[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.

To go forth in the future we need to discover our past, a hard thing in an age of short memories as you say. … Leadership might not come from size but from those nations that have steadfastly refused to give in to the prevailing decline in so many places. Switzerland, for all its refusal to join the EU, has managed to maintain one of the greatest gun ownership rates in the world yet not have a single gun-related murder attributable to its own in most years; Singapore, retaining its Confucian philosophies, manages a city-state with limited natural resources.
   Their example needs to be communicated to the world, as well as the positive aspects of certain parts of the US or China—they exist, but they are hidden.
   This is one reason to like blogs because they can cut through the shield of the MSM and government propaganda. I do not think that we have reached any critical mass among netizens, networking citizens together in a form of moral leadership. … [T]here are pockets of good people everywhere as you and I have witnessed, just that we are not necessarily visible.
   But that critical mass can come—and if warfare now is at a terrorist, guerrilla level in so many places, I suspect moral leadership itself will come from a grass-roots base.
   The system needs idealists like us, reminding people of their short memories, and maybe change will be effected not through top–down governmental, propagandist methods or the MSM, but through one-on-few communications from each of us.
   I would rather [expect] that the next superpower, therefore, is not a nation or even an ideology, but a collective of humankind cutting through the BS and revealing the truth. Who says the ’net cannot be a force for good once more? If it can propagate hate and porn, it can just as easily propagate hope and truth.

   I get reminded of this every now and then by others who feel the same way: Chris, at the Edutainment & Convergence blog, wrote to me privately and inspired me. And when I think back to books like Beyond Branding and Typography & Branding, I think there was a great deal of post-9-11 optimism and the desire to build a better, more understanding world. I find passages of my Typography & Branding inspiring, if an author is allowed to be inspired by his own work, and I can’t have been this cynical back then.
   It’s a good zone to be in and I haven’t felt this hopeful about the potential of the ’net in about a year.
   Last year, I was bemoaning the decline of the blogosphere as it began looking more and more like the darker parts of society, with gossipmongers and rude, anonymous commenters finding their way on to it. Where were, I asked, the globally minded idealists of the 1990s?
   On the other hand, their entry into this world surely puts them closer to the hands of the idealists who can now shape agenda, creating more hopeful sites and messages.
   And maybe channelling or finding the above message from my subconscious helped me put things into perspective more. If indeed the state nation is less relevant and change is better effected by people helping people directly, because technology has now made that possible, then the moral vacuum caused by various changes in society can be filled.
   All it needs are willing participants prepared to get together to make the world a better place, regardless of their political, cultural or religious stripes.
   That’s really why I got into media.
   If we agree on this target, then the rest must follow.

Neutrogena has partnered with Self magazine and Jennifer Garner to unveil what the company calls The Roadmap to Healthy Skin, a viral campaign discussing sun safety and skin cancer awareness.
   The Roadmap appears in the May 2008 issue of Self, stressing the importance of self-examination to prevent skin cancer and promote early detection. Self encourages women to download a mole map, located at www.self.com, to track skin changes that could signal cancer.
   An e-card campaign enables women to send e-cards to friends and family to encourage them to perform self-examinations and to visit the dermatologist for an annual full body check. For every five e-cards sent, Neutrogena will make a donation to help support skin cancer research.
   Self.com also has an exclusive video about sun safety featuring Jennifer Garner, and an interactive map highlighting important facts about sun safety across the US.

Some of the most famous women in the world are lending a hand to celebrate Moms this Mother’s Day and also raise awareness about an important women’s health issue affecting thousands of women each year.
   Oprah Winfrey, Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox Arquette, Faith Hill, Jennifer Garner and Olivia Newton-John have signed on by autographing the Pampered Chef limited-edition Pink Kitchen Gloves (the company notes that these contain natural rubber Latex) and Pink Aprons to raise funds for breast cancer education and early detection as part of the company’s Help Whip Cancer initiative.
   From May 1 to 31, 2008, supporters nationwide can log on to www.pamperedchef.com to bid on items signed by more than a dozen famous women, many who are also Moms, including Jane Seymour, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tori Spelling, Meredith Vieira, Melora Hardin, Nancy O’Dell, Samantha Harris and the ladies of The View including Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Auction proceeds will benefit the American Cancer Society.
   According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer remains the most common form of cancer among women in the United States and every woman has a chance of developing breast cancer. Thanks to early detection through regular mammograms and effective treatment, the five-year survival rate has improved to an astounding 98 per cent.
   In its ninth year, the Pampered Chef Help Whip Cancer national campaign will offer a collection of limited-edition pink products including Pink Kitchen Gloves, Mini Scoop and Measure and the Pink Kitchen Brush to raise funds in support of breast cancer education and early detection programmes. For each product purchased, the Pampered Chef will contribute US$1 to support the American Cancer Society.

