Sex Detective vs Dr Phil, part one

You know why I despise Dr Phil?  Yeah, apart from him being everything I'm not - rich, successful, famous, well-marketed, Texan, bald and fat.  No, what shits me is what he represents: just the right mix of simplistic truth and twisting lies that sells so well to people who have forgotten how to think like fully functional adults.  Phil is a great believer salesman in instantaneous behavioural modification.  "You've gotta change your life!"  "Take charge of your life today!"  "Today is gonna to be a turning point in your life!"  But like all salesmen, his solutions weren't warranted until he told you there was a problem in the first place.  It's Dianetics and infomercials all rolled into one.  Do you have a troubled teen?  Is your relationship on the rocks because of lies?  Does your kid hate vegetables?  Is your ass suffocating your head?  Then buy one of my many books that tell you how to live your life, because you obviously can't be trusted to work it out yourself, moron.


What Would You Do?
I had a peek at his blog today in order to tackle the hard questions on offer.  Today's biting provocation into the heart of your soul was this: What would you do if you only had 24 hours to live?  Many respondents droned on about forgiving rapists, surrounding themselves with family, or praying to their imaginary friends or something.  Personally I found the scenario bizarrely disturbing.  I could only come up with two viable reasons why it would present itself.

1. I was already dying horribly from something and the doctors just gave me the expiration date, in which case the best I could wish for on my last day were every happy drug they could pump into me.

2. I was being held hostage by some assholes who were real sticklers for punctuality, meaning that I had a whole day to piss and shit myself in between begging and sobbing.

"Hey, guys, what would YOU do if you only had 24 hours to live?"

"Rape you 48 times, now shut up and keep walking, imperialist scum."

But even assuming I was otherwise healthy and unrestrained when the news broke, I'd be so fucked up by the prospect that I doubt anything sanely worthwhile would occur to me.  I guess I probably wouldn't go to work for a start.  Not too sure I'd be all nostalgic and remorseful either.  No way would I waste time contacting every family member and close friend to let them know - why the hell would I put the people I love through that grief?  I'm actually not always a very nice guy, and by telling me I'm dead by tomorrow kinda disinclines me to keep that flaw in check.  In fact I can almost guarantee that over the next 24 hours there would be a lot of 'closure' heading towards every cunt who ever pissed me off, mainly in the form of highly ironic practical jokes.  And by 'jokes' I mean 'fists'.  It would be a 24 hour smack-fest.  A knock at the door followed by a falcon punch without preamble or explanation.  Balls or ovaries, I wouldn't discriminate, just punch, punch, punch til the timer on my cortex bomb ran out.


Keep It Real, dude
But aside from inciting pointless fantasy scenarios, Dr Phil likes to dish out simplistic relationship advice for folks who need a crash helmet to navigate a stairwell.

Do you ever lie? Or are you in a relationship with a liar? Dr. Phil offers steps to change your behavior, and in turn, change your relationship with a dishonest person.

Everyone lies, Phil, even you.  It's not only one of many innate human traits, it's essential for people to function in society.  Bad people lie for careless gain, good people lie to help others.  Some people even lie to sell shitty self-help books on their TV shows.  Deceit is just as valid a survival ability as any other.  It's not the lie itself that harms, it's the reason behind it.  But, no, that's way too cynical for the audience.  Instead you offer them insanity.

Be Real with Yourself and Your Partner
If you lie to yourself, you’re the filter. You’re the way the world gets to see you, so if you’re distorting, then you’re totally lost.

Technically these are legitimate sentences oozing out of his self-righteous head, but fucked if I can make sense of them.  Put the word 'dude' at the end of his sentences and suddenly you realise it's just '70s stoner philosophy as typically discussed while waiting for the pizza to arrive.


A Family Affair Fucking Train Wreck

Ed hates his wife, but she wants to save the marriage as punishment.

Six months ago, Ed revealed to his wife (Kandi) of 12 years that he'd been having an affair. That news was shocking enough, but shortly after he dropped another bombshell: The mistress is pregnant.

