminist concerns about objectification?

Can women objectify other women? If so, should it trouble us?

What constitutes sexy? What role does irony play? Why did the loudest, most boisterous screams follow the least polished and least stereotypically sultry performances? Are points awarded in burlesque for simply giving it the proverbial college try?

Does the single act – the chutzpah – of braving a stage and disrobing maketh a person sexy?

Is the fact that most burlesque performers aren’t the waifish blondes that society often lauds – and instead offers up for eyeballin' other body shapes and sizes – enough to deem the spectacle feminist?

At the Miss Burlesque competition, women dominated the audience and women were the ones whoopin' and a hollarin'. Some of the audience might have been lesbians, sure, but many had male dates. Is their roaring, therefore, the same kind that a male strip show might solicit, or does burlesque – with its fancy lingerie and dolled-up faces and elaborate coifs – motivate lady audience members to scream less about sex appeal and more about the celebration of femininity?

And, lastly – and, you’re no more grateful to get here than I was on Friday night – was I right to feel as uncomfortable as I did that the scantily clad women who cleaned the boa detritis after each jig were referred to as kittens?

Of course I over-thought the evening: as is my skill and probably my downfall. I didn’t depart a burlesque devotee – truth be told, by the end of it I felt very inclined to jump on stage and explain that there are much faster ways to remove clothing – but at least intellectually I understand the appeal a tad more.

Side note: once upon a time on a flight, I met a woman who owned a turkey feather processing factory. At the time I thought it seemed like such an anachronistic industry. The Miss Burlesque competition taught me just how wrong I was.

I’m always vaguely suspicious of people who don’t have stories. Folks who, when you ask them what they’ve been up to, offer a bit of a shrug, a vague “not much”. This does not make good conversation.

I have very few missions in life, one is my duty to contribute stories, anecdotes. Historically, my brother has always sceptical of them – as though I somehow need to fabricate. Such distrust however, was remedied in the dairy aisle of a supermarket recently. A swarthy wizard of a man approached me, ran his hand over my hair and said something that could have been “so fluffy” or “so frizzy”. And then disappeared. My brother, looking on – brow furrowed, conceded defeat: I attract the story, baby.

Of course, the actual event is much less important than the telling: which details are played up, which are left out. Whether the wizard gets emphasised over the Woolworths backdrop. And I was thinking about this after a screening of The Imposter yesterday.

In the vein of other fabulous documentaries showcasing suspected sociopaths – think Forbidden Lie$ (2007), and Tabloid (2010) – The Imposter reminds us once again that truth is always stranger – and inevitably more seductive – than fiction.

The briefest sketch is a boy goes missing in the US and three years later, another boy turns up in Spain claiming to be the missing American. Divulging any other details would ruin the splendour.

I saw The Imposter on my brother’s recommendation. One of his compliments was how fair the treatment was. And this question of fairness – or at least integrity – was on my mind throughout.

One one hand it’s true: The Imposter doesn’t offer easy villains or victims. Of course, just because everyone gets a word in, does not a fair treatment make.

Reenactments are spliced in with real-life video footage and every participant is edited to provide just enough detail to both answer a question and also seem deliciously cagey.

For me, that’s part of the charm and also why my brother and I would disagree about just how diplomatic the film was.

A common trope in literature – but one readily identifiable in film and television too – is the Unreliable Narrator (coming soon, incidentally, a post on Gone Girl). While the idea is interesting, postmodern thinking would suggest that every narrator is as equally – and, completely unreliable – as the next.

The Imposter doesn’t quite have a narrator. It does however, have a storyteller – a filmmaker – behind it. A puppetmaster, pulling our heartstrings, making us suspicious/appalled/aggrieved and strategically playing a Doobie Brothers track to set a tone and remind us that this is such a quintessentially American story. (Even if the doco was made by Brits).

In media studies, the most interesting aspect of bias is the process of story selection: which tales get broadcast and which get sidelined. This decision – this edit – is at the heart of the bias inherent in every story: what isn’t being told?

The tension, the delightful drip-feed of details, is all an act of editing. Of bias.

Not a criticism by any stretch of the imagination. For a more “well-rounded” insight into this astonishing story, the onus is on us to do the research. And there’s plenty out there to assist. For the entertaining version however – for the escapist, immersive joy of raconteuring at its finest, I’m very okay with the skillfully edited The Imposter.

Carb-love and vegetarianism might have seen me pay more attention to the Domino’s story than had a burger chain been involved, but my real interest lies in the “anticlimax”.

For the past week, TV ads have been running with Domino’s honcho Don Meij promising a pizza “game changer”.

Staged not unlike a press conference, the announcements promised fast-food revolution and a whole new face for pizza.

That pizza box was prised open today and we ended up with pork belly, blue cheese and grilled beef. For $8. Pizza fans feel a bit jibbed, apparently.

My bleedin' heartness dictates that I’m all for feeling emotions to their full extent, but even I have to ask just how much bloody devastation or deception can be felt around pizza?

As I see it, emotional pain is commensurate with input: it hurts more when we spend more time/money/energy on it, or when we loved harder or wished most fervently for it.

So just how much wishin' and a hopin' can possibly be centered on a Domino’s Christmas? Just how much grief, anguish or jibbed-ment can be felt here?

An equally worthwhile question is what possible pizza initiative could have justified the game-changer tag? What possible watershed moment in the history of pizza could have kept the hungry sated?

There answer of course is nothing: Meij can star in ads a'plenty, hype loud and hype proud and Tweet until the cows come home and he’s still only going to give us pizza. Because – shock horror – he’s a pizza seller.

If, in a focus group, I was paid a penny for my pizza thoughts my wishin' and a hopin' would have centred on calories, on carbs. Less and less of both, thanks. And maybe caramelised onions. (Properly caramelised with the brown sugar and the vinegar). Not a game-changer, no, but I’d be content. Because I understand there’s only so much a pizza can promise.

Pizza can’t get Melbourne’s temperatures below 30. Pizza can’t bring about gender equality. Pizza can’t bring peace to the Middle East (well, not really). It’s pizza, let’s not go crazy.

Admen love phrases like game-changer, cutting-edge, revolutionary and ground-breaking. Not exclusively because they’re buzzy and attention-grabbing, but because they’re immeasurable. Immeasurable, unprovable and ultimately meaningless. Nothing countable, nothing to point to and say “nuh-uh” and certainly nothing to constitute deceit.

The campaign has quickly been dubbed a fizzer, but me and I’d caution a rush to condemn.

Successful campaigns are not exclusively measured by sales. Other things like brand recognition and media mentions are also counted. Tick and tick.

Also probed are the unintended consequences: a personal favourite topic. Run a sexist or racist campaign and you might offend some but you might solidify – if not excite – your base. Run an over-promise/under-deliver campaign and what’s the worst that can happen? Will anyone really choose not to spend their pizza pennies at Domino’s because of one ho-hum Grand Reveal?

We’re all talking about the product: one enormous tick for the campaign. And a few people might even go out and try the pork belly and ask themselves whether putting mouldy cheese in their mouths is a sane choice.

No harm, no foul and certainly no more deception than advertising doles out daily.

[Warning! Warning! This article contains an – albeit predictable – spoiler]

Films are too often dubbed contemporary, modern. Of the Zeitgeist, at the vanguard. Normally I’d roll my eyes at such a description but I’m going to dub I’d Give it a Year A Very Modern Rom-Com.

I’m undecided of course, as to whether this is a compliment.

The Brits do murder well. I’ll always pick a British stab at fictional crime over an American offering. I’m less convinced however, about the British humour thing. For every The Office there’s a host of episodes of ‘Allo 'Allo and Steptoe and Son and some nonsense with sleazy creeps asking Mrs Slocombe about her pussy.

And it was the very Britishness of the film – encapsulated by Stephen Merchant’s unfunny and exhaustingly crude barbs – that made me give it a three. Out of ten.

The bawdy humour however, wasn’t what made it modern. In fact, the humour all felt very done and dated. Rather, it was the cutting edge presentation of relationships as thoroughly disposable that made it such.

In my book on infidelity, I had a chapter about the economics of cheating. One theory I posited was that when we’ve all been so primed to go to market to solve our problems – to buy stuff to fix whatever ails us – that it’s no surprise that this attitude has pervaded our romantic lives. That the second we get bored, the second that something – someone – fails to satisfy us or, God forbid, to complete us, then we’re back scouting for newer thrills.

In I Give it A Year, newlyweds Nat (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Rafe Spall) are on shaky ground. It isn’t quite guidance they seek from “therapist” (Olivia Colman) – as unprofessional a dolt as there ever was – rather the sessions simply provide an uncomfortable backdrop for disjointed scenes of “unravelling” romance.

Days after seeing the film and I’m really not sure what was so bad about the marriage. I mean, he found her mondegreens grating and she found him vaguely uncouth. Grounds enough for divorce? Yeah, I’m not so sure.

And does this really matter?

At the end of the film the two fall – quite literally and oh so cheesily – into the arms of new people. Without even a skerrick of compunction.

And I think this makes the film both modern and troublesome.

I’m the last person who would suggest “staying the course” in an unhappy anything let alone marriage. And yet – and perhaps it’s the romantic in me – finds it pretty heinous that at the first sign of trouble, at the first of the easing of ecstasy, an exit is sought.

And this I found to be modern and also quite a bit irritating.

For all it’s unfunniness and grating performances, I Give it a Year does raise the interesting question about whether contemporary romance – and the future of romantic comedies – is as much about getting out of love as getting into it. And whether that’s any course for terror. Or celebration.

The verdict I gave when the lights came up was, “I fell asleep three different times”. My friend laughed a little – arrogantly so – having predicted that I’d find Lincoln boring when we bought the tickets. In fact, it was palatable enough for as biopic. But at 150 minutes it was just too long. And I’ve had a gutful.

Sure, I have an overarching objection to sitting still for longer than 90 minutes: I get fidgety, disruptive, and am hard-pressed resisting the gravitational pull of my phone.

But my true objection centres not on the achy coccyx or restless legs. I simply do not understand why a story can’t be told in 90 minutes.

From high school through to my undergraduate years, every single assignment I ever wrote was ridiculously over the word length. No matter the topic, no matter my interest level, I’d research like a maniac and think that the only way to show how much work I’d done was to write copiously.

I had all kinds of elaborate techniques to “hide” words: narrowed margins, smaller fonts, my beloved kerning. Once I started tutoring as a PhD student however – once I was tasked with marking essays – I realised how immature and farcical it all was. And I promptly learnt my lesson.

I suspect that my naive belief that quantity was the best way to crow about my labours is akin to the rationale of Hollywood’s Long Film Syndrome.

An unnamed director recently described Django Unchained as Quentin Tarantino “masturbating for three hours”. Harsh. But I too would question the levels of self-indulgence of a director taking three hours to tell a story. Any story.

I had been on a sketchy mission to see all the Oscar nominees before the ceremony. I couldn’t however, bring myself to see Django, and the thought of sitting through Les Miserables made by arse ache. 165 and 158 minutes respectively.

Comedian Rita Rudner – discussing her friend’s long labour – commented, “I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours”. And I often think of this line when a film approaches the two-hour mark. My aversion to sitting still of course, is on its own insufficient grounds to protest film length. Instead, let us turn to the economists.

I might have exited that undegrad microeconomics class with a pitiful mark of 66%, but I did pick up a couple of handy terms. One is the law of diminishing marginal utility.

The law of diminishing marginal utility states that the more of a product the consumer has, the less will be the marginal utility… The idea of declining marginal utility is based on the assumption that even though human wants are, in general unlimited, the desire for any particularly product is limited.

Or, as I like to paraphrase it: the first chocolate in the box tastes best, each subsequent bite tastes a little less good until you eat so many you’re ill.

And film is the same. The film might be good – the film might even be great – but it’s not getting any better the longer it drags out; in fact, the sitting, and the restlessness and the needing to go pee pee all likely detract from the enjoyment.

I have actually seen a few of the films on the three-hour plus list. I really liked Deer Hunter, for example, but I’m pretty sure I’d have loved it had it not ran for 185 minutes. Ditto Schindler’s List (195 minutes) and Magnolia (188 minutes). And at a ridiculous 317 minutes, 1900 was way too much effort for one scene of Stefania Casini giving simultaneous hand jobs to two men. (Even if those men were Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu).

Hollywood – a size-queen if ever there was one – has gotten herself into a cycle of thinking of thinking longer is better, longer is serious and longer means epic. To me, I just want to know where the bloody editors are when you need ‘em.

Hosting an awards ceremony is always fraught. No matter how talented the host is, such night-of-nights are always boring and, as I’ve written previously, scarcely entertaining enough to sustain a multi-hour telecast.

I watched the ceremony yesterday – each gruelling hour of it – and, truth be told, I thought it was passable. There was some truly cringe-worthy bits – what the hell was the Paul Rudd/Melissa McCarthy sketch about? – but host Seth MacFarlane made a routinely unbearable production tolerable. No laughs from me, but hey, I’m a tough crowd.

Blind Freddy of course, would have realised that The Boob Song in the opening was going to be the belaboured bit in the post-ceremony autopsy. For American audiences, the mere mention of the mammaries is guaranteed to cause a fuss. A day on and people – in Australia as readily as the US – are still going on about the song. In this piece I’m going to tell them why they’re wrong.

Go and hire Silkwood: you’ll see we really did see Meryl Streep’s boobs. Go and get yourself a copy of Gia and yep, you’ll get a sneaky peek at Angelina Jolie’s.

The boobs in these films are a fact. That fact might be regrettable, it might be something feminists abhor and it might well be a damning indictment of what female actors need to do to “make it” in Hollywood, but this was not what the song was about and nor do I think it was a state of play that MacFarlane was endorsing.

I’ve written almost ad nauseum about the double standard that exists in showing lady bits compared to gent bits on screen. Equally, I’ve written many a time about my feminist discomfort with seeing boobs and vulvas in non-pornographic films purely for the sake of titillating an audience and reaping a more adult classification. But MacFarlane’s song wasn’t about the politics of a breast display nor was it an endorsement of showing breasts in rape scenes, rather, was simply about the fact that Hollywood’s leading ladies have exposed their breasts over and over and over and over and over again.

Hell, one might even go so far as to read the song as very light-hearted commentary on how long the journey to gender equality in Hollywood really is.

Like his humour or, as in my case, dismiss it as puerile garbage, MacFarlane’s song was a simple and whimsical homage to the fact that seeing breasts can be fun, fascinating and arousing for audiences.

Where’s the egregiousness there? Where’s the controversy?

Criticism of the song lies is discomfort about female breasts. Criticism lies in the politics that bare breasts continue to stir. Criticism of the song lies in the trap that each of us who’ve bothered to comment on it has fallen into: the ditty was orchestrated controversy and nothing more.

I often find myself arguing that feminists need to pick our battles more carefully. Sure, I could say the same thing on this occasion. More so however, I think we need to ask ourselves whether complaining about singing about breast displays is missing a much bigger picture.

Aside from being convinced that I’d seen the whole Carnival Triumph story play out before – pretty much the same thing happened in 2010 with the Carnival Splendor – my interest was piqued by Twitter chatter about the stranding.

Social media has made all kinds of interesting impacts on our experience of news, from speed and accuracy through to citizen journalism and stories broken on Twitter.

One element I particularly like is the counter narrative proffered. No matter how cynical I might feel about a story, Twitter is the place I can go to have my wickedness validated.

While it was déjà vu that distracted me during the Carnival catastrophe, admittedly I understood the inclination to eye roll. At least initially. A theatrical eye roll was precisely my reaction to last year’s Docklands yacht fire, for example.

While eye-rolling on my part got sidelined because I was busy realising that the sandwich fillings belaboured during the Carnival coverage was the exact same thing dwelled upon when the Splendor runaground, Twitter reassured me that there were lots of others eye-rolling for me:

I might have smirked at the first few but I quickly checked myself before I wrecked myself: this is the exact social media behaviour I abhor.

Click on any tabloid story on a newspaper website and inevitably there’ll be a “who?” jibe amongst the comments: an effort, seemingly, to downplay a story’s newsworthiness.

I’ve never understood this. How can people be bothered to click on a story that they know they’ll find egregious and then bother again to comment? By clicking, by commenting – even if only ironically, even if only to kvetch – the “worthiness” of the story is validated.

At least once a week someone on my social media radar will jump on the “let’s clean up public discourse” crusade and post that lofty Eleanor Roosevelt quote as a catch-all critique of pap reporting:

I agree that it’s worthwhile questioning which stories get reported on vs those that don’t; about spotlighting quiet biases. But isn’t there room for the gamut? Do we not read stories about celebrities, about dogs driving cars, about sex scandals because there is a time and place for entertainment, for the quirky?

The counter narrative of the Carnival Triumph story lies in the simple premise of deserving vs undeserving victims. Apparently people who can afford to take cruises don’t deserve our sympathies. A popular class contempt frame.

Perhaps an understandable position, sure, but doesn’t this thinking lead to every single little thing that preoccupies us in the West being dismissed as a #firstworldproblem? So what, because we speak English, because we aren’t in dire poverty, our concerns are rendered trivial? Aren’t worth writing about?

Truth be told I didn’t really feel any great sympathy for the folk on the Triumph because a) I didn’t know any of them and b) they all got out alive. But I do appreciate that being stuck on a ship – being stuck anywhere – is unpleasant.

For those who’ve been stranded in airports, on tarmacs, in train stations, sure, the problem doesn’t compare to starvation, but at that very moment it’s real for us and it’s all-consuming and we shouldn’t feel bad for getting upset.

Afterall, who knows how long it took some of those folks to save up for that cruise.

Who knows how difficult it was for some of them to get time off work.

Who knows how many holidaymakers only packed enough medication for the days they were supposed to be sailing.

Sure, they may be #firstworldproblems, but I’m not sure that renders them irrelevant. Equally, I’m unconvinced that those dissing news coverage of the Triumph story would actually tune into those about third-world poverty anyway. Equally, I know full well that I’d be completely hostile to a league table of Stories of Greatest Worth.

