Complain

I was in a foul mood after cycling home from uni one day. Walking into the family room, the first unfortunate person to come into contact with me was my dad. “The traffic out there is ridiculous!” I raged. “It took me at least ten minutes to cross each major road. Cycling in peak hour sucks!”

Dad, a keen cycler himself, leapt to the rescue. “You know, you could always go to the nearest set of traffic lights and wait there, it’d probably be quicker. Actually, there’s probably a better route you could take. Let’s get out the Melways, I’ll show you the way I ride”.

I knew dad was trying to help – he was showing me he cared about my problem. But instead of being grateful for the advice, I just got angrier. “I’ve already worked out a way to get to uni! The traffic is just impossible!”

It’s not that I didn’t need a solution to my problem, and I did end up taking some quieter back streets to avoid those main roads. At that moment though, my main issue wasn’t actually the traffic, it was feeling frustrated. I didn’t want an answer, I just wanted to complain.

There’s a lot that gets said about fundamental differences between men and women. People say that men are more logical, women are more emotional, and usually I find this a sweeping generalisation that’s rarely fair.

In the case of complaining though, I have to admit that I’ve found a pattern. If I told my mum or sisters about how annoying it was to get home that day, I doubt they would’ve presented me with something different to try. Instead, they probably would’ve said, “that sucks. I know what you mean though, the traffic was really slow on my way home too.”

That’s why I find this ad so amusing –the ‘perfect’ man says, “when there are no women to listen to, I practice my listening face”. It pokes fun directly at this divide between men wanting to fix things and women wanting to understand.

Complaining, in moderation, is a way that people put their problems into words, vent their frustrations and – most importantly – seek empathy. No matter what problems we face, the worst part about them is feeling alone.

If you’ve ever found it more comforting to confide in someone facing the same challenge as you are, you probably know what it is to feel better through feeling understood.

Once when I was having trouble getting through to a friend, I talked to someone for an hour about different approaches, tactics to try, ways to manage my stress levels and what was going wrong with the current situation. After the conversation, I reflected that the best and most helpful thing she had said was, “that must be really hard for you”.

It’s great to get advice from someone who cares about you, and problems do need to be fixed in the end. But sometimes, what you really need is just to be heard.

White Ribbon Day

When it’s dark, I walk down the middle of the road rather than the footpath. It’s something that I’ve done for years, and only recently a male friend of mine who was walking with me asked why. “So I can hear a rapist running towards me,” I replied. He had a bit of a giggle at how dramatic I was being, but I was dead serious.

In a piece by Australian Football League CEO Andrew Demetriou, he remembers an exercise he did at the AFL that highlighted men’s ignorance of violence against women.

A group of men were asked what they did on a daily basis to counter violence and sexual harassment against themselves. He suspected that the answer for most men is nothing – they do nothing, because it rarely if ever happens to them.

But, Demetriou said, ask women what they do and you’ll get a very different response. In fact you’ll get a range of responses because they have to do a range of things. They have to be careful about the way they dress. They have to think about where they walk and what time they go out. They have to think about whether they drive or catch public transport. They even have to think about what they say.

And I do. I think about those things every single day. I’m 22 years old and my parents still pick me up from the train station after dark because they can’t stand the thought of me walking home alone.

Mercifully, I’ve never been a victim of rape. I have been honked at in the street, been yelled at by strangers to “show us your tits”, had a man steal my cardigan and take it into the toilet with him, seen a man expose his penis to me in a pub without my consent, been called a slut and had my buttocks and breasts groped in public places. And I consider myself to be extremely lucky that’s the worst I’ve had to put up with.

One of the best campaigns that I’ve seen highlighting violence against women runs along the lines of: “One in every four women will be sexually abused in her life. Will it be your mother, your sister, your wife or your daughter?”
Today is White Ribbon Day. If you’ve been looking for a good cause to chuck some money at, you can do it here.  But more importantly, think about it yourself.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop walking down the middle of the street at night, because violence against women isn’t only the incidence of brutal beatings or rape.  It’s in our advertisements showing women stripped, bound and humiliated. It’s in our sexist jokes, our high-fiving of boys who sleep around and branding of girls who do it as whores, news reports showing women as victims instead of experts and rating women’s body parts out of 10.

Violence against women is in our culture and our attitude and that’s what has to change.

Typeface

Fonts are amazing, aren’t they? We’re exposed to so much text through all our various media consumption that the font someone uses is like their tone of voice – it sets the mood for their message.

Since I learned basic word processing, I’ve been fascinated by fonts. I used to love the way my friends used all kinds of crazy colours and styles on MSN (but not anymore, we’re grown-ups now), and I still amuse myself while writing essays by typing them in the most outrageous lettering I can find. In fact, I pay so much attention to typeface that I become rather outraged when I see a business that has used a font from Microsoft Word as their business logo/signage. I shake my head at trendy cafes with Papyrus on their menus and beauty salons using Lucida Handwriting. I’m even plotting to turn my own handwriting into a usable font (with some help from my computer-literate friends, of course).

Which is why I was so offended by the blatant misrepresentation in my latest reading for uni; an article that was all about ‘giving young people a voice’ by including their perspective on the education system. All fair and good, until I noticed that while the researchers’ part is written in the very serious Times New Roman, any comment from students appears in Comic Sans.

Anyone vaguely interested in typeface would immediately associate Comic Sans with text that is juvenile, insincere or otherwise associated with children, given its cultural background as a standard font in comic books. It is never used by professional graphic designers or marketers, and is often ridiculed on the Internet.

The whole effect struck me as an incredibly patronising way to ‘give young people a voice’, and at the very least the practice of putting students’ comments in a different font is making them the ‘other’, detracting from anything they might actually be saying.

I know it might sound pedantic – but just as your tone is crucial when you talk to someone, font matters.