Subversive anti-feminism

So I think, in the words of Catlin Moran, I just experienced some sexism. That was some sexism just there.

And you know it wasn't the out and out "Show us yer tits" sexism.

But rather that sneaky little "real woman" sexism.

I have this job, and needless to say it is not my dream job - but at least I am working in marketing.

It is a huge organsiation and I have to deal with about 100 different clients each week, and really, there is only so many times a woman can say, "Sure, I can update that brochure for you."  without wondering what the $40,000 HECS/HELP debt was for.

I decided I would just ask people for what I need from them, so I can give them what they need, and deliver a great campaign to get great results.  Directly.  I know I know new concept.

So I get called into a private meeting to discuss...well I didn't know.

Then I get "you need to find another way to ask questions, because it is very confronting."

Fine - "I have had complaints"  Really.  So I ask "About my work, or the deliverables?"

"No".  "Just about the way you ask questions."

So......

(In my brain at this point I am thinking WTF!!!!!  If I was a man, would you be speaking to me like that?)

"Try to be nicer."

Awesome.

(And I am still wondering what the HECS/HELP debt is for)

That was TOTALLY some sexism right?

Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got till it's gone

I am leaving Toowoomba.

Not that I really wanted to be here, but I tell you what, this is more difficult than I thought it would be. My lovely friend gave me some advice, it did not involve any wine or booze, but she knows me well. By invoking the poetry that surrounded the experience, rather than specific events, I will be ok, so she tells me.

So – I mourn:
My House: my lovely house; my home, built by a hard working man, with his own two hands. He made it posh were people could see, and saved where they couldn’t. So solid, water tight and unassuming. My boy built a fence, a patio, a kitchen, a bathroom, a vegetable garden, a front garden, a side garden, re did the roof, put in insulation, polished the floors, new carpet, along with re purposing furniture, studying and working.
(By Jingo – look how much you can get done when you’re committed.)

My Job: I learned so much at my job, and my boss was great for me. The friends I made at work have been lovely, and it was certainly a soft landing for me.

My position: Our house is so close to everything, I wish I had taken more advantage. Seriously – 1.2 km from a major department store, 400 m to two major bottle shops, 900 m to a cinema, pub restaurant, 300 m to pizza shop , video shop, chicken shop, butcher, GREAT fruit shop.... OMG why am I leaving??

The Parks: Walking Jake is much nicer in a park. He probs doesn’t know, but it is nice for me. So close as well. Hmmmm..

*not sure if this is helping*

I might have to get back to this.

*open a bottle of wine*

The Christmas! The Christmas!

Shopping list:

·         2 x packets of pate (your choice)

·         200 g salmon

·         Small packet philly cheese

·         Dill

·         1 x French bread stick

·         White nougat (bought)

·         12 fresh figs

·         1 x box forrero rocher

·         Jindi triple cream brie

·         Jindi Deluxe Blue

·         Honey

·         Mint

·         Lavoche biscuits

·         Maggie Beer’s quince paste

·         Muscatels

·         700 g white grapes

·         700 g black grapes

·         Ingredients for raspberry and almond cupcakes (see following)

·         Ingredients for dark nougat

·         Ingredients for Brioche (or bought)

·         Watermelon

·         Ingredients for Orange and poppy seed cake (or packet mix)

·         Ingredients for the Yule log (see following recipe)

·         Potatoes 600g

·         Sweet potato 600 g

·         Carrots 600g

·         Green beans

To Serve: 

Goose liver pate

Smoked salmon on French bread with philly cream and dill

 

3.5 kg goose

Steamed green beans with almonds

Roast vegetables (carrot, sweet potato, potato)

 

Almonds:  http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/23061/raspberry+and+almond+cake

Hazelnuts:  forrero rocher

Figs:  Fresh  Figs, drizzled with honey &  sprinkled with a bit of mint

Semi dried muscatels – to go on the cheese platter

White nougat

Dark nougat: http://frenchfood.about.com/od/desserts/r/Cinnamon-Almond-Brittle-Recipe.htm

Brioche:  Bought brioche

Quince: quince paste  with brie and blue cheese

Dates: Sticky Date Pudding http://www.exclusivelyfood.com.au/2006/07/individual-sticky-date-puddings-recipe.html

Winter melon (we are going to replace with watermelon):  sliced watermelon

Grapes:  black grapes and white grapes (700 g of each)

Oranges: orange and poppy seed patty cakes with cream cheese icing (Greens does a great packet cake)

Yule log: http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/yule-log

 Can you please let me know in the comments which bits you are going to bring, and I will organise the rest.

