lifestyle

Open Post: what's on your mind?

Mia met with MM's political reporter Lauren Dubois in the office.

Step right up, it’s Open Post time where absolutely everything is on the table for discussion. It’s like improv class, just see where the moment takes you. Ask a question, flick through the fairly awesome behind the scenes gallery, laugh at some odds and ends or add your own comment in the very Mamamia choose your own adventure. But first, some interesting things this week:

Look ma, I was on television!

Odd socks, a hole in one shoe and I forgot to do my hair. That’s how I do television, which will definitely not surprise anyone who knows me well. I have a terrible habit of not standing on ceremony. Sometimes I even go so far the other way I don’t even stand near it. As a former newspaper journo, my dress sense is usually ‘shabby’ at best.

The show: Mornings on Channel Nine. The mission? To talk on a man panel, the Boy’s Club.

Hold your laughter. I need you to because my friends didn’t. Look, I might not be your regular blokey-bloke but I have manpinions (the plural, my friend Angela told me is ‘menpinion’) and here I am, finally being asked to share them. An injustice in the world has been set right.

The fairly spectacular co-host David Campbell actually set the ball in motion and I went in for a kind of screen-test a little over a month ago to sit on the set and try and say witty, intelligent things which is almost physically impossible when you’re frozen in terror like a big ice block that is terrified.

And then I went on TV and you can see it here but only if you promise not to be mean which will be hard after you see my performance:

Regulating female bodies? Your turn guys.

This is several shades of awesome. Over in yonder America (where talk about contraception and women’s reproductive health is more popular than the tanking economy and the war in Afghanistan), one lawmaker is a bit over it. Why the obsession with ovaries and the uterus? So Ohio State Senator Nina Turner decided to turn the tables by introducing a bill that would require:

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“…men to visit a sex therapist, undergo a cardiac stress test, and get their sexual partner to sign a notarized affidavit confirming impotency in order to get a prescription for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs and … also require men who take the drugs to be continually ‘tested for heart problems, receive counseling about possible side effects and receive information about “pursuing celibacy as a viable lifestyle choice.'”

“I certainly want to stand up for men’s health and take this seriously and legislate it the same way mostly men say they want to legislate a woman’s womb,” Turner said. Of course the law will never get up but it’s a nice up yours to the friendly folk right across the country who keep passing bills that require women seeking abortions to have detailed trans-vaginal ultrasounds and descriptions of the foetus read out to them before they make their decision.

Oh, and it’s my 25th birthday tomorrow too

But Lucy stole my thunder on that last week so I’ll just go and have my quarter-life crisis in peace and start planning my six-month long, soul-searching hibernation in a Peruvian cave on my own.

Behind the scenes

Take a look behind Mamamia in this week’s gallery:

But enough about us, over to you. What’s on your mind?

 

 

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