Mocking #firstworldproblems and downplaying coverage of them doesn’t makes a person more socially conscious or more abreast of what’s Really Important. I’m pretty sure it just makes us jerks.

Watching Silver Linings Playbook was how I’d imagine a shiv being shoved into my ribs would feel. Over and over and over again. And just when the plunging stops, the wounds would get doused in battery acid. For good measure.

Days on and I’m unsure whether the sweet and hopeful ending compensated for the too-close-to-the-bone gut-wrenching-ness of it all.

Days on and I’m unsure whether it hurt just a little too much for even a committed masochist like me to enjoy.

One aspect I did appreciate however – before it all become a blur of despair and smudged mascara – was the idea of music as a trigger.

“Trigger warning” is a phrase used mostly on-line to head up discussions of topics like sexual violence, depression or self-mutilation: warning, warning, the material contained within might make you sad/sadder/saddest.

Personally, I’m conflicted about the usefulness. Are triggers really so predictable? Who would have thought that a book’s scant mention of a person cleaning chopsticks would briefly put me in the foetal position last year? And yet it did. Because I’d like to think that most of us aren’t like light switches when it comes to distress, but instead, are triggered by the curious and the surprising and the completely bloody bizarre.

In a chapter I penned recently about vegetarianism, I discussed the horror film Dread (2009). As a child, Cheryl (Hanne Steen) had been sexually abused by her father who had worked as a meat-packer. As an adult the smell of meat was her trigger; hence her vegetarianism.

Reading about molestation wasn’t the red-flag for Cheryle, rather, the far more personal, esoteric and visceral trigger of smell tipped her.

For Pat (Bradley Cooper) in Silver Linings Playbook, it was music – just one single song in his case – that perpetually put him in a red mist rage.

I so get this. Not the rage – I’m not all that rageful myself – but the ability of certain songs to sabotage a moment completely.

A handful of years ago I was in a department store in Moscow. Sia’s Breathe Me – months before Coles de-activated it for me during the 2008 Beijing Games – was playing and I was doubled over at the cosmetics counter.

Late last year, I was eating with a friend at a restaurant which normally only ever played musak. That night – timed perfectly with my friend going to the bathroom – the hellhole dining establishment cranked up David Grey’s Babylon. And I fell apart.

The entire Bob Dylan catalogue is on my banned list, pity then that the bastard keeps turning up in the most unlikely places – including in Silver Linings Playbook. Once upon a time his Just Like a Woman was playing in a bong shop that a rebound guy had lead me into. Hearing it was the proverbial last straw.

The Tragically Hip’s Bobcagyeon at an airport Starbucks. Damien Jurado’s Sheets while at a radio station a month ago. Every single time those bloody hipster coffee shops try to indoctrinate clients to Stars and Deathcab for Cutie. Yes, my list is really, really long.

For Pat, his spiral of psychological demise was triggered by Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour”.

Judging by the extensive laughter in the cinema, “My Cherie Amour” doesn’t seem like the kind of music that would prompt psychosis. But really, isn’t that the whole point?

It’s much less about the song and more so about the time that it first meant something. It’s not that I like David Gray – I really don’t – and it’s not like I’d rank “Breathe Me” in my Top 100. But such songs get inextricably bound to a moment, to an emotion, to a person, and hearing them unexpectedly can be transportative for better or, as in my case, usually much worse.

Silver Linings Playbook was in fact one very long trigger for me, broken up with a handful of bonus emotional explosions just in case I got any delusions of respite.

Because triggers are unpredictable.

While watching it, while sobbing away, I wondered whether a Trigger Warning would have had any effect on this occasion; whether I would have resisted buying a ticket. I doubt it. Wet paint? Ah, but how wet really? Surely I’m brave enough to touch it just once…

For the first 5 years of primary school, my best friend and I were in the same class. Come Grade 5 and we were abruptly separated.

As a world-crumbling-around-her 9-year-old, I begged my mother to get to the bottom of what I considered the World’s Biggest Travesty. And she did. And my best friend’s mother had asked for us to be separated. I made her first-born too competitive, apparently.

I once lived in a 5,000 person town in the US that had five supermarkets: part of me is all too convinced about the virtues of competition. And yet years ago, during a make-a-wedding-dress-from-toilet-paper hen’s night game, I callously pushed aside the fat-fingered, hideously ill-qualified “seamstresses” in my group and made the Quilton couture gown on my own. When I think of competition my first thoughts always centre on the ugliness.

While considering my primary school friendship as some kind of awful intellectual duel is a step too far for me – I always did think my friend’s mother was a hideous delusional – nevertheless, there likely was a little sparring going on. And I’m convinced it brought out the best in both of us.

Our thick-as-thieves, smart-arse-y dyad benefited from some of those things routinely overlooked when competition between women is quickly dismissed as horrible and only ever centered on men who never deserve that kind of attention.

I’ve written repeatedly about the media too often framing disagreements between woman as a catfight. The catfight frame is cheap and it’s ugly. And yet two people striving alongside one another doesn’t always have to be this way.

Benchmarking is the process whereby a person / a company / a government, compares their performance against something; a set of criteria perhaps, or a similar person or entity. The objective is to establish something to strive for, model against, learn from and perhaps even equal.

And, because it was a pretty long film, I was thinking a lot about benchmarking while watching The Life of Pi.

There’s lots of things going on with Pi that would maketh a worthwhile article: the Wizard Oz allusions, the over-explained Wizard of Oz allusions, the idea of the “unreliable narrator”, the faith.

The one thing that interested me was the relationship between Pi and the tiger, Richard Parker, and how it provided a thoroughly unexpected cinematic presentation of benchmarking.

Winnie the Pooh got it all wrong apparently: befriending a tiger is impossible. So when Young Pi (Vibish Sivakumar) found himself shipwrecked with the stripy beast, the situation was less about the duo becoming BFFs, and more so about them coming to the realisation that their sparring was essential to survival. That the battle kept them going.

Pi described Richard Parker as his “fierce companion”. He claimed that the tiger gave him something to look after, but most notably, kept him alert. Pi had to keep on his toes around the animal because tigers – not unlike pre-adolescent girls apparently – are moody creatures who snap and bite at will.

I’d like to think my friend and I had a closer relationship than Pi and Richard Parker – afterall, we had Barbies and sleepover parties – but this idea of not resting on one’s laurels, of knowing where your colleague is at – of what their standard is – can help you be a better you.

I was a better student when she was my standard; the reverse was equally true.

Yes, I’ve written about comparison being the root of all unhappiness before. And I do believe that. But equally, I think there’s something to be said for knowing what everyone’s up to; knowing what’s considered good. Because while I unquestionably hate it, good / fine / safe / happy don’t exist in a vacuum.

There’s a worthwhile article to be written about Brenda (Kyra Segwick), the protagonist of the sadly now-defunct The Closer.

Brenda, who went to her drawer for a Ding Dong every time she was stressed. Or anxious. Or jubilant. Brenda, who not only dared not to have children, but who went through menopause – complete with the hot flushes and a femininity crisis – at work. Brenda, with her butter-wouldn’t-melt southern-drawl, who tight-rope-walked the line of propriety every single episode.

Along with Alicia (Julianna Margulies) from The Good Wife, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) from Big Love and Sarah (Mireille Enos) from The Killing, Brenda has been amongst my favourite female characters in recent years. Strong women, flawed women, screwy but ultimately thoroughly captivating women.

As fantastic a character as Brenda was – and undoubtedy a standout, irrespective of gender, in the genre – I’m less inclined to just write a piece praising her: a) I’m not really the tribute-piece kind of writer and b) TV has offered us dozens of such characters with equal parts smarts and neurosis:

• Nina Proudman (Asher Keddie) in Offspring
• Emily Owens (Mamie Gummer) in Emily Owens MD
• Mindy Lahiri in The Mindy Project

And that’s just in the medical dramedy genre!

The thing that made Brenda more than just a neurotic career woman makin' her way in a “man’s world” was Fritz (Jon Tenney), her sometimes-suffering husband.

From episode 1 right through to 109, Fritz was Brenda’s man. In the pilot when they met for that first drink, Brenda established the pattern for their dyad: she was always going to be more keen to get her hands on his FBI files than on him. She loved him – she loved him for 7 seasons – but she wasn’t going to compromise herself for him.

And over that first drink, and enduring as a quiet theme for the duration of the series, was Fritz exuding the belief that Brenda – in all her career-driven, neurotic, murder-room-at-home, dogmatic sense of right and wrong madness – was worth it. Completely, without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt worth it.

Fritz wasn’t spineless, he wasn’t pussy-whipped, he wasn’t fucking his way around Los Angeles. He didn’t try to change her or fix her or crush her spirits or make her feel any less the detective dynamo that she was. He let her be crazy and he loved her.

For 109 episodes this struck a chord with me.

I tell a story in my contribution to a coming-soon anthology, about meeting my brother’s current partner for the first time. Prior to her, he was seeing a different woman who was pretty much batshit crazy. I write that as the highest of compliments, of course. I met the crazy woman and clicked with her instantly; we were kindreds in that highly-political, highly-sexed, highly-over-thinking way. She and my brother, of course, were never going to succeed.

And then I met the new partner. She was lovely – she remains lovely – and they are good together. The morning after I first met her however, my brother came to my place for a debrief – what did I think, isn’t she nice, yadda yadda – and I burst into tears.

Of course she was bloody nice! And the nice girl won him over and the crazy one evidently wasn’t a keeper.

And isn’t this what happens time and time again in life? On screen? The path of least resistance is picked over and over and over again.

The Closer was able to deviate from this script because of Fritz. Because he loved Brenda enough to make it seem possible that even the most batshit craziest of women can live happily ever after. Yeah, I’ll buy the boxset for that.

A couple of years ago I went to a rather interesting fetish conference in Istanbul. One bloke, giving a paper about porn, read his paper monotonously from his notebook; behind him on the screen played a pornographic slide-show.

In the question time that followed his paper, I asked him what 20 minutes of footage of women being penetrated had to do with his research. Scowls and groans followed and I became the token “feminiazi” of the conference, daring to rain on the parade of those free-wheelin', sex positive academics. (That I was there talking about my own sex-positive book on sexual perversion was apparently lost on them).

Truth be told, I actually have no problem with images of nudity. I do however, think that disregarding time, placement and one’s audience can render such images sexist. Using pornographic images of women – and women only – to decorate a lacklustre conference paper is one example. Using such images to make an opening scene of a very boring – and exhaustingly preachy – film memorable is another.

Flight opens with the pilot at the centre of the ill-fated title voyage (Denzel Washington) woken by a phone call summoning him to the cockpit. As he guzzles down the remnants of last night’s booze, his companion – colleague Trina (Nadine Velazquez) – walks around the hotel room naked. Full-frontal. Back and forth, back and forth she walks, her breasts, her minimal bush on display. Miss it the first couple of times? No worries, there she goes again.

My feminism isn’t about randomly jabbing fingers at things and claiming they’re sexist. In fact, there are plenty of scenes where full frontal female nudity is relevant to a narrative. One of my favourite films from 2012 for example – Take This Waltz – had a lovely scene of old and young, fat and thin women each naked and towelling off after a swim.

The year prior, in the equally excellent – if gut-wrenching – Shame we saw a lot of the protagonist’s (Michael Fassbender) penis because he was a character perpetually kowtowing to the yens of his cock. For Brandon the sight of his penis was much more relevant than his face.

When women’s bare bodies are used to decorate a scene – as exclusively eye candy or as a quick and dirty rationale for a more adult classification – it is sexist and it is testimony to the enormous disparity that exists between scenes of schlong and those of vulva: one is, apparently, arty, beautiful and worth eyeballing; the other a threatening eyesore.

Later this year I have a book coming out – American Taboo – which has a chapter on full-frontal male nudity. In it I quoted from Douglas Rowe’s article on nudity in film:

scenes with full-frontal male nudity usually can be timed with a stopwatch while those with nude women can be measured with a sundial…

I like this quote because it highlights one of Hollywood’s many double standards that Flight complies with. We don’t see Denzel’s dongle – God forbid – because penises are considered as much more confronting/explicit/aggressive/challenging than a vulva. Because men and women are expected to enjoy a long hard look at lady genitals but to find the wang offensive if not an egregious turn-off.

Flight will be memorable to me for a host of reasons. That Denzel got nominated for an Oscar while Anthony Hopkins' excellent performance in Hitchcock got ignored will plague me in perpetuity. Most of all I’ll remember it for it’s embarrassing opening scene. And the reminder that it serves of how much sexism still exists in cinema. Pretty good soundtrack though.

Late January spells hot and hideous weather, the TV full of rubbish and the saddest of legacies left behind by Little Johnny Howard: stores full of flag crap and bastions of hypocrisy like Dick Smith vying to control definitions of “Australian”. (For the record it involves making a fortune from selling imported electronics and later becoming a bitter patriot flogging counterfeit Vegemite).

January also means it’s slow news time. Really slow news time. And slow news means that craptastic nonsense like boobgate gets traction and a story about the most desirable traits in men and women piques my interest.

Firstly, given that roughly 72% of my income gets spent on shampoo and conditioner, obviously “presentation” exists as permanent whitenoise for me. There have however, been occasions when that niggle has become a cacophony. I’ll recount three.

One. I was 24, writing my PhD, and stumbled across some research that reported that 24 was apparently the age that women were most attractive. That stat of course, was far less devastating than the 24-year-old woman quoted in it: she realised that she looked as good as she ever would and yet she still hated herself.

Two. Just before Christmas last year the Fairfax Beauty Beat blog ran a post that included the line “any woman over 30 worth her hard-earned disposable income has had it done.” It being Botox.

Three. Last night a female friend and some bloke I’d never met shared a table. We were talking about age and he asked me mine. I answered, and chirpily he volunteered that I “looked really good for 32”.

So last night’s failed compliment and waking to this morning’s Dick Smith horror movie meant that reading the RSVP.com.au research on desirability could have proven my downfall.

On the list of attributes that men are apparently looking for in a lady friend, I don’t have any. Not a one:

• No strong political beliefs
• Blonde hair
• Green eyes
• Social/occasional drinker
• 170cm tall
• Works in advertising/PR/media
• Non-smoker

Okay, so I don’t really smoke: but reading that list and I desperately wanted to start.

I could lie and write that it was my copious quantities of self-love that ended up rendering that whole piece of research laughable. Alas, I’m as insecure and self-loathing as the next academic. Rather, it was the list of traits most desirable in men that truly neutralised the nightmare:

• Swinging voter
• Grey hair
• Green eyes
• Social/occasional drinker
• 190cm tall
• Works in real estate
• Non-smoker

Once upon a time I was 29. I had just slept with him – that exact “most desirable” man, right down to him being nearly a foot taller than me – and I remember watching him reattach his cuff-links and realising that I bloody hate swing-voting real estate agents; if I’m ever to sleep with another then I damn well want to be paid. That way I’d at least feel less politically compromised.

I’m never visually seduced so grey hair and green eyes are irrelevant to me: I’m stuck on the voting business. Men want women who are politically apathetic and women want men who are politically fickle.

WTF?

And that’s the nugget of gold that’s keeping me buoyant.

Who the hell are these people?

What kind of man wants his partner not to have any strong political beliefs?

What kind of woman is happy for her bloke to be so void of values that he’ll vote for just about anyone?

Who would have thought that such questionable-quality research could make me so happy?

Sure, the social scientist in me could highlight all kinds of sociological explanations for the findings – if not also spotlight the obvious methodological flaws – but I’m only interested in the takeaway: that men who I don’t like don’t like me. Yeah, I think I’ll live.

I’m a vegetarian who’s served as an apologist for KFC. I abhor the elevation of athletes to God-like status, but sure, I’ve defended Warnie. I actually quite like David Koch so writing a defence of him wouldn’t be impossible. And I’ll do a little of that. Along with spotlighting his el cheapo publicity stunts.

First, let’s backtrack a little.

The Kochie/boobgate scandal has been raging for a couple of days now and I’ve consciously resisted getting involved. I blame my fears of the mommy bloggers. Not because I have anything against them, of course, but being childless, my broaching parenting is done with both reluctance and great, great caution. That, and I really hate the feminist vs. feminist / mothers vs non-mothers wars: actively playing into that game bores me and I so hate the catfight frame.

But I did a couple of interviews on the topic today – in essence, I “broke my silence” – so I may as well write the piece.

I am, without question, supportive of those mothers who chose to breastfeed. Hell, I’m quite okay with non-mothers breastfeeding too. “Go for your lives,” as my grandmother would say: suck, be sucked, all good by me; I won’t ever question your right to offer up the nip'.

I happened to be watching Sunrise when Kochie made his comments. He was talking about a woman who had been breastfeeding at a public pool and he used the words classy and modest in a criticism of her act.

Classy and modest are inflammatory words to me – undoubtedly more so to militant mothers – and he was always going to get a rise. A rise I’m thoroughly convinced was orchestrated, but that’s a point I’ll return to later.

I don’t find breasts offensive. I have a set, a great number of us do, and they really should appear in one of those HSBC ads captioned by “food/sex/disease”: they are more value-laden than any other body part and this makes them a perpetually complicated display.

While I may be all good with the boob, some people are much less so. And yet those people – who very well might be criticised as boring or retrograde or fuddy-duddies – have just as much a right to use public space as every nursing mother. In turn, they need to be free from images that they find offensive.

I was talking to a friend about this topic over lunch and she remarked how rare it is to see public breastfeeding. I’m not sure that it actually is all that rare: I’m more sure however, that most mothers during public feedings hold their babies against their bodies without much booby fanfare. I don’t think it’s about them being classy or, God-forbid modest, rather them simply taking into consideration their environment.

And we’re back to Kochie’s point.

Sure, he used some stupid words – deliberately, but I’ll get to that point in a minute – but he was simply trying to contend that one’s surroundings are worth thinking about. Are worth considering.

Isn’t this what I do every time I listen to my music via earphones rather than a boombox?