Ed is a doctor (a real one, not like Phil) and yet possibly the stupidest man on television.  His family, his really pissy looking wife most of all, think that by exposing Ed's shame publically on Dr Phil, some ageing Texan therapist can fix this shit.  Hey, do you wanna know what men do when women pressure them with shame for fucking up?  They continue to fuck up more, often in new and interesting ways.  Compound this pressure with half an audience of rabid women and you turn an otherwise conventional marital abortion into a national disaster.  He's confessed to fucking at least one of his nurses, and unless this mistress did her medical training in the Vatican, she deliberately allowed him to impregnate her.  Still, Dr Phil reckons he can help with some vague, hick advice on marriage saving.

"There definitely is a plan and a way to work through this. But both of you have to say, 'I'm just going to keep putting one foot in front of the other'."

Sure enough, the marriage is doomed, no matter how many feet get put where.  Ed moves out (gets his ass booted) leaving his wife and their 3 kids behind.  Of course Phil will claim this is because they failed to follow his advice.  That's what we call a non-falsifiable claim, or unprovable bollocks.  Look, the guy was getting his on the side, hoping for just a fling, but ended up in a shit storm of his own making.  I'm guessing the guy is great at his job - the medical bit, I mean, not necessarily the nurse-fucking bit - which means he probably sucks at other stuff like monogamous, healthy relationships.  Instead he turns soft-cock, telling each woman whatever bullshit they want to hear at the time until one or both of them make a decision (eg: get the hell out) for him.  Why?  Because he can.  He knows damn well he's got 2 broads fighting over him.  Many modern women are competitive on levels we guys cannot conceive but are happy to exploit if we are weak enough to do so.

Ed adopted a victim mentality the moment he fessed up to Kandi.  He wanted to get away from her, but lacked the cajones to file for divorce.  Instead he simply had to continue to be a lecherous dick until she threw him out.  The public shame forum that is Dr Phil just solidified his victimhood status in his own mind.

The Sex Detective would certainly adopt a different approach.

SD: "Ed, it's obvious to me that you hate your marriage, otherwise you wouldn't be fucking some other chick out of boredom or spite, or, from what I've seen of your wife, pure physical revulsion.  Divorce her, dickhead."

Ed: "But my kids - "

SD: "Will be fucking fine, just like every third kid in their class living with divorced parents right now."

Ed: "But I think I still love my wife!"

SD: "Can it, fool.  Love's a verb, not a noun.  It's a doing word, and you ain't doing shit, pal.  Divorce her now, and if you still feel that way about her on a few years time you can always marry her again, okay?  Pussy.  [Turns to audience] Next we have a mom whose emo kid likes to cut himself in his room, so we're going to give her some carpet cleaning tips.  Stay tuned."

Click here to see Part Two...

Universal Piece of Shit

As is typical of crap cover art, nothing this awesome actually happens.

Holy shit, I just hit the motherlode of manky films.  Universal Soldiers has nothing to do with Jean Claude Van Dam.  It's way, way worse than that.  Another fine product from The Asylum, this movie tells the tale of a team of marines and scientists battling to survive on an island while being hunted by military cyborgs.  That sentence is the coolest and most dishonest thing you will ever read about this plot.  What really happens is that a bunch of amateur actors spend a weekend in the Southern Californian countryside wearing camping gear fatigues and carrying what are clearly toy guns.  They are being stalked by what appear to be homicidal glam rock fans who like to climb trees and kill their prey by throwing sharp bits of wood at people.

Military Inaction

According to Universal Soldiers, the best way to deal with a survival crisis is for everyone to march slowly out in plain sight then stop every 5 metres to have a screaming match.  The cast literally do this, taking it in methodical turns to freak out and step on each other's lines.  Subordinates are yelling shit at superior officers, scientists are yelling abuse at soldiers, and I'm pretty sure I saw one girl yelling at a tree.  But the acting is not my real grievance here.  These people were certainly paid gas money just to make noises.  No, the real gripe is a total lack of attention paid to detail.

