From paula_angela:
(i) What would you do if you had your own television chat show?
Spend most of my year travelling around the world. Oh, you mean, on the show? I think it would just be a TV version of the mag I want to do: a combo of cultural stuff, political stuff, travel bits. I’d want to combine Denton’s Enough Rope with The 7.30 Report (but only the really amazing interviews) and have some travel segments and art/culture reviews too.
(ii) Which Tarot card are you, and why?
Excellent question. I often get the Magician as me and I think that’s probably appropriate. I think it matches my self-confidence, my attitude to knowledge and creativity, and also the masculine aspects of my character.
(iii) Tell me about the first time you remember thinking: “No, this is not about respecting someone else’s culture anymore – that is just wrong.”
Almost certainly clitoridectomy, but I don’t remember the specifics of my thought process. It was on a TV show in my late teens and it was about cutting out a girl’s clitoris with a sharpened stone in West Africa. I think she was about 13. It’s interesting because I’d read about Australian indigenous practices of splitting the underside of the penis and filling it with clay as an initiation rite when I was about 12 and hadn’t blinked at it. I guess it’s because that doesn’t take away the pleasure of future sexual interaction. It’s not the mutilation that distresses me, it’s the deliberate removal of potential pleasure forever for that girl. I realise that FGM can take very minor ritualistic forms now and I understand that it’s mostly women who perform it on other women. In many ways, that makes it worse, but it’s hardly unusual. In our society, it’s women who socialise other women to conform to ideals of beauty too.
(iv) What is the most physically difficult thing you have ever done?
These are hard questions. I don’t do a lot of physical stuff any more. At a guess, I’d say training for high jump when I was a teenager and trying to switch from the scissor jump which I was really good at to the Frosbee Flop which I sucked at. That’s not a very good answer, is it? I don’t really push myself physically at all. I was a bookworm! Give me a break!
(v) What is your ideal pet? Do you have one? Why/why not?
I miss my rat. I don’t have one because it’s no longer really appropriate in my position to wander around with a rat on my shoulder (not that it really was at high school, but I didn’t give a damn) and I’m not going to get a rat and then leave the poor thing at home all day with only a play wheel. They’re far too intelligent for that. Second to that I’ll take the black cat, and yes, I have one of those.
Questions for you:
1. You ran for office and may well do so again. Why do you have faith in the political system?
2. What lessons did you learn in Tanzania?
3. At your wedding, your friend made a lengthy speech about the Buddhist attitudes to suffering and marriage. Has your experience of marriage been anything like he predicted? How?
4. First book you read that made you want to change something in the world?
5. What was your favourite thing to do in Year 9?
Want to join in? Interview me!