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Keywords: Shapes

  • MEDIA

    Vagina dialogue

    • Moira Rayner
    • 25 July 2012
    20 Comments

    Johnson & Johnson's 'Carefree' ads talked unblushingly of women's vaginas, inter-period discharge and daily smells. According to some, we shouldn't talk about such things, not on television. Until recently commercial products for absorbing menstrual blood didn't exist, with dreadful effect on women's participation in community and public life.

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  • MEDIA

    The feminist diet

    • Ellena Savage
    • 08 June 2012
    3 Comments

    Squeezing my own body fat in front of the mirror is a horrible, but familiar experience. Reflecting on the self-loathing involved makes me red with rage and embarrassment. I should be above that. Today's women are united more by their collective disgust of their bodies than they are by any other factor.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Erasure of an Aboriginal temple

    • Patti Miller
    • 03 May 2012
    21 Comments

    For thousands of years there was a temple on the banks of the Macquarie. A long avenue of trees carved with serpents, lightning, meteors and hieroglyphs led to a walled space where a giant human figure made of earth reclined. It was as important as the Acropolis or the temple of Horus. But it no longer exists. 

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  • RELIGION

    Beyond Catholic corporate spin

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 19 January 2012
    8 Comments

    The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Great Britain last year prompted an interesting experiment. The Church asked for lay volunteers to deal with media enquiries. At first glance this could be construed as an exercise in corporate spin with a focus on persuasion and not on truth.

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  • EDUCATION

    The best teacher I ever knew

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 07 December 2011
    13 Comments

    Top classes or remedial ones, nerds or footballers, were all the same to Albert: he was first a teacher of boys and then a teacher of maths. One of Sydney's most prestigious schools offered him a position which he turned down due to a disability that would remain with him for the rest of his life.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Lessons from Bluescope's human crisis

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 August 2011
    11 Comments

    Respect for the people whose lives will be affected by the Bluescope crisis should lead us to ask wider questions about the society their children will inherit. The ways in which Australia shapes its economy creates a society in which human beings may flourish or be diminished.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No place to talk about death

    • Warrick Wynne
    • 26 July 2011
    2 Comments

    The light is falling away with the tide, but the dark shapes are birds going somewhere. the bubbles in the sand small breaths rising into the air ...

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  • MEDIA

    Sex education in Pornland

    • Lyn Bender
    • 27 May 2011
    15 Comments

    British sociologist Gail Dines argues that porn shapes young people's expectations of how sex should be, at the cost of healthy intimacy. Positive erotic portrayals can inspire and guide us by enhancing our perceptions and extending our narrow world view. Dines argues that the hardcore porn industry promotes a damaging view of sex that shapes young men's (and women's) fantasies and expectations of how sex should be, at the cost of healthy intimacy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stories from the Struggletown Library

    • John Falzon
    • 25 May 2011
    10 Comments

    There was a liberal use of corporal punishment in my school. We were seen as a loutish bunch of lads who needed a firm hand. It did nothing to help my education. You don't create a smart and confident Australia by taking to people with a stick.

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  • MEDIA

    Sex scandals and SNAG soldiers

    • Lyn Bender
    • 21 April 2011
    5 Comments

    Listening to the Defence Force top brass talk about the 'female' cadet scandal is like taking a trip back to the 1940s. The stoic military 'warrior culture' can be tempered by encouraging men to develop appropriate self-disclosure and empathy against the dehumanising effects of training.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Resisting the duty to die

    • John Kleinsman
    • 21 September 2010
    11 Comments

    The debate about euthanasia arises only in certain societies that see the world as belonging to those who are independent, strong and productive. In a society in which the sick, dying, disabled and elderly are undervalued, the 'right' to die will all too quickly become a 'duty' to die.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Defying the ebook revolution

    • Brian Doyle
    • 28 July 2010
    5 Comments

    Went to return a book the other day and it refused to go in the BOOKS ONLY slot. I tried again, thinking perhaps I had suddenly aged beyond belief and could not muster the muscle to cram it through the wall, but no, it was the book itself, adamant, recalcitrant, bristling and ruffling indignantly, that would not allow itself to be returned.

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