my struggle

maryann can you fix my car?

you know, 'my struggle' would be a great title for a book.

Are you talking about completely cutting yourself off or just trying to shield yourself as much as possible?

Ethan - I get the impression the reference was deliberate.

Ethan - ich habe keiner arme

Duane - it's the battery.

fight fight fight. don't be an exile, if you are an exile, you can't influence anyone.

thats what i say in theory. in practise it can be hard to do that cos it's often so unrewarding and people just don't listen. people don't wanna have their fucked-up attitudes questionned cos it means changing their own comfortable behaviour and subsequently their own power.

don't give up though, if you give up you might as well be one of them.

Maryann, please clarify.

Is this about the men on that thread, or is this a Fat Is A Feminist Issue thing, or is this...something else entirely?

I didn't comment on the porn thread because I *loathe* hetporn (unoriginal, exploitative despite the wages of women being higher than men, and for me, Very Old Ground) and had deadlines IRL.

Tell me what it is and then I'll be able to comment. But please realise I am a feminist (post-feminist = world's silliest term) who thinks that attempting to cut self off from the world is a little like flipping the Monopoly board because you think someone else is winning.

As the song goes "Life's what you make it.". If you like to see life as a struggle, then obstacles will appear on your road.

Knowledge is power. "Seek to understand, not to be understood"

(maryann you are one of my favourite posters even tho I sometimes disagree with you: selfishly i say you must be out in the world struggling, because the world is more boring if you go into exile)

Please explain Maryann, surely it's not the posters is it? Apart from a few rivalries (you know who you are) This is prob one of the friendliest and flame free areas on the interweb.

What's to be gained by going to ground, losing the respect and support of a lot of people for starters.

No you become a blowfish. You become defensive and pricky . You push into people until they learn to recognize pain . Then you slowly deflate. You yell your opinons on the roof tops. You tumble and kick and scream how you feel ! That is what IL* and the world is for. Sometime in this choas nobody listens and people reiterate to make sure their life is heard. ( ie the porn thread, whcich was not my proudest moment) I like your posts ALOT ! I find you clever and you have this really pesky habit of making me reconsider my opions.

Oh and you do not critique my spelling, which i apprecaite more hten you will know :)

FWIW your stuff on the porn thread made me think very hard about my attitudes to porn and past-and-present consumption of it. It's not that I'd not heard the arguments before but the thing about a forum which is 80% social is that you're more likely to listen to people you like and are mixing with socially when 'more important' stuff comes up.

That said the first rule of the Internet community is that if you feel you need a break from one, you probably need a break from one.

Thanks guys, I luvxor you! I honestly hadn't thought of all these things and now they seem so obvious. So THAT is the advantage of these other humans.

can someone tell me what 'luvxor' and 'suxor' mean? i worked out something involving boolean logic and heterosexuality (some kind of PC sux removing it from its original homphobic meaning) but it seemed to silly.

sorry i mean "too silly".

maryann, I don't want to put you on the spot, and I'll respect your privacy if you'd rather not go into it, but I feel like reiterating peoples' questions above about what the problem w/ the kate thread was? I certainly never meant to say anything offensive, in fact, I thought I was standing up for people who seemed to be going against the dominant ideas of what womens' bodies should look like, which I think is unhealthy. Just know that I, as well as it seems everyone here, really values yr input and we'd hate to see you go :).

And my reasons for asking are so that we can hopefully avoid any future misunderstandings and communicate better, not to pry into yr private life.

yeah m. you are 1 of my favourite posters too! you gotta keep doing this, it would suck if you were'n't round any more.
oh yeah that's right i can talk to you IRL if i wtd to. This shit is way the hell better tho!
You gotta check yr mail BTW! sorry i did not show up, you can imagine why, sorry.

Hamish thanks for writing on the porn thread. I don't know what luvxor means either, I only have guesses too like what you said, but I know it's hacker stuff? But Ned Raggett or Mark S should know the Truth so can they please say?

Re Kate Winslet - um no one thing, just that it did actually turn out to be a whole thread discussing her weight fluctuations. And that this kind of (to me) falacious debate ensued between people saying that 'she should be comfortable with her weight' and others saying 'it's ok for her to want to be healthy.' Both of these things are no doubt true as isolated statements but talk about not seeing the wood for the trees ... man?

But surely self-image is a topic worthy of discussion? I mean, people die from things like anorexia nervosa. And a lot of what gives people a sense of positive identity is a feeling of being desirable. I took the intent of Sam's original question to be "don't listen to what the media tells you is attractive, I liked you for what you were!" Which is surely a sentiment which should be more prevalent? And Ally and Suzy's points were obviously made with good intentions, even if I did poke some fun at them. I understand this is a sensitive topic, but I don't see what was offensive about bringing it up. I'd think something like the "heigh and weight" thread would be worse.

Oh, I see what you mean, tha chzza. Yeah, this was an inoffensive thread compared to some of the things on the height and weight thread, for example. I know that the people who contributed to the Kate Winslet thread were all actually trying to be sensitive! But in some ways it was even more depressing than the 'height and weight' thread, because I basically think that discussing how Kate Winslet should think about her weight misses the point that probably she shouldn't be thinking about it, and neither should we, and why are we? And it's like everyone was so close to that realisation, but somehow not quite there. It's just that if I think too much about those things, personally, I'm more likely to spend time shopping and moping and talking on ILE rather than making revolutionary political films that inhabit but undermine bourgeois forms, and stuff like that. Does that explanation suffice? I definitely wasn't annoyed with what each individual said on that thread. Do you see what I mean?

But also, I have kind of revised my views anyway. Wider society goes on about Kate Winslet's weight, so as most people pointed out here, it would be sort of naive to just pretend that doesn't happen. All I need to do is to become supremely confident and everything will be ok!

You kick nads, maryann. The social struggle wouldn't be the same withoutcha :-).