 

I got the goose.

 

 

Just as hard to mow

I wondered what a midlife crisis looks like when it happens to a woman.
A bit of cursory investigation on the interwebs came up with an article from Time Magazine from 2005. Not really what I was talking about but interesting nonetheless.


The bit I really liked is the line that says "women are natural marketers". Now that is something I can really get on board with.
Marketing can be a pretty rough gig. I used to joke with my team about getting first year marketing lecturers to start with "Everyone stand up. Now sit down anyone who is interested in making lots of money, getting constant praise, or being supported and nurtured in a job that has big budgets. Those of you still standing up ask yourself, and you handle when it all goes right and you get none of the credit and when it all goes wrong it is all your fault? If not, sit down. All of you still standing – welcome to marketing, and good luck!"
That being said, there is nothing quite like the first time you see a supersite billboard that you brainstormed, budgeted for, built into a IMC and you are getting measurable results from. That's a sight that really warms a girls heart.
Now that is the other thing I really like. Results. I am probably lucky (in more ways than one) that I was not working in the hey day of advertising in the late 50's or the mid eighties, because I am pretty mean with the budgets. I want to see OUTCOMES. Without a goal, a measureable one – all this is just pointless busy work.
Setting goals in marketing plans can be a challenge. I have found that business managers want to reach all the goals, but don't wish to expend the budget to do so. So I have been known to write goals on a corresponding sliding scale, just so they can get the picture. Conversely – trying to impress that twice as much budget will not necessarily deliver twice the goal, and that there is a minimum spend to reach any goals at all.
Makes all this marketing malarkey sound like a serious job doesn't it?
What do you guys think?



 

Rolling in the Deep

I have been playing the nostalgia game quite alot this week, and am sure wether that is spurred on from the time of year, or listening to Adele "21", or what...

But I think I can unequivocally say I am now done with the past. No longer do I flinch, no longer do I cry or wish for things to be different.

I have so many things in my life that have proved to be more fulfilling, lasting and understanding, that I am unsure what ever was the previous obsession.

Adele sing about finding "someone like you", but now I know, I don't want some one like that. I want someone so much more, with integrity, ethics, morals - and a sense of perspective.

Luckily I am surrounded by them.

So I raise a glass to the present and the future, am thankful for the past...... but am so fucking glad its over.

so to rewrite Adele just for a moment.

but never mind, I found so much better than you.

I wish nothing but the best for you...So forget me, I beg,

You'll remember I once said, it hurts, but it's better instead....

Oh baby, it hurt but in the long run its better instead....

A.A. Gill – inside my head

Please find following the AA Gill story about Dubai – on Vanity Fair.
It is like he got inside my head and told my story…
Whilst I am privileged to have spent time in Dubai – to go to university and not work – I didn't have the easiest time. Something about it always struck me as empty and desperately hollow. There weren't a lot of morals to be found – the majority of people were just out for themselves. There were very few conversations had about anything deeper than your last holiday, your next car or how much money you made on your last deal. I was lucky enough to find some people who I would truly call friends – but they (and their open minds, and generous spirits) were in the minority.
Dubai – amazing place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there (or to go back there as the case may be).

Dubai on Empty

Its skyline erupting from the desert in just two decades, Dubai is a cautionary tale about what money can't buy: a culture of its own. After gorging on the Viagra of easy credit, the emirate has the world's tallest building, the world's most expensive racetrack, and a financial crisis to match. From the Western mercenaries and Asian drones who maintain the gaudy show to 100-odd families who are impervious to any economic reality, A. A. Gill discovers that no one truly belongs in Dubai, where the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.

