Why I hate Christmas

Every year my hatred of Christmas grows, and every year I articulate what I hate about it to myself a little bit better, so I thought I'd finally put it into words.

It started off years ago when I thought I still liked Christmas but couldn't quite reconcile the anxiety leading up to it with the stress and fatigue associated with it. One day I simply realised I don't like it at all, that the downsides I felt about it more than outweighed any of the upsides like the big dinner, presents or time with the people I love.

After that I suppose I looked for and latched onto external or socioeconomic reasons not to like it so as to validate my inner cynic, and my dislike of it's only grown since.

First, here's what I hate about my own experience.

My household outlays much more money than it can afford or that I want to. In the early years when we had no money it seemed to leave a smouldering crater in our already torpedoed finances that we'd spend the next six months recovering from, and what did we get out of it to be left in that state? A ton of food that certainly wasn't worth months of tenuous household income, a huge task undoing all the furniture removal and mess to fit everything and everyone in, and yet more stuff cluttering up my life.

We'd sit up all night wrapping presents nobody would care about in two weeks, we'd spend a fortune on enough food to feed three times as many people as we'd host, food and drink that's incredibly bad for us which I never wanted and which is wildly over-catered (enough soft drink to sink a ship, cake, pudding and ice cream crowding decent food out of the freezer, etc).

I'd get a handful of presents that in some other life might be cute and nice, but in this life and in the space we have to live in with all the crap already in it because of our constantly unsettled circumstances, it just ends up more stuff I have to find a corner somewhere to shove out of the way.

Presents not because the giver has had the time and energy to put thought into something that's unique to both them and me – the entire point of a gift from someone, after all (and I don't hold anyone, least of all my wife, in contempt or anger about that because she faces the same unbalanced deficit of energy, time and money every year I do), but presents to fulfil a social obligation we're brainwashed about our entire lives.

I'd move furniture all over the place to accommodate everyone (including between houses in most cases), have no time to work or relax for what feels like weeks on end, and it's all for absolutely no tangible benefit.

But it's for the kids, you might say. Fine, except the way we entertain and raise our kids today and all the material goods we surround them with is utterly obscene. My grandson has so many toys in his life he'd never get to play with them all even if he wanted to, and every time he's at my house he completely ignores his toy box and goes straight for the iPad game he's addicted to. He'd get more out of $200 credit on that game than all the crap he unwraps and leaves everywhere at Christmas.

My wife talks about when her mother was a girl in WWII-era England and how, when they got an orange in their Christmas stocking, it was like getting a Wonka golden ticket because they almost never saw one. They probably got a steel train carriage or a knitted doll too and that was it, and let me promise you they were happier with their fun than kids of today's world whom we drown in oceans of plastic crap.

But it's about the pleasure of unwrapping presents, you might counter. 19th century European royals and nobles got pleasure out of hunting animals across their African colonies too, to near-extinction.

Unfair analogy? For the privilege of all that momentary and ultimately meaningless pleasure of present-opening that gives them the kind of dopamine response retailers use to swindle us every day, we spend enough money to get entire continents out of debt. A news story this year reported that just in WA – the least populated state in the least populated continent on Earth – we were going to spend $833m... over three days.

Extrapolate that out to the amount we spend around the whole world in a single year on all that garbage and it wouldn't only end poverty, it would solve every sociopolitical problem there is, advancing human society to the point we probably wouldn't reach for a century otherwise. Instead, all it does is let Disney, Hasbro and Proctor and Gamble maintain (not even increase – they structure their whole business models around expectations of that revenue) their margins and not fire hundreds of thousands of people, which they have to do to 'correct' their stock price.

And every time I look at him unwrapping some other piece of forgettable plastic he might play with twice before it eventually gets thrown out or given to an op shop in a year after its lain under a bed or outside in the weather, I can't help but wonder at what a minority he's in. He was lucky to be born in a rich Western country where we can afford all that useless shit.

Whatever he opened was probably put together by a kid just like him – maybe several of them – in some third world hellhole where they're chained to a factory lathe churning them out by the millions after already losing a couple of fingers in the machine, are paid barely enough to scrape crumbs from the ground and who wouldn't know a Christmas present if you hit them over the head with it.