I finally came across the full text of the press release attacking Massey University over its story on its alum Rhonda Grant, Miss Universe New Zealand’s second runner-up.
   You can read the statement from the Association of University Staff’s president, Assoc Prof Maureen Montgomery, via Scoop. I think she was pretty persistent, sending it out to the NZPA as well as other news sources—she really disliked the story.
   It’s a shame Dr Montgomery has received anonymous hate mail over this today, when her release is filled with good targets for debate.
   I respect her right to hold an opinion and I think she was right to circulate it, but I wonder just how it might benefit the Association of University Staff, or any institution promoting tertiary issues.
   A lot of the arguments are addressed in our own release, which pageant director Val Lott asked me to write. I was more than happy to put the record straight, something that Dr Montgomery gave me a good opportunity to do.
   You can tell Dr Montgomery failed to do what I thought academics should do first and foremost: get sufficient evidence and maintain an open mind.
   The story on Rhonda Grant was no better and no worse in quality terms than the puff pieces about alumni on the Massey University website, so we know she has been singled out.
   Dr Montgomery writes, ‘Massey’s story reads like the formulaic sort of thing that aspiring beauty queens are expected to say when interviewed on the catwalk.’
   As I said in our release, the reality is the interviews are tough—and there are no expectations of formulaic answers at Miss New Zealand.
   I defend the pageant because I know how tough the judging got: Rhonda was allowed to talk about nutrition, and other contestants were quizzed about everything from the moral repugnancy of bank charges to genetics versus socialization, depending on their university specialization.
   ‘One might expect a university public relations office to do more than piggy-back off what comes across as a publicity statement produced by the Miss Universe organisation,’ she said.
   Publicity statements from the Miss Universe Organization seldom focus on second runners-up but, whether we like it or not, Massey has engaged in journalism. We might argue over the quality.
   I share some of her concerns over objectification but I believe that was sufficiently addressed when Rhonda’s bikini-clad photograph was removed from the Massey University website in favour of something more conservative.
   Once that was done, then the complaint really is a case of the lady protesting too much, unless all alum puff pieces are equally, to use Dr Montgomery’s word, ‘banal’.
   And as deep journalism, maybe that’s not unfair—but it should apply fairly to all puff pieces, not just Rhonda’s.
   If it were couched in such terms, I would gladly stand by her.
   Dr Montgomery’s complaint on Rhonda’s piece specifically might be better directed at government educational policy that has supposedly bred a generation of sex-obsessed high school graduates who might find Rhonda Grant’s figure the reason to join Massey University.
   Actually, on the sexualization of youth, I would also gladly stand by her.
   But for now, as a colleague here at Lucire said to me today, ‘You have to ask yourself: what does Maureen Montgomery get out of it? It’s none of her business. Why has she been allowed to be involved?’
   I suppose the answer comes, rightly or wrongly, from the anti-American stances of liberal universities around the world, and Dr Montgomery’s own informs them. It helps the profile of the University of Canterbury, where she works, and cements its liberal position.
   My own father equated Dr Montgomery’s release to Rosie O’Donnell’s outburst on The View against Miss Nevada 2006 and Donald Trump: ill-considered, narrow-minded, poorly investigated and founded on opinion.
   Where Dr Montgomery and I do share some basic views is how images can shape agenda. I know this. I publish fashion magazines. Let’s not kid ourselves. 
   She wrote, ‘Massey University has provided an excellent example of how the desperation to market universities as “attractive” places to gain knowledge and transferable skills intersects with the use of the sexualized female body as a site of desire.’
   There is an element of truth to such statements, but I question if university choices are made based on attractive alumni—even with my rant yesterday on sexualization.
   When I went to university, I had far more pressing concerns such as degree programmes and career prospects.
   Vitally, we are talking about a story that is hard to find on the Massey University site—a site that had proxy errors in the small hours of this morning that rendered it inaccessible. If it were not for her own strong and widely disseminated disapproval, it would have been seen probably by a few dozen people—perhaps one prospective student.
   I’d personally have saved the energy for when universities started putting out alumni swimsuit calendars.
   By all means, speak out—I do on even lesser issues. But consider the effect of the publicity: right now, it seems Rhonda Grant is going to be promoted to national stardom on Close-up and Campbell Live, and the pageant will get prime-time coverage on the same day Miss New Zealand Samantha Powell did her Good Morning interview on TV One. Earlier today, Paul Holmes promoted this as a major item on his radio show in Auckland.
   We couldn’t have dreamed of this profile.
   This has played into the hands of the pageant exceptionally well and, as a judge, I thank Dr Montgomery, even if I do so somewhat selfishly.

