#also they never ask cate's experience with her colleagues

[gena-rowlands]

another challenge! interviewers maybe try showing a crumb of interest in the actors you're interviewing rather than simply asking them about their more famous colleagues!

[postguiltypleasures]

Saying goodby to Shrill

I have been following the writing of Lindy West since her Jezebel days. I congratulated her on Twitter when she got a book deal (before she quit Twitter). I read the book Shrill with a bookclub and was one for the most enthusiastic about it.

When the first season of the television series Shrill, arrived on Hulu in mid-2019, Jezebel gave the first reason a good review. Writer Cate Young praises it’s depiction of living in a fat-phobic world.

The brilliance of the show is that Annie is still on her journey of self-acceptance. She isn’t a magical fat girl who is “body positive” and never feels badly about herself. She is mired in messaging that tells her she is less than, precisely because her body is more than, and she has internalized these damaging ideas just like everyone else. When we meet her, Annie is all but apologizing for her own existence.

In anticipation of the second season, Hazel Cills did a post calling it “The Only Good Show About Blogging”.

The first reviews were positive, but it never really hit the zeitgeist. An example of a review that might get at why this happened was Emily Nussbaum’s in The New Yorker where she says that she almost didn’t review it because it is otherwise too close in spirit too a lot of other shows. (Interestingly the list she provides all have wrapped up earlier. Also she defies it as set in Seatle, where the real Lindy West is from, but the second season repeatedly states that it is based in Portland, OR. )

The announcement that the third season would be it’s last was disappointing. It might not have caught fire in popularity but it was well received and liked. An interview with Aidy Bryant in The Washington Post written by Geoff Edgers mentions that they planned to do a fourth season. The interview also gets into some interesting stories about how they worked things out so Bryant would be comfortable with the sex scenes and that one doctor’s interaction was based on Bryant, not West’s, experience. It also includes Lorne Michaels reflecting on how different Bryant’s treatment of her weight to some of her Saturday Night Live predecessors.

The first review of the final season was from The AV Club written by Megan Kirby and it was discouraging. Not only did it find Annie’s journey this season mostly selfish and un-engaging, it indicated that it doesn’t seem like the third season was planned to be a final one and it ends in a way that asks that it get picked up by another service. At The Mary Sue, Samantha Puc wrote a slightly better review, though it also wasn’t entirely happy with some choices, especially in ways they felt regressed the characters. Allison Keene at Paste Magazine also wrote a mostly positive review though it does criticize an episode with flashbacks for not giving new insight into Annie and her best friend/roommate Fran, played by Lolly Adefope. (Coincidentally a scene from those flashbacks was used by Savannah Salazar at Vulture in a joint interview with Bryant and Adefope) Over at Vulture, Jen Chaney was more sympathetic to the decisions to highlight the less appealing of Annie. Thee article also speculates about why they show might not have built the audience it need. It’s interesting to me that one of the most positive reviews also says that it didn’t need a more finished finale. I agree with that something pat would feel wrong, but based on reading the book, I was sort of expecting to see some life changing events fictionalized for the series and it doesn’t feel right without them. However, reading the interview with Bryant and Adefope has made me feel slightly better about the end.

Lindy West appeared on the podcast Hysteria the day before the final season dropped. They did not discuss the circumstances about the show ending, but they did discuss things they like about the show. There was a lot about enjoying the scenes at the Thorne, the alt-weekly for which Annie works. (Hysteria host Erin Ryan also wrote for Jezebel around the time as West and she does bring up the impact of some of West’s articles there.)

While watching the second season I felt like a bad fan for liking these scenes the best. They definitely are the ones that make me laugh out loud the most, but they also feel the least real, and not just because there aren’t any threats to the paper’s continued existence until the third season. The characters are closest to caricatures there, weird for the sake for the sake of it. Generally they come off as almost invulnerable like they mostly exist to highlight Annie’s insecurities. Situations with Fran, Annie’s parents (who are sadly, barely in the final season) and the men Annie dates all feel more real and uncomfortable.

Bryant also gave an interview to Gwen Ihnat at The AV Club. (Ihnat seemed to like the season a lot more than her colleague Kirby.) There is a lot of talk about her role as a writer and producer including getting to work with people she’s worked with before. There is some talk about filming during COVID (Annie’s parents decreased time was due to the actors discomfort with COVID filming). There is also a little more about her SNL work, including having really great collaboration experiences.