I'm a bit of a gun nut hobbyist.  I like to know how they work and what they can do.  I've never been in the military, and the closest I've ever gotten to a live fire scenario is blatting off rounds at the local pistol range.  But for a military themed action film, the producers and cast seem to know so much less then me.  Within the first few minutes one marine is complaining about how low he is on ammo, despite the fact he is wearing a double bandolier of the stuff.  Yes, I know that no armed force has issued bandoliers since the 19th Century but - hang on, upon closer inspection this soldier is wearing bandoliers of empty brass casings.  My bad.

One unlucky grunt is packing a combat shotgun, or at least a Taiwanese toy factory version that's been resized for ages 6 and up.  They don't even bother to post-edit in any muzzle effects for it.  Instead the poor guy is seen simulating imaginary recoil out of synch with the occasional sound effect.  At one point, while trekking aimlessly around with the others, he even throws the gun down in disgust saying "This won't do any good!"  I'm not sure if that was a line or if he was just berating the props department.  Either way his commanding officer orders him to retrieve the weapon, just in case they get in a water pistol fight later on.

Then there's the other two marines armed with the heaviest fire-power the team can muster - a pair of plastic molded M-16 assault rifles.  Unless you really know what to look for, these rifles seem pretty genuine until they are fired in battle.  Once again, no post-edited CGI, so instead what they have to do when discharging the guns is attach what can only be described as black-painted party poppers on the end.  From my tenuous experience with The Asylum studio I have concluded that all their films share the same half a dozen toy guns, and that they simply can't afford a professional armourer to organise blank-firing replicas. 

They also can't afford any army consultants to explain, well, anything service related.  Like rank.  At one point, after Major Expendable is dispatched by a thrown stick, the squad's burly sergeant declares that he's taking comand, despite the lieutenant standing right next to him.  That same sergeant then, during a later imaginary ambush, orders his obviously disinterested troops to "Fall out!" and flees behind a tree for cover.  "Fall out!" is what you say when dismissing a parade, Sergeant Panic.  "Fall back!" is the universal command for 'run away and hide!'  In between yelling confusing orders and contrary tactical advice, he spends most the time running away from things he can't see while doing the same types of tumbling safety rolls that I used to when trying to impress Joanne Gladigau in year 5.

Military Cyborgs: part man, part machine, part animal?

There are 2 antagonist cyborgs stalking our heroes, a pair of army experiments to make super soldiers.  They look like a couple of Borg who got lost on the way to a KISS concert.  According to the somewhat baffling snippets of exposition, these volunteers have been biologically altered to be stronger, faster and more stupid looking than anyone else in the film.  At one point one of the characters who isn't even a scientist explains that the cyborgs can change shape and size through molecular control, which would've been kinda cool if they so much as bothered to do so while on camera.  In addition to having bits of metal arbitrarily welded to their faces, these guys apparently also have animal genes spliced in, presumedly to help them with their embarrassingly obvious wire climbing and wire flying abilities.  Oh, and like I keep saying, they are the masters at chucking wood at shit.  Even the third, ultimate cyborg - a 50 foot tall cartoon robot - uproots and hurls a telephone pole because, you know, a giant military warbot with inbuilt weaponry might give the tax payer the wrong idea.  The next logical step is to create a Transformer that turns into a catapult.

I haven't mentioned any plot holes yet due to lack of plot to perforate, but the supposed mission required to rid the island of killer cyborgs is to "reboot the mainframe".  Hmmm, unfortunately the film makers don't quite understand what a 'mainframe' usually is.  According to them it's a dusty old CRT monitor and keyboard sitting in the corner of a disused utility shed.  They also think that 'rebooting' means switching off all power on the island for a few minutes while still randomly tapping on keys in the dark.  Anyway, this convoluted process manages to shut down one cyborg, while being ignored by the other, and also activates the superbot.  Nice try, flesh-sacks.

Happy Ending (for the viewer)

Almost everyone dies, but who cares because the only hot chick survives.  How?  By pulling out the radio hidden in her ass for the last 80 minutes and calling in an air strike on the megaborg thingy.  The airforce arrives by using stock footage of 3 completely different types of fighter jet then firing a cartoon missile into the metal giant's chestoid area.  But wait, the pretend explosion had no effect!  Luckily for Pfc Perky the killdroid is standing next to an electricity sub-station so she fires a round into a transformer and the ensuing lightning bolts fry that fucker but good.  Because, fuck you, that's exactly how electricity works, okay?

