That post

Hi All

It is kinda weird that a television show that we are assuming is not reputable has visited the Forums and left a calling card that doesn't say much, and is not what we are really interested in.

We may have made an unfair judgement, but I smell fish too and it is not fresh fish. By posting this in a new topic I hope we can move discussion away from something that looks dodgy and have a look at the effect it had on us.

It's like having a teenagers' magazine run an article on how bad pimples can lead to suicide, or a funeral director advertising outside an old people's home.

In the interests of openness there is nothing 'illegal' with either of these but they are inappropriate. If I was doing a TV show about medical things I would hang out on a relevant medical forum to find people who were interested in participating. It's just that she picked an inappropriate Forum! Maybe she has posted elsewhere too. Until she identifies herself and comes clean she won't be regarded as innocent, and I don't think she will post. I suspect there would be confidentiality clauses in any contract, so even if a Member takes her up we won't hear about it, so she is just using us.

Funny though, how something like this calls up deep, dark emotional responses from within us about POP, privacy, appropriateness, the insatiability of the media, sensationalism, vulnerability, parading around specimens in cages like Victoriana and how the program that was on Channel 4 had the gall to do what they did! It's called picking on people who are 'not like us' and seducing them with fame to satisfy the voyeuristic tendencies of others and so fill their advertising coffers. I just think it is sick.

Perhaps we can use it as individuals to examine the secret thoughts that sprang up for us when she posted. Mine were about my attitude to my body, the assault on intimacy that POP is the first time a doctor pronounces his/her verdict and the vile vulture-like nature of these titillating commercial television programs, dressed up like a friendly woman who only wants to help.

I was angry, astounded, and fearful of what would happen to any woman who took them up.

Then I realised that they were only words on a computer screen, coming from one of my favourite places on the Web, and that I was perfectly safe from any assault. I also thought that we may have made a dreadful assumption which may or may not be true. Either way I am now OK with it, but don't want to see it brought to the top of the New Posts again. I feel that the wolf has visited my door in the night and has now gone.

Thanks to her I have learned something about myself.

L