By A. A. Gill•

Photographs by Tom Craig

WEB EXCLUSIVE April 2011

Locals stand in front of the royal enclosure at the track.

The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn't real. It's a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it's a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste. Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun. It's a holiday resort with the worst climate in the world. It boils. It's humid. And the constant wind is full of sand. The first thing you see when you arrive is the airport, with its echoing marble halls. It's big enough to be the hub of a continent. Dubai suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest. This includes their financial crisis.

Outside, in the sodden heat, you pass hundreds and hundreds of regimented palm trees and you wonder who waters them and what with. The skyline, in the dusty haze, looks like the cover of a dystopian science-fiction novella. Clusters of skyscrapers lurch out at the gray desert accompanied by their moribund cranes, propped up with scaffolding, swagged in plastic sheeting. Dubai thought it was going to grow up to be the Arab Singapore—a commercial, banking, and insurance service port on the Gulf with hospitality and footballers' time-shares, an oasis of R&R for the less well endowed. But it hasn't quite worked out. The vertical streets of offices are empty. A derelict skyscraper looks exactly the same as one that's teeming with commerce. They huddle around the current tallest building in the world—a monument to small-nation penis envy. This pylon erected with the Viagra of credit is now a big, naked exclamation of Dubai's fiscal embarrassment. It was going to be called Burj Dubai, but as Dubai was unable to make their payments, they were forced to go to their Gulf neighbor, head towel in hand, to get a loan. So now it's called Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi's ruler, who coughed up $10 billion to its over-extended neighbor.

Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it's Dubai.

My driver gets lost more than once. He's lived here all his life. He says he always gets lost. The roads keep changing. It's a confusion of orange traffic cones and interlocking barriers; access roads peter out into long drops to rubble and dust. Nothing actually goes anywhere. The wide lanes loop around endlessly, and then there's no place to go. No plaza or square, no center. Nowhere to hang out, nowhere to walk. Why would you walk? In this heat? You pull over and throw your keys to a valet, and get indoors as quickly as possible, generally in one of the countless shopping centers that look like the airports of lesser nations or Egyptian tombs. They echo with the slow footfalls of the security guards. In the boutiques, the glossy assistants stare at mannequins with a mutual mime of cashmere-folding despair. Dubai has been mugged by its own greed. Its consumer economy is being maintained by oil-rich families to whom depressions, booms, lottery wins, and recessions mean little. Riches and wealth are relative terms. But not ones we're related to. There is an indoor ski mountain, probably the biggest indoor ski mountain in a desert, where the Arab boys queue for suits and boots and skis. The smarter locals arrive in their own designer après-ski gear, with fur and moon boots. You walk through the doors and it's like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—the land of permanent winter. The fat boys push past carrying their snowboards toward the Tyrolean chocolate shop and Swiss fir trees and slide down the hill with a practiced arrogance. The girls slither, splay-legged, hijabs fluttering, in the manufactured snow.

Pre-race at the nearly $3 billion Meydan Racecourse, in Dubai.

No one dreamed of this. Twenty years ago, none of this was here. No Narnia. No seven-star hotels. No tallest prick buildings. Just a home of pastoralist tented families herding goats, racing camels, shooting one another. And a handful of greasy, armed empire mechanics in khaki shorts, drilling for oil. In just one life span, Dubai has gone from sitting on a rug to swiveling on a fake Eames chair 100 stories up. And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That's not quite fair—of course they've lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy. The money seeped out of the ground and they spent it. Pretty much all of it. You look at this place and you realize not a single thing is indigenous, not one of this culture's goods and chattels originated here. Even the goats have gone. This was a civilization that was bought wholesale. The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie's warning about wealth: "There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else." Emiratis are born retired. They waft through this city in their white dishdashas and headscarves and their obsessively tapered humorless faces. They're out of place in their own country. They have imported and built a city, a fortress of extravagance, that excludes themselves. They have become duplicitous, schizophrenic. They don't allow their own national dress in the clubs and bars that serve alcohol, the restaurants with the hungry girls sipping champagne. So they slip into Western clothes to go out.