After the season came out West and Bryant did an interview with Esquire. It’s good and while it doesn’t address the reviews that included above they do discuss their goals for some of the most criticized plots, like the Annie writes about the white separatist ranchers. (I think it was a little underbred, but I was less angry than the reviews led me to think I would be.) They also get into what a fourth season might have been like, though their words are a little more fanciful than the show they made. I wish the best for both of them.

[cloudfather]

Marijuana Conspiracy

SHOULD anyone still believe that the use of marijuana is spreading because of the Mafia conspiracy or a Communist plot to sap the will of our youth, let me tell of a 40‐year‐old who tried it for the first time this summer. He is a major figure in the advertising world; but despite that fact, he seldom drinks liquor and never smokes cigarettes.

What led him to pot? His 14‐year‐old daughter gave him three miserably rolled joints for a Father’s Day present. He smoked only one of them in my presence and had to be taught by the others in his room how to inhale. The thing burned like a small bonfire (no one had told him to lick the cigarette before lighting it), making little explosions (un cleaned marijuana contains seeds that sometimes go “pop” when fire hits them) as the gentleman struggled to “swallow” the smoke. He nearly choked. I doubt that he’ll ever go near it again.

But he has now become part of the most rapidly growing estimated statistic officially issued by the United States Government. Last October, a Na tional Institute of Mental Health pamphlet made the “conservative estimate” that about 5 million juveniles and adults had used marijuana at least once. Five months later, in March, another N.I.M.H. pamphlet said that “more than 8 million people have used the drug.” Then, a month later, the N.I.M.H. reported to Congress that the number “conservatively was between 8 million and 12 mil lion.” In June, Dr. Stanley F. Yolles, then director of N.LM.H., used the figure 20 million. A standard projection curve suggests that by now one could easily find someone at N.I.M.H. willing to go for 25 or even 30.

OBVIOUSLY, the N.I.M.H. figures rely on some wild guesswork, but no one at all awake through out the last decade can doubt the direction in which they point. We Americans are using a lot more marijuana than we used to, and we will be using a lot more than that. It is now the very rare college student who has never tried the drug.

In New York and the outlying areas where day time New Yorkers go to sleep, high‐school students complain that they must either smoke or learn to enjoy solitude. A ninth‐grader in Scarsdale High School estimates that 50 per cent of her friends have tried marijuana and says that not infre quently it is smoked in the school (“like during fire drill, when we’re jammed into the vestibule between the cafeteria and the outside door”). She knows of seventh‐graders in Scarsdale who are smoking; children in New York private schools are aware of its use in sixth grade. Juvenile‐delin quency cases involving possession of marijuana get into the papers under datelines from Los Angeles to Hyannis Port.

This progression of marijuana down the age scale is extremely disturbing, and properly so, to adults. Marijuana, psychiatrists inform us, is a euphoriant and can be used as a rigid defense against the problems of growing up. It is unques tionable that a certain number of children have seriously damaged their personal development by habitually turning off their problems through drugs and never learning to solve them. Thirteen‐year‐olds who turn on at recess probably do them selves no more harm than 13‐year‐olds who get drunk at recess, but psychiatrists tend to find the prospects for both quite dismal.

In conjunction with that worrisome use of mari juana by younger and younger children, however, is its use by older and older adults. Marijuana long ago bridged the generation gap and has since been streaming across like the First Army at Remagen.

Undoubtedly, the most important reason for the sudden outbreak of marijuana use in the adult working world is that young people have grown older. The pot‐smoking art student of 1965 is the pot‐smoking art director of 1970. The pot‐smoking coed of last year is today’s pot‐smoking “assistant buyer of better dresses.” And Seventh Avenue is adjusting to her.

As she explains, “You go into a showroom, and there’s a straight set of salesmen for the old ladies, and they offer the old ladies a drink, but there are also hip salesmen, guys with real long hair and groovy clothes; and they just take you in the back and turn you on. In some of the houses the design ers, the models, everybody is spaced out of his mind. And sometimes they lay dope on you. They’re very cool about it. They come over while you’ve got your book out and you’re writing orders, and they say, ‘What do you do for kicks? Do you get high? I’ve got some very interesting stuff here,’ and they give you an ounce.”