Is that really such a scandalous idea?

Ahh, but it was so scandalous because Kochie constructed it to be so. I’d argue that he deliberately used words that would inflame. He went on to read aloud text messages from those aggrieved and continued talking about the topic the following day. He kept stirring the pot until the nursing mothers felt compelled to lactate outside his studio.

I should divulge that I don’t actually have a problem with any of the Sunrise tactics: Kochie and Co can do whatever they like to promote their show and viewers can respond accordingly. What I do have a problem with however, is feminists taking the bait.

Last year in this space I wrote about the lingerie football stuff. About how this crap only ever makes papers because feminists naively keep buying into these carefully stage-managed faux-debates. By allowing Kochie’s comments to inflame, protesters are both validating his low-brow techniques and helping deliver him more publicity.

Who wins? Kochie solidifies his fan base: those who love him continue to see him as a host who dares to “go there”; those who hate him never watched the show anyway so he loses nothing.

I didn’t want to touch this topic; I’ve now devoted some 800 words to it: I too have bitten. But I think it’s really, really important that we feminists pick our battles carefully. Mine today centre on encouraging media literacy and familiarisation with the art of PR. Kochie and the Boobs are much less interesting.

I understand the morals clauses in contracts. I might not particularly like them – being morally ambiguous and all myself – but they make sense: you signed a contract with PETA; wearing a coon-skin bikini really would be a bad decision.

Had Lance given his Oprah confession while simultaneously receiving a pay cheque from sponsors, then sure, company lawyers could point to Clause 463, subsection whatever, and dump him. With this I’d have no qualms.

But we’re talking about a very different situation here.

As I type, sponsors are undoubtedly having sit-downs with their legal teams, working out how best to profiteer and indulge in the big ol’ double-dip. Because, afterall, this is precisely what any law suit against him would be: sponsors having their cake and eating it.

Lance partaking of the juice was not a recent rumour. For the years and years that he smelt a little like EPO, a little too testosterone-y, sponsors happily threw cash at him. They conducted their own cost-benefit analysis amidst extensive speculation – as does any company before picking a tout – and still chose him.

Because even under the cloud of substance abuse concerns, the corporate decision was that Armstrong would be a brand asset. Fans saw him as a hero, elevating him to that pedestal reserved only for athletes and boy bands. And sponsors cashed in on it: the Armstrong juggernaut peddled barrows full of merchandise and all was well.

Flash forward a few years and sponsors suddenly want their money back. Far worse than the stench of synthetic testosterone is that of moralistic opportunism.

Under contract, Lance made sponsors money. Shoes and t-shirts and other assorted crap got sold, contracts got renewed, money was spent, money was banked. That’s called business.

On what possible grounds do sponsors now think they have a right to ask for a refund? To ask for more than a return on their initial spend?

The very reason sponsors bought a piece of Armstrong was because he was useful in personalising their ideals: Lance was chosen because he embodied performance, dedication, success. Had they wanted someone who could not tell a lie, then they should have gone with George Washington. They choose Lance because he was all about the win.

And it worked. Consumers looked at the Lance package and decided – as evidenced by them buying and donning the Armstrong wares – that they too aspired to these ideals.

Companies made money out of him and consumers, while wearing the shoes and those curious rubber bracelet things, got their much-desired connection to their hero.

Where’s the fraud?

Who hasn’t read an interview with a much-respected actor/author/whoever and choked on their toast when they read that he/she’s a Scientologist?

Who hasn’t bought a skincare product and not suddenly looked like Cindy Crawford/Elle McPherson/Miranda Kerr?

Who hasn’t looked across the table at someone and thought, yeah, you’re really not the person I thought you were.

And yet none of us are greedy enough to expect refunds or compensation for our time or bruised egos.

All marketing is about smoke, mirrors and a whole lotta wishful thinking.

I’m not a legal theorist and I’m sure the shysters will find some spectacularly ingenuous grounds for a cash-grab. Me and I think, well, the bloke wasn’t all he said he was and his product didn’t quite match up to the hype. So what? That’s called life. Suck it up.

Much has been made of Lance Armstrong falling short of an Oprah mea culpa. While he may have admitted to the imbibing, he didn’t say sorry, didn’t express remorse. Certainly didn’t do the expected Marion Jones sob-a-thon.

We all wanted more from him, of course. More detail, more dates, more names. Fear not however, because we’re most certainly gonna get it. He might have been booted from the bike but Mr Armstrong most certainly hasn’t left the building.

There are two reasons that we got few words and scant emotion from cycling’s Great Satan. One, it was all a drip-feed preview to an inevitable – and likely more lucrative – tell-all book.

Two, this Lance – the driven, unflinching, egotistical bastard – is the version he’s always peddled; the image that he, presumably, wants to keep turning a dime from.

Ask any marketing theorist and they’ll readily espouse the value of brand consistency: Lance needs to keep up the bastardry because after the dust settles and we all find someone new to gnaw on, it’s the all-grit-and-determination Bully Boy who will move the merchandise.

The true value of Armstrong is not as a cyclist, rather, as the embodiment of the well-worn, much-loved, tried-and-true gendered tale of that bloke who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and never gave up, never gave in.

Had he laid his head on the lap of Oprah and sobbed convulsively onto the fabric of her interview finery, he wouldn’t have been true to his brand. And it’s the brand – and only the brand – that can be salvaged from this mess.

It was service to this brand that had him “break his silence” and it’s salvaging the brand that explains his arrogance and lack of repentance. Brand Bastard is a label defined by self-belief, self-reliance and an unflailing dedication to winning-at-all-costs, even at the darkest of hours.

Even if Lance decided to straighten up and cycle right, his future lies not in elite athletics: a) decades of cheating and only the village idiot would believe he’s clean, and b) he’s 41 and would be duelling – inevitably unsuccessfully – against younger and more testicled competitors.

The bigger story to emerge from this brouhaha – the narrative much more interesting and certainly more marketable than that of a 41-year-old serial doper – stars a pig-headed champion who would do anything to win. Sure, he’s a drug cheat, but he’s also a clench-your-teeth-and-plough-through-the-pain role model with a story to tell and motivational speaker terrain to conquer.

Like him or – as in my case – find him thoroughly loathsome, he’s dedicated. Dedicated to the Lance Armstrong brand, to the narrative of the self-at-the-centre-of-the-universe and to the story of triumph over adversity.

None of us need to forgive him, in fact, I dare say that us continuing to see him as a jerk is crucially important. Just as there are audiences for unapologetic serial pests like Charlie Sheen, just as people pay good money to be hollered at at boot camp, there’s a market for this Lance and much less so for a sooky sooky la la who might have wished it had all played out differently.

The interview might have been unsatisfying for those wanting him to claw at his chest, gouge out his eyes or offer an artery up to the masses as repentance. But for those of us interested in marketing, in branding, the interview was a tentative – but enormously useful – step into his post-cycling life where his bullying, drive and dogged prize-piggery has a ready-made self-help-seeking audience.

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Tune into Lauren Rosewarne’s 7-part radio program “The Fairer Sex” on Wednesday nights at 7pm on 3RRR (102.7FM) or download from ondemand.rrr.org.au/. Airing until January 30.

Last week on Lifetime – a cable channel in the US – a reality TV show called Double Divas premiered.

The trailer gives a useful overview: a couple of best friends fit amply bosomed women for new bras. Ta daa!

Anyone familiar with women’s magazines will know the “truism” about most women wearing the wrong size bra. Whether this is actually true or merely folklore perpetuated by Bendon and La Perla, it’s a story often told.

The undercurrent of this tale – and the central theme of Double Divas – is that getting a well-fitted over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder will completely overhaul a life: change your bra, change your life as the Double Divas tagline goes.

The sense in getting a decently fitting bra isn’t something I care to contest: be it a new bra/hair cut/lipstick, if you feel less hideous or depressed following a new purchase, what’s the real harm?

What I want to question however, is why anyone would join the audience. I don’t ask this in a who-would-ever-watch-that-crap way – I try not to judge the malarkey some people tune into – but I am genuinely curious about the appeal. Is it just about the boobs? Is there nothing boobs can’t do? Can’t sell?

First things first: in a world where dating shows about “ugly” people and folks who take couponing a little too seriously go into second and third series, evidently no topic is off limits in the reality TV genre. No topic is too offensive, too boring, too stupid. Such shows get made because there are audiences for them. And I want to know why. In the case of Double Divas, why is anyone tuning in to watch women get new bras?

Is it the freak show factor? Are we watching these gigantically breasted women in voyeuristic horror just to mock their grotesquery and feel smugly better about our own imperfections?

Is it about titillation? Is there something arousing – made more respectable by watching it via Lifetime rather than, say, the Playboy channel – in watching all those bountiful boobs bounce up and down?

Is it about characters? About watching the the quirky, the over-the-top, the quite possibly criminally insane in the same way we’d consume any fiction?

It’s just about the boobs, isn’t it?

It’s just about the boobs. A show about women getting fitted for shoes wouldn’t work. A show about men getting new shirts wouldn’t work. Double Divas got made because it’s got boobs at the helm.

So what’s my problem with it?

If I’ve got scarce problems with the sex industry – be it strip clubs or porn – what is my concern with Double Divas?

If I wear a padded bra myself every single day, surely I “get” the boob thing?

I’m thinking it’s authenticity. The sex industry is selling a very specific product: tune in to porn and you know what you’re going to get; enter a strip club or brothel and you know what’s on offer.

For me and there’s something vaguely irksome about a show purporting to be about all about self-help, transformation and female empowerment actually just being a vehicle for more boobs on to TV.

I’m picking on authenticity here – or lack thereof – but there are equally substantial concerns about class and race.

That refined women, that educated women, aren’t getting their bras fitted on TV, for example. Concerns for another post of course.

Double Divas will no doubt make its way onto Australian screens – the appeal of boobs is evidently universal – but personally I find the why of it all so much more interesting than the what. But then, boobs never have done it for me.

Writers, feminists, academics, social commentators. Each stir up varying degrees of loathing, mockery and complete and utter frustration in me.

The irony and hypocrisy does not evade me.

Depending on the day, writer/feminist/academic/social commentator is the label I’ll receive or use to describe myself.

And because I write, of course, I’m nursing issues with self-loathing and jealousy and misanthropy and arrogance.

And this is exactly what Zoo Time is about. Guy is trying to write a novel about a novelist. (Apparently a sign that things truly have gone to literary shit). In Guy’s world, all writers – himself spectacularly included – are secretive and horrible and narcissistic and grotesquely neurotic.

And even if, in real life, we’re not like that all of the time, I’ll happily embrace a professional excuse for my quirks.

It’s when Zoo Time is at its hysterical and hyperbolic best that I was most enraptured.

In Guy’s world, publishers and agents blow their brains out; disappear from mountaintops without a trace. So dire is the industry. I have, quite literally, had the editor I was assigned at a publishing house go missing. Missing. Without a trace. One day he was buying me lunch in New Haven and the next his emails were bouncing and I was assigned a replacement. And he was never ever mentioned again.

In Guy’s world, writers are constipated; so much so that industry magazines devote pages to exploring remedies. Years ago I was in a relationship with a writer so very preoccupied with his bowels – so bizarrely fetishistic about undergoing colonoscopies – that he made the crackpots in Zoo Time look gastrically sane.

When Guy reflects on some of the least satisfying aspects of his marriage – musing “Only a writer or pervert would put up with this” – I knew, to my very marrow – that he’s right. Much much worse, I knew that he was describing me.

There’s so much to love about Zoo Time. A favourite theme is the idea of writing being so like wanking. Not a new idea of course.

In my book Part-Time Perverts I quoted literary theorist Lawrence R. Schehr who had a wonderful analogy about this:

He moves one hand along a somewhat cylindrical object until a liquid is released. No one is there to receive the liquid; the dried traces of that liquid may or may not be noticed at a subsequent point as tell-tale signs of the activity…

Jacobson offered his own description involving pens being dipped in semen.

Both descriptions are more suited to male masturbation than female, sure, but the link is perfect.

Masturbation and writing can both be so bloody self-indulgent. And insular. And pleasurable. And isolating. And wonderful and horrible and arousing and…

Even the bits of the Zoo Time that felt repetitive felt repetitive for a reason. Masturbation often follows exactly the same course – to the exact same ends – too. Over and over again. And yet done right and it can be awfully splendid.

I’m going to dub it my favourite release of 2012. I’ve yet to settle on the criteria used to judge this, but any book that both claims writing is a wank and yet is as beautifully written, thought-provoking and zanily reassuring as Zoo Time gets my vote.

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P.S. My 7-part Summer radio show – “The Fairer Sex” – starts on Wednesday the 19th of December on 3RRR (102.7) in Melbourne at 7pm. Podcast available after the show. Tune in!

Some trips get ruined by natural disasters, acts of terrorism, Tiger Airlines. For me, my first solo trip was ruined by Nickleback.

Back in 2002 I visited The Continent. And wherever I went during that trip – every store, every train station, every café – Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” was playing.

The torture was not unlike my brief foray working at a dance studio in the late 1990s where the only music pumped around that mirrored hellhole was Enrique Iglesias. Or that nightclub hotline where I recorded phrases like “come and play toss the boss on Wednesday nights” in a husky voice and where Ben Folds Five’s Brick was always on.

So in 2002 it was Nickelback. Awful music, on par with the equally abhorrent aural atrocity Creed.

I’ve never asked anyone about whether they shared my Nickelback sentiments: how could they not? So whenever I made a joke along the lines of “Did you still want that Nickleback T-shirt for Christmas?”, I just assumed the other person would understand that it’s funny because Nickelback are heinous.

It was only in the last couple of weeks however, that I realised just how very organised Nickleback hatred is. In Detroit recently, some 55,000 sane – if possibly humourless – folk signed a petition aiming to stop the band committing crimes against music in Michigan.

In a recent interview, Nickelback members addressed their status as “The World’s Most Hated Band”. While working only to solidify my contempt, they offered a lengthy rationalisation about why bands like theirs have so many haters: mega bands are apparently like big cities – the bigger the population, the more detractors.

I was dwelling on this issue of band hatred as I started reading Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time (2012) yesterday.

Early in and the protagonist – novelist Guy Abelman – was discussing his Amazon stars with his publisher. The more glowing his reader reviews and apparently the more stagnant his sales. Guy’s suicidal publisher, Merton, explained this as readers not liking being told what to like. When Guy suggested populating the site with negative reviews, Merton countered by claiming that readers don’t like being told what to hate either.

While ill-fated Merton’s comments were couched in a broader lamentation of the publishing industry – and were mentioned alongside the apparent hideousness of authors needing to “Twit”, the scourge of poor punctuation and the low-brow popularity of vampires – I think he might just have a point.

I didn’t quite feel sorry for Nickelback’s high-level hatred – with their 50 million album sales and legions of deaf women finding their music… ahem… arousing… they don’t need my sympathy anyway – but with so many people already hating them, do I really need to continue?

While my views on Nickelback haven’t changed, popular hatred for a product often does elicit my sympathy and curiosity. A bad review, for example, is certainly never a reason for me not to see a film. And I rarely read anything about a book until after I finish anyway.

Some marketing campaigns even aim to be hated. When Carl’s Jnr in the US used a sudsy Paris Hilton molesting a car to advertise a burger, they knew there’d be backlash. From feminists, from parenting groups, from conservatives. Marketing gold! Getting these groups offside can help rally a product’s true market: in this case, pimply teenage boys.

Audiences don’t like being told what to hate and just as keenly do they resist being told what to like.

Cast your mind back to the very early 90s. Whichever network first screened Seinfeld on Australian television and they were advertising it as “America’s Funniest Show”. And I distinctly remember Dad saying that he certainly wouldn’t be told what the funniest show is. (He’d later becoming a Seinfeld encyclopedia, but that’s another story).

For a lot of people – myself included – there’s something not only abrasive about being told that something is the greatest thing you’ll ever see/hear/taste, but savvy audiences know the equation anyway: the greater the hype, the greater the budget for marketing.

Unless you’re Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom no, you probably won’t actively want a bad review. But being widely panned doesn’t have to be a bad thing either.

In one of the last scenes of The Master, cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) sings On a Slow Boat to China. The romantic connotations aside, the ordeal of so long a journey perfectly encapsulated my viewing experience.

144 minutes, my friends. 144 gruelling minutes.

The other day in The Body Shop I was buying a shower gel and the shopkeep asked me if I wanted a Bath Lily. (For the uninitiated: it’s a nonsense and expensive sponge-thing). I said no thanks and needlessly noted that I hated them. Hate of course, was far too strong an emotion for a sponge. But it’d been a long day.

But I absolutely hated The Master. 144 shambolic minutes of overacting and characters so disposable that I wished each would die gruesome – but celluloid-worthy – deaths.

In those 144 minutes I counted four cult-themed films I’d seen in the last 12 months; a number that seemed a little too large for just one year:

Sound of My Voice. Excellent.

Martha Marcy May Marlene. Kinda interesting; very good ending.

Higher Ground. Boring.

Why? What is it that makes cults so interesting to filmmakers? To audiences?

I’m convinced that part of the appeal lies in the freak-show factor. Of watching “weirdos” who are oh so different to us. That on one hand here’s a (debatably) charismatic leader offering the lost and the angry and the anomic answers. That there’s something seductive about watching a self-styled prophet manipulate and exploit and destroy.

That the guy might be villainous but the lucky bastard also possesses those brain-washing techniques we’d secretly like to sample on days when playing God seems fun.

And, of course, we’re also watching for the devotees. Those sad sacks and dumb-arses and weak-willed saps who are so embarrassingly desperate for answers that they’ll let themselves be brainwashed – as PTSD-sufferer Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) did in The Master – by a dulcet toned Svengali. And we’re watching them, vacillating between thinking that they’re naive and idiotic.

And we’re – without a shadow of a doubt – thinking these followers are all other. That they’re unhinged while we’re far too smart to ever be tricked into some cultish tomfoolery.

