I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

Paedophilia is the paraphilia of being sexually attracted strongly or even exclusively to prepubescent or early pubertal children.

Of the past 50 headlines in my ABC News RSS feed, five are obviously about sex. Four of these five are about “child sex” or “child sex abuse” and one is about prostitution.

From this, I can only conclude that the Australian media, as an entity (and bear in mind the ABC is our government-sponsored, relatively stuffy media - not the commercial pack of snarling animals that are no doubt blowing these stories out even further) is strongly attracted, perhaps almost exclusively attracted to sex with children. It rarely mentions adult sex (I daresay; adult sex is somewhat under-represented), and shows no interest whatsoever in heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality. It isn’t even into masturbation. It’s sexuality is interested, in descending order, in:

1) Sex with children

2) Sex with prostitutes

3) Forced sex with adults

Is this healthy? How does this reflect on us as a people - god knows the media only reports what we’re interested in reading or hearing (not, necessarily what the public interest would be best served by reporting), so does this mean we as a nation are more into child sex than sex with adults?

Now I know, it reflects what we are most concerned with, but it’s also sensationalism selling stories, hooking readers, so I have to ask - isn’t writing about sex enough? What’s wrong with BDSM? Or the ‘terrible’ decline in ‘fidelity’, the loss of ‘faith’ in marriage, or what the fuck we’re going to do about it? Or who we’re going to fuck about it?

And for the love of God, can we PLEASE get our terminology at least vaguely correct? Someone who had sex with a 13 year old girl is not (necessarily) a paedophile. Go and READ that wikipedia article if this is confusing for you. ‘Being sexually attracted strongly or even exclusively to prepubescent or early pubertal children’. Not ‘got it on with a young teen once’.

Yes, before we rush out and arrest that portion of the Canadian populace who have (legally) had sex with a 14 year old person, or every 15yo who’s done the same thing (legally) in Australia, or label as a Paedophile anyone who thinks 15yo girls are cute, might be an idea to get our facts straight. Or at least… have some facts to start with.

While I’m on the subject of our unbelievable ignorance, why can’t we draw a line that’s a little grey for a change? Why is it that I can legally tie up my girlfriend on her sixteenth birthday and assfuck her in front of her mother and older sister, but the day before caressing her bum through her jeans can get me thrown in jail?

And I must go on to say, what in the fuck is UP with throwing female TEACHERS in jail for fucking their teenage male students? Did anyone ASK the male students what they thought about that? Was a proper anonymous survey taken? Did anyone ask a psychologist or counsellor who deals with teenage boys about that one? Have we Just Got No Idea in this country?

Now for those who just can’t read, I’m not advocating adults having sex with children… and these people they’re locking up now for sex with early teens - if they were responsible for these children in some way, or used coercion or force of any kind, by all means, lock them up or shoot them out of a cannon or something. I’ve known at least three people who were abused as children - two sexually - and they were all pretty screwed up. There’s a mountain of evidence linking it to permanent psychological damage, depression, drug abuse, suicide and further abuse of others. It isn’t a good idea.

BUT it also isn’t cool that a young teenage couple I know (who were 19 and 14 when they began going out) were afraid of holding hands for fear the elder of the two would be locked up, or have accusations brought against them, and a stigma they could never erase. We’re getting that wrong people, the world needs more love, not less, and teenagers need it very badly indeed.

Before I sign off, one more thing. The recent flurry of “child sex” articles are about an Aboriginal (in this case referring to native black Australian) community where apparently some of the younger teenage girls have even become pregnant. SHOCK HORROR.

When I was 21 a friend of mine (who was about 19) knocked up a 14 year old girl. She gave birth to his kid nine months later. Is he in jail? Hell no (laughing out loud here) he’s white! I remember meeting several sub-16 pregnant (white) girls back when I lived in Wollongong, and I’ll be buggered if I remember police being involved even once. Another friend of mine’s 14yo sister ended up moving out with her 30+ boyfriend, again the police were not called. Now again I guess I have to say - if these fuckers they’re arresting have been doing girls they’re meant to be protecting or guiding, or used any kind of force or coercion, put them in the lion pit for sure. Don’t get up ME about not knowing - the media hasn’t said jack about it.
But if their crime is consenting sex with someone that our government says isn’t allowed to consent, where other governments would disagree, then I think we’re in the ethical grey zone, especially if the treatment for white guys is “well if the parents don’t mind it must be ok”.

In the meantime, I’m pretty sick of “child sex” headlines.

The past few months have been the worst for me since 2003.