A lot more marijuana‐smoking among adults can be explained as experimental in nature. As the father of three teen‐age girls recently told me, “I’ve now tried pot twice, just to see what the girls are up to. I wanted reassurance that it wouldn’t kill them.”

ONE would have to be a man of very little curiosity not to wonder what the mari juana experience is like. Enough authorities have now indicated that the drug does no apparent harm that the risk in trying it seems to many to be solely a legal one, and people do seem willing to risk the law’s wrath on this issue. A Nobel laureate re cently asked psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, an advo cate of legalized marijuana sales, whether he could pro vide him with a few joints. Needless to say, Dr. Grin spoon couldn’t and didn’t; but the intellectual level of his petitioner was no surprise to him. He lists among the more enthusiastic older smokers in the Boston area “social scien tists and academic people, astronomers and physicists.”

But no single explanation such as “curiosity” covers the thousands of adults who five or six years ago feared and shunned marijuana but use it today. I’ve recently met en gineers, Wall Street brokers (one of whom, three years ago, threw his best friends out of his home for offering his wife a marijuana cigarette —the break between the two families has never been re paired) and film editors, all of whom were in their 30’s before trying the drug, but who now would rate them selves as regular users. One film editor uses it in place of all other possible drugs. It is his first cigarette of the morning, his coffee break, his martini, his sleeping pill. He nevertheless manages to function.

Statistics don’t exist on this matter, but it is this observ er’s impression that in New York marijuana is being used most widely by adults in the arts and the commercial arts, in the teaching profes sion (where it is argued that one could not conceivably understand the students if one did not grasp their highs), and in the “helping” profes sions. Four members of the New York Psychoanalytic So ciety recently agreed on the estimate that 95 per cent of their colleagues in their own age group (between 35 and 45) had experimented with marijuana and that many continued to use it from time to time. Moreover, to the best of their knowledge, all the psychiatrists under the age of 35 whom they personally knew, and certainly all of their own psychiatric resi dents, smoked pot regular ly, many of them daily Knowl edgeable Bostonians suggest that their psychoanalytic com munity is equally turned on.

The smoking of marijuana, in other words, can no longer be interpreted as a sign of alienation. Great numbers of pot smokers are very nicely adjusted to our society. They make love; they make money; and for that matter, reports from Vietnam indicate, they make war. (A study in Febru ary showed that one out of five front‐line soldiers smoked marijuana every day.)

THIS wide use of marijuana is plainly a new phenomenon, at least in the middle‐class East Coast culture. (On this sort of fad—if that is what it is—we generally tend to be two or three years behind California, two or three years ahead of Kansas.) It is caus ing people to ask themselves rather serious questions about their own morality and values. It is changing the nature of many social gatherings and, more important, it is affecting many social relationships, in cluding those of parent and child, husband and wife.

I have recently been talking with middle‐class adults about their own attitudes toward marijuana. I wanted to know why they were using it or not using it, and what it was do ing to their lives.

Marijuana is not new to all members of the middle class. Its use by some of them in the past, however, had something to do with slum ming. Throughout most of its long history, marijuana has been a cheap pleasure of the most downtrodden poor of the poorer nations. (“In Moroc co,” said a man raised there 50 years ago, “we’d see the servants smoking hashish [a stronger form of marijuana]—they were forbidden to smoke in The house—but no one who had servants would smoke.”)

When marijuana began to enter this country from Mex ico in the nineteen‐twenties, however, young people in the Southwest found it not only cheap and abundant, but good for laughs at parties. It is not at all hard to find people with pleasant memories of using “the weed” 45 years ago in Albuquerque. It is even easier to find others reminiscing happily about smoking “tea” in Greenwich Village in the thirties outside of Bohemia, marijuana tended to be found mostly in the black slums, where a number of white middle‐class boys ran into it because of their love for jazz.

For almost everyone who smoked, decades past, it was simply a means to a good time. “We didn’t make a mys tique or a religion of it,” said a woman editor who smoked in the nineteen‐thirties. “We were left‐wing artists and writers not at all mystically oriented.”

“It was a form of naughti ness,” explains a female phy sician of her high‐school days in the Village in the early nineteen‐fifties. “I went out with a black guitar player who brought it down from Harlem. He thought it made him Segovia; I just thought it was fun to do something il legal. But you know, I was too young to drink, too, and it was just as big a thrill to go into a bar and get served Scotch.”