And yet – I thought, at probably the 80th minute of torture – aren’t we all, in varying degrees, members of one cult or another?

One of Merriam-Webster’s definitions that I like is “a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator”.

I love advertising: both the art of it and the psychology behind it. And the most simple thing that advertising does is attempt to “cure” what ails us.

Without advertising for example, we might never have known that our genitals stank, had cellulite, had “abnormal” sexual functioning or that our hair was too thin, too frizzy or too flyaway.

Advertising teaching us what’s wrong – what our disease is – and then offers us a cure through product.

But it’s not just consumer behaviour that can be cult-like.

Worship of rock bands and political parties and political philosophies and sporting teams and authors and actors and vitamins and coupledom and money and professions and dietary choices and…

Each of which can also be treated as though it’s a “solution”.

Of course, I’m not claiming that any of this is a bad thing.

One of Grand Master Dodd’s tenets is that no human can exist without serving a master. While I’m not sure that that one idea was worth 144 minutes of my life, it’s an interesting thesis.

Whether or not we have JC or Allah – at one end of the respectability spectrum – or Marshall Applewhite or Charles Manson at the other, or Apple or Chanel, that quest for a cure for the human condition seems pretty universal. And certainly a decent idea for a film. Perhaps.

I’m a stickler for immersing myself in local literature while in foreign lands. It goes without saying therefore, that while in London recently I soon sourced a copy of the Daily Mail.

Buttressed by stories about scantily clad soapie stars was a piece on things that ordinary Britons had never experienced:

19% have never been inside a McDonald’s restaurant

30% have never bought a takeaway cappuccino or latte

28% have never watched the X Factor on TV

The stat I honed in on centred on Bond. James Bond. Apparently 9% have never seen a Bond film.

Now I may have been into several McDonald’s dining establishments and seen X Factor and bought a coffee (albeit for someone else – I’ve never imbibed myself) but I’d not seen a Bond film either.

And I haven’t owned a car (like 18% of Britons) or skied (like 68% of them) or wired a plug (like 17% of them). I in fact, don’t know what it even means to wire a plug. Hell, I only changed my first light bulb last week.

I’ve never had a driver’s license, let alone a car, I’ve never smoked cigarettes, or marijuana for that matter, yadda yadda: I’ve already accepted that I’m probably not much like an ordinary Briton anyway. (Not that statistical everydayness is any huge aspiration).

But, I write about film and television. And gender. How had I not seen a Bond film? It seemed vaguely preposterous. Preposterous and effortlessly rectifiable.

There are lots of angles I could have written this piece from having now watched – and stayed awake through at least most of – Skyfall. More stupid Turkish stereotypes, evil bisexuals, barely-surface-scratched-homoerotica, Daniel Craig’s very peculiar running style and my compete and utter perplexity that any woman could find such a jerk attractive. Instead, I’m going to focus on this notion of a Bond film being deemed important to the collective experience.

Is having seen at least one Bond film important?

If so, important to what exactly?

Is it an experience more important to Brits than to Australians?

What is it about a Bond film that is deemed as important and akin to the everydayness of, say, sending an email (something, incidentally, that apparently 16% of Britons haven’t done)?

Dad was recently lamenting that he’d watched a quiz show where a PhD student contestant answered a capital city question wrong. Dad though this was heinous. He then said – before I’d even opened my mouth – “you probably don’t think that it matters because you can Google it.”

I actually wouldn’t have said that. My response would have been something about a PhD not being any guide to intelligence. And then I’d have mentioned the Google Effect.

But the root of Dad’s argument is simply that some things need to be taught in school; that some things are so important that everyone should know them. I’m not sure I agree – at least, I’m not sure I could agree on the list of what’s importance – but I was thinking about this while watching Daniel Craig sneer around Istanbul. Around Shanghai. Around London. About this idea of common knowledge and common experiences.

I don’t feel more well-rounded as a person having now watched a beautifully shot but far too long film with a gauzy script.

I certainly don’t feel more educated as a scholar of film and gender. Nor do I feel more connected to my paternal British heritage.

I have however, sharpened a deep-seated loathing of Craig. Daniel Craig. I guess that’s something.

There’s a hilarious scene in Joe Meno’s novel Hairstyles of the Damned (2004) where the teenaged protagonist, Brian, tried to seduce a Catholic schoolgirl by playing REO Speedwagon.

Hilarious just as much as it was hideous.

While I laughed at the idea of anyone thinking that Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore (1984) could possibly have mystical leg-parting qualities, it’s only funny because it’s true. At 32, I continue to be as musically seduced – as musically stupid – as that schoolgirl. And most curiously, I still haven’t learnt my lesson.

I broke the not judging a book by its cover rule and downloaded Hairstyles purely because I liked the cover artwork. I didn’t know anything about it; after reading it and perusing some of the comments on Amazon, apparently I wasn’t alone in this. (A lesson to anyone suggesting the irrelevance of digital book “covers”).

While I knew nothing about it, it turned out to be about one of my favourite vices: music. It’s all about mix-tape making and communicating through lyrics and daydreaming about the perfect super band. I didn’t love it like I loved Nick Hornby’s similar-themed Juliet, Naked (2009), but I miss the characters now that I’ve finished it. And seeing The Perks of Being a Wallflower over the weekend made me like Brian and co a little more.

This idea about seduction through music is something that has long fascinated me.

I was in a car recently with a nice enough guy who I wasn’t going to see again. We reached my street and either he surreptitiously turned on the stereo or I suddenly realised music was playing. Either way, it was Talking Heads.

I love Talking Heads. No leg-parting – hell, I don’t love them like I love The National or Nick Cave, let’s not go crazy – but sure, I conceded to a bit of “And She Was” (1985) making out because good songs – like good conditioner – shouldn’t be wasted. That, and when it comes to music I’m as wayward as a Catholic schoolgirl.

A little longer back and I was in a hotel room. By midnight and I was convinced that I needed to end things and I was sitting alone and teary in the en suite. Come morning and I heard him in the bathtub splashing away and listening to Peter Cetera. Without any compunction; without a trace of hipster irony. And of course, I swooned, forgave and loved a little harder.

I’ve made innumerable dodgy purchasing decisions based on music – paying to see Argo, Water for Elephants (2011) and Like Crazy (2011) purely for the songs on the trailers are good examples. These films each turned out to be, in varying degrees, crappy, but at most they cost me $18 and two hours. I have no regrets.

Equally I’ve made questionable romantic decisions based on music – I have, for example, fallen a little bit for every man who has ever made me a mix-tape. Those relationships that ended badly cost me a lot more than money and time. I’m still pretty sure I have no regrets.

I enjoyed Hairstyles of the Damned but it’s very reliant on the reader buying into the idea that music has a range of coercive powers. That it can seduce and persuade and delude. Me, and I was convinced at seventeen when a greasy-haired boy gave me my first mix-tape.

Among the many fascinating points made in Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, was the tendency for readers to link together the books they read in a similar period. To identify parallel themes and questions in texts that often have nothing more than the reader to unite them. And in this post I’m making such a connection with films: Argo and Cold War.

Sure, I saw both in roughly the same timeframe, but there’s a few things beyond me – the sometimes humble film fan – that make them similar:

1. Big, expensive, all-star productions
2. Plots about hostage situations
3. Normally-clean shaven “hunks” donning facial hair (a beard for Ben Affleck and some finely finessed fluffery for Tony Leung)
4. Sweet but irrelevant (and tokenistically brief) scenes of the protagonist playing papa
5. Game changers: the trailer for Argo made me hate Eminem less; Cold War challenged my 32-year-old contempt for fireworks

At the end of my Argo screening, a man behind me remarked, “Well there’s next year’s Best Picture Oscar in the bag.” My dad, next to me, loudly guffawed.

Regardless of how Dad or I might review the film, the bloke behind us was probably right: Argo will likely win some trophies next year. The stranger behind us wasn’t claiming he enjoyed it – although, perhaps it could be inferred – but was simply stating a fact: Argo has the elements that see films win stuff. Stuff like it being historical, like it being a story of an American institutional success, like it being in English. Argo will win stuff and Cold War won’t. And I’ve been quietly obsessing about this idea.

It’s ultimately meaningless for me to say that Cold War is a better film. While I thought it most definitely was, taste is fickle. The reasons why Oscar will nod at Argo – and more broadly why Argo is screening in ten million cinemas and, in Melbourne – a city, of only like a mere 90,000 people born in China – Cold War is only showing at two – have little to do with quality or audience enjoyment and so much to do with marketing and assumptions about demographics.

It is, of course, worth noting that it is rare for any “foreign film” (read: non-English language film) to break into the mainstream: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), the God awful Life is Beautiful (1997), Amélie (2001) and Pan’s Labrinyth (2006) are rare examples of foreign films that made money outside their own country.

Why? Why can the most hideous nightmare of an English language fart joke flick fare better at the box office here than virtually any foreign film?

Is it because audiences actually prefer sophomoric cinema, or is it because this is the crap that multiplexes keep showing and we – myself included – keep patronising?

If multiplexes are to blame, what the hell is going on? Are they just making screening decisions based on history – a history influenced by racist distribution decisions – or because they know audiences harbour internalised prejudices about non-Western faces and God-forbid having to read while watching?

Chicken, egg and false consciousness arguments perhaps.

Cold War needs more attention. Argo – a decent film, but ultimately just a film – needs to be compared to the world of cinema before it gets branded as fabulous and showered in gratuitous glory just because its fares well against the other crap showing.

Whenever I use the term “literati”, I’m being facetious and describing a Melbourne writer’s culture that I find peculiar at best and laughably pretentious at worst.

When I came across The End of Your Life Book Club – written by Will Schwalbe, a writer, an editor and mercifully, not from Melbourne – I was petrified.

I didn’t want to be part of yet another literati conversation about the death of the book. I didn’t want to hear about mergers and acquisitions or how the publishing industry is akin to gun manufacturing. Another print vs digital rehash was far beyond my patience.

So it was with trepidation that I downloaded the Schwalbe tome. Trepidation that it would be all-industry, all bitchy and nasty and awash with literary in-jokes and obscure references to books I’ve never heard of. Trepidation that it would be a literary Emperor’s New Clothes wank-fest.

Trepidation, of course, that was completely ill-placed. Rather than focusing on the author’s bio – such the rookie mistake – I should have concentrated on the title. Instead of fearing industry prattle, my worries should have centred on the spectacle I’d become listening to a 9.5 hour audiobook without someone holding my hand.

The lump lodged in my throat on the first page; by the end I had sobbed far more than I had reading David Nicholls' One Day (2009) or Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002); the two books that once topped my Most Devastating list.

So the premise is a simple one: an informal book club emerges between the narrator, Will, and his mother, Mary, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. A club, Schwalbe acknowledges, that he – like all enthusiastic readers – has always been apart of.

I was completely sucked in by this idea. As someone who failed her one and only organised book club foray, I really like Schwalbe’s point they all keen readers are always in casual book clubs. Those what-we’ve-been-reading conversations have long been my favourites; my relationships with folks who don’t read often feel thinner for it.

More than just a book about books however, The End of Your Life Book Club is about reading. It’s about other things, sure – death and dying and feminism and refugees and public health and education and homosexuality and travel and middle-class guilt – but it’s mostly about the gifts accrued through that simple act of turning pages.

Books provided Will and his mother a way to talk about things that would have been too confronting, too frightening, too close-to-the-bone to discuss frankly. Instead – and in a way that was both sweet and familiar – mother and son spoke about life’s big ticket concerns through characters; through, ostensibly, avatars.

Books provided Will and his mother an escape; not necessarily from the awfulness of Mary’s chemo, of her impending death, but just the offering of elsewhere. I’ve written previously about the simple but intoxicating idea of just wanting different – not necessarily better but just something else. Books provide this. You can read to feel better, or worse, or just more simply otherwise.

The End of Your Life Book Club forced me to think about my own patterns of literature consumption. I realised I read much more when I’m less-than-happy. When I’m happy – really happy, as opposed to just content – I just want to listen to music and loll; if I’m truly happy, my concentration is far too impaired for books.

When I’m less than happy however, I read voraciously. I have to. And I have to have the next book lined up; the idea of there being a gap – a consuming chasm – is petrifying. And sure, sometimes it’s about about escape – about preferring other people’s misery to my own – and at other times it’s just about wanting to give introspection and self-reflection a rest. To immerse in something outside of myself.

Schwalbe discusses a diverse range of books I enjoyed immensely – from Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2008), Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006) – and far more that I hadn’t. And yet, rather than make me feel excluded from the unfamiliar volumes – rather than making me feel as though I’m pressed up against the window of some fantastic door-list-only literary in club – instead, he had me salivating to read them.

The End of Your Life Book Club is a beautiful combination of memoir, tribute to a parent, but even more so, it’s a lovely homage to that transformative exercise of reading.

I’m not sure a reader could ask for more of a treat than that.

Some of my best friends are dairy farmers. Okay, one is. Then there was that dodgy romp with a milker at her wedding. Country air brings out the worst in me.

Anyhow. My friend, the dairy farmer, rang me on the Monday to champion the multi-million dollar Yeo Valley ad from the UK.

Only a couple of days later she would ring in ever-exacerbating fury about Victoria’s new Devondale campaign:

Ten-odd years of friendship and we’ve never had any reason to argue. The spruiking of dairy apparently brings out our fightin' spirit.

In one corner we have my friend, the dairy farmer. She’s construing the Yeo Valley campaign as slick, as modern, as giving due honour to contemporary dairy farming. It’s everything she wants in an industry tout.

Everything, apparently, that the Devondale campaign isn’t.

Her claim is that the Devondale campaign mocks dairy farmers. Depicts them as hicks. Presents farming practices as retrograde. Portrays the industry as something to laugh at.

I’m in the other corner. Complete with a furrowed brow. To me, the Yeo Valley ad is what happens when anyone tries to look cool. It screams “geeks” getting makeovers on bad reality TV shows; politicians trying to be funny, cool. It’s awkward, it’s contrived and it’s the polar-opposite of hip.

I’m not going to champion the Devondale ads. In general I quite love the art of advertising, but an ad needs to be pretty bloody special for me to get excited about it. I might find the hillbilly farmer caricatures uninspired, but I certainly don’t see them as offensive.

While she and I are no longer discussing the ads for the sake of our friendship, our differing views nicely encapsulate some of the big challenges of advertising.

My friend, the dairy farmer, wants the dairy farmers to get their due, their dignity, their kudos. Yeo Valley does this apparently, Devondale doesn’t.

A line that she will never forgive me for, but hell, I’m rarely adverse to throwing caution to the wind: who bloody cares about the dairy farmers? I’m asking this, of course, from a marketing perspective, but in all seriousness: why on earth would Devondale spend money to make their farmers feel better about their labours?

When do companies ever put employee morale at the forefront of an external communications strategy?

Even the Yeo Valley ad isn’t really about the farmers, it’s about branding; it’s about achieving cut-through, about constructing a brand differential.

Both campaigns are about peddling cheese, hawking milk, trafficking in yoghurt, but that’s it. To expect them to do anything more is ridiculous.

As a left-leaning, city-dwelling dairy consumer, sure, I might like reassurance that the cows are treated well, but I couldn’t care less about the farmers.

I don’t care if they seem like interesting or fun people or whether they use the newest, shiniest milking machinery or if they wear the latest Driz-A-Bone tracksuits.

So long as their working conditions are decent then I just want my to eat my yoghurt in peace, thank you.

To look to advertising for professional validation is not only delusional, but fails to acknowledge the central objective of advertising: to sell stuff. Succeeding in anything else is just cream.

I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “jumped the shark”. Not because I think it’s overused – although I definitely think it is – but I find the premise a bit stupid.

In brief, it comes from the 1977 Happy Days episode when a water-skiing Fonzie jumped over a shark. It was, apparently, the moment the show stopped being good.

The phrase is more than just a comment on quality though. The Fonzie/shark thing, apparently, was when Happy Days stopped being true to itself.

It’s here where my irritation with the concept lies: who gets to decide what a show’s truth is? What the show’s intended vision was?

So I was thinking about this shark-jumping business while watching Series 5 of Californication. I’ve long loved the protagonist, Hank (David Duchovny), based on my unwavering fondness for men who are drowning in problems rooted in women, substances of addiction and art.

QF9 Melbourne to London offered both time and splendid guiltlessness for me to down the season in its entirety.

Akin to how I judge Australian films, I’m a little less harsh on anything watched at 30,000 feet. If it’s less boring than playing another game of Tetris then I’ll consider it decent. That I was fetishising falling bricks throughout the 12 episodes is a pretty damning indictment.

So what was going on? Why, after so many years, was I suddenly finding Hank so cringe-worthy? Why were Karen (Natascha McElhone) and Becca (Madeleine Martin) so gratingly insipid? Why were there so many irrelevant blow-jobs and so many bloody bare breasts?

Which made me ponder the shark theory. To consider whether Californication has “jumped the shark” we need to ask if it’s deviated from the original vision. Is it still the show it was intended to be?

The pilot opened with Hank fantasizing about sex with a nun. It was steamy enough to arouse Andrew Bolt – which illustrated just how terrific it was.

That pilot established that the show was to be about a frequently-sozzled writer finding himself through sex. Come Season 5, therefore, it’s as true – as same – as it ever was.

So if it’s still the same show, if Hank is still fucking and fleeing and Charlie (Evan Handler) is still masturbating and Marcy (Pamela Adlon) is still being fabulously vulgar in a way that only Susie from Curb Your Enthusiasm gets to be – if, evidently, no sharks were jumped – then why was I so devastated that the final sex scene doesn’t in fact kill Hank as I’d hoped? And why does the show feel so horribly hollow?

Is it about comparison?

I’ve written about it in this space before and maybe comparison partly explains it: I started my flight by watching The Sound of My Voice (2011) which was great and which set the bar pretty high. But I’m discerning enough to realise it’d be an apples and oranges comparison.

What about arc-less-ness?