But even if we didn't move forwards as a society thanks to the whole enterprise, it would be a start if we didn't move backwards. After it's all over, it takes me a fortnight to get rid of all the Christmas paper and plastic packaging by cramming it into the bins to get rid of it.

If the stuff it contained turned out to be beloved treasures in a child's life that might almost make the abominable scale of waste worth it, but the amount of material left over after all the carnage is mind boggling to behold in a single household – imagine a whole country.

We now have to take our own bags to the supermarket and we've all jumped on board the same hashtag bullshit about banning plastic straws, yet we know very well that more than half of every Christmas present we wrap is the packaging that will be thrown away. Where do we think it'll end up? Google pictures of Pisang Batu river in Jakarta.

'That's not us', you might argue, 'it's unenlightened, backwards, third-world Asians who won't stop polluting their own backyard the way they throw their trash into a river'. So just because the backyard we throw all our clamshell Nerf gun packaging (as well as our computers, phones, cars, food scraps and everything else – nearly a ton of rubbish per person per year, and that's just the average American) is in some other country where laws about polluting their waterways and poisoning their people are so lax, that makes us so much better? The fires and cyclones of global warming won't only hit the technology-strewn rubbish dumps of China and India...

If I leave water in a saucepan overnight to soak the food off the side, I take it outside the next morning and throw it on the garden rather than down the sink. It's a completely useless gesture coming from a single person in a corner of the smallest city on the most sparsely populated land mass on Earth when China, America and all the other economic powerhouses are getting worse at the way they treat the environment.

But I once heard the phrase 'be the change you want to see', and one thing I can't stand in myself is hypocrisy. Of course, tipping two measly litres of water on a plant instead of wasting it when I cram all that plastic into my bins every Christmas like everyone else makes me a complete hypocrite.

There's a socio-cultural dimension to it as well, and it can be summed up in the cheesy old phrase we always associate with the occasion - 'peace on Earth and goodwill to all men'.

At its most simplistic the notion that we'd all stop fighting and killing each other in the endless orgy of power struggle-fuelled violence we keep kidding ourselves we're better than for a single day to drink eggnog and open presents is an insult not just to the sensibility of what it means to be human but – if you want to be politically correct about it – the millions of people who've died because of it.

Dig deeper. The economic system that perpetuates and relies on Christmas being the destructive orgy of consumerism I described above is the reason for that continual power struggle. Today nation states exist to buttress ways of life, and in the West the endpoint of that is the concentration of wealth in an ever shrinking number of corporate-controlled hands. The artefacts our political and economic systems rely on – Frozen DVDs just as much as oil – come to us through a very entrenched industrial infrastructure, some of which exists in unstable parts of the world.

And as governments over the last century have proven, they'll act as outsourced police forces to maintain the supply stability of those artefacts to prop our economic systems aloft. Decades-long wars and occupations in the Middle East not to free or protect the people but assure the continued flow of oil is only the most visible example. For ones you've barely heard about search online for Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Cochabamba Water War and many other examples like them.

None of that political force or violence committed by and on behalf of financial interests is going to stop for Christmas, because it's by its virtue that Christmas take the form we know, with all the shopping centre Santas, snow spray painted in shop windows, turkey with all the trimmings, etc etc.

But I've got political again. Take me to task on spending time with your family. I won't even talk about how many people are forced to spend time with people they don't even really like and only see on Christmas because it's the done thing – a million memes and social media jokes about Christmas Day fights cover that more than adequately.

Let's suppose you're spending time with family you really love and want to be around and you only get to see them on Christmas (or some similar special occasion). You know all the studies about how we're destroying our health through constant overwork as well as I do, and it's not just distant relatives we only see on Christmas who suffer – our spouses and children are emotionally stunted and damaged because of it.

Our society (the same one that invades foreign countries to protect oil interests – at the risk of getting political again) normalises working yourself stupid until you have an ulcer or heart attack, and we're all headed for the same endpoint where we realise one day that our wife/husband/partner doesn't know us any more and that our children have been raised by Playstations and phones, faultlessly trained to understand that we don't have time for them.