“Also, adults then didn’t seem to get as clutched by the idea of their kids smoking pot as they do now. When I told my father, all he said was, ‘Just stay out of auto mobiles. The driver’s timing might be off.’ That was the extent of it.”

Many marijuana smokers of 20 or more years ago gave up the drug when they “no long er had friends in the jazz world,” or “went off to col lege,” or found that they had to put any effort at all into getting it. Many marijuana smokers appear to take pride in the fact that they have never bought it. Now that marijuana has become so easily available, many smok ers of years ago have returned to it.

It certainly can’t yet be said that marijuana has been accepted by the New York middle‐aged middle class. As was the case some years ago with the young, it is general ly thought to be the more politically progressive and possibly more intellectual of their elders who are currently smoking. Recently this writer met with a group of 30 Long Island parents (by ac cident almost all liberals) to discuss the pot situation on the North Shore and found them in agreement that in their part of the world there are absolutely no right‐of center adults who use it.

Psychoanalytic evidence might back up this concept. The four analysts with whom I’ve discussed the matter de scribe those among their pa tients who are most against marijuana as “rigid‐moralis tic,” “struggling to control their own impulses,” “meno pausal churchgoing,” “the peo ple who oppose sex education in the schools,” “the same people who never talk about sex.” But being in analysis at all suggests a certain adven turousness; and one analyst said, “Almost all those I’ve seen in their 20’s and 30's—even the conservative, rigid ones—have tried both sex and pot, though they might feel a bit guilty about both. It seems to me that my adult patients use pot very much the way I do: occasion ally at a party or just for the fun of it. They don’t use it the way the kids take it, which is every day or to solve prob lems or to deal with tension.”

IT does not really make sense, however, to view the marijuana issue as simply age related, or political, or a sign of good or poor mental health. Many people who oppose mar ijuana are frightened of it for intelligent reasons. Marijuana does have powerful effects on human beings. No one knows precisely how marijuana cre ates its effects and there is no certainty that its action is harmless. There have been sci entific reports from Arab coun tries describing a form of psy chosis traced directly to the use of hashish.

Most American researchers at the moment doubt the ex istence of a syndrome specific to the use of cannabis, and it is hard to find a New York psychiatrist who believes in it. This can be frustrating to any one who is convinced he is suffering from it. A young writer, who is awaiting the publication of his first novel, recently described his symp toms to me as “feeling as if I’ve been stoned for a long time, and now I’m almost down but not quite, and I’m tired, and I have a kind of trippy feeling and a slight dizziness; and nausea keeps coming and going. This has been going on for six weeks.” He blames it on three years of daily pot‐smoking, claims to have friends who have simi larly suffered from long‐time heavy marijuana use (and they have all given up the drug as a consequence) but who have not yet been able to come up with a physician who would blame their symptoms on anything more than “an xiety.” Said the writer, “The last fellow I saw told me that once my book was out and well‐reviewed I’d be my old self again.”

ALTHOUGH doctors, for the moment might tend to feel the cannabis psychosis is mythical, they do seem to agree that the use of mari juana could very well trigger a psychotic reaction in a person whose ego is already shaky. It might, however, be the case that this problem, too, is self‐limiting. A study that Dr. Grinspoon made of 41 acute schizophrenic college age patients admitted to his research ward bore out an im pression that he’d had before “that schizophrenic and pre schizophrenic people tend to stay away from the drug. Only six of them,” says Dr. Grinspoon, “had ever used marijuana, which is remark ably few for that age group. In four of them, it was clear that the onset of the psycho sis was so removed in time from the use of the drug that (the two) wouldn’t have been related; in the last two I was unable to say one way or the other. I couldn’t implicate or exonerate the drug. It stands to reason that a drug like this might precipitate psychosis. But putting it into perspective with other things, if you get someone who is psychosis prone or is prepsychotic, any number of things might do it, such as, let’s say, an alcoholic debauch, a severe automobile accident, the loss of an im portant loved one….”

Dr. Grinspoon himself might be part of one of the more im portant influences leading adults to try marijuana for

It turns some people off. It turns some marriages off the first time. A highly au thoritative article of his in last December’s Scientific Ameri can, which surveyed world scientific literature on the sub ject of marijuana and essen tially found it less harmful than either liquor or tobacco, has been mentioned to me by at least two people as a fac tor that encouraged them to dare try the drug.