The Gulf Arabs have become the minority in this country they wished out of the desert. They are now less than 20 percent of the total population. Among the other 80-plus percent are the white mercenary workers who come here for tax-free salaries to do managerial and entrepreneurial jobs, parasites and sycophants for cash. For them money is a driving principle and validation. They came to be young, single, greedy, and insincere. None of them are very clever. So they live lives that revolve around drink and porn sex and pool parties and barbecues with a lot of hysterical laughing and theme nights, karaoke, and slobbery, regretful coupling. In fact, as in all cases of embarrassing arrested development, these expats on the short-term make don't expect to put down roots here, have children here, or grow old here. Everyone's on a visa dependent on a job.

Then there is a third category of people: the drones. The workers. The Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos. Early in the morning, before the white mercenaries have negotiated their hangovers, long before the Emiratis have shouted at the maid, buses full of hard-hatted Asians pull into building sites. They have the tough, downtrodden look of Communist posters from the 30s—they are both the slaves of capital and the heroes of labor. Asians man the hotels; they run the civil service and the utilities and commercial businesses; they are the clerks and the secretaries, the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants; there isn't a single facet of this state that would function if they didn't maintain it. No one with an Emirati passport could change a fuse. Yet, the workers, who make up roughly 71 percent of the population, have precious few rights here. They can't become citizens, though some are the third generation of their family to be born here. They can be deported at any time. They have no redress. Many of the Asian laborers are owed back pay they aren't likely to get. There are reams of anecdotal stories about the abuse of guest workers. I'm told about the Pakistani shop assistant who, picking up an Arab woman's shopping bags, accidentally passed gas, got arrested, and was jailed.

 

The Arabs live in their own ghettos, large, dull containments of big houses that are half garage behind security walls, weighed down with satellite dishes. We drive by an empty lot, and my driver tells me that this was the site of the house of the second son of a high-ranking official. Daddy had it bulldozed when his boy was caught having a Western-style rich-brats' party. There is a growing, unspoken problem with the indigenous youth here. Fat, and spoiled beyond reason, they are titanically rude. They have reportedly taken to forming slovenly gangs that have been responsible for random attacks on foreign workers and women simply for the computer-game fun of it. This is a generation of kids who expect to never seriously work—but do expect secure jobs. An Indian manager who runs hotels in Dubai told me that everybody dreads the call from some royal Arab telling them to expect a nephew who will be coming to work. The boy will demand an office, a secretary, a car, wages, deference, and an empty schedule. It's a sort of protection shakedown that you pay to do business here.

The Al Maktoums are secretive and autocratic, as most Arab despots are. The emir is always prime minister. Abu Dhabi's ruler is always president. The royal family's public exposure is universally adoring, supine, sycophantic, and breathlessly bland. There are rumors, always rumors, about disappeared princesses, abducted children, madness, and suicide. The royal family owes its power to an intricate web of family alliance, patronage, and operatic charity. It is sincerely respected.

   

The Al Maktoums have taken to horse racing. They practically own the British and Irish bloodstock business. It's a clever and self-serving hobby. Horses are one of the very few upper-class American and European enthusiasms that are shared with Arabs. All racehorses have a little Arab in them. So the Al Maktoums can mix in the West without that stigma that the Saudis suffer from back home—the public decorum with a private, Western decadence. The simple business of betting is of course ignored with a disdainfully turned shoulder. Since Dubai's construction-based economy stumbled, the prince has obliviously opened a massive and spectacularly hideous hippodrome, the Meydan Racecourse. The biggest racetrack in the world, it cost almost $3 billion to build. It's home to the Dubai World Cup, the most expensive horse race in the world, naturally. This place couldn't have the second-most expensive horse race in the world. The winner pockets $10 million.