If audiences are offered a character as troubled as Hank, there’ll be expectations – in varying degrees of fervour – that he transforms. Some will want him to get worse; romantics like me will want him to straighten up and fly right back to Karen.

The problem is that Hank hasn’t changed. Not even a little. He might sway – a little more sober one day, a little more drunk and depraved the next – but he’s the same person. And maybe that’s real life – the leopard, the cad, don’t often change their spots – but such stagnancy is rarely sustaining in fiction. Certainly not over five seasons.

How about Fatigue?

A couple of years ago I proposed that Victorians voted out the Brumby government not because they were pro-Baillieu, nor even that they were all that anti-Brumby but just that they were bored; that change was desirable simply because it’s something else. Not only has Hank not developed as a character, but my boredom came from doing the calculations and realising I could have been watching something – anything – that I hadn’t seen before. I wasn’t necessarily after better, just different.

Season 6 starts in January. Yes, I’m a masochist enough to eventually watch it.

My day started out happily with some accidental comedy.

On the tram I saw a man who I thought was perhaps the most gorgeous I’d seen. I kept staring – curious, because I’m never attracted to strangers – and realised that he looked exactly like Gru. God I love Gru.

My day ended horribly, with some supposed-comedy that was anything but. And which cost $16, to add insult to injury.

I’ve not yet met those plebs who ever doubted it, but apparently 2011’s Bridesmaids proved that women can be funny too.

Sadly however, the sole women-can-be-funny accolade apparently available has been handed out, so Bachelorette greedily decided to vie for the most vacuous/vapid/bitchy/cruel prizes instead.

When asked about the worst film I’ve ever seen, I often think about the The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009). I was only woken in the cinema when the snores of the man behind me got too loud.

Imaginarium’s sin however, just lay in it being coma-inducingly boring. Bachelorette is boring but it’s not only boring. It’s grating and pretty bloody offensive.

I’ll start with 5 reasons to hate it.

1. Women calling each other cunts.

2. Isla Fisher. Notably, Isla Fisher reprising her roles from… well, everything except Home and Away. (I think she shook it up a little in that and got all sapphic).

3. The suicide-atttempt storyline.

4. The fat jokes. The fat jokes notably only ever made by “friends”.

5. The abortion storyline.

I’m focusing on #5.

We first meet early-30s bridesmaid Gena (Lizzy Caplan) when she wakes to find herself in bed with a man she doesn’t know (and worse, who apparently likes Jack Johnson).

Gena has lost a day, lost a job, appears bitter, twisted, and has a problem with substances of addiction.

So what’s happened to make her life go to rack and ruin like this? Surprise, surprise, she had an abortion as a teenager.

Light bulb! It all makes sense now.

I’ve nearly finished writing a book which has a chapter on abortion in cinema. Pre-Roe v. Wade, women on screen were punished for their abortions by bleeding to death at the hand of a crook with a knitting needle.

Flash forward a few decades and the punishment is more likely psychological. The dire warning dispelled is that wayward ladies abort at great peril to their happiness and sobriety.

Abortion is not something spoken about with ease in our culture and nor is it something frequently portrayed on screen.

So when it is included – notably, in a “comedy” – and presented as something responsible for ruining fifteen or so years of a woman’s life, to me, it’s serving as a cautionary tale.

The message is that while abortion might be legal and might be incredibly safe, that it’s not really safe.

Cue finger-waggling and ghost-babies and scariest of all, promiscuity.

In a 2012 film you might not bleed to death and you might avoid getting hit by a car leaving the clinic, but you’re going to have to pay up one way or another.

And the oh so “chic” abortion debt offered in Bachelorette is a life of depression and nose-candy.

Worth noting, this anti-choice monstrosity was written and directed by a woman. Of course, it’s stupid to expect better: women – albeit reprehensible ones – hold up bloodied dioramas outside abortion clinics too.

It’s not spoiling anything to reveal that the crux of Looper is that Little Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Big Joe (Bruce Willis) meet: it’s a) the reason for Gordon-Levitt’s stupid facial prosthetics and b) it’s spotlighted in the poster and the trailer.

My understanding of time travel is sketchy and I’m not entirely sure whether a Looper-kind of meeting so unsettles me because I’m not sure it’s possible – in the “scientific” rather than conceivable sense – or whether I just find the idea psychologically stupefying. I’m focusing on the latter here.

I cry at lots of peculiar things. At the moment I have to walk away from the TV during the Purina Supercoat ad with the Labrador lifecourse snapshots. In fact, time-lapse photography in general makes me sad. And it’s this idea that underpins my reasoning for finding the idea of meeting a different aged version of myself so distressing: all those years have passed and we’re supposed to sit in a diner like the Joes, calm, composed, and shoot the breeze? Huh?

I lived in Small Town USA for 6 months last year. The afternoon that I nearly bought the grow-your-own-pumpkin kit made me think that my sanity was being compromised there. Another clue was my daily walks past the psychic’s house. She did palm readings for $10 and on those days when I’d seen everything at the cinema having my hands fondled by a stranger seemed vaguely tempting.

My cynicism aside, there were lots of reasons I never actually visited the psychic: the biggie was that I envisaged walking in, saying hello, and she – hearing my accent – saying, all mystic-like, “I see you’ve come from a faraway land.” The other reason was, let’s just say she did see something – or thought she saw something. And then she told me. Unacceptable! Things can’t be unsaid or unheard. Particularly for someone like me with an uncanny memory for dialogue.

Meeting a time-travelling version of myself couldn’t be helpful for my mental health. That said, if I had to – afterall, it’s not like Little Joe wanted to meet Big Joe – what would I do? Say? What words of wisdom could Big Lauren give Little Lauren?

This same question, interestingly enough, was asked on Can of Worms this week couched as advice we’d give our 10-year-old self.

Pre-Can of Worms, pre-Looper, I’d already been dwelling on this. I recently wrote a chapter for an anthology on female friendship. While it didn’t make it through my vicious edits, in an early draft I had a section about advice to a younger self about friendship. I could only think of four useful words; four words to get Lil' Lauren through school, through uni, through life: this too shall pass. Four words that no younger version of myself would ever have listened to; four words that Big Lauren equally can’t take in.

So let’s just say the two Laurens had a meeting, ala Looper. Little Lauren/Big Lauren, diner showdown. What do we do? What do we want from this meeting? Do I hand Little Lauren a copy of the Sports Almanac? Deck out my apartment with copious quantities of leopard skin fabric?

Do I tell Little Lauren about whether it’s vampires, wizards or whippy-whippy millionaires that the book-buyers are procuring in the future so she knows what to channel her writing energies into?

What possible thing I could I say/hear that wouldn’t irrevocably change things to such an extent that everything Big Lauren has ever experienced would be rendered confused and disturbed?

Time travel films force me to obsess over unexplained details that disrupt my enjoyment – and I won’t pretend that Looper avoided raising them too – but it’s an entertaining film. There’s a spectacularly fabulous Village of the Damned-esque child (Pierce Gagnon), some smouldering Bold and the Beautiful looks from Bruce Willis, some pretty decent existential questions to gnaw on and the kind of abrupt ending that I’m a sucker for.

Saturday night, the credits rolled and my companion turned to me and said, “So what did you think?”

My head still shaking in dismay, I replied, “It reminded me of the first film I made.” I then started laughing because at least I amuse myself. “It’s time I tell you,” I said, in grave seriousness, “about my film-making past.”

‘94. Pre-You Tube and pre-anything fancier than a Mac Classic at our high school. One of my best friends and I got it into our heads that we could be film-makers. Panasonic was running a student film festival. How couldn’t this be a good idea?

We spent months conjuring our elaborate production. The closest we got to a “plan” was part Méliès, part TAC commercial and – for reasons that still perplex me because I’ve always hated them – the Beatles In My Life was going to soundtrack it.

Big, big ideas, some sketchy storyboards, no skills or resources to make any of it happen. Certainly no rights to any Beatles ditties.

And suddenly we had, like, five minutes left to make the film. Big ideas, apparently, weren’t enough to constitute an entry.

Dad drove us to film cows in the morning. In the afternoon we surreptitiously filmed people eating Big Macs at McDonalds. For the coup de grace we made our way onto the roof of a tall-enough building to film the Melbourne skyline.

Cow footage. Cut. Burger-munching footage. Cut. Cows. Cut. Burgers. Cut. City shot. Credits.

The soundtrack was a barnyard nursery rhyme. We called the feat Feeding an Urban Society.

It was film-making on the fly. We knew it wasn’t wonderful but we still thought we were pretty bloody clever. A delusion centred largely on the music.

The music was what what really jazzed up our hokum.

The music was going to make us look all postmodern and political and – because evidently Alanis Morissette had gifted us our word of the year – oh so very ironic.

And we did okay; a nomination in a minor category. We’d go on and make another travesty involving a tour of Asian CBD restaurants with music from the King and I in the background.

Anyhow. Flash forward nearly twenty years. I’m watching Killing them Softly and throughout the 93 minute film – which, incidentally, felt at least 50% longer – I was quite positive it was a homage to the very worst of student film-making.

A flimsy plot, Brad Pitt groomed within an inch of his life, and a world where women only exist to get fucked. It’s bad. The very worst bit was the adolescent use of music.

Pop a guy. Play an ironic song. Pop a guy. Play an ironic song. Pop a guy. Play an ironic song.

Which forced me to ask a few questions: a) is Panasonic still running the film festival? and b) isn’t director Andrew Dominik too old to enter?

One of the Macquarie Dictionary editors was interviewed on The Project during the week. She briefly mentioned the challenges of defining “irony” to encompass how it’s used in contemporary parlance.

Feeding an Urban Society wasn’t ironic. Ketty Lester on a soundtrack isn’t ironic. A cast of former screen mobsters playing washed up goons isn’t ironic.

Rather, it’s the entry you throw together when your media teacher is on your arse hustling you to wrap.

Daily, my mum’s cousin devours Il Globo. Not for the articles – I’m not entirely sure she can read Italian – but for the death notices. And regularly, excitedly, she’ll call Mum with the “untimely” deaths of people who got off the ship with my grandmother. In the early 1950s.

I was thinking about these death knells – about Mum’s cousin’s barely veiled excitement – while reading JK Rowling’s new door-stopper Casual Vacancy.

Parish politician Barry Fairbrother’s fatal aneurysm starts the novel. And it’s the palpable delirium of characters spreading the news – broken telephone-style – that drew me in to this small town, local politics romp.

I’ve written about schadenfreude in the space before and I suspect it’s a worthwhile consideration: I’d argue that for some there’s a perception – however small – of an inoculating effect of someone else getting sick, of someone else dropping dead.

More so however, I think it’s a timely reflection of the public appetite for drama. About how drawn we are to negative news stories and how few options exist for us to insert ourselves into the action.

About 50% of the time that I go into the women’s toilets at work for example, I expect to discover a dead body.

This isn’t because I actively want a homicide, rather, because part of me quite fancies the idea of a workday turning into an episode of Law and Order.

Life is often pedestrian so drama and excitement is routinely found in vicarious access to it: commonly film, books, television. Equally, it’s drawn from talking about it. About being the one with the bad news; about getting to frame the revelation, to add the inflections. To be there when an audience hears, for the first time, news of something horrible.

It’s why we remember where we were when we first heard about September 11, about who we first spoke to about it. Less enduring are memories of the good news stories.

The narration of Casual Vacancy is deliciously biting. Pagford, apparently, is only populated by the truly wretched. Cruel people, ugly people, rapists, addicts, empire-builders, thugs. And few are treated with any sympathy. Which quickly sucked me in.

I’ve not read any of the wizard books, but it’s a lot like Stephen King’s The Dome, which I loved.

Less excitingly, it’s much less subtle than the King tome, and at times it feels as though Rowling got her mitts on an undergrad sociology book and was paid per social ill incorporated. Bullying, check. Drug abuse, check. Domestic violence, check. Illiteracy, incest, obesity, check, check, check.

But it’s good. And it’s worth putting in the effort of working out who’s who, where the allegiances and skeletons lie and just who will seize Barry’s vacant seat.

As far as flavours of the month go, this is one I can delight in. One I can Turkish delight in. Boom boom.

Waiting for Taken 2 to start and there was a preview for the new Bond film, Skyfall. Filmed in Istanbul.

Shortly thereafter was one for Argo. Also filmed in Istanbul.

Taken 2 began and moments in and Bryan (Liam Neeson) was off on an unexplained work trip. To Istanbul, of course, because Hollywood isn’t going anywhere else in 2012.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit on three occasions. Istanbul is one of my favourite cities and without a return scheduled, I can happily settle for ogling.

Had Taken 2 been filmed anywhere else and I’d quickly have dismissed it as phallic shlock. But the splendid backdrop motivated me to not only cut it a little slack but allow myself to take it too seriously.

Nope, I’m not Turkish, but on every visit some random person has claimed I have “eyes of the Turk”. I’m construing the remark as a) a compliment and b) testimony to my affinity with the Turks and my duty to defend them against stupid insults.

On one hand this shakily-shot, laughably idiotic romp does a pretty good job at showcasing the city’s aesthetic wares. Like the equally dodgy The International (2009), Istanbul is shown as noisy and delicious and architecturally spectacular.

The film is frenetically-paced and borrows/steals not one but two fantastic songs from the much better flick Drive (2011): sure, there’s some small mercies at hand.

And yet, as gorgeous and crazy as Istanbul is portrayed, some demonisation occurs that no amount of terrific music or seductive cityscapes can disguise.

While copious supplies of flags and headscarves work – eye-rollingly – to convince audiences that Turkey is so very ethnic and foreign and suspicious, Taken 2 has even bigger problems than inaccuracy.

Apparently turfing grenades all over Istanbul is the only way to track down someone who’s been kidnapped. Property destroyed? People killed? Pfft, merely collateral damage: good God, man, American lives are at stake!

As though this isn’t all disrespectful enough, cue any number of brilliant/ethical Anglo and dumb/shady Wog stereotypes.

He might be 60, but Bryan is an American. Which equally explains why he can single-handedly outwit and outsmart even the most diabolical of cheap leather jacket-wearing overlords.

And being an American, of course, he’ll fight cleanly, honourably. Unlike those swarthy and lascivious Turks who rape and terrorise and compulsively watch soccer on broken TVs while eating borek.

And of course, there’s going to be a car crash and a simit cart will get rammed sending the sesame treats flying.

And of course there’ll be a duel in a hamam. Because, really, what other possibilities are there for men in a bathhouse?

No, no whirling dervishes. Fortunately. And I only spotted one stray cat. But there’s hookahs and knock-off-handbag merchants and carpet peddlers a'plenty. As Morrissey would croon, dial-a-cliché.

Taken 2 is nowhere near the worst film I’ve seen this year – in fact, ironically, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is far less enjoyable – but it’s certainly the most racist.

So just how much city porn can compensate for mean stereotypes and gross disrespect?

Mid 20s HR professional Catherine finds herself in the perfect relationship. Hunky Lee is gorgeous and devoted and protective. Apparently he’s everything a woman could want in a bloke.

At least until he proves himself to be a bit psycho.

Suddenly what initially looks like commitment seems smothering; the sex that once felt all new and exciting and spontaneous feels a whole lot like rape.

Think Sleeping With The Enemy, although a bit deeper and a lot less Julia Roberts.

Like all of the books I tend to crow about, Elizabeth Haynes' Into the Darkest Corner can spawn any number of juicy conversations.

On one level, it raises some really worthwhile conversations about consent. The crazy boyfriend turns up at 3am and Catherine opens her door to him. They have sex, it was rough, she was in pain during – and afterwards – and at no point did she say no. Was it rape?

Equally worth discussing – and unusual for a crime novel – the book spotlights that hard-to-confront reality that the bloke in her bed is far more likely to be a woman’s real source of threat than any “man in the bushes”.

A third issue exploits my fascination with “emotional work”: those labours women too often do to keep relationships functional. In numerous scenes Catherine tries to calm down the abusive Lee; to try and make him feel better about his bastardry. Awful to read but worse to acknowledge that this women-making-everything-okay-in-spite-of-themselves nonsense feels very bloody familiar.

Three fascinating topics to discuss, but I’m going to focus on a fourth.

A debate Catherine has with herself during an early split with Lee is whether the sex – sex she considered, at least initially, as great – was grounds for reconciliation. For perseverance.

Admittedly, its very tempting to devote this entire post to defining good sex.

For Catherine it was sex with variety: each time with Lee was different and she quite liked that. At least to begin with. I’m not sure I’d prioritise variety so highly, but for this post let’s keep the definition simple: good sex is the Snickers-type; sex that really satisfies whichever way “satisfies” gets defined.

By the time Catherine debates this question, Lee has already demonstrated his bad-boyfriend attributes: he’s snuck into her place and rearranged things to disorient her, he’s toyed with a little light stalking and he’s had the kind of sex with her that I’d consider brutal.

So when is good sex enough to compensate for a bad relationship?

Can a few evenings of the good stuff compensate for all those less good times?

How good does the sex have to be for it to act as a relationship panacea?

Certainly for me the presence of sex – regardless of the degrees of satisfaction – is a dealbreaker. While I’m sure there are relationships that are are functional – are satisfying – sans sex, I’m not particularly interested in one.

So on one level I’m completely convinced that you can’t get everything you want or need from one person. To assume that your partner can satisfy all of your intellectual/emotional/physical needs is setting yourself up for failure.

With that in mind then, if I can have fantastic conversations with my friends, vent to them, seek solace from them, go out and have fun with them, then what’s the one thing – the one dealbreaker – that I should want from a partner?

What’s the one thing – the only thing – that in most relationships would be considered unacceptable to source outside of the dyad?

Sex.

So shouldn’t this be grounds to prioritise good sex over pretty much everything else?

It seems logical and yet I’m not so sure.

A friend and I often discuss the mind/body split in sex: she’s very apt at what writer Erica Jong termed the zipless fuck; she can do it recreationally, just for fun, without all the head chaos. I can’t. I’m seduced by good conversation, by intimacy and I can’t indulge in any kind of sex without an emotional investment.