Marijuana, in other words, has been getting a much‐im proved press these last few years. Although, many people ask quite sensibly, “Why, with all the problems we have with alcohol, do we need another socially acceptable method for turning off our problems, act ing inanely, and killing our selves in automobiles?”, vir tually everyone, smoker or nonsmoker, under the age of 40 and reasonably educated with whom I’ve talked, is aware that marijuana is not a narcotic, is not addictive, does not produce hangovers and is furthermore considered, in some circles, chic.

IT became evident in talking with middle‐class adults that the main problem they see in the use of marijuana is that it is illegal. About half of the group of 30 I talked with in Long Island had tried mari juana. Some of them had chil dren too young to be interest ed, but none of them had told their children that they had used the drug.

Some felt that they would make that confession when a proper occasion arose. Many of these parents had very carefully worked‐out speeches to explain why “as adults we can smoke but you as a child cannot.” In general, they go: “There are things that physi cally and emotionally are harmful to children. When you’re mature enough, you can drink, you can drive an automobile, you can make love and you can use mari juana, but all of that can cause trouble for a 13‐year‐old.” Most people rehearsing such speeches feel that the legalization of marijuana with prohibition of its sale to minors would make their case more convincing.

Most smokers found the very concept of letting their children know that they had broken this law disturbing. In New York City, I did meet marijuana ‐smoking parents who have told their children they smoke, in hopes, one ex plained, “of making it seem less exotic,” but at the same time, I’ve met very few par ents who have actually smoked in front of young children. A comment I’ve now heard many times is, “We wouldn’t make love in front of them.” The connection between the two concepts remains elusive to me. But clearly this is a worri some question in many homes.

Although few adult smokers choose to smoke in front of their teen‐aged children, teen agers have a tendency to find out about such parental hab its anyway; and the use of marijuana by the older gener ation is not totally loved by the younger ones. A Westport commuter told me of a pro gressively reared 16‐year‐old who became infuriated on walking into her house and finding her parents and three other couples turning on. She accused them of being hypo crites, a favorite accusation by the young, and had to be reminded that her parents had never complained so loudly when she came in that way. Nevertheless the next day she announced that she was off marijuana for good. She explained, “If you and the rest of those sellouts are do ing it, there must be some thing wrong with it.” She did indeed quit; her thing is now macrobiotics.

But like it or not, the young will simply have to get used to the fact that there is no youthful monopoly on hedon ism. Like high‐school students who fear being left out, par ents, too, enjoy good parties, and in New York, these days, they frequently involve mari juana. Recently, for example, a New York editor found that he was excluded from a grass smoking dinner party because he had let slip that he’d never learned to inhale. To make up for the slight, his hostess‐to be invited him to a second dinner party with a bunch of drinkers, but he still felt that he’d missed the real fun.

He was, probably, just as well off, for as anyone who has ever attended one knows there is nothing more dismal than a pot party when you’re straight. There is no one type of pot party. Marijuana is easily titrated. As a study re ported to New York’s Mayor La Guardia in 1944, most ex perienced smokers know just how high they like to get, and when they reach that point they stop. For most adult smokers, that point is well within their own ability to snap out of the high, behave rationally and carry on a fair ly normal conversation. One can find people smoking at cocktail parties behaving like everyone else in the room.

But one characteristic of marijuana is that it turns peo ple thoughtful and frequently when it is smoked in small groups, people tend to grow quiet, listen to the music (a common adult reaction is, “I never understood rock music until I turned on”) and inves tigate their own fantasies. Such quiet gatherings can drive the nonsmoker to new extremes of boredom.

On the other hand, mari juana can make such state ments as “Please pass the mustard” seem fraught with hidden meanings of oracular import, and the struggle to decode them can break up everyone in the room. Abso lute uncontrolled hilarity is one of the great and mysteri ous pleasures of group mari juana use. At times it is al most clear what is knocking everyone out. (An event that apparently brought down the house at one party was a young lady’s forgetting that she had already eaten dinner and announcing that she was starved; at another party it was a young man’s holding up a roast chicken and remark ing that it looked like Bran cusi’s Bird in Space—every one agreed with him, then cracked up.)

In general, what it is that amuses everyone is a total mystery. No one knows what anyone else is laughing about and the attempt to explain only makes it seem funnier—if you happen to be high. The fellow who is not finds the entire situation at the emo tional level of a nursery school, and stomach‐turning. He often starts smoking out of self‐defense.

