Dare To Ask Talk And News About Our Differences 
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No I haven’t ever envied Americans, but I don’t hate them. I’ve liked almost all of the Americans I’ve met, though. It’s funny, I don’t like the stereotype of an American – loud, pushy, rude, insensitive, not particularly smart, racist, rabidly Christian – but most of the Americans I have met and known have been lovely people. The stereotype seems to come from TV and movies. The only part of the stereotype that I have found to perhaps be true for a reasonable number of Americans is the racist part. Of course all Americans aren’t racist…it just seems more common in people over there than where I live.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,Those women sounded very strange and rare… You sound like a nice guy willing to do something nice for the people who might need it as you listed. I would never get on a crowded bus, train etc and expect someone to give me their seat just because I’m female. It’s rude, outdated and silly. And if they really think women’s lib has spoiled everything, I guess they don’t want the right or freedom to vote, work outside the home, go out unaccompanied, drink in pubs and bars, not get married, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. (Ok so voting’s a suffragettes issue but they were feminists before Greer.) Don’t worry about it Roger…in my experience the vast, vast majority of women are not like the strange two you wrote of!
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,When you accept a culture, you accept their language. No language is ‘better’ than another – all are used equally well within their own cultures for communication, to express solidarity, and so on. So black youths are not lazy, they’re just communicating with each other in a familiar way. Also, the perception of what is ‘lazy’ changes over time. Italian and French used to be considered slang, because if you spoke ‘properly,’ you spoke Latin.
As for your crack-dealing friends, maybe they just fell in with the wrong people, maybe they made the bad choice and you made the right choice. It happens. Not everything is determined by race, you know.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,Some Italians are still blonde.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,Women aren’t ‘delicate’ and never were – everyone just said so until we proved them wrong. I don’t think of sports as being “guy” sports or “girl” sports because I’ve seen males and females play just about every sport I can think of (except gridiron, but then…!). It’s funny, because in Australia, hockey was considered more a girls’ sport in years gone by, according to my mum. Do you play field hockey or ice hockey? Perhaps that’s the difference.
I can’t understand why there isn’t more coverage of women playing sports – for example, it really annoys me that I can’t watch the Australian women’s cricket team. It’s not unwomanly to play sports; as long as it’s something you like to do, you shouldn’t worry about whether someone thinks you’re not being womanly.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,‘Axed’ actually used to be the Old English pronunciation, and in recent times {ie this century} ‘asked’ was actually the innovation. As for hisself instead of himself, it’s easier to say – simplification of consonant clusters in our words are behind a lot of the constant evolution of how we pronounce words – and ‘his self’ seems to make as much sense to me as ‘him self’, even though I don’t use it myself.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,You may as well ask ‘Why do men wear shorts and singlets – or even no shirt at all?’ I wear short skirts because I live in a very warm place and it is too hot to wear much else {although I try to wear long-sleeved shirts to prevent sunburn}. Trust me, there are very few women around who wear revealing stuff just for guys. We aren’t here just for your visual pleasure, you know.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,I used to have exactly the same problem until I did a short public speaking course four years ago. How did it work? Once a week I had to give a two-minute speech on any topic to the other seven people in my class, who were all very friendly students at my school. That’s all you have to do. Just start by giving a short speech to a few friends regularly. When I’m speaking to a large crowd of people, I also like to think that hardly anyone in the audience is actually listening to me{which is always the case in a school or work situation!} Good luck!
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,I’m white, female and ‘artistic,’ but I definitely prefer dogs. I have never liked cats – living in the country in Australia, I watch too many local cats eating the native wildlife. Also, I have never really understood the antisocial nature of the cats I’ve known. Dogs, unless they have problems, are generally incredibly friendly and loyal {and keep an ear out for intruders at night}. When I figured out a couple of years ago that I was allergic to cats, that sealed it for me. So I guess, in my definition, a cat person is someone who can overlook the scratches, the dirtiness, the moodiness and put up with a pet that can’t really be made to behave. And Shadow, my friend: of course people from other countries keep cats. People in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand – just to name a few – also speak English, just like your owner, and lead surprisingly similar lives to them as well. We’re not savages, you know.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,I’m not trying to say this makes your feelings any less important, but Australian Aboriginals have to deal with many of these same problems, as far as I can tell. But I don’t know about Aboriginals having so much hate inside. Again, as far as I can tell, being a white person, they just want to be treated fairly and have people recognize that life in Australia didn’t start 200 years ago {with the arrival of the Brits}. Reconciliation, in other words. I don’t think I have the capacity to understand your problems at all, because I’m a ‘privileged white middle-class girl.’ It’s not that I’ve never thought about them – I have – but in the end all I feel I can do without going over the top is to say I’m so sorry for what my ancestors did.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,I fully agree with Kent from Melbourne – just by reading the kinds of questions posted in the Yforum each week, it does seem that Americans just ignore the rest of the world a lot of the time. In comparison with Americans, I find that although Britsh people distinguish heavily between class, they are quite accepting of people from different nationalities and cultures.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,Here’s an interesting reversal of your situation: Last year and the year before, when I was in year 11 and 12 at school, I noticed that white kids in year 7 and 8 would always scurry right out of my way if I tried to walk past or through a group of them before I had a chance to say ‘excuse me’ – but if I were trying to get past Aboriginal kids of the same age, even after excusing myself, I would have to dodge and weave around the kids, because they usually just stood their ground. (By the way, I am 5’2″ and extremely slight.) Even if I was (accidentally) obviously on a collision course with another Aboriginal (younger or my age), they would never appear to see me. It doesn’t really worry me, but I wonder what it’s all about.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,Perhaps more whites, or some whites, just feel that their religion and their work are separate areas in their lives. I guess I’m speaking on behalf of Australian whites rather than American whites, but it can’t make much difference.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,If you don’t treat having friends of the opposite sex as being normal now, your daughter will find ways to go out with and contact boys behind your back. This will cause great conflict when you – or her father – eventually figure out what’s going on. Or at least, that’s what happened to me. I’m 18 and have had (and still do hav) many innocent friendships with guys (and some not so innocent!) even though my parents have never been happy about it and have often tried to prevent them. But by trying to a) stop me from interacting with these people and then b) getting hostile when they did find out I’d gone behind their backs, they only push me further away and make themselves more worried. If they were more open-minded and relaxed about boyfriends, I would have – and would now – feel more comfortable about bringing them to meet my parents, and discussing them and boundaries I should have in these relationships. But they just treat the issue as if it’s wrong to have a boyfriend, and that it’s wrong and suggestive of a slut or a guy-chaser if I just want to go camping with my guy friends, or to the beach or something. They – especially my father – suspect, doubt and accuse me, and it would have saved them so much worry if they had just realized at the beginning that trusting me a little, talking with me a lot and showing me why and what exactly they were worried about was what they needed to do.
Tell your husband he is putting himself on exactly the right track for a lot of worry, arguments, tension and the loss of the affection and respect of his daughter – which could be avoided if he tried to understand that his daughter will always be in contact with boys no matter what he does, and that it’s far better for him to face the issue knowing exactly where his daughter comes from, and being able to talk to her about it.
I’d just like to say two more things: 1) my parents aren’t religious, they’re just damned strict – and 2) for God’s sake, don’t set a stupid dating rule based on age. Age doesn’t mean all that much. Not too much can happen at the movies, especially if you drop your daughter off and pick her up. And if something unwanted does happen, instruct her to scream, kick, bite, scratch, spit and all those other ‘unladylike’ things.
User Detail :
Name : Netta, Gender : F, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, Age : 18, City : Armidale, State : NA, Country : Australia, Occupation : Student, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Middle class,
