Newly bald Britney Spears has checked herself back into rehab after a weekend of excessive partying and unsavoury exhibitionism, just another young woman self-destructing in front of our eyes.

There has been no sign of the 25-year-old singer’s two young sons amid the crotch-flashing, mascara-smeared, vomit-specked nightclubbing that preceded her impulsive head-shave at a Los Angeles salon – an act psychologists have interpreted as an existential cry for help.

But Spears’s meltdown is more than just her personal tragedy. Sexualised almost since her days as a Disney child star, she is the canary in the coalmine of troubled young womanhood.

As other celebrity car crashes – Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith – pile up, it is clear something is terribly wrong with the fairer sex.

Spears inhabits the same space, her increasingly desperate exhibitionism, non-stop inebriation and casual couplings with numerous forgettable men chronicled in lascivious detail by gossip websites and magazines. We have so normalised self-destructive slutty behaviour that Spears’s antics were considered the natural reaction of a young woman letting down her hair after a marriage breakdown.

Until it all got too much. One witness to the shearing scene claimed Spears said she was shaving her hair off because she was “sick of people touching her”. One psychologist said the act was an attempt to repel male attention.

In a world saturated with pornography, when women treat themselves like sluts, why would men treat them any differently? Mutual respect between the sexes, romance and a legacy of chivalry by men entranced by the feminine mystique have been trashed in the name of female equality and sexual liberation.

Now Valentine’s Day, once a time for love hearts, flowers and romantic cards, has been hijacked by radical feminists in the United States as V-Day – either a day to celebrate vaginas or to raise awareness of violence against women.

And judging by Cleo magazine, a one-night stand is almost elaborate courtship. Next month’s Cleo catalogues a new sex trend: “The curiosity shag: dying to know what he’s like in bed? This could be the way to find out. No strings attached.” But the problem is, with women, there invariably are emotional strings attached to sexual encounters.

Evolutionary psychology is providing confirmation of what most people instinctively know – men are hard-wired to want more sex than women, more casual sex, more often, and with more partners, because there is an evolutionary advantage to spreading their sperm far and wide and fathering lots of children.

Women, who need nine months to produce a child, have no such biological imperative, goes the theory. Instead they are hard-wired to form emotional attachments with a male who will protect them and their children.

Launching straight into sex before even the first date was a hallmark of the sexual revolution, a way women could emulate men and jettison the emotional baggage of romantic love that had supposedly held them back for generations.

But no matter how hard they try to live up to the old feminist ideal of “zipless f—s”, invariably women get hurt.
Take the celebrated “mile high club” scandal on Qantas. A flight attendant, Lisa Robertson, has told how she initiated sex with the actor Ralph Fiennes on a flight from Darwin to Mumbai, leading him into a toilet cubicle for a quickie.

“I’m going to have to kick you out now,” Fiennes said suavely after a later rendezvous in his hotel room, according to the account of events she sold to the Daily Mail newspaper. “See you on the next Qantas flight.” But for a woman who seems to embody the liberated female’s attitude to casual sex, Robertson seemed overly concerned with feelings.

She said she had hoped the relationship would continue and was “hurt and disappointed” that Fiennes wouldn’t support her when she was sacked. To Robertson “the experience was a lot more than just about sex”. But men are wired differently. No amount of brainwashing and SNAG-ification will change that.

A study released this week by the American Psychological Association warned of the psychological harm being done to women by the increasing sexualisation of society.

“Sexualisation of girls is a broad and increasing problem,” said the study, and it could cause psychological and physical harm to young women and girls as young as four. Imagery of “sexed-up” little girls and women posing as adolescents could lead to depression, eating disorders and poor academic performance.

If you ever needed proof that women were the losers in the sexual revolution here it is. It is time women seized back their inner prude.

Forgive me for being cynical, but I really don’t give a hoot about whether Corby’s Mother think’s her daughters friend is lying or not. What I care about is whether Global Warming is a reality or not. Whether Rudd is a good leader or not. Whether the US is going to invade Iran or not. And so should the rest of this country.

Yet Two million Australians tuned into that rubbish this week. IF we want to know where political, social and moral complacency comes from, look no further.  Whatever you do for the rest of this year, I urge you to boycott Today Tonight and A Current Affair….

Now to business. Political Backflipping receives an awful lot of condemnation from the media. In some cases I can understand why, but not when it serves no purpose. And in certain cases, the opposition party tends to jump on it and use it to deflect public discussion on more pressing matters.

I’ve noticed this just recently with the alienation of Peter Garrett’s sentiments towards US bases in Australia. Whilst I have little opinion towards the issue itself, I do see however how his change of heart has sparked the media frenzy.

(Click here for the story) 

Now I don’t know if his change of heart is right or wrong, or whether it was subjection the ALP party politics or not, the thing that this story sparks to me is how the media loves to come down hard on political backflipping. It also shows me how personal criticisms often deflect policy debate. And this happens on both sides of politics and at all levels….