But gatherings solely for the purpose of smoking seem not to be part of the adult, regular smoker’s world. He is far more likely to use mari juana precisely the way he previously used alcohol, and there are now middle‐aged circles in which the drinking of liquor has almost disap peared. As a 40‐year‐old fin ancier told me over a glass of sparkling Perrier water, “I once had a great fondness for icy martinis. They had many good qualities. Of most im portance, they were lubrica tors of social interaction and the alimentary canal.

“Well, I can hardly remem ber the last time I saw a drink at a dinner party. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a drink.

“You know, the homes to which I get invited aren’t that remarkable. I’d say they’re upper ‐middle ‐class, typical East Side Manhattan, South Shore folks who fear drug abuse, would shun cocaine and run from LSD, but it is a rarity in their homes that I’m not offered pot in beautifully rolled joints. I ’d say that there’s a cut‐off date in this: I don’t see pot in the home or anyone older than his early 40’s unless he’s a photogra pher or an extraordinarily wealthy unreconstructed Bo hemian.

“But it seems to me that there will be an ever‐greater tendency for hostesses of all ages to provide pot as an al ternative to cocktails as the word spreads that if people turn on before dinner, there are no bad meals.

“Last weekend my wife prepared leg of lamb, casse role of rice and mushrooms, salad and cheese. We had two other couples to dinner. The leg of lamb was huge. We ex pected it to last us through Sunday. Every bit of it went. Everything went. The brie was snapped up as if there were imminent danger of war with France. When dieting, I can not smoke before I dine.

“I think,” the marijuana smoking venture capitalist went on, “that it’s ridiculous to fear that pot leads to other things, at least not for grown ups. Most pot‐smokers, I find, are serious‐minded family peo ple, politically oriented, and they smoke pot because it is a deliciously communal thing to do and it tends to sharpen everything from movies to sex; but the idea that if this is terrific, wouldn’t cocaine be better, never occurred to them.‘’

SINCE marijuana smoking is so new to the middle class, there is still a certain amount of confusion as to how one should serve it, use it, and be have under its influence. But certain rules seem to be evolv ing.

In general, in relaxed cir cumstances, it’s traditional to pass around a single mari juana cigarette The stuff is still somewhat scarce. By pass ing it around, more smoke goes into people and less into the air. But there is something about passing around a single joint at a dinner party that resembles passing around a single glass of Scotch. Host esses are now spending after noons with their rolling ma chines making enough joints to turn on three times the number of guests expected, if they smoked economically.

The question of marijuana high conversations is an in teresting one. On first turning on, almost everyone is in need of guidance. The experience is subtle, and the novice smoker needs someone to ex plain to him what it is that he is feeling and how to ride with it rather than fight it. Paranoid reactions are com mon on first smoking. Be cause of that, old‐time smok ers tend to talk new ones through the experience. That, however, is a training process; it is not done in public, for to most adult smokers it is a bore.

In fact, in adult smoking circles it is now considered bad form to discuss (as is common among new smokers) the quality of the pot, the town in Mexico from which it came, or precisely what it is doing to one’s head. One does not ask others if they are feeling it. One does not say, “Oh, wow,” or “Dynamite!” If it leads one to a feeling of unity with the universe, one keeps it between oneself and God.

The people who today seem most excited about marijuana are those who have gone for years detesting alcohol yet envying people who seemed to enjoy it. “I’d go to parties, and hold one drink all night,” a housewife in her mid‐30’s told me. “I hated the taste of alcohol. And it made me diz zy, and it left me with a hangover. Marijuana was a godsend. It’s much milder than liquor and much pleas anter, so I carry my own. When everyone else drinks, I open my cigarette case, pull out a joint; and everyone is very impressed: ‘Barbara the swinger!’ But I just smoke enough to get a slight high. I don’t really like the super‐boo that takes the top of your head off. I just want to feel more relaxed, more in the mood for a party. I love it.”

This use of marijuana, as if it were Scotch, to get through parties, however, does not ap peal to everyone. For ex ample, says one typical long time, weekend marijuana smoker, “I can’t stand using it except with my husband and sometimes close friends. I think it’s an intimate experi ence. You see, alcohol takes you out of yourself. It makes you cloddish and indiscrimi nate. Everybody’s your bud dy. But grass gets you into yourself. It heightens what ever it is you really feel, and if you’re with someone you don’t like, or with someone who is acting phony, the grass makes you really hate them.