Big stress at work combined with big stress at home combined with nowhere but work or home and compounded stress-related health problems. Things have ranged from absolutely fucked-up shit to fairly mediocre, with flashes of happy-good-times.

Work’s been a right cunt. Actually, that’s a stupid use of the word cunt. I love cunts… work has been a bad workplace with a bad boss and bad culture. My boss doesn’t mean to be bad, but he IS a terrible people manager and isn’t changing anytime soon.

It was around May where things really began to fall apart. It’s always May. Five months into the job, my 90-plan to integrate myself into the business a total shambles, no progress on any front that I could see, no improvement on the boss front, still none of my equipment live and no responsibility over a single live piece of equipment, one team member only…

Meanwhile the awful costs of St Kilda living were biting on, a mouthful even my income was choking upon, while the cold war at work and hot war at home were burning my brain making me insane with pain oh god im typing and listening to faithless again!
What the fuck are we doing out here in the cold? Why’d I leave a job in which I could grow old? The warning to us all that we need to be told; that sometimes you pay for being so bold. I just didn’t know how I could cope, halfway down the cliff with not enough rope.

But anyway, I sat down when my boss was having lunch (aha! cornered at last!) and hit him with what I really considered to be my last straw. He was insisting we document the living fuck out of the project we were doing, in the kind of detail I never want to see in documents (so detailed your mum could follow our work = too much documentation overhead people), IN ADVANCE as in, before the plan had been tested in the real world.

If you’ve been in my business for longer than three minutes, you’re familiar with the following concept, if not the exact wording: ‘In theory, there is no difference between theory and practise. In practise, there is.’ And: ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy.’ Where enemy = any other company’s influence, any piece of equipment, software, air temperature or humidity, position of the planets, presence of goat hair, or in short, any dose of reality your perfect plan chokes to death on.

My idea of good project documentation BEFORE the work is done is outlining what the IT stuff needs to do. As in, requirements. Not how its going to do it. Yes, you must plan to have all the hardware you need. You go for this as closely as you can, but you can’t plan out every detail of implementation in advance.

Anyhow, he wanted every last detail. It was driving me batshit, and it was actually destroying the morale of my one and only direct report. Worse, he seemed to want to dictate every detail of the work, and was sort of using the pre-documentation to control every detail, by reviewing our ideas and revising them for us. For me, this was failure on all fronts. I obviously hadn’t earned his trust yet, and the fact that I had warned everybody (him included) that their policy of only having me build new stuff, not managing their old crap, would result in this situation, months ago didn’t help me now. Not one bit, just made it more annoying.

For reference’s sake, I’d had a call from the recruiter who headhunted me into this position a few days before, and she signed off with “Sounds really bad - give it another few months and give me a call if you still hate it, I’ll find something else.” A bad sign for my employer.

Anyway, I told my boss “This is something I really actually care about. It’s not some minor technical detail that doesn’t matter one way or the other for the business, this is fucking shit up and it’s ripping into my morale and [my direct report]’s. It’s eating into our time, and it’s going to be a nightmare to maintain in the future. Now, I don’t mind if you HAVE all this information. I don’t mind giving you whatever you ask for - normally, I’d resent this much info being demanded from your position, but in your case your input is always good - I just want to be able to GET you your data through better means, like scripts, and present it better, like web interfaces, rather than copying bits of config files into word docs.” (which is alllll true)

Anyway, that was the turning point. He finally got it, and we earned each other’s respect from there. People above him began to notice I was getting things done despite all the shit, and began to talk seriously to me about taking over my department later in the year. We began to actually BE productive, and shortly after that I was designated project manager for the project. I now am collecting reports from three people, plus one indirectly. Nothing’s official yet, I’m just calmly compiling weekly reports for the department. Yes, I’m playing politics. And it’s working.

Meanwhile, the home front’s been better, a lot better. Now my crazy girlfriend’s away for two weeks, and two days into it I miss her a lot, and I’m noticing all the little things she does which made my life easier all that time.

However, throughout the hard time, what got me through was this.

No matter how hard things got, I never sat down and blamed everyone else for how shit it was and gave up. I always looked to see what *I* could do about it, be it trying to fix my current job, or getting another one. And that, I believe is why I suffered very little from depression during this period.

From my experience of it, depression is caused when you are repeatedly faced with a problem you can do nothing about. Or rather, you think you can do nothing about. So the cure is simply to always think about your options, your alternatives, and seriously consider them. And I sure as fuck don’t mean suicide - I mean your alternatives to whatever shitty situation you’re in. How you can modify it, or remove it. You always have options, what are they?