It is also interesting as you can apply modern events to the ideas that are presented.

I would be interesting to see what the Aus LDS read think about it.

Cheers

Stewart

Good luck everyone!

I’m all for national security. In these perilious times where I could be seriously hurt by a flying banana at the Cricket when the Mexican wave storms by, or when someone decides to plant a grade 2 nuclear weapon in my napsack at the train station, I think it’s in our best interest to upgrade the laws. No sarcasm intended. But something that I am aware of is identity theft. It is a problem I agree. But is a national identity card taking it to the extreme?

Bronwyn Bishop appears to think so. I find her comments that the ‘Nazi’s would have used this to round up the Jews’ particularly interesting. But to a degree, she has a point. There is two sides to this story. One is Fraud prevention and control, the other national security. I’m all for the first, but not so much the latter. Now we’ve been assurred that this is only to minimise risk and produce a more mainstream whole of government approach to running human services. But it also provides a level of check not previously afforded to the state.  This is something that I am not so crash hot on. In a day and age where we are overregulated in this country, I fear that more regulation will bring inevitable discontent or complete apathy. Prominent thinker Max Weber thought that the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy would turn everyone into robots. I also heard some UK journalists who were out here on the ashes tour suggest that Australia is one of the most overregulated countries on the planet. Now that may be a bit of an overstatement, but it does ring some truth to me. We are regulated enough in everything we do. Perhaps a National ID card is only opening the door way for more regulation and more checking on the things we engage in. Thoughts?

In the past weeks education has become a political platform for our pollies. Kevin Rudd has proclaimed possibilities of a ‘revolution’ in educational reform should his ascendancy land him in the Prime Ministership at the end of the year. But this is nothing new. Over recent years, and particularly the past 12 months there has been heavy focus on educational reform and specifically, the creation of a national syllabus. It’s probably hard to argue against this. Indeed, logic almost demands that Australian students should be taught the same things to the same level across the nation. And in some subjects, such as chemistry and physics, states share around a 90% overlap in course content; a commendable consistency. Yet subjects such as history, English and other humanity-oriented subjects often share less than 40% in common. Clearly Julie Bishop is intent on remedying this. However, she is meeting stiff opposition from the states. 

I was particularly interested to read her comments in the Australian on Friday Feb. 2, 2007. The first comment that struck me was this:

“The quality of our teachers is critical. After parents, teachers are the most important determinant in educational outcomes for school students. Our teachers are a precious national resource. They should be respected and rewarded for their significant role in educating our children.”

To that comment I add my applause. However, Ms Bishop then went on to suggest,

 “But like other professionals they deserve career incentives. That is why I am developing options for greater consistency in professional development for teachers as well as calling on the states to provide higher salaries, with an element of performance or merit-based pay and greater workplace flexibility. For example, we should be rewarding teachers who work in our most disadvantaged schools and achieve outstanding results, or specialist teachers such as in science or maths.”

And how, Ms Bishop, do we measure the performance of teachers in order to best incentivise them? One would imagine it would be based on the outcomes of the students. And student outcomes are measured in one way only. Grades.  You see, grades are a tangible outcome, whereas learning is not. We can’t measure learning except insofar as test performance indicates it has occurred. 

This slippery slope leads to some severe possibilities. Firstly, if my pay were based on a student performing well from a grade point of view, you can be assured I would set a test I know that they can complete. They’ll all get A’s, I’ll get my pay, and the students’ education is dumbed down further. Their actual learning is undermined. Or try this. We introduce standardised testing so all students must be able to perform to an agreed upon standard. Indeed, purely because they’re standardised, these tests are widely regarded as objective instruments for assessing children’s academic performance.  But there is considerable reason to believe that standardised tests are a poor measure of intellectual proficiency. They are, however, excellent indicators of two things. The first is affluence. Up to 90 percent of the difference in scores among schools, communities, or even states can be accounted for, statistically, without knowing anything about what happened in the classroom. All you need are some fact about the average income and education levels of the students’ parents. The second phenomenon that standardised tests measure is how skillful a group of students is at taking such tests – and, increasingly, how much class time has been given over to preparing them to do just that. 

There is specific research that finds a statistically significant positive relationship between a shallow or superficial approach to learning, on the one hand, and high scores on various standardised tests, on the other. I could go on and provide more reasons for my opposition to standardised testing, but ultimately that’s not the point of this post.  

I simply posit the following:  Firstly, a national curriculum is very much in the interests of our children, particularly with the claims that education is the driver of our nations’ economic prosperity.  

Secondly, providing merit pay, or incentive systems, to teachers (or for that matter any profession) is simply the worst way to obtain quality results. It’s a great quick-fix, but for genuine positive outcomes and intrinsically motivated staff, it is a powerful disincentive to do things the right way. Your thoughts?