If you look forward to seeing certain family (or just people you love – family takes many forms) on Christmas, you're probably not seeing them enough to begin with. Why wait until one day of the year to make the effort? As it is it's the worst day to socialise with people because you'll be so stressed and harried cooking three times as much food as they'll need on time and drowning in all the wrapping paper and plastic strewn around the perfect house you just spent three weeks decorating and that nobody even looks twice at (because all they're interested in is eating all the food you bankrupted yourself to pay for and what they'll get in their presents)?

Throw in all the conspiracy theories about how Coca Cola invented the modern visual iteration of Santa Claus and how corporations have conflated certain holidays to shove down our throats because of the money to be made (St Patricks' Day is only advertised by pubs, after all, and only confectionary companies and soft toy factories make extra money at Easter) – most of which are true – and the whole thing is an abomination.

What does it take to be a visionary?

Here's a question I can't quite figure out the answer to. Think of the people we consider visionary today. They come from technology (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg), film (James Cameron, George Lucas Steven Spielberg), science (Einstein, Edison or Dawkins) or politics, either on the official end like FDR or the action end like Martin Luther King).

And what's the one thing the people we think of as visionary and who've changed the world in some tangible way have in common?

They're all rich. Einstein as worth $12m when he died in 1955. Martin Luther King was from a wealthy family because of his influential father. You can't make any kind of splash in the technology world today without a mystique born out of billion dollar venture capital and expensive start-up funds. The smallest possible cut of some of the most successful movies would still put any film director or producer among the 1 percent.

Is that a prerequisite to being a visionary? We all have ideas, some of us huge ones, and many of them would undoubtedly change the world if they were bought to fruition. But it's a big world, and that means that on an industrial/practical level there's a high cost barrier to entry in executing world-beating ideas.

Almost everyone you care to mention who's done something that's changed the world has done so with the backing of an extensive infrastructure. Steve Jobs might have dreamed up the Mac or the iPod (he actually did neither), but without a company the size of Apple behind him to develop, manufacture and distribute it, he would have stayed a scruffy hippy with a passion for computers.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are transforming more industries than we can count and will be long remembered as visionaries, but would they be making the advances they are in AI or self-driving cars without that kind of money behind them?

There are actually two really good reasons supporting the idea that all it really takes to be a visionary is that you be loaded.

First, Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPod in isolation. Nor did James Cameron paint every set or stitch every costume of Titanic or program the motion capture software of Avatar. Nobody we consider visionary can claim full ownership, command or even stewardship over the aspects of a product or change the word 'visionary' bestows upon them.

Society thrusts that upon them because we need a figurehead, a human face to put on industrial success. Bill Gates or Peter Jackson are easier to latch onto rather than tens of thousands of software engineers who created Windows or Weta Digital or the negotiating lawyers who ushered all those companies and products to users.

The second reason, closely related to the first, is that if you put any other educated, socially aware person in the place of those we think of as visionary, they might do just as good a job at changing the world. It might be easier than it looks with all that structural backing to do the kind of R&D, product marketing or distribution to create (or just approve) something that changes the world.

Most people who've ever done a day's work already realise the way to extract the best possible performance from any kind of commercial development apparatus is to populate it with the smartest and best people you can find.

Steve Jobs didn't walk around the design teams at Apple loudly telling them to come up with a new kind of digital music player or phone (as far as we know), he just saw the potential when it bubbled up from the dank labs that can be found in any huge company. At Google it's the famous 20 percent of employees' time rule where they get to make up and work on their own projects.

Of course, any of us might fail spectacularly because we back the wrong project – Jobs did so with Lisa and NeXt, and no less than Stephen Hawking threw all his research out at one point and set about disproving it because he realised it was wrong.

We simply underestimate the extent to which the people we idolise for being so brilliant are in the right place at the right time. Nobody has superpowers and most of them are no smarter, more forward thinking or more talented than you or I.

Give any bozo on the street $150m and expect him to make a hit movie? Undoubtedly not, but those who do aren't blessed with any potential you weren't born with too.

On why the orgasm is the emblematic state of the human condition

The human being is a very unique combination of hardware and software, enmeshed to work in tandem at the minutest level (probably cellular), and I don't think anything illustrates that as perfectly as the orgasm.

To begin with, it's an unmistakably physical process. The friction of skin and muscles eventually causes the spontaneous and rhythmic contraction of muscles around and throughout the pelvis in both sexes and pumps sperm from the testicles in men.