The track sits in a wasteland surrounded by the exhausted squirm of motorways. I walk around it and look not at the galloping horses and their bright jockeys but back up at the stands. Here in one long panorama is the Dantean vision of modern Dubai—the Arabs huddled in a glass dome, looking like creatures from a Star Trek episode in their sepulchral winding-sheet dishdashas. Next to them are the stands for Westerners, mostly British, loud and drunk, dressed in their tarty party gear. The girls, raucous and provocative, have fat thighs that wobble in tiny frocks. Cantilevered bosoms lurch. The boys, spiky and gelled, glassy-eyed and leering. In the last enclosure, the Asians, packed in with families and picnics, excited to be out of the Portakabin dormitories and the boredom and the homesickness of Internet cafés. In front of them all are the ranks of wired-up security guards, making sure the layers of this mutually dismissive society don't pollute each other. After the horses have run, Elton John will perform.

Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn't just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.

   

March – and all that entails

 

I heard that you're settled down,
That you found a girl and you're married now,
I heard that your dreams came true,
Guess she gave you things I didn't give to you,
Old friend, why are you so shy?
Ain't like you to hold back or hide from the light,

I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited,
But I couldn't stay away, I couldn't fight it,
I had hoped you'd see my face,
And that you'd be reminded that for me it isn't over,

Never mind, I'll find someone like you,
I wish nothing but the best for you, too,
Don't forget me, I beg,
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead,"
Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead, yeah,

You know how the time flies,
Only yesterday was the time of our lives,
We were born and raised in a summer haze,
Bound by the surprise of our glory days,

I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited,
But I couldn't stay away, I couldn't fight it,
I had hoped you'd see my face,
And that you'd be reminded that for me it isn't over,


Never mind, I'll find someone like you,
I wish nothing but the best for you, too,
Don't forget me, I beg,
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead,"

Nothing compares,
No worries or cares,
Regrets and mistakes, they're memories made,
Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste?

Never mind, I'll find someone like you,
I wish nothing but the best for you,
Don't forget me, I beg,
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead,"

Never mind, I'll find someone like you,
I wish nothing but the best for you, too,
Don't forget me, I beg,
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead,"
Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-iOcKaSeFo

Don’t you know that (old) white men can’t negotiate?

I have spent part of the day in a 'workshop' with a group of people from across my organisation to discuss (again) a matter of importance.

 

So the discussion pretty much goes like this:

• It's not my fault
  
• We need more…money people time
  
• That doesn't apply to me (or the I'm special rant)
  

 

I try not to pay too much attention to it. Because all it does is wind me up. So I think about my farm, or other things I need to do at work, or my boy or… well… you know.

 

The biggest issue I have is to keep my unvalidated, possibly unhelpful opinions to myself. All that really happens I that I get a very sore tongue (from biting it so hard) and a headache.

 

I am trying to be much more zen of philosophical about it and think in terms of moral objectivism.

Ethics and morals are supposedly interchangeable as words – in fact one is from the latin root and the other from the greek.

 

And of course the view we have now is one (morals) is more driven by organisations or communities – such as organised religion – and the other (ethics) is driven from a personal point of view.

 

So my own set of ethics and morals are currently being challenged. I am learning about moral objectivism, moral realism and the rest. So I am using my new found knowledge to remember that there is only one REAL truth and it can only be revealed through research and understanding – not just passionate opinion.

The thinking I have learnt recently that I really like is the negation of the statement "I am entitled to my own opinion". Well, the real situation is that you are NOT entitled to it. You may have an opinion – that much is true – but you are no more entitled to one any more than simply entering a race means you have won it. To be entitled to an opinion means you will have thought deeply about it, researched it, had it critiqued etc – to indicate that your position is validated and worthy.

This has really helped in these type of workshops and meetings – understanding that every individual has a moral/ethical standpoint – and may well truly believe that their standpoint is 100% true and right. However, it is impossible for every individual's views to be 100% truth – as it is impossible for more than one truth to exist. So all that remains is one truth and many opinions.

 

That REALLY helps me keep my mouth shut. I only ever want to be on the side of the 100% truth – and it takes a long time to get there.

On a brighter note – it is the last days of summer, the garden looks great, my dog and chooks are happy and my boy is home. Gotta be happy with that.

 

And it is International Women's Day on 8^th March. Embrace your inner feminist, embrace the feminist in your life and say it LOUD and PROUD.

Girls can do anything.