I gotta admit, plenty of scenes in this flick had me laughing hard.  The cyborgs somehow being in two places at once, marines dying in depressingly horrible ways, and scientists turning on the troops because all the director wrote in the scene notes was "do some sort of plot twist now".  This movie managed to score a rating on the IMDB of 1.4 out of 10, but you can bet that it will still turn a profit for The Asylum and get screened on the Sy Fy channel.  These guys simply don't give a shit.

Sex Detective Crosses The Line

I heard about this site on the radio a few weeks ago.  A bunch of voice actors pretending to be teens or concerned parents or possible pedophiles asked controversially obvious questions like 'when is it okay to hit a girl?', 'is it okay for my teenage daughter to text naked pictures of herself?', or 'do I have to have sex if I don't want to?'  Well, if you're not sure if it's 1952 and suspect that any of these answers might be less than a resounding 'No, you fucking savage!' the you might want to visit Crossing The Line, the new goverment website designed to inform humans on how to deal with teenage relationships and stimulate meaningful discussion.  Of course, when I say 'the government' what I mean is that Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) threw a hundred bucks at some emo work experience kid and asked him to build a website.  The parameters were simple: keep the backgrounds to bland pastel, and don't get carried away with the interactive features.

ASO 5 Webmaster - Raven Darkheart

I don't really like teeagers much.  In my former career I spent over a decade as a youth worker which gave me plenty of time to learn what there is not to like about them.  Before that I was a teenager myself and still thought they sucked.  There weren't any online answers for my teen sexuality and relationship issues, but then again most of my questions would have run along the lines of 'why do girls kiss like they're eating a Big Mac?' or 'what's the fucking story with this constant boner?'

Sharing The Line

In the '90s the government secretly created a pre-digital positronic android designed to infiltrate behind enemy lines and cause ruthless, dispassionate mayhem.  Unfortunately their creation was programmed in Linux and immediately turned into a pretentious pussy, so the military traded it to FaHCSIA for a bunch of state wards to do the same job.  That andoid is now chained to a computer in a hidden bunker and has ben redesignated as the Share The Line blogger who, in its own words is:

a writer, commentator and social media lover, who loves life, people and relationships but realises that in 2010 the boundaries within relationships are more unclear than ever before.

This thing generates the fairly harmless scenarios intended to evoke discussion from those who visit the site and let them chat about whether or not their own problems involve 'crossing the line.'  The responses posted in the comments section are then published for everyone to see.  Commentators usually manifest in 3 forms: some kid with severe literacy problems, or some parent who wants an insanely easy answer to the complexities of raising a teen, or some verbose first year Social Work student who think they can prescribe convoluted solutions to the evils of the world.

Goverment Scenario Example

So, let's see what typical teen dilemma the STL blogger 2.0 presented for the launch of this site - teen pregancy? date rape? drug-induced gang violence?

Please be all three.  Please be all three.

I found myself considering something kind of shocking the other day. I was actually on the verge of hacking in to someone else’s email. I didn’t do it in the end. But it was seriously tempting, and it would have been scarily easy to do.


I wasn’t planning to read their emails (or at least that’s what I told myself). I just wanted to see who was emailing them, and how often. It was all brought on by jealousy, I have to admit. And a big fat dose of paranoia.


They say all’s fair in love and war. But is it fair to look at someone’s email in-box if you don’t actually read the emails? Or is that crossing the line?  

Seriously?  Sounds pretty lame, but, okay, whatever.  I guess my years of experience working with teens can allow me to draft a suitable response.  For a start you talk about 'hacking', but unless you're an experienced coder with a specialisation in decryption algorithms and access to some pretty impressive resources, I'm going to assume that you really mean 'steal someone's password'.  Otherwise I might need to inform Gmail, Yahoo and MSN Live that their empires teeter on the brink of collapse due to your superhuman 'hacking' skills.  As for whether or not it's fair to read just the banners of someone else's email, well you've kinda fucked the morality bitch anyway seeing how you already stole their password and logged into their secure account, you stalking psycho.