But there's one problem concerning the physical description of orgasm that's never been explained. In talking about orgasm physiology we tend to talk about the high number of nerve endings packed into the head of the penis and the clitoris, and saying we get pleasure from sex because of the number of nerve endings is like saying you get wet while you're drowning – it doesn't even begin to cover the extra dimension of extreme physicality that's more than just heavy sensory input.

If that was the case we might feel heady sexual satisfaction or pleasure from having our lips or fingertips stroked, both areas that are as much or more sensitive than the genitals thanks to the number of nerve endings in them.

The end result of sex (assuming we're both doing it right) is the burst of explosive pleasure we feel, not just a keen sense of touch. Where does that come from?

Obviously the flood of sexual pleasure we get from lovemaking is physical as well, somehow, and it's got a lot to do with pressure on certain muscles – you didn't know what it meant when you were little, but swing hard on a swing set today and you'll feel the unmistakable pleasure of G forces pressing on something in your groin and crotch.

It's also where the software comes in. Think of the emotional response to orgasm. Release – although the word doesn't even begin to cover how powerful and cleansing it is. You can't keep worries in your mind when you orgasm.

Togetherness – the resulting hormones flood your body and brain and prompt responses from wanting to be physically close to the person you just had sex with to believing you're falling in love.

Joy – is there anything else that makes most of us (again, assuming we're doing it right) as happy as adults as sex and orgasm?

And the release, togetherness and joy are heavy and palpable, physical sensations themselves as much as emotional responses. Orgasm prompts a wave of feeling in both senses of the word that floods the physical brain and body and the sentient mind.

The physical sensation of the pleasure is so complete, so deep seated, so seemingly stitched to our body at a micro-level it has the power to overcome almost any prior mental state of being and completely overwrite or re-program it at a stroke (no pun intended), the hardware rewriting its own software and generating a completely new expression of it. It's as if Windows or OSX knows we're having trouble because we have too many documents and windows open and spontaneously reboots itself to clear the cache.

How to be a man

Love women. Some of them might hurt you, break your heart, laugh at you, even slap you.

But never stop loving them, because as a gender, they deserve it, and if some of them hurt you or are stupid, it doesn't mean they're all like it.

Women are good at being caring, nurturing, soft, gentle, loving and giving. Here's what they don't tell you growing up - so are you.

Sometimes, believe it or not, the thought of having sex will be exhausting, nauseating or completely uninteresting to you. That's okay. It doesn't mean you're any less a man.

Sometimes when you want sex you won't be able to do it. That doesn't mean you're any less a man either.

Ignore everything you read or hear about the rules and etiquette about dating. If you want to call her, call her. If she isn't interested, she either won't call you back or you'll hear it in her voice. It's her loss – move on. Your conscience will tell you where the line between pursuit and stalking is.

Don't worry about what sort of man women want and whether you fit that description. Be yourself. Plenty of women will want and love you exactly the way you are.

Does she earn more money than you? What the hell are you complaining about? Open a beer, cook more or play with the kids. Enjoy it.

Don't compare yourself to anyone. Most rich people inherited what they have or got that way through an accident of fate and are no smarter than you.

Most of the men girls fawn over in magazines are 22 and don't know the first thing about real life. Most Hollywood stars have five hours a day to spend in the gym and have all their housework and meals done for them.

You're naturally aggressive and ambitious, more so than women are, and aggression is a dirty word in modern society. Ten thousand years ago it gave you the power to fight off predators and bring down prey who were bigger, stronger, faster and had sharper teeth. It let you feed your family. It's much too late to try and get rid of it now. What matters in this world is what you do with it.

Use your aggression to go after what you want. It's the hallmark of every alpha male in the animal kingdom.

But remember that you need be the alpha male to nobody but yourself.

Never, ever, under any circumstances hit a woman. For any reason. If you know of any man who hits a woman, hit him. Hard.

At least once in your life, shed tears over a woman. It takes a lot to make us cry, and there's no better reason to do so.

Build something. It's good for the male soul.

Destroy something. It's good fun.

Teach a child to build something. It's the reason we're the dominant species on Earth.

