Vicious Cycle

Yet again you retreat
Into your black hole:
Poor me
Retributions
Lies.
Standing before your wall of contempt,
I stare
Blank, bemused.
What am I to do?
Your desert is my ocean,
My black is your white.
My inner scream shatters the glass clouds
And tears a hole in the black sky.
I am lost to you,
Cut adrift on my ocean
While you blind yourself
Kicking sand in your eyes.

Kathryn Lee
27/04/08

I'm writing again!

It's happening! Once again the juices are flowing and the pen is back in contact with it's long lost love, the page. Once the rough drafts of what has emerged have gone through a few evolutions, I will test them out here. I don't know if anyone actually reads this blog, if you do and you care to comment, please do.

The last taboo?

A couple of years ago, over a couple of glasses of wine, a friend of mine suggested that the last taboo frontier to be smashed would be the incest taboo. Soon enough, she reckoned, there would be people coming out of the woodwork hoping to garner acceptance, both moral and legal, for their incestuous relationships.

Bah, I dismissed. I doubt that will ever happen.

Well I stand corrected. Having seen the section on 60 Minutes tonight called Forbidden Love about the father and daughter in Australia and the half brother and half sister in Scotland - both couples in sexual relationships - I haven't been able to stop thinking about this.

Why is incest a taboo, after all? To protect the gene pool? To prevent child sexual abuse? Because to those of us who grew up with our siblings and parents it is completely unthinkable (although Freud would tell you a different story) and gross? Then there's the legal issue... is the law against incest really protecting anyone in the cases of these people who have met as consenting adults and started a consenting, loving relationship? What function does the law serve here? To legislate against what most people find abhorrent? From what I could tell, the legal position was "Fine, carry on having a relationship, just don't have sex." Which I find odd on two levels: a) how would anyone know? b) so basically it's the sexual connection that is the issue.

Interesting topic. Something that I will be pondering for a few days...

Journalistic relevance?

I was watching the news this evening on Channel One, when the item about the murder of Emma Agnew came on. The ex-girlfriend of the guy accused of raping and murdering Emma was in the witness stand giving her testimony and this had created quite an interest. Understandably. What I just couldn't find understandable, however, was that the first thing the reporting journalist said about her was:

"She was slim, attractive and well-dressed..."

What on earth does that have to do with anything? If she had shown up and been over-weight, ugly and in ripped jeans, would it have taken anything away from her testimony or her credibility? Or was it a warning? "See! Nice girls can get mixed up with murderers too!"

God knows. I just found it totally irrelevant and worthy of some comment.