For me, if the relationship is bad – if there’s no trust or if outside of the bedroom it all feels strained and lonely – then for me good sex means little.

So what can good sex compensate for?

Equally worth asking, how fantastic does a relationship need to be to compensate for bad sex? If the coupling is warm and trusting and romantic, does it really matter if the sex is all a bit crap?

If the sex is lacklustre – if you could take or leave it – then just how important is it really?

Into The Darkest Corner is an engaging read raising important issues about sexual madness and OCD, manipulation and exit strategies. More so, it puts on the agenda questions about prioritising sex and querying the role of quality in comparison to all our other relationship priorities.

Courtney Cox shocked America in 1985 when she became the first person to say “period” on TV. Period, at least, in the context of menstruation and not punctuation.

Flash forward a couple of decades and this year the same daring word (along with a couple of other doozies) ruffled a few feathers in a Carefree ad. At least it did initially. The furore quickly dissipated and the ad now runs regularly, uneventfully, in Australia. We’ve seemingly learnt how to cope without the conniptions.

I daresay it’s the ingratiating of the Carefree ad – with its references to the bits of ladyhood ironically considered least feminine – into our landscape that’s paved the way for another revolutionary down-there-business ad going undetected. Undetected and surprisingly, unwhinged about.

The new Libra ad dares use the P-word again – sure, itself a euphemism but a) “menstruation” is probably too many syllables for a short ad and b) I’d still rather hear period than any other sanitised circumlocution.

The truly startling bit about the ad however, is the way female sexuality is presented.

For most of last year I was living and breathing menstruation while writing a book on it. My focus was on media presentations and sex n' blood got treated to a whole chapter.

While there are signs that our culture has become more menstrually mature – we’ve evidently learnt not to dial 000 when discharge is mentioned on TV for example – some menstrual taboos remain. Menstrual sex is a biggie.

On one hand thinking of the menstruator as sexy seems outlandish in the context of film and television. A couple of wonderful Californication scenes aside, periods on screen invariably and inevitably disrupt sex lives and give women – and men – an excuse to restrict it to spoonin'.

On the other hand, feminine hygiene ads are in fact full of attractive ladies peddling products to help menstruators stay sexy all month long. In advertising, the idea of the bleeding woman as outwardly desirable is effortlessly detected.

A much more shocking – and far more insteresting – construct however, is the idea of the menstruator herself feeling sexy. By sexy here, I’m not referring to the way others see her – to her objectification – rather, to her being in touch with her own horniness at a time when women often feel – biologically or because society has coerced it – dirty and out-of-action.

The Libra ad involves a woman who, while initially reluctant because of her period, eventually joins her friend to perve on male boot campers.

Lecherous ladies in advertising are nothing new of course; Diet Coke has long been flogged with some mildly hideous Sex and the City-style male sexualisation:

My concept of feminism doesn’t deem women panting over men as something inherently progressive. It’s not the ogling in the Libra ad however, that interests me. Rather, it’s the act of ogling for the purposes of arousal while the woman has her period.

I can’t help but be charmed by TV offering us a horny menstruator.

While a niche genre, menstrual-themed porn – here, I refer to the indie material, rather than, say, the buckets-o'-blood-fetish stuff – hints to the idea that some women are, shock horror, actually randier during their periods. Mainstream pop culture and vanilla porn however, routinely give the idea a wide berth. As in No Strings Attached (2011), menstruation is apparently a time when a bloke is just not gonna get a look in.

Just as I’m delighted when I see a woman on TV who deviates from the young/thin/white archetype that pop culture so adores, equally happy am I to see an example of female sexuality presented as a little more complex – and a tad more messier – than what’s normally on offer.

A small win, but I’ll take it.

My favourite Freudian idea is omnipotence of thought. It explains everything from superstition to lucky charms to OCD and it’s what’s “new” about cash cows like The Secret.

That our thoughts are powerful enough – are magical enough – to change things.

As a writer, the idea that thoughts, that words, could have such power is thoroughly seductive. Seductive and oh so very self-indulgent. And it’s the premise of Ruby Sparks.

Neurotic wunderkind novelist Calvin (Paul Dano) dreams about the perfect girl, types her up and just like magic she appears. In real life. In all her flame-haired, coloured-stocking, blow-job-enthusiast glory.

So I really hate the what do you want question as related to relationships. Equally do I loathe the what do you like question in regards to sex. I don’t know how to answer either. There’s too many ifs and buts and variables.

And I was thinking about these questions – about my inability to answer them – while watching the preview for Ruby Sparks a couple of weeks ago. Calvin’s powers lacked appeal for me because I don’t know what I want well enough to type it.

The handful of times I’ve desperately crossed-my-fingers wanted something and when I got it was, often, horrible. I write this not merely as support for the be careful what you wish for adage, but more broadly because I don’t think it’s possible to wish with sufficient accuracy or specificity.

How do you type up wanting love, wanting to be needed, wanting copious amounts of affection but also manage to accurately identify all those on-my-terms and in-palatable-doses-only caveats?

How do you specify wanting the dream partner to appreciate your work, to satisfy you sexually, to find you hilarious, but also manage to make them forget that they’re only doing it because you’ve forced them?

I went into the cinema over the weekend convinced that I wasn’t interested in Calvin’s superpower because I don’t trust my imagination or skills as a writer. I left the screening convinced of it for quite a different reason.

Philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has a line about taste being born from what we’re “condemned to”. While Ruby Sparks makes no overt references to Bourdieu, his idea pervades the film: that we can only ever have an appetite for what we know.

That our vision of the perfect partner at most is a version of ourselves.

Calvin can only fantasize about the perfect girl by using the points of reference he has. He can give her traits that his previous girlfriend didn’t possess, perhaps gift her qualities he’s desired but never experienced, but the ideas are still only drawn from the finite pool of what he knows; from what he thinks he has a taste for.

To me this idea explains my complete befuddlement when trying to answer the what do you want/what do you like questions. How can they be answered when embarking on anything new? How does anyone know what they like when with someone they’ve never been with before?

The other day I clicked on a Fairfax blog post which – in far too much detail – pitched a a road map to the G-spot. More interesting than the post however, was one of the reader comments:

I dont really buy all these “twiddle knob A, push button B while operating flange C” style things…You should just fool around and see what she likes

Encapsulated in this comment is the key to working things out in the bedroom, but more so, in life. And it explains why Calvin’s “gift” turns out to be such a disaster. There’s what you think will work in theory – on paper – and then there’s just seeing how things go. Without the lists and the planning and the obsessive orchestration.

Like Garden State, like High Fidelity, like Me and You and Everyone We Know, like Synecdoche, New York – films I loved but which nevertheless tried very hard to be cool – sometimes Ruby Sparks felt laboured. But I liked it. Despite myself I liked it.

I am, afterall, a sucker for ever newer lenses to examine my neuroses.

I’m relatively convinced that it’s comparison that’s at the root of all unhappiness.

Comparisons wreck relationships and equally do they ruin pop culture.

I’m voracious when it comes to films, to books: I see a lot, I read a lot and thus it’s rare that I’m ever eagerly anticipating or long await-ing anything.

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom was an exception.

If I’m asked that impossible “favourite film” question, I’ll usually answer Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). I generally run an anti-repeat-viewing policy, but I’ve seen and loved Tenenbaums a great few times.

So when a writer/director like Anderson gifts you something so wonderful, so seductively quirky as Tenenbaums and you can’t help but expect that everything he follows it with will be equally great. To dazzle you and move you exactly the same way.

You can’t help help but harbour expectations.

And he delivered with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2009); the shark scene still makes me teary (admittedly Sigur Rós probably had a hand in that):

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) was also quite wonderful:

And Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) is probably one of the most visually stunning films I’ve ever seen:

I first read about Moonrise Kingdom – read that it was set in New England – while I was living in New England. Of all my various personality oddities, my belief in synchronicity, in patterns, defines me. And my blind worship of serendipity allowed me to develop expectations. I knew better – I always know better – but the long-awaiting and eager anticipation soon started.

So what went wrong? Why, half an hour in, was I fidgeting? Why did I leave the cinema with a single word review: meh.

My intention in this blog is not to write reviews but rather to tease out talking points. For Moonrise Kingdom my interest is in comparison. Of querying the role it plays in enjoyment.

The friend I saw Moonrise Kingdom with loved it. You could see it in his hideously delighted smile. He was, needless to say, an Anderson virgin. He had nothing to compare it with.

Oh how I envied him.

I too remember what it was like to watch Rushmore (1998). To be charmed, to be dazed, to have my first taste of Anderson’s gorgeously melancholic/faux-nostalgic/perfectly soundtracked splendidness.

Alas, Moonrise Kingdom was not my first Anderson foray. And it is here where the disappointment lies.

I had to compare Moonrise Kingdom to Anderson’s other films. And it gives me no pleasure to say it faired poorly. It offered nothing I hadn’t seen before, it didn’t conjure any feelings I hadn’t felt before, and that whimsical scrapbook-y, swap card aesthetic of his other films felt worn a little thin.

Had I simply compared it with the other films I’d seen either side of it – The Watch and Your Sister’s Sister – it might have been considered good; great even. But my brain doesn’t work that way. Rarely do we examine things in isolation, in a vacuum.

Years ago I attended a philosophy lecture. (An accident, admittedly). The theme was the daring suggestion that we view and analyse each event – in history, in life – as completely independent, individual and as separate from everything else around it. As a political scientist the idea seemed thoroughly preposterous: I’m all about patterns, about explanations, about connections and time-lines.

But I was thinking about that lecture as I left the cinema. About the possibility of daring not to compare.

Imagine if we didn’t compare, for example, date 27 with date 1, and thus didn’t feel resentful that things weren’t as romantically spectacular.

Imagine if we didn’t hear that first The Editors song and compare it to – and thus dismiss it – as a poor imitation of REM.

Imagine if we didn’t compare Moonrise Kingdom with any other film and just enjoyed it on its own merits.

Imagine if we didn’t compare our appearances, our lives, our relationships, our work with others.

I’m pretty sure our brains don’t work that way – I’m convinced we haven’t yet conjured a method of evaluating stuff without considering all that’s around it – and yet I’m almost certain that I’ve scratched the surface of (un)happiness.

Being a teetotaller, there wasn’t the option to brace myself for reading Laid Bare with something fortifying.

So I did my equivalent and downed my Sisterhood Soundtrack: Pat doing We Belong, Kate with Running up That Hill, Chrissie doing Pleasure and Pain and a bit of Cher because I’m yet to decide whether I’m a Gypsy, Tramp or Thief.

My 3-ish most formative romantic entanglements were with Him. Not author Jesse Fink of course, but 3-ish men who were each off the proverbial leash after the demise of long relationships. My head, heart, sheets and prose knows the story of What The Divorced Guy Did Next a little too well.

Even if I hadn’t, Californication is one of my favourite shows. When I’m feeling all masochistic I read Sam de Brito. This is very familiar terrain.

The book opens with the epiphany Fink has while straddling the face of one of Australia’s “most famous women”. Indeed, homage is paid to his “erect cock” on page one.

A feminist response to this post-split memoir would have been satisfying to write. Equally so would have been an ever-so-slightly vitriolic rebuke from a woman who’s been loved/fucked by Him. But I’ll refrain. I prefer writing to be a tad more challenging.

So aside from dousing my wounds in acid, making me vacillate between depressed and angry, nostalgic and homicidal, what else could I milk from Laid Bare?

Gender. More specifically gender as related to audience, to books.

Is there such a thing as a women’s book? How about a men’s book? Can a book itself have a gender?

I ask this and think of razors. Less about my masochism and more about marketing. The pink For Her packaging reflects marketing and the public fetishisation of choice but has absolutely nothing to do with function.

So, is it authors or in fact the marketers at publishing houses who envisage that a book’s audience will be populated by only one gender?

Do men and women really like different books? The thought makes me bristle.

Bristle, but perhaps it somewhat explains my reaction to Laid Bare. Was there really any chance I’d enjoy a book that opens with a man “finding himself” while ejaculating into some nameless faceless mouth?

So what excluded me? My genitals? My feminism? My disharmony with having fallen – more than once – for this man?

If I’m to argue that Laid Bare – with it’s grotesque vanity and copious sporting/drinking/fucking glory days anecdotes and liberal use of the C-word – is a men’s book, then what about every other book I’ve read? Were they gendered too?

The book I read prior to Laid Bare was written by a man. The book before that too. And like every other book I’ve read, neither feel very gendered.

In fact, the more I dwelt the more I realised Fink’s was the first I’ve read that felt male.

So how – reading two or so books a week – have I managed to avoid male books my whole life? Is it because I’m genitally repelled by them or is it because most books aren’t in fact gendered?

And if Fink’s was my first male book what about female books? Is it to be expected that, being a woman, I would have read more of them?

Earlier this year I read a shelf of Alice Hoffman books, back to back. Some I liked, some I loathed, each paragraph I was convinced that I was reading a female book. I felt the same reading the Jodi Picoult oeuvre.

So why does even typing such an idea conjure indigestion and guilt? Why do I feel I’ll accidentally incur the wrath of the Stella Prize folk? Why am I thinking of Jim Crow suddenly?

Can I make the claim that some books feel gendered without implying that this is in any way connected to quality, importance or worth?

Can I make the claim and still harbour my anti-essentialist views on gender, on sexuality?

Is claiming that a book feels gendered a compliment or a condemnation?

I alternated between pelvic floor clenching and teeth grinding throughout Laid Bare. I’m okay with this. Fink opens hoping we’ll have some conversations: ta daa! I’m not sure I’ve just started the one he hoped for, but then, I paid $32.99 for it; I’ve no further favours to give.

A few years ago I joined a book club. This ill-conceived lark lasted just the one episode but happily proffered a handful of anecdotes. My favourite was the ice-breaker.

Having myself repeatedly assigned such getting-to-know you exercises as a lecturer – and having had many inflicted on me as a student – I’m convinced that they’re always awful. Book club did not change my mind.

Introduce yourself by naming a book you’d be embarrassed to be caught reading.

I delude myself into thinking that I have a fantastic poker face. Photographic evidence proves the contrary. And I don’t doubt that I was scowling at the Group Leader. There were some Da Vinci Code responses, some bodice-rippers that I assumed involved pirates. Someone said something about War and Peace, her embarrassment irritatingly predicated on I-swear-I’m-not-pretentious idiocy.

One time. There’s only been one time where I cared about such matters. It was 2008, I was on a train, and I was preparing for my book on infidelity by perusing a copy of You Can’t Have Him, He’s Mine. (I draw your attention to the chain on the cover).

Even though – following the lead of every sprung-pedophile in history – I truly was only conducting research, reading it didn’t look good. It didn’t feel good. Being a possessive and clingy nutjob was not the impression I wanted to convey on public transport.

My annoyance with the stupid ice-breaker centred on how cringe-worthy it is that anyone might experience guilt about books. I hate that people feel deluded enough to distinguish between the apparently good, quality, high falutin' books that we should want to be caught reading and the supposed shlock that we need to dive behind the couch to down, fearful that our unrefined palates might be exposed.

Pfft to that.

There’s something so significantly abhorrent about assembling tastes on the presumption of what other people think is cool. I hate Other People.

I say this in one breath, but am stuck on two contradictory thoughts.

One. I did recently mock someone incredibly dear to me for having not only read but paid for Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity. I still feel righteous, but concede to my hypocrisy. (But God do I hate Dick Smith, Gerry Harvey and Richard bloody Branson).

Two. I too have a guilty pop culture secret. One so warped and disturbing that I needed to come out to my parents about it over the weekend.

I’ll gladly confess to Neil Diamond on my iPod, to porn consumption, to having read bucket loads of James Patterson and even paying to see Jack and Jill. And yet there’s some pop culture sins far too shameful to divulge so flippantly.

Mrs Brown’s Boys.

Lots of marvellous television has come out of the BBC: Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Waking the Dead, Silent Witness. Judge John Deed. Need I go on?

Mrs Brown’s Boys is not such a show.

I’ve only watched a couple of episodes – deliberately so, because I simply can’t become That Person – but throughout each viewing I’ve laughed and simultaneously berated myself.

So why do I care?

I live by myself. I can watch whatever I like. I write about popular culture, hell, I can justify whatever I watch.

So why the shame?

What makes Mrs Brown’s Boys so much the dirty secret?

Why does this show seem more egregious to laugh at than any other sitcom?

Bad drag. Swearing. Sexism. Racism. Puns a'plenty. Cheapness. Eerily – if not anachronistically – reminiscent of all those horrible British sitcoms that seemed to run on a loop at my grandparents' house.

‘Allo 'Allo.

Are You Being Served?

Steptoe And Son.

Nostalgia? Perhaps. Masochism? Indeed I do like my pleasure mixed with a little somethin' somethin'.

And then again, maybe there’s just something spectacularly – and enduringly – beseeching about a man dressed like my grandma.

I did, afterall, quite like Mrs Doubtfire.

I don’t like people leaving my life. By ‘don’t like’ I mean hate.

This situation is based on a variety of personality quirks, notably rampant sentimentality and a distaste for change.

For a normal person, such an affliction would stop at flesh-and-blood folks; departing lovers, say, or friends. Not me though. No, I mourn fictitious people too. Such is my capacity for anguish.

The academic in me rationalises that John Hurt gets away with such infatuations in Love and Death on Long Island. Charmingly so. If it’s good enough for John…

So it was my loathing of losing people – losing characters – that had me postponing the last episode of House. Much like books I don’t want to finish, or songs I don’t want to end, apparently my delusion was that in delaying my viewing I could stall the end.

I’m yet to decide whether my preoccupation with the Good Doctor is because I – arrogantly, granted – see him as an embodiment of my very best and worst manias and fetishes, alternatively, because he’s the gorgeously screwy man I always fall for. Either way, he is my favourite TV character.

Was my favourite character.

I’d been crying throughout episodes 1 through 21. My sketchy assumption for the finale was me in the foetal position burning effigies of everyone who didn’t sign a new season contract.