“Grass sharpens things. The ugly gets uglier—you can’t stand to listen to bad music or a raucous voice—but the beautiful develops subtleties. I personally never see colors at all; I couldn’t tell you the color of your eyes; but on grass all colors are amazingly vivid for me.

“And I really have touch ing, personal, mysterious ex periences on it. An example?

“Well, I was walking around the block very high with a close friend one night, and suddenly he knelt down and put his arm around a fireplug. Well, you see, I found that touching, terribly significant. I still do, but I can’t say why.”

There are people who find that marijuana causes prob lems in their marriages. As one psychologist says, “Mari juana leads you to pick up a lot of non‐verbal signals that you normally don’t notice and that’s not always good for a marriage. One of my patients has been getting along for years with a very minimal sexual life. She began to smoke pot, found that it turned her on sexually, and did nothing at all to her hus band. It became completely clear to her that he didn’t want her, she didn’t want him.”

Many pot smokers insist that the drug clearly affects their sex lives. A study made of 200 marijuana users by sociologist Eric Goode showed that 68 per cent found that marijuana increased their sex ual enjoyment and 44 per cent claimed that it increased their sexual desire. A good number of pot smokers with whom I talked insisted that it im proved their marital relations, but others claimed that it cut out sex entirely by putting them to sleep.

MARIJUANA, it may be said, is now firmly rooted in our society. It helps to produce good times for influential peo ple. Unless it should be proved that it seriously harmed ev eryone who smoked it, it is unlikely that the growth of its popularity could be halted. Even then, it is not certain that the American public would not accept it as it has accepted tobacco and alco hol.

Past attempts to stop the flow of marijuana into this country either came to very little or have proved actually harmful. Last year’s “Opera tion Intercept,” along with causing the most massive traf fic jam Mexico has ever ex perienced, did create a na tionwide marijuana “famine,” but it also led gentlemen farm ers throughout the nation to lay in crops of their own. Most American marijuana is of poor quality, but says one can nabis horticulturist, “We’ve only begun to research the matter. Consider how long it took to produce a drinkable New York State champagne.” Last summer’s marijuana fam ine had more serious conse quences as well: with the rela tively mild marijuana denied them, many young people pushed on to much stronger and more dangerous stuff.

Ours is indeed a drug culture, and marijuana is generally the second or third drug (after cigarettes and alcohol) tried in a progression that can lead to disastrous addictions and ruined lives. The middle class is for the first time becoming aware of the drug menace that has so long plagued the black ghettos, now that heroin is beginning to appear in its own colleges and high schools. Pressure must surely soon build up to redraw lines between what is acceptable and what is for bidden in our drug‐taking society. But this time, let us have the sense not to misrepresent what we are doing. As Dr. Grinspoon points out. “Kids who feel lied to about marijuana’s dangers tend to assume that they are also being lied to about LSD, and cocaine, and heroin.

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To the mattresses: part 1, basic training

‘Manners maketh man’ is sizable social construct by a patriarchal religious institution in a patriarchal society, which largely, a patriarchy eschews practising? Well – when one considers 98% of incarcerated persons are male. At what point do women need to become downright fucking rude to advance their human rights?

Over the weekend, women in STEM hijacked an existing industry campaign to give US President Donald Trump a big-ole social media finger. And it was as pretty as it sounds.

The ‘actual living scientist’ tag ‘to improve industry access to professionals’ was leveraged in an emerging gender issue as threatened by the new White House administration.

Worldwide; tough, intelligent, tenacious STEM women segued existing discussion to comment professionally on Trump’s new ‘dress like a woman’ workplace policy, and tweet pics.

Like Karen Romano Young, who assert for her female colleagues in science and snow – ‘here’s what we wear in the Arctic when we’re studying the effects of climate change’.

Or, Ivelisse Viruet who tweet Trump commenting: ‘while you were granted five draft deferments, I served 22 years in the military – I #dresslikeawoman, and you need to #actlikeapresident’; and, Amy Tan MD, who says ‘I can’t #dresslikeawoman without my scrubs.’

But it’s Herding Movement who best demonstrates a continuing workplace problem: ‘I’ve had engineers ask me to get them a coffee because I #dresslikeawoman (and) then realise that I’m the #actuallivingsciventist running the damn project.’