Real Teen Scenario

Like I said, many commentators who actually fall into its intended 12-20 yo demographic tend to respond with scenarios of their own, some depressing as all hell, some uplifting tales of courage, and some clearly bizarre.  Once again I get to employ countless hours of hard-earned youth-working skills to tackle the tough issues faced by today's youth.

The uther day i ran outta toylet paiper and askd my frend for a tee towell she toold every1 at skool, is that crossin the line?

What the fuckin- I mean, who the hell makes their friend watch them go 'toylet' in a kitchen then wipes their ass with a tea-towel?  You weren't crossin the line, you disgusting little muppet, you literally shat all over it.  You're the sole justification child psychologists use to charge parents $150 an hour.

Drawing The Line

Disgusted with what passes for teen problems nowadays, I moved onto the Gallery where site visitors get to use some sort of interactive art tool to create self-expressive pictures for all to see.  I've known a few highly talented young artists in my travels so I was eager to see what was on offer.  Until I came to this...

Christ, I don't even know what I'm looking at, and the portarit titles don't help much either.  I had a look at the process.  Apparently you can upload an image of yourself then use their software to draw over your pic with an uninterrupted line to make a clumsy doodle tracing of yourself.  I'm not sure why anyone over the age of 6 would find this fun, let alone how reducing your features to a spastic squiggle boosts self-esteem, but the results are hilariously depressing.  It seems pretty much the opposite of youthful artistic expression, summing up beautifully the government's perception of teen issues.

Parents & Teachers

If you're a concerned parent or teacher who doesn't understand why teenagers carry on like a bunch of teenagers, then this is the section for you, provided you like your advice to be overly simplistic and often worthless.  I picked one of the four advice documents at random - Bullying. 

After the 3 minutes it took to read it 3 times, I still wasn't sure if they were anti or pro bully.  What I did learn was that whoever wrote it graduated from Social Work in 1987 and never bothered to keep up with current events in their field.

...know that bullies operate out of a place of low self-esteem, inadequacy and feelings of powerlessness and this can often be changed with help and understanding.

Developmental and child psychology have come a long way over the last 20 years and if there's one thing we've learned it's that the above statement is bullshit.  Bullies are are quite the opposite of insecure.  The problem isn't low self-esteem, it's artifically high self-esteem.  Throughout their life they were always praised and encouraged and never challenged by role-models on their behaviour.  They have been shielded from failure and taught to expect to assume power around others.  This inflated sense of entitlement means that they stop treating peers as equals.  The bully who robs your lunch money and takes an almost homoerotic pleasure in flushing your head is not some domestic abuse victim, he's a narcissistic, borderline sociopath spoilt into believing that other people simply don't matter as much as he does.

I gave up after that.  It's great for the government to let kids and others have their say online in a site moderated to regulate flame wars and possibly educate the masses about how rape is actually wrong and that feelings are important, but teen advice comes down to this basic understanding: teenagers are proto-humans caught in a phase where their bodily chemicals are outracing their brains.  The pre-frontal lobes take about 20 years to fully mature and that's the part that controls our ability to reason cognitively and predict the long term consequences of our actions.  I don't care how intelligent some kid is, he's doomed to be an impulsive idiot or an emotionally retarded depressive in his teens.  It's how they're built.  They are almost pre-programmed to cause problems because they literally aren't mature enough to plan effective solutions.  Teens are selfish, volatile, rebellious and sometimes outright douchebags, just like the rest of us were back then.  There's a more than even chance they will be sexually active by age 16, as well as experimenting with drugs and/or alcohol.  And there is literally nothing anyone can do to stop this without causing some major psychological damage down the track.  The fairy tale morality of childhood is behind them, while the real, experiential ethical codes of adulthood have yet to be reached.  I like to think of the hardships and trials faced by teens as a form of innoculation to toughen them up in readiness for those adult challenges yet to come.