It’s not that we haven’t kept up with the row over the Miley Cyrus photographs taken by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair, which sexualize the teenage star, but I have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to news coverage.
   There are quarters in fashion publishing which would deem these photographs appropriate and artistic, just as Leibovitz claimed, and we ourselves have featured teens in and even on the cover of Lucire, looking probably older than they really are.
   But if a subject comes to me and tells me that she is embarrassed by a series of photographs, and for a cover decision she may well be in the know, then that’s good enough reason for me to have a meeting or a big office poll about it.
   And that’s just what Cyrus, star of the beloved Hannah Montana series, has said of her half-naked bedroom shot.
   In normal circumstances, this matter would be worked out privately between the Cyrus family and Vanity Fair’s publishers.
   Which makes this all rather odd: has the crisis surrounding these images been manufactured? One commenter on a Murdoch Press website seems to think so and, knowing how cover decisions are made, especially those that are potentially controversial, I am seriously tempted to agree.
   Reports suggest that Cyrus’s father, singer Billy Ray Cyrus, was present through most of the shoot.
   What I do know is that the modelling agencies we would work with are protective of their talent and we agree on many aspects of the shoot prior to starting when it involves a young girl—and that means overt sexualization is out.

For once many of the press have taken a moral high ground and that is, at least, pleasing to see, even if I have questions on their consistency. The Fairfax Press noted:

Every artist wants to subvert hypocrisy and artifice. And childhood, after all, is the ultimate artificial construction. It exists only because responsible adults deliberately set out to protect children from predators and situations their young brains are not yet wired to deal with.
   But in an era in which all taboos must be broken, the reigning philosophy is that every truth must be told, every emotion liberated, no matter how destructive, or unreasonable, because there is nothing worse than repression.
   Well—news flash—yes, there are worse things: child neglect, sexual abuse, childhoods cut short, depression, eating disorders, academic failure, violence against women, and all other manifestations of the premature sexualisation and objectification of girls in our culture.

   Interestingly, the op-ed in the Fairfax Press touches on similar subjects to a blog comment that I wrote in discussion with William Shepherd, a marketing expert based in California—one of those smart netizens who reminds me of the days in the 1990s when most people on the ’net were of a certain intellectual level.
   He wrote, on the topic of pornography in Brazil:

However, I find it hard to imagine that Brazil has an issue with porn. They should have a concern with AIDS, the cheap sex and underage labor that Brazil offers to Sex Industry. …
   [W]ill blocking wordpress sites stop white slavery, sexual abuse towards young children, men from going to Brazil to engage in power driven sex events that hurt the fiber of global culture, and humanity? …
   Sex is what it has always been. Yet, the online media has tried to make porn a staple of global culture and economics.

   When I think about these words today, it’s not just the online media, as Vanity Fair and others have shown us.
   I do, after all, see the irony of citing the Murdoch Press when it popularized the page-three girl and sensationalist stories founded in sex.
   At the risk of offending fans of certain TV shows, I responded:

The sex economy, the fixation on sex, are not good things for us to be so focused on, yet I don’t like it being constantly propagated even through prime-time shows such as the old Friends or Desperate Housewives.
   I do not regard myself a prude but you are right: there are more pressing things to be concerned about, and I’m far too busy to find double-entendres in every sitcom appealing.

   While sex is as woven in to Desperate Housewives as it was into Benny Hill, and those watching it at its late hour (past the watershed?) know what to expect, it gets an awful lot of publicity in TV promos with their share of suggestive imagery at other times. OK, it wasn’t the best example of a TV show (which I watched at one point), but the old Friends certainly was. I think it’s difficult to disagree that we have become too obsessed with sex in our society and those early seasons of Friends depended less on characterization and more on innuendo, not often that subtle.
   At the idealistic level there is nothing wrong with this when it comes to showing behaviour between consenting adults—it’s less objectionable than seeing the extreme violence that has now made it on to prime-time television—but we now face the danger of it going further and further into promoting promiscuity among the young. Expand sex’s reach, and you arouse greater curiosity in our youngest citizens at an earlier age. It’s like lowering the drinking age to 18, as had happened in New Zealand: now it’s not 17-year-olds sneaking in three years before they are legal, but 14-year-olds with fake IDs.
   That curiosity around sex has always been there with those who are 11 or 12, as any of you reading this will know, but the signals are telling us that as adults we need to give more guidance, and we need to take a stand against marketing that encourages sex at a time when mentally, young people are not prepared for the consequences.
   And it was interesting to read that I am not alone in my assessment; in fact mine seems ill-educated alongside that of an author who has devoted a book to the subject. Fairfax again:

[Melbourne child psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg] said internet porn, with hardcore sites available to children at a mouseclick, “has completely changed the sexual behaviour of young women, [particularly] the obsession with oral sex.” Young girls, he said, have been encouraged to behave “almost as predators, as if [a boy] is some sort of game animal they want to bag”.
   Again, he blamed parents for creating “a culture of entitlement and indulgence [in which they] are hesitant to set limits around sleep or internet use. Democracy doesn’t work in families. You have to have a benign dictatorship.”
   In a new book, Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Carol Platt Liebau writes that “an incremental but aggressive sexualising of [our] culture … [has created] a status quo in which almost everything seems focused on what’s going on ‘below the waist’.”

   As long as we sit back, tut-tut when the items make the news but fall back on not caring at other times, then we have lost yet another value. Add that to a huge list in the west—and the east—since the end of World War II.
   If certain institutions are being so aggressive as Liebau writes, then adults need to be as aggressive. ‘Benign dictatorship’, in the words of Carr-Gregg, probably describes the families many of us had—and we turned out all right.
   It was a sort-of democracy in my household because my parents involved me in every family-affecting major decision and I earned their trust so I never had a curfew. But that was earned—and I was probably lucky I had a good conscience or spirit guide, or something directing me.
   Not everyone is so fortunate, and in this day and age, it’s not a bad idea to be strongly involved in our children’s lives because that moral compass no longer comes from those cohesive, homogeneous communities of old, nor does it come from the media, at least not regularly or consistently. We, the regular people, are the last and possibly only resort in our respective families.

Our editor-at-large Summer Rayne Oakes has been named the fourth best dressed person by the Sustainable Style Foundation, up from fifth last year. Congratulations! Number one by ’09!

UK model of the moment, Agyness Deyn, will release a single, according to British media today.
   It will be her first foray into music, in collaboration with New York-based band Five O’Clock Heroes.
   Deyn contributed some vocals to the song, ‘Who’, and will appear in the video.

Online today: a preview of the H&M summer 2008 range (left), which the company says is inspired by hot, exotic locations such as India and Africa.
   This is clearly in the Zeitgeist: the same week we receive Peter Alexander’s latest catalogue (below), which has an African-inspired collection. There’s something about Africa this summer, so let’s hope that translates into awareness of the continent’s issues that we, as a planet, can help with.
  Speaking of exoticism, we do have our special on Katherine Mansfield, the famous New Zealand author—and possibly its ‘first fashionista’, online, for those who missed it earlier this month. The exhibition of her property—including her clothing, perfume bottles and jewellery—is still on in Wellington, and we highly recommend a visit to understand the New Zealand fashion character.

I’ve heard from Brad at Peace Love Life, who has been doing T-shirts to help worthy causes around the world.
   The latest range: to help raise money for various areas, in collaboration with Invisible Children (working in Uganda) and Sisters of Rwanda.
   In Brad’s words, ‘I believe these are our most fashionable, yet most powerful products yet. We really want to make an impact on the world with these shirts.’ I believe so, too.

Paraparaumu-born Samantha Powell, 20, representing Horowhenua, is the newly crowned Miss Universe New Zealand 2008 in a ceremony at the Novotel Ellerslie, near Auckland City.
    Hannah Matthews of Auckland, Miss Masport, is runner-up, followed by Rhonda Grant, Miss TR Designs of Palmerston North.
    Miss Powell says, ‘It’s a real privilege and I’ll do this country proud.’
    She is a team leader at ASB Bank Wellington and returns to the capital for work “as normal” right after the pageant.
    An auction to benefit Look Good Feel Better, the charity which helps women with cancer, raised $3,000 at the function.
    Jack Yan, publisher of Lucire, who judged alongside Look Good Feel Better general manager Yvonne Brownlie, interior designer May Davis, and fashion designers Minh Ta and Patrick Steel, says this year’s judging was far tougher than 2007’s.
    ‘We spent six hours on interviews in 2007. We spent the same amount of time this year with fewer contestants,’ he says.
    ‘We really had to get in to what makes these young women tick.’
    The judges found it was harder to pick a winner as the majority were ‘cosmopolitan and globally minded,’ says Mr Yan.
    Sylvia Laurenson (Miss Bettjemans) and Rebecca Connor (Miss Establishment Bar Wellington) rounded off the top five. 
    Last year’s winner, Laural Barrett, performed a song at the event, as did singing duo Anthony & Edward.
    Miss Powell represents New Zealand at Miss Universe at Nha Trang, Vietnam, on June 17.