Has anyone else noticed comments on their user page randomly disappearing? I have noticed this twice now, and both times they were comments on topics that seem to get DA’s panties in a good ole frothy twist. I can’t remember what the first one was, but the second was about inseminating Daniel Radcliffe. The explicit comments have disappeared, but non-explicit comments in the same thread have remained, leaving random isolated comments that make no sense. Is DA filtering comments and opinion now, in addition to artwork submissions? Sick and fucked up and downright evil, anyone?

On a totally unrelated note, Anthony Mundine is a Super Massive Black Hole. Ooh, ooh, racial slur! Clearly I am deriding him because he is a successful “athlete” (coming up, Anthony Mundine fights a 62 year old homeless guy with MS! Go “the man”!), and Aborigines aren’t allowed to do that, so yeah, take that Cathy Freeman, Nova Perris Kneebone, Benn Harradine, and a whole page of Aboriginal athletes who have represented Australia at the Olympic Games that I just found through Google, you should thank Mundine for belittling your achievements and behaving as though being an arrogant obnoxious arsehole is an act of indigenous pride! ‘Cause that’ll help EVERYONE involved! Woo! His other wonderful acts of Australian Aboriginal pride include declaring himself a Muslim, and doing his best to be an African American “rap artist”. Yay pride!

What else was I going to bemoan and complain about? Oh yeah, “sexting”. Really, get the fuck over it. Thankfully we are not like you crazy fuckers in America. That… law dude, I saw on the telly, claiming the best thing to do was charge 14 year olds with disseminating “child porn” for sending topless pictures of themselves to their boyfriends (thus putting them on a “Sex Offenders” register for life), and then as “evidence” of this he produces a picture taken by some American girls at a sleepover, where two girls are wearing singlets/training bras, lower bodies covered by blankets, one is talking on the phone, the other is making a V sign with her fingers. He claims this is “ provocative” posing, and warrants charges of “disseminating child porn”. Doesn’t this say much, much more about what a FUCKED UP WORLD this man clearly lives in, as opposed to what young people are up to? I saw another thing about it on one of those nauseating morning television programmes today (I need background noise when I draw, okay?), where a very sensible, intelligent, and knowledgeable sociology lecturer was talking about it (the only thing that fucked it up was she was doing that thing that the British deride us for, that Neighbours thing where the end of every sentence is an up note, so it sounds like she was asking a series of stupid questions), and she pointed out that every generation has been sexually permissive in a way that horrified the previous generation, all the way back to fucking Aristotle and before. The only thing that’s different now is the technology. And by all means, teach your kids that when they send an image out into the internetty ether, it is there FOREVER. That may well remove the desire to do it for many of them. But, as you may have noticed, many, many people here on DA happily post nude and often quite explicit images of themselves on the internet on a daily basis. Yes, most of them aren’t underage, but I don’t think the differences are that drastic. Yes, kids might regret it if the images are forwarded to dozens and hundreds of people, but it’s hardly going to “ruin” their lives the way the media is telling us all it will (and obviously I don’t mean “ruin” in the melodramatic 14 year old sense of the word). Sure it’s a stupid thing to do, and you’ll probably regret it, but again, it’s not some morally corrupt evil satan possessed boogey man that everyone everywhere should shit their pants repeatedly over, like the fucking media is telling us it is. Kids do dumb things, they get embarrassed, they live and learn. Oh wait, there’s that other argument, there are 900 million paedophiles out there just gagging for a blurry mobile phone image of budding teenage booby, and when they get it it’ll set of a murder and rape crime spree that will be all that teenager’s fault! I don’t deny that people like that exist out there, but fucked up people can get their rocks off from commercials, television programmes, there was that thing about how paedos with a foot fetish should watch The Sound of Music because there’s a scene in that which would give them a woody, should we ban The Sound of Music?

Actually, I think it’s nice so many young people are so comfortable with their bodies, I’m certainly fucking not. Maybe their parents could teach them a bit more about appropriate and inappropriate situations for doing shit like that (because pretending they just don’t arise is working SO well!), but I don’t thing “a dirty old man might get a jolly!” is a valid reason for putting an underage kid on a fucking sex offender register. Morons.

What else was there? Oh yeah, the artist’s resale commission thing. At work yesterday I was reading an email from NAVA (National Association of the Visual Arts) about Peter fucking Garret’s wank at the senate about the resale royalty thing… and I actually totally disagree with it. As an artist, it sounds like a brilliant thing. As someone who works in a commercial art gallery, NO! (so much more paperwork to do!) But I was talking to my boss a while ago about it, and he was the head of the Australian Commercial Galleries Association for five years, and he said he visited the body that does the same basic thing in France, and that 75% of the funds gathered through the resale royalties scheme there went to places like the Picasso, Miro and Chagall estates. People with millions, and who sell works for millions. It’s great for them, but for emerging artists like me, the more caveats and conditions you put on a sale, the less fucking likely it’s going to happen. Who does it really help? It helps soothe Australia’s Aboriginal guilt is what it does.

Lastly, baby mutilation.

Saw a story on one of the stupid current affairs programmes on circumcision… and it really pissed me off, as you may have guessed… I dunno, I have heard a lot of this stuff before, ”new research” suggests circumcision reduces risk of stds, hpv, penile cancer and HIV… but you know what, so does wearing a fucking condom (well, except for the cancer one, more on that in a bit). And another one I heard, men in Africa who are circumcised blah blah blah, its fucking AFRICA, they refuse to wear condoms and have questionable personal hygiene to begin with!

The only reason this shit started was when people realised that rather than sacrificing their children to god, they could just cut off a little bit of the boys and that would make god happy.

Apparently, 25 years ago when I was circumcised, they didn’t even use the anaesthetic crème they use nowadays, because they believed newborns did not feel pain. Many people believe the same thing about fish. Value judgement anyone?

And since when is “you might get cancer” a valid reason for chopping bits of you off? By this logic, every girl who enters puberty should get her breasts cut off, because she might get cancer in them one day. Worried about penile cancer? Why not just cut the whole cock off at birth. Won't get any cancer in it then! But wait, don’t most people get some sort of cancer at some point in their lives? So let’s kill all babies at birth. It all makes sense by circumcision logic. You might have problems with your teeth later in life? Let’s pull them all out now. Joint problems when you get older? Let’s replace them all with steel when you’re six.

Then there’s also that well publicised case of the baby boy who had his cock fucking BURNT OFF during a circumcision (I assume botched cauterising after the procedure). Again, unspeakable genital mutilation when a child is a few hours old? WHY?!

Finally, this “it happens when they’re young, they’ll never know, they’ll get over it”. I’m here to tell you they fucking don’t. I am bisexual, all the males I have slept with bar one have had their foreskins. Every woman I have slept with has had all their pink bits intact. As if I didn’t have enough issues with my personal appearance and masculinity to begin with, I feel like my dick has been mutilated and part of my masculinity has been taken away, all without my consent or knowledge. And for NO VALID REASON. Fuck, surely teaching your fucking kids to bathe, to use contraception, and even to self-check for anomalies, is preferable to taking a fucking scalpel to their genitals shortly after birth. Fucking barbaric shit.