Strangely though, I was completely dry-eyed. At least for the first 37 minutes. Dry-eyed, bored and a bit angry: where was my spectacularly heart-wrenching finale? Where were my doubled-over sobs? Where was my agony, dammit?

And then, almost abruptly at the 38th minute, it got good. It got moving and – watching on my iPad in a café – I quickly became a spectacle. By the time the Warren Zevon track came on I hastily made my exit.

(Interestingly – and in line with television’s spectacular use of music to manipulate – the very same Zevon song was used to equally weepy affect in Californication).

During those first 37 doubtful-looking minutes, I was forced me to ask some very serious TVLand questions. Could any farewell do the Doctor justice? Was it inevitable that the episode would be a victim of the impossibility of a good series ending?

On one hand, there probably couldn’t have been any “good death” with House: the show hadn’t jumped any sharks, House was still delectably screwed up and I most certainly could have gone another season.

More than this, however, I think there’s an inherent problem with season finales in that they get judged in ways that no other single episodes ever are. Viewer expectations are simply too high.

A final episode is expected to encapsulate everything we loved about a series. How is this possible?

There’ll be some viewers who want answers; they’ll want the doorbell fixed as in the final episode of The Cosby Show, or – as in Boston Legal – they’ll want the delicious chemistry to culminate in marriage. (Compulsory heterosexuality or not).

I don’t fall into this camp. I love loose ends and ambiguity. Not in my private life – never in my private life – but on screen I’m delighted when I’m trusted to decide what happens. The season finale of The Sopranos goosebumpily worked for me: the screen went blank and I was left to decide what happened. Perfect.

Then there’ll be those viewers who want the promise of future; who’ll hope that the characters go on in perpetuity and, perhaps one day, reunite for a cringe-worthy reunion episode. I fall into this camp. If I can’t have them on my screen forever, at least I can have them in my head. Heart.

After dealing with my loss, after over-thinking the final House a little too much, I’m committed to the idea that it had one thing in its favour. One lesson for future series finales. It ended with what was important.

The show was always the Holmes/Watson House/Wilson affair. Even after those first 37 minutes vomited out a stupid procession of distracting cameos and even at that point where it looked dangerously like treading the hallucinatory – and dreadful – Roseanne finale terrain, it returned to the central platonic love affair.

No, it wasn’t perfect – rarely do TV finales get this honour – but it stayed true. And true is good enough for me.

One of my favourite picture books as a kid was The Jolly Postman (1986).

Sparking a manic inquisitiveness that I’d later horn into a career, the book followed the route of – surprise, surprise – one very peppy postman. Teeny tiny little envelopes were stuck on each page and the reader could open and peruse the contents at will.

Oh the joys of mail-tampering!

That joy – lain quietly dormant for two decades – was promptly reinvigorated by Maria Semple’s new book Where’d You Go, Bernadette.

Not since Nick Hornby’s equally excellent Juliet, Naked (2009) have I found a book so hilarious. That I was surprised at how charmed I was is simply testimony to my shoddy pre-reading investigations: Semple was involved with Arrested Development – unquestionably one of the greatest sitcoms of all time – the book was destined to be great.

Composed of seized correspondence from, to, and about the missing Bernadette, the reader is taken on a fantastical romp to find out just where this wife, this mother, this prize-winning architect and gorgeously neurotic misanthrope has disappeared to.

I could write about the pleasures of voyeurism, but I’ve done my time investigating Peeping Tom-mery. Instead, I’m interested in one of the narrative threads: schoolgate bitchiness.

A month or so back I was interviewed for a newspaper article about the so-called Carpark Mafia. Apparently there are some mothers who like to bitch it up at the schoolgate.

When I was in primary school a delightful mother of a classmate menaced, “I’ll have your head rolling down Gaffney Street, Lauren.” Apparently my badge-making technique deployed during the school’s fundraising day was slightly… suspect.

That mothers can be insane is no great surprise.

I’ve written about cat-fights before, notably about the media’s preoccupation with them. While the public penchant for women pulling each other’s ponytails likely explains the Herald Sun’s interest, I’m more interested in motivations. What underpins parents glamming it up for the drop-off, forming cliques and dabbling in ostracism?

We could muse about gender, but instead, I’m going to focus on drama. On our preoccupation with it.

Blame social media, blame soap opera, blame women’s magazines, blame a pervasive OMG-everyone’s-life-seems-more-exciting-than-mine mentality, but whatever the impetus, for many, there’s a preoccupation with living a life more dramatic.

That our lives just have to be suitably jazzed up to warrant being loathed, being envied, being Facebook-ed and Tweeted about.

In Where’d You Go, Bernadette, each of the Galer Street School moms – who Bernadette bitingly refers to as the “gnats” – is taking the self-as-the-centre-of-the-universe idea a couple of steps too far. In their minds they’re the stars of their own reality television show. Sworn enemies, frenemies, foes and vengeance a'plenty flesh out their domestic dramedies.

These mothers have created theatre where none exists to distract them from the yawn-worthiness of daily routine. And it’s so divinely witty!

I’m generally unconvinced about the usefulness of genre; certainly Where’d You Go, Bernadette is not of any ilk I’m familiar with. But that shouldn’t deter you. It’s quirky and funny and most entertainingly is quietly of the Zeitgeist in its subtle commentary on the living publicly culture we’re now in.

Some of my favourite films – Marnie and Elegy and Secretary and Mammoth and Happiness – each have single-word titles.

Pretending however, that I went to see Vulgaria because I had hopes that it would reach those lofty heights would be fraudulent. I saw it because I’m interested in the “dirty”: just what constitutes filth? Offence? Vulgarity? Perversion?

To (Chapman To Man-chak) is a struggling film producer who’s taken money from Triad gangster Brother Tyrannosaurus (Ronald Cheng). Together, they’ll remake a porn classic.

So is it vulgar? Did it warrant the verbose warning at the beginning? Did it really need to offer a ten-second pause to allow the freaked-out to exit early?

Sex with mules.

Fellatio with a mouth full of Pop Rocks.

Cow vagina served with pickled vegetables.

Yep, there’s some stuff that justifies the MA15+ rating. That said, is it anything that we haven’t seen before?

Vulgaria is pretty much a Chinese Adam Sandler film. Not good Sandler like Funny People or Punch Drunk Love, but bad Sandler like… well, everything else he’s done. It’s sophomoric and it’s forgettable.

But I’m of the camp that believes all art has its offerings. For Vulgaria and it’s a fantastic example of sexual hypocrisy.

I mentioned the mules earlier. So Brother Tyrannosaurus likes mule sex. In fact he’s in a relationship with one. Brother’s T’s predilections don’t end there though: he brings a couple of mules to dinner and insists To has sex with one.

Later, Brother T discovers that To didn’t use a condom. And he’s revolted. So revolted in fact, that he doesn’t want to continue sharing a table with the producer.

I love this! I love that even the most perverted of characters has standards: Brother T forced To to have sex with the mule, but evidently not using a condom makes To the filthy bastard.

This sexual spin on the honour among thieves idea is not a new one, of course.

In a scene from Stieg Larsson’s book The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009), the protagonist, Lisbeth, wanted to lure forward her sadistic father to allow her reach to attack him. To do this, she suggested he come closer for sex. Her father — a brutal, murderous, sadistic sex trafficker — declined saying, “No, thanks, all the same. That would be perverse.”

In an episode of the spectacular television series House, a father held no remorse about having had sex with his daughter; he was, however, visibly disgusted when he discovered that she was biologically male.

In one episode of Big Love, polygamist Lois (Grace Zabriskie) referred to monogamous couples as “sickos.”

I love that in these scenes even the kinkiest of kinks are shown to have their limits, to have their own set of norms and boundaries and things that make them queasy.

Shock horror, even the kinky have standards! And even the kinky can be hypocrits. Because even the kinky are normal.

I’ve written a lot about perversion, about how sex and sexual interests – more so than any other practice – too often come to define a person; that an interest like sadomasochism or cross-dressing or panda-costume wearing becomes the total of a person’s identity far quicker than any other identity attributes. Cue an old, crude but poignant joke.

I wouldn’t say Vulgaria is worth seeing for that one scene. It does however, provide a nice reminder that for good and bad, we’re all more complicated creatures than what we do under our doonas.

It’s a pretty safe bet that if a film is going to include my favourite Frank Black song, involve an ill-fated love affair, run for under two hours and completely destroy my mascara, then I’m going to like it. Hell, I’ll probably even love it.

Premature probably given that it’s not even September, but I think I’m ready to dub Seeking A Friend for the End of the World as the best film of the year (only topping Take This Waltz because the latter failed to solicit tears).

Many questions preoccupied me while watching, while crying, the most pressing being what the hell did this film do to earn such a limited release? How is Magic Mike still running but I had to schlep out of the CBD to find a Seeking a Friend screening?

Of equal importance – and perfectly in line with my professional and personal preoccupations with taxonomy – is questioning whether the film really is science fiction. And how this relates to the pitiful release.

Like those folks quick to dismiss country music because it’s assumed to only ever involve aural atrocities like Achy Breaky Heart and Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, I’m equally quick to dismiss sci-fi.

I recently downloaded an audiobook and about ten minutes in, the very second the “air car” was mentioned and I knew I couldn’t finish it. Aliens and space exploration and fire balls and UFOs are topics I give the widest of wide berths to. Like climate change, I don’t care and I can’t fake it.

So how did Seeking a Friend for the End of the World disrupt my expectations of the genre? Just because IMDb dubs it sci-fi, does that mean it really is? Does it matter?

The backdrop involves an earth-destroying asteroid; people have been given their death sentences. Panic, religious epiphanies and rioting ensue.

In last year’s less-good but still pretty decent Melancholia, a planet is about to collide with earth; less overt panic, but questions of mental illness, patience and anomie arise.

Joining Drive as my equal favourite film from 2011 was Another Earth about the discovery of, surprise, surprise, a second earth. No panic, but the big questions about choice and love and fate are asked.

So I’m conflicted as to whether I’m finding the entire concept of “genre” suddenly useless or whether it’s just the sci-fi label that seems wrong for these films; films I liked.

So a fortnight ago I did a shift at my uni’s Open Day. Wearing a charmingly oversized “Ask me about Politics and International Studies” badge, for two hours I answered the very same question: “So what’s politics?”

My answer was “power” with a follow-up on the multitude of manifestations. The colleague standing next to me was peddling his version: “life – politics is about life”.

Ever since I’ve been vacillating between liking his answer and thinking it was completely preposterous.

Isn’t everything about life?

I want to take Seeking a Friend and Melancholia and Another Earth out of the sci-fi genre because they aren’t really about space crap, or new technology or extra-terrestrials, rather are about love and humanity and mortality; i.e., life.

But then, isn’t everything? Even the worst films I’ve seen this year – Margin Call, Mirror Mirror or Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – are still, quite obviously, about life. Life however, isn’t all that helpful for classification.

Wikipedia – offering a definition encompassing many proffered in film texts – defines sci-fi as “imaginary but more or less plausible (or at least non-supernatural) content”.

So then, pretty much everything make-believe is sci-fi? Every film is about life and every film is sci-fi?

If genres are so fluid and elastic and frequently all-encompassing, is there any practical application?

If not, what’s the alternative? IMDb offers keywords for Seeking a Friend including Insurance Business, Orgy and Vinyl Record . Evidently even less helpful than “sci-fi”!

Returning to where I started, the film got a pitiful release in Melbourne. It was billed – certainly by the looks of the poster – as sci-fi. Actual sci-fi fans would likely have flared their nostrils at it – if offers zilch by way of special effects and explosions – and the sci-fi genre eschewers were pitched little to entice.

So who is the film really aimed at?

At the very least, genre classification matters a whole lot when trying to fill a cinema.

One of the most controversial installations at Hobart’s Museum of New and Old Art is Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca: the excrement machine.

When I first stuck my head in during a morning visit, it smelled vaguely of meat. Two o'clock was poop-o’clock; complete with a ta daa dish of the steaming stuff.

Cloaca was commissioned. It has its own room. Inside a gallery. Is this enough to make it art?

I was thinking about Delvoye’s work when I was reading about Monkey Jesus; trumping July’s Good Food and Wine Show/simulated oral sex story to become my favourite news item of 2012.

In case you missed it, a presumably well-meaning parishioner has had a stab at restoring a 19th century church fresco.

We’re talking Spain so the original image, surprise, surprise, was Jesus. Cecilia Gimenez’s take has been described not-so-generously as a pale bearded monkey.

In one corner we have a ruined 120-year-old fresco. In the other we have 10,000 people signing a petition to keep Monkey Jesus.

I’m slightly swayed by 81-year-old Gimenez’s moxie, but I’m loathed to pick sides.

My real interest in the story centres on questions about art. About preservation.

Once upon a time I visited Rome. A decade on and the thing that’s stuck is a single line of graffiti I spied:

Rome is not a museum.

Open to interpretation, but my reading is a revolt against manic preservation. That by keeping – and honouring – every single cultural artifact, every building, every ruin, a city doesn’t ever get to develop and never becomes anything more than a relic.

As someone who is still sickened that Melbourne’s art deco Lonsdale House was pulled down to put up a parking lot/Apple store, I’m certainly not advocating a slash and burn. But when does it stop?

Elías García Martínez’s original fresco was no masterpiece. I dare say it failed to appear on anybody’s must-eye-before-I-die bucket list.

And yet, Gimenez’s fat-brushed touch-ups have led to words like botched and bungled being bandied around. All of a sudden the art world’s big questions are being thrashed out.

The old fresco vs the postmodern “parody”.

Good art vs bad art.

Established art vs street art.

The professional vs the amateur.

Permanence vs passing.

The very best thing about art – be it a painting, a film, a book – is that two people can look at the very same thing and see something completely different. Different in terms of meaning, sure, but also different in terms of value, about whether it constitutes art and whether it deserves the status of public display.

If Martínez’s fresco was – prior to this fiasco – considered valuable, I dare say it wouldn’t have required Gimenez’s DIY efforts in the first place. Europe is full of old stuff and the money isn’t available to preserve everything. Certainly not in bankrupt Spain.

Now that the fresco has been substantially tinkered with however, suddenly value is ascribed because it’s no longer in original condition. Suddenly, people who never visited it, never spent a cent on its upkeep, never noisily lauded it, are lamenting a lost masterpiece.

Time for a Joni Mitchell interlude:

The original work now has new-found value. Most fascinating however – and perfectly reflecting the fickle nature of worth – so too does the redux.

Millions of people have now been exposed to Monkey Jesus. They’ve seen Gimenez’s work – if, like me, they’ve been thoroughly entertained by it – and 10,000 have gone so far as to sign a petition advocating its retention. Suddenly Monkey Jesus has value too.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come of this story is that a fresco we never heard of has been elevated to the lofty status of “lost gem”. Highlighting equally our love for old stuff and our obsession with fetishizing the past.

Equally exciting however, Gimenez’s reno puts on our agenda all those juicy questions about what is art, who is the artist and what’s worth valuing.

It was never going to be Wag the Dog. Or Primary Colors. Or Ides of March. Or The Contender.

It was never going to be great, hell, I was doubting it would even be good. My suspicions were sadly, confirmed.

In brief, The Campaign is a moderately entertaining comedy that’s not particularly political, not particularly funny and would be thoroughly forgettable if not for one small detail: The Political Shrew.

Rarely discussed but a staple of both popular culture and media innuendo, the Political Shrew is the woman behind the man. Not just a wife however, she is the brains, the brawn, the bitch and the puppeteer behind the candidate.

If it’ll get her man the top job, she’ll be knee deep in the muck and the mire and she’ll play it dirtier than the dirtiest political henchman.

In The Campaign, the Shrew is Rose (Katherine LaNasa), wife of incumbent congressman Cam (Will Ferrell). Turning a blind – if withering – eye to his infidelities: her sights are fixed firmly on that “second lady” spot.

I’ve recently finished watching the first season of Scandal. A great show offering its own Shrew: episode after episode, Mellie (Bellamy Young) is shown as far more committed to the top job than her POTUS husband (Tony Goldwyn).

Mellie faked a miscarriage to seduce voter sympathy and went so far as organising “play dates” for her cad of a husband. She was born to be the First Lady and everything else was just background music.

Jackie Kennedy and Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin and Elizabeth Edwards and Anne Sinclair and Silda Spitzer. The pollie hubby strayed and she stayed and each faced scrutiny.

Amidst the public speculations was that each betrayed wife each liked their role just a little too much. That they gauged that a spot of feminine forbearance was a teeny price to pay for retaining The Lifestyle.

On the surface, it’s effortless to read Rose and Mellie as diabolical and misogynist caricatures. That such stereotypes are offered because they serve as witchy excuses to why their husband’s life – why any cheating man’s life – is so damn hard that solace simply has to be taken in a new vagina.

But it’s not the only way to read the Shrew archetype.

Rose and Mellie – and in real life Hillary too – were always presented as the smart one, the one with the political nous, the true political wonk.

Such characters are perpetually framed as negative because smart, political savvy women are threatening and powerful and they damn well can’t get to be likeable too.

Mind you, is there anything actually all that bad about these women doing the math?

Men are rarely called calculating; it’s a word doled out to women. For men it’s being rational, for women it’s a character indictment.

It takes two to be in what appears to be a bad marriage. If both parties are staying, both are presumably getting something out of it (else one is not only bad at maths but very bloody stupid).

The Campaign gave me a good hour or so to ponder the big questions. Another worth posing is whether the political wife as Grand Manipulator is a more egregious stereotype than the male politician as Oversexed Hapless Muppet?

Last week in this space I posted a piece about Magic Mike titled Where are the Willies? Originally I’d dubbed it “Where’s the Wang?”: a title exploiting my love of alliteration and my recent work on sexual euphemisms. I was telling Dad about it – crowing delightedly about my superb title – and with a furrowed brow, he asked, “So it’s about the absence of Chinese men in the film?” Huh? And, as a quick family poll soon exposed, the women knew wang to be a euphemism for penis, the men however, did not.