Pound for pound, these women, and women globally, are doing it better than men in their arena. Period.

It’s easy to qualify that statement; simply, those women did it without the resources men have thrown at them, and yet, they continue to throw-in for the potentially criminal shitshow that they are often victim too.

Like my 1990s Defence colleague, ADFA naval officer Fiona, who was physically tortured by her officer-in-charge – made to march while carrying a vacuum cleaner over her head because he knew she had a bad back.

Or my mate Summers, a naval investigator at Garden Island whose well-qualified Christmas Day search request was blocked by lazy male officers.

In the end, she went around them; ran the investigation herself and uncovered a hoist of illegal weapons. One sailor had nine guns. Job done.

Or the time I was sexually harassed working for Immigration in 2010. Again, yawn. I was chatting with female colleagues about the green wedding dress Cate had worn, when ACT change pretender Troy lurched over.

Troy thought to demonstrate his kinky workplace VPL fashion concerns, which seemed strange for a Hawaiian-shirt loving Neanderthal? ‘You wouldn’t have worn panties on your wedding day, would you Amber,’ Troy grunted.

I tend to feel sorry for these professional deviants or workplace terrorists; well, look at them? What’s someone like that actually got going for them? Hot tip. It will never worry me when a 2017 male mode ‘chooses’ socially, politically and economically regressive personal policy, which as studies show, negatively affects ‘their’ mental health.

As women, we need to focus on circumstances within our control. These oft-silent terror attacks are and continue-to-be managed by professional women on a case-by-case basis. Think Turnbull and Trump for next four years, ala ANZUS Gate last week. Besides, warfare is a training grounds.

The real problem for women is not the odd workplace dust-up. It’s this. Despite the Dunning-Kruger effect, professional females who are ‘actively’ aware of their talent, are ‘actively’ underselling themselves because it’s ‘unladylike’.

And Australian female professionals have a further cultural barrier; more colonial hangover with the Tall Poppy Syndrome. Women are taught in so many ways – not to acknowledge professional strengths that aren’t sexually-based, and sell themselves in a capacity which is not physical-based. Think about that, people?

On the other hand, men are biologically-programmed and well socially-advised to double-down on risky behaviour that backs numero uno. Studies show, men are more likely to talk themselves up, and all the while, women are talking themselves down. Christ, I don’t need a study. I am the study.

Like Airservices colleague, German national Sven, who introduced self as an ‘ANU scholarship awardee’? Sure, it’s impressive – but it smacks of hubris, and is ultimately unAustralian. One does not walk around dispensing tickets to their own show, PT Barnum-like. ‘Step right up, folks!’ People want people to go about achieving quietly, and this is especially true of women.

Why? Over 150 years of studies show the incredible conscious and subconscious bias that both genders have towards women. Neurobiology well demonstrates the hurdle. For example, researchers recently discovered that while both genders objectify undistorted images of each other – when the images were both distorted, both genders continued to objectify women…and not men.

Clearly, human beings have no real response control to ‘the feminine’ as a society – and I doubt we can ever know the full depth and breadth of an issue that will make or break us, I’m sure.

One thing is clear – male self-promotion is effective. This means professional women must adopt a new personal public relations strategy, and enforce new boundaries.

Because no one is here for anyone – if you don’t believe in you, with necessary self-talk required to develop a positive attitude and enact supporting behaviours, nobody is going too.

So, try it out. It’s won’t be easy for most – people will laugh at you, depending on the size of your social experiment. Like Canberra Business Chamber representative Kate, when I test to partially determine her usefulness to me?

Although, it’s worth noting, the failure finally occurred some 14 days later, in which time, Kate had managed to sign-me-up electronically for a $180 in-house workshop, all the while not distributing to me, the start-up information freely proffered.

Apparently, a smart professional woman who self-brands as ‘talent’, will continue to be confronting. Of course, there is the other thought? That it’s just so hard to find talent these days.

Ghandi said it best: when you go to ‘change the world’, people will ignore you at first. Then they laugh and resist you, before finally, accepting the change. The beauty is, also according to Ghandi, all you need to do is, ‘be the change’.

Yep, there it is. The man-made world already largely ‘works’ for men. So – it’s actually time for women to beat their change drum, which will benefit our species. Yep, time to double-down, ladies.