Tag: abuse

Some of the most uncomfortable films you can watch part 2

Flashback of a fool

A while ago I wrote a blog about the most uncomfortable films I have seen, which I can only watch once a year at most.

These are some of the most unconformable films I’ve seen recently… The kind of films where you can’t move from your seat afterwards or when you do, you feel like having a shower straight afterwards.

  1. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Haunted by painful memories and increasing paranoia, a damaged woman struggles to re-assimilate with her family after fleeing an abusive cult.

  2. Requiem for a Dream
    The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island individuals are shattered when their addictions become stronger.

  3. Shame
    In New York City, Brandon’s carefully cultivated private life which allows him to indulge his sexual addiction is disrupted when his sister Sissy arrives unannounced for an indefinite stay.

  4. Irréversible
    Events over the course of one traumatic night in Paris unfold in reverse-chronological order as the beautiful Alex is brutally raped and beaten by a stranger in the underpass.

  5. Trust
    A teenage girl is targeted by an online sexual predator.

  6. Hard Candy
    A mature 14-year old girl meets a charming 32-year old photographer on the Internet. Suspecting that he is a pedophile, she goes to his home in an attempt to expose him.

I wrote that a while ago and I have more films to add that list. Films which I can not watch more than once a year because they are psychologically too heavy to take in one year.  You can see themes which are uncomfortable (drugs/rape/abuse/etc)

Heavy
Drug-dealer Sev and his equally broken girlfriend Maddie accept a risky deal from an old childhood friend, setting off an irreversible chain of events.

Swallow
Hunter, a newly pregnant housewife, finds herself increasingly compelled to consume dangerous objects. As her husband and his family tighten their control over her life, she must confront the dark secret behind her new obsession.

Pieces of a woman
When a young mother’s home birth ends in unfathomable tragedy, she begins a year-long odyssey of mourning that fractures relationships with loved ones in this deeply personal story of a woman learning to live alongside her loss.

Flashbacks of a fool
An aging Hollywood star, Joe Scott, lives a life of narcissistic hedonism, observed by his laconic personal assistant, Ophelia. The death of his childhood best friend, Boots, takes our protagonist, and the movie, into an extended flashback to a sea-side town in 1970’s Britain.

Selling Isobel/Apartment 407
A thriller based on true events, featuring the real victim in true life playing the main charter. It’s about a woman who got locked in, drugged, held against her will and sold to numerous men for 3 days in an apartment in central London. It’s a film about her fight for survival all the way to the gruesome end.

I didn’t know the main actor played herself and I can’t even imagine the impact of this. Truly horrific but also must be watched for its absolute importance.

Tell me who I am

And there are two film documentaries I have to add to the list, although I could add more.

Tell me who I am
Alex trusts his twin, Marcus, to tell him about his past after he loses his memory. But Marcus is hiding a dark family secret.

Rewind
Digging through the vast collection of his father’s home videos, a young man reconstructs the unthinkable story of his boyhood and exposes vile abuse passed through generations.

Is everything public on social media fair game?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/xdxd_vs_xdxd/6829374609/

Of course I would say not exactly, especially in the face of the  IBM’s Diversity in Faces project which I wrote about here and got a initial reply here. But its a interesting question which prompts the post, scientists like me are studying your tweets are you ok with that?

“Public” is the magic word when it comes to research ethics. “But the data is already public.” That was the response from Harvard researchers in 2008, when they released a data set of college students’ Facebook profiles, and from Danish researchers in 2016, when they released a data set scraped from OKCupid. The regulatory bodies that oversee research ethics (like institutional review boards at U.S. universities) usually don’t consider “public” data to be under their purview. Many researchers see these review boards as the arbiters of what’s ethical; if it’s not something that the boards care about, then it can’t be unethical, right?

Whether the data is public or not is important for ethical decision-making — in fact, it’s necessary.

There is a old-school hacker thing, that anything public is public and if you don’t want it public don’t put it online. But to be fair that idealistic view before the likes of cloud services broke the notion badly.

However there is a question for research which upholds its self above the likes of commercial companies.  I know being in the research field myself, research and the ethics boards are really strict with this all. To be fair I’m glad of this because I’ve seen too many bad uses of public data including semi-public (dating site data for example) and heck private data!

As researchers, we have a responsibility to acknowledge that factors like the type of data, the creator of that data, and our intended use for the data are important when it comes to using public information. These factors must inform the decisions we make about whether and how to collect data and to report findings. I hope the work that my collaborators and I are doing will help to inform best practices, so that, in the end, we can continue to contribute great science to the world while also respecting the people who share their data with us every day.

Absolutely!

Now can some tell IBM this too?

What does it mean to be a man?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/36140346725

“Don’t be weak. Don’t be small. Don’t be poor. Don’t be emotional. Don’t be feminine. Don’t be aggressive. Don’t be unapproachable. Don’t be sexist. Don’t be patronizing. Don’t be entitled. Don’t be unemotional. Don’t be big. Don’t be loud.”

What does it mean to be a man in modern time, is a question which keeps popping up again and again. Things have change for the better I would say but every once in a while the old fashioned legacy comes fighting back. Better known as toxic masculinity

One such thing is the nightmare which sexual harassment, abuse and rape. Its one of those things men don’t like to talk about, mainly the notion that it makes them less of a man? What ever that really means?

Now I hear some of you say, “Surely Ian, no one would give someone a hard time for encountering sexual harassment?”

To which I would say, where have you been?

So although most men have the right attitude for women, this is totally reversed for other men. Perfect example is 50 Cent’s mocking of Terry Crews’ sexual assault is no surprise given the toxic masculinity engulfing African American communities.

To be fair I careless what 50 cent thinks or says but its a example of what I see and hear too often when men get together. Its a typical pack mentality with each one outdoing each other with what they would have done, or how it wouldn’t happen to them. Yep the usual nonsense…

Dr NerdLove sums up my thoughts so well, that I’m going to say little else about it; theres also audio only if you prefer it like I do.

I don’t have absolute answers but belittling men victims of such abuse can’t be the right way…!

There are serious problems with masculinity but not talking or trying to outdo each other isn’t helping at all. I would also add there is a lot that can be learned from feminism, regardless of what others may think.

The sick and twisted people looking for a date, avoid & report them!

This is the kind of person people imagine talking to when first joining a online dating site.

I’m generally not shocked at the kind of things men (generally its men but I have been on the receiving side from some crazy women) say to the women to get a date or more. However I’ve never ever seen anything so graphic and aggressively racist as this before.

Massive warning if you are easily offended don’t look, as it will wind you up no end. The language and subject matter is combined is so wrong on quite a few levels…! Its sick, twisted and this guy is trying to convince this women to consider him (ffs!)

Thanks to Tom for highlighting the reddit thread, which is full of crazy private dating conversations. I really hope the women in question reported the man in question, although most people don’t!

I have some conversations saved from the past with some insane women I have spoken to on instant messenger but I have saved them for my ebook. But to give you a taster of whats to come…

Her: I12 lic yr ear :-)
Me: Oh hello?
Me: My ear?
Her: I12 lic u
Her: I wanna lic yr ear
Me: Thats pretty forward
Her: &?

And thats only the very start of a weird instant messaging conversation…