A seed, nonetheless, was planted.

The topic of sexuality and representations of Asian men has preoccupied me for a while now. By representations of course, I’m referring to those found in Anglo pop culture: fans of Asian cinema would, presumably, be much more satisfied with their pickings. (Cue clips from In The Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) and Lust, Caution (2007). Yes, the overrepresentation of Tony Leung is duly acknowledged).

AAMI have recently been flogging car insurance with the “Rhonda” series. I don’t own a new-fangled ad-fast-forwarding-gizmo, but for those who do skip the ads: homely Rhonda is spending the dosh she’s saved on safe-driver insurance by sunning herself in Bali. In the first ad she partakes of foot massages, in the second she savours the ministrations of the attractive cabana boy Ketut.

The Rhonda/Ketut ad has divided audiences. There are the voracious fankids, devoting Facebook pages to honouring the duo’s “chemistry” and wearing t-shirts to… well, I’m confused there, but then I don’t do slogan clothing.

And then there are those revolted, those offended, those who’ve interpreted the ad as promoting colonialism, imperialism, exploitation if not also sex tourism.

Evidently an attractive Asian man can only ever be construed as subordinate, as economically sexualised, as a sex worker who is passive, trapped.

I was thinking a lot about Rhonda, about Ketut, and the general absence of Asian men as figures of desirability in pop culture when I stumbled across an issue of the Gay News Network. One of the articles discussed an apparently common – if alarming – phrase “no rice, no curry”. Four hideous words used in classifieds to denote that a non-Asian, non-Indian lover is sought.

Ruminating a little longer and – in serendipitous timing – Christian Vega posted a fantastic blog entry on Asian sex workers in Australia. Vega, a sex worker himself and an activist, explored the challenges – and the offence – of clients assuming Asian sex workers to be trafficked, powerless, exploited, disease-riddled, desperate and completely without choice.

Similar to critics' assumptions about Ketut.

Vega provides a useful way to think about Ketut, about the absence of sexy Asian men on screen and about how mind-blowingly offensive it is that some people feel justified in ruling out the desirability of entire populations.

Apparently we can laugh at Asian men, see them as sinister, duplicitous, math geniuses, feminised, as drug barons, as refugees, but God-forbid they be portrayed as sexy. If they are, then an explanation is demanded.

So when Ketut appears in the AAMI ad, there’s a chunk of the audience who are frothingly desperate to “decode” his presence; to expose a subtext. He can’t just be an attractive man working at a resort, rather, Ketut has to be the embodiment of all the worst, the simplistic, the most clichéd assumptions about Asian men.

That only kinda-frumpy women like Rhonda would find him attractive.

That Ketut’s “desperate” circumstances dictate Rhonda to be his meal ticket.

That as an unusual presentation, Ketut can only ever be a caricature.

Most of my research examines representations of sex and sexuality in film and television. A question often asked by journalists is “okay then, so what needs to be done?” I’m anti-censorship, equally I’m opposed to suggesting what producers need to do; society doesn’t change because a soapie is cajoled to do diversity. That said, I’m equally aware that variety won’t spawn spontaneously.

Australia is home to over two million people born in Asia. My maths is bad, but that’s a fair few. A lot even. I’m not demanding quotas, I’m not suggesting boycotts, I am however, politely requesting that the definition of desirability be broadened a little wider than the sea of whiteness proffered to us by most screen content.

Maybe the journey can start with a single insurance ad.

The National’s song About Today (2004), Sarah Polley’s film Take This Waltz (2011) and Mo Hayder’s novel The Devil of Nanking (2005). Three of my favourite examples of pop culture showcasing the rarely discussed politics of male/female entanglements.

I’ve just finished reading Hayder’s The Treatment (2002). On one hand it’s a standard, if disturbing, police procedural with Jack Caffery, an almost-hard-boiled detective, tracking down a rope-fetishist perp. It’s a standard crime novel with a trajectory familiar to anyone versed in the genre. What elevates Hayder’s books – and why they so spark my curiosity – is that more than just crime yarns, her subplots spotlight what’s politically fraught about romantic dyads.

For the purposes of this article, I’m interested in Hayder’s use of cunnilingus in The Treatment as an allegory for the role of power in the bedroom.

In two scenes where Jack goes down on his girlfriend, Rebecca, as soon as she orgasms he motions to unbuckle his trousers. Each time however, his efforts are stifled when Rebecca moves off the bed and exits the room. Poor Jack: high, dry and hard. And he’s pissed. More than that, he’s angry. So angry in fact, that in a later scene he’ll exhibit his “dissatisfaction” in a way that Rebecca forgives far quicker than I ever would.

For her part, Rebecca’s actions are dealt with in the novel; she’s got abuse issues which she fears will resurface during intercourse. Not examined however – and far more interesting – are Jack’s “rights” to feeling irked.

In discussions of sexuality, women are routinely portrayed as gatekeepers: they’re the ones who get decide if, when and how sex will happen; they’re the ones charged with – and responsible for – stirring men’s desires. While in practice I’m not convinced this transpires in all or even most scenarios, nevertheless in a world where the vast majority of men are not rapists, if she says no, no it shall be.

Rebecca left the bedroom as is her right. And Jack – laying supine and erect – had no recourse. Up until that point in the novel he was trying hard to be the good boyfriend, the quality lover. I won’t go so far as to call him a feminist, but nevertheless he’s portrayed as a new-age man; a man who knows the effectiveness of cunnilingus, is willing to do it and acknowedges that in the 21st century demanding reciprocity will curry no favours.

And yet he’s still palpably annoyed when reciprocity doesn’t transpire.

In studies on gender and sexuality, often discussed is the “sexual script”. It’s a way to explain how the hijinks of our bedrooms – of our sexual interactions more broadly – frequently follow a pattern of internalised conventions and norms; that lovers go through an inevitably scripted dance.

Sociologists have applied this concept to a variety of phenomena; for the purposes of this article – and to research I’ve recently conducted for my day job – my interest is how the script relates to heterosexual cunnilingus.

In short, invariably cunnilingus is treated as foreplay. It’s a precursor to the “main event”. It’s not considered as sex on its own – cue the Clinton explanation – and it’s unlikely for any sexual interaction between a man and a woman to only consist of him going down on her. Cunnilingus is a lead in or adjunct to sex, but it’s rarely sex in its entirety.

For Jack in The Treatment, he performs oral sex because he loves Rebecca and because he seemingly enjoys the act, but his intent is not exclusively about benevolence. He expects to equally profit. When this doesn’t happen he is resentful.

Jack feels owed. Sexual script research indicates that men in general feel owed if they go to the oral trouble. This is certainly something promulgated by porn: innumerable scenes of cunnilingus are included but it always serves as the warm up for other penis-centric acts.

I suggest this is quite different from the fellatio script.

While sexual script research documents that women would quite like their blow job gifts to be repaid, they don’t expect it. That sometimes fellatio will actually constitute the whole sex scene.

It’s the penis that makes the difference. It’s the penis that forms our definition of heterosexual congress; it’s his orgasm that truly connotes that the job has been done. This is a norm that both men and women have internalised.

While I find the idea of sexual reciprocity fascinating, not for a moment do I think it’s an easy subject to discuss nor grapple with psychologically. On one hand I find it icky/upsetting/a big fat turn off that a sex act might be performed purely – or even just largely – out of expectation, point-scoring or because someone is due “their share”. That said, as I’ve discussed in this space previously, our motives for sex are complicated; participating because a lover’s pleasure has been prioritised is as rational – as laudable – as any other justification.

Mo Hayder does a good job with the detective tale but an even better one at nodding to all of those sexual complexities that make heterosexuality horrible and wonderful and enduringly interesting.

I was never going to enjoy Magic Mike. I’ve no history of being turned on by men I’ve never met. My heart doesn’t race for an oiled up six-pack and my genitals certainly don’t moisten for gyrating g-strings.

I like a wordsmith who’ll laugh at my jokes and who won’t steal my razor to shave his armpits. I’ll leave the Duffman-style thrusting and fireman/GI Joe/Tarzan costumes to those keen on tucking cash into anal cleavage.

Nonetheless, I saw Magic Mike and it was every bit as loathsome as I’d anticipated, made much worse by mumbled dialogue, too many sex industry cliches and way too much Matthew McConaughey.

Loathsome, but fortunately not totally void of talking points. For this piece, I’m curious about the cock. Or lack thereof.

How can a movie about male strippers exist with only the briefest glimpse of a penis (sheathed, might I add, by the plastic of a vacuum pump)? How can a movie about male strippers have more boob shots than balls?

Don’t get me wrong, Magic Mike is very penis-centric. They’re worshipped and stroked, nuzzled by randy bachelorettes and at various junctions – complete with sound effects – even thrusted as machine guns at the audience (in one of director Steven Soderbergh’s many nods to feminism).

And yet each penis is covered by lycra or the American flag or by the predictable faux animal print.

A small number of mainstream films have dared to show full frontal male nudity – think the brilliant, if disturbing, Shame for example, or Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But the penis is not a common feature of non x-rated films.

Why? What’s the big deal? Why are breasts routinely bared but penises remain duly covered, contained and condemned? Why is an uncloaked penis considered so scandalous, so salacious, so boundary-crossing?

While I understand that many men don’t feel comfortable about seeing penises – cue some vaguely laughable concerns about accidental arousal and envy – there were two men in the near-full cinema I saw the film in. Magic Mike wasn’t made for men, it was a cash cow for the 50 Shades audience; cock-confrontation fears are moot.

So why no wang for the ladies?

Lots of explanations circulate, perhaps the standard is grounded in aesthetics: apparently ladies simply don’t swoon for the penis. Such an argument routinely explains why the Playgirl and Australian Women’s Forum audiences were only ever gay men; why the male strip industry remains much less lucrative than the female eqivalent.

Apparently a penis is just not considered as pleasing to the eye as a pair of bouncy breasts.

I find this argument preposterous and so depressingly childish. Only one set of genitals I’ve ever had contact with were aesthetically challenged and that was purely because they’d been waxed. I’m a loud and proud champion of the pubes and hairlessness confuses me.

My own preferences aside however, the central problem with the nonsense aesthetics argument is that it immaturely treats the penis as somehow hideous and confronting and as naturally aggressive. Incredibly unhelpful.

No, I’m not particularly interested in seeing anonymous dicks. And neither am I interested in ogling breasts. But if a film like Magic Mike is going to market itself as somehow offering equal opportunity perving – as the promotion tour seems eager too – at least provide us something to adequately objectify.

My leftie objections to the Olympics manifested this week in the mildest, least lifestyle-disrupting manner I could conjure: reading about a fictitious attack on them.

From the productive – if not necessarily prestigious – James Patterson Factory comes his collaboration with Mark Sullivan: Private Games. The London Games are under threat by “Cronus”, a shady character with a God-complex, who is killing off officials and athletes in a variety of elaborate, if vaguely preposterous, methods.

While the full-throttle assault on the games promised by the blurb didn’t quite pan out, the idea of a fictitious attack on the London Games – written for release just prior to the real Games – fascinated me.

Surely there’s something a little macabre about me – about the thousands of others drawn to the book – reading about something horrible happening to a major event while that event is actually happening?

I’m very interested in the concept of schadenfreude, a German word describing the pleasure reaped from the pain of others. Initially it occurred to me that being drawn to this book, this genre, encapsulates this.

In a world where all major international cities are fearful of terrorist attacks, in an environment where millions are spent attempting to safeguard major event participants, the pleasure in reading about an attack on something like the London Games seems indicative of our darker preoccupations. Not about us actively wanting something bad to happen necessarily, but sourcing at least a modicum of pleasure when it does.

While the simplest understanding of schadenfreude is laughing at someone slipping on a banana peel, there are other features that make it much more interesting. Humans, for example, often feel pleasure at hearing about the misfortune of others. This isn’t normally about sadism, rather, about seizing an opportunity to perceive our own lives – however dismal – as a little better than those around us. Another aspect, particularly as related to disease or misfortune, is the concept of the dodged bullet.

Hearing about the cancer of a friend or a terrorist attack on a city that isn’t our own, and there is pleasure reaped from the simple fact that it’s not us; that, in a world of gruesome statistics, we’re not one of them. That we feel somehow inoculated.

One last speculation of the appeal is our insatiable appetite for drama. If we think of the biggest news stories of our lifetime and they’re the bad news ones. Wars and bombings and plane crashes and mass shootings sell papers. They sell papers as well as sell novels and film tickets and computer games because we love bad stuff. We love fiery, high-stakes footage. We love infinite angles and drip-feed revelations and stirring personal testimonies. We love this stuff because the media permits us participation at a safe, arms length distance. Our hands remain bloodless, our shoes spotlessly clean.

No, of course I didn’t want anything to happen to the real games. But what makes the premise, if sadly not the writing, of the Patterson/Sullivan collaboration intriguing is the reality that the bigger the major event, the bigger the attack and, inevitably, the bigger the media spectacle will be.

In the space of one week I’d been timetabled to teach in the uni’s psych building, I’d been a guest on a radio program hosted by not one but four psychiatrists (intervention much?) and I finally – and kinda blindly – read Emma Forrrest’s mental health memoir Your Voice in My Head (2011); a recommendation from someone who knows me better than most.

Like that kid in Touch, admittedly I do see patterns in everything. Unlike that kid, I’m superbly apt at ignoring them.

I’m quite drawn to the psychological idea of projection. That the more you hate something the more likely it is that you see something ugly or frightening or so very well-suppressed of yourself mirrored. And I didn’t just hate Your Voice in My Head, I despised it. And I despised it more and more with every name she dropped and every song she mentioned and ever city she’d gone and visited. That Stanley Tucci – who I quite love – is attached to the film project shatters me.

My loathing isn’t an indictment on Forrest’s book. Hardly. As a writer the only thing I want to do is make people think or feel something. Encouraging them to quietly loathe my every word would certainly not be the worst thing to come from publishing.

But this piece isn’t on why I found Forrest’s book wrenchingly abrasive. Instead, it’s about memoir and story ownership.

Of the handful of relationships Forrest discusses, one is with a bloke she dubs her “Gypsy Husband”. Anyone who knows anything about Forrest would be aware that the disguise was unnecessary; from the paparazzi through to the legitimate press, Forrest’s relationship with the roguish Irish actor Colin Farrell had been thoroughly documented.

Your Voice in My Head – but the memoir genre more broadly – raises some fascinating questions about ownership and perspective and exposure.

Just who owns the rights to writing about a relationship? To outing a relationship? In history, it’s the victors who invariably write the story; who wins in a broken relationship? Does the writer get to control the narrative, the perception? Do readers assume the published version is the only story to be told; the only truth that exists? Is getting in first to tell a side motivated by patenting a version, manipulating memories or serving as a kind of public therapy?

Two of my books have mentioned past lovers. One became the nail in the coffin to a relationship which, during the writing, had been the most important of my life. Is any book worth such a loss? (For the record I’m going to say no).

I’m too wedded to postmodernism – and far too invested in my identity as a writer – not to be a proponent of multiple truths and our rights not only to own our experiences but to write about them at all costs. Doing so however, certainly isn’t without consequence.

Having the right – if not the perceived yen – to scribe it all down is quite a different thing to all that happens after the story is written, after it’s read and after the fallout.

An Upper West Side shopping trip proves devastating when teenager Lisa (True Blood’s Anna Paquin) becomes embroiled in a fatal bus accident. The pedestrian victim, Monica (The West Wing’s Allison Janney), dies in Lisa’s arms thus prompting an anguished attempt at processing the unfathomable.

With a woman close to thirty playing a seventeen-year-old, with an embarrassing glut of underutilised talent (think Jean Reno, Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick) and at a whopping 150 minutes long, there’s a lot here to find irksome. More positive however, there’s also a couple of reasons to find Margaret fascinating: as a sex researcher, I’m going to focus on the sex.

At the centre of the film is Lisa, a teenager without the nous, wherewithal or life experience to process what has happened. She harbours an amalgam of never cleanly articulated feelings – anger, guilt and anomie just for starters – and attempts to handle them with a variety of misguided tactics befitting a teenager.

One method is ridding herself of her virginity.

In the fantastic film High Fidelity (2000), there’s a scene when – after her father’s funeral – Laura (Iben Hjejle) propositions ex-boyfriend Rob (John Cusack):

Listen, Rob, would you have sex with me? Because I want to feel something else than this. It’s either that, or I go home and put my hand in the fire. Unless you want to stub cigarettes out on my arm.

Arousal is the expected reason why people have sex. Followed closely by love and intimacy. Sex however, is often had for a multitude of other far more interesting, far more complicated reasons. Laura in High Fidelity wanted to feel something – anything – other than her grief. Lisa was similarly motivated; her yen made particularly interesting because it involved virginity loss.

I’ve written about virginity before, noting the social and cultural pressures on women to treat it as something special, as sacred, as prized.

In Margaret, Lisa bucks this expectation. Eschewing sex with the lovely Darren (John Gallagher Jr) – who’s thoroughly besotted with her – instead she chooses the local stoner Paul (Kieran Culkin) for an afternoon of orchestrated bedroom awkwardness.

Rather than imbuing her first time sex with magical or transcendental properties, Lisa’s objectives centred simply on difference. She chose sex with someone who didn’t matter to her, who she had no feelings for, to create an experience that was motivated purely to feel otherwise.

Lisa’s motivation, of course, can be considered as slightly self-flagellating – the experience wasn’t particularly pleasurable – but the sex wasn’t intended as love-making, wasn’t motivated by arousal and most certainly wasn’t a quest for orgasm.

Lisa’s decision highlights that no sexual decision is ever made in a vacuum. Politics and culture and in this case psychology each motivate our choices. It also reminds us that the meaning of sex is rarely stationary or universal.

For Lisa, sex functioned as a way to feel something other than pain. It didn’t fix everything – a woman just bled to death in her arms, what possibly could? – but it did work to aptly illustrate the complexities regarding motivations for sex.