If you want to lash out in a temper, pick your target very carefully. It might blow off steam, but something you love might be broken and our anger is always stronger than our body – you'll probably hurt yourself. Instead, have something ready to take it, like a punching bag in the garage.

Love. There's nothing else in the world worth spending your life doing. Not even your work.

Love your work. If you don't, find other work.

Never think you know everything about something. Put yourself in a learning frame of mind even if you're the expert. The second you stop learning, you stop growing and you don't learn a thing more.

If she nags, tell her. Tell her you'll listen to her and promise to do what she wants, but she's driving you crazy and making you want to do it less.

Don't promise her you'll do something just so she stops nagging. If you promise her you'll do something, do it.

Kill spiders. It's your job. If she's not scared of them and you are, let her. But you have to kill something.

You have two people in you. The capable, strong man who can handle anything and the tiny boy frightened of everything and wanting his mother. Let them live together in harmony and don't struggle against either one.

Shake hands and introduce yourself and others. Even if somebody knows who somebody else is, it breaks a barrier.

Cultivate female friendships. Your wife or girlfriend is not the only woman in the world, and the company of women is very good for a man. If she's the jealous type, reassure her. She'll just have to learn to live with it.

As much as time and money allows, go away without your significant other, and have her go away without you. We were never designed to live in each others' faces, and you can never know the joy of missing someone and being reunited if they're there the whole time.

Being completely honest 100 percent of the time is for computers. We'll never truly and completely understand each other, so don't feel guilty of keeping some things to yourself. Chances are they're not important enough to bother her with anyway.

If you don't have sex for a year, don't put the first woman you sleep with on a pedestal. You'll end up disappointed and she won't be able to deal with the pressure.

When a wild animal is dangerous and can't be reasoned with, we put it in a cage. If you can't control damaging impulses or desires, that's where you belong too. Not for your sake – for everyone else's.

Your Dad might not have hugged you a lot, spent a lot of time with you or been much of a role model, but if he spent his whole working life putting food on your table love, respect and be grateful to him for it. If he was born before 1960 he probably never understood he should have done anything more.

If you break up with a girl, you might hate her and never want to see her again, but ask yourself if you and her could have been friends in another universe. If the answer is yes, you could be friends in this one too. Consider forgetting your past grievances and giving it a try.

If you're a virgin, you might be wondering if sex is really the be all and end all it's made out to be.

It is.

If you're a virgin, you're probably looking forward to your first time. Just remember chances are it won't be the carnal frenzy you imagined. It might even be terrible. Don't worry, it's gets much better.

Despite the erotic allure of one night stands and sex with hot strangers you meet at cool nightclubs or parties, the best sex you'll ever has is with someone you've done it with before, simply because you know what each other likes.

If you don't watch TV for a long time, you realise you're not missing anything. The best shows are on DVD anyway.

Few of the people above you in your workplace or industry are there because they're smarter, richer or more cunning than you. There's no reason it can't be you.

Don't try to identify with any group's likes or tastes to fit in. it's okay to like arthouse dramas and action blockbusters, or read high literature and comic strips.

Don't be ashamed of your hobbies, just keep in mind some hobbies will make some people assume you need a girlfriend.

If you work with computers for a living, build a wall or plant a garden. If you're a farmer or brickie, learn how to build a website. Never stop expanding your horizons.

Travel. The very act of doing it opens your soul to new experiences and you'll find strangers are friendlier and the world is more accommodating. We're a nomadic species and weren't built to stay anywhere forever.

Grow a beard at least once. Only you can do it, and ten thousand years ago that's how she picked you out from a long way away.

You'll never understand why we love boobs any more than she will when she rolls her eyes and shakes her head. Nor will you care. Just go with it.

If she never orgasms during sex it's not necessarily your fault, but don't rest until you both do something about it.

People are slack at keeping in contact, it's a fact of life. If you decide not to contact someone just because they don't contact you, you'll lose all your friends. It's holding a grudge to spite yourself, and unfortunately, it's a classic female trait.

When your daughter reaches 15 it's time to stop just saying 'no' when she wants something. Get all psychological and try and talk her out of it. Highlight the potential negatives. Lie. Anything. If she really wants it she's finally smart enough to get around you.

If what she wants isn't that bad and you're just being overprotective, say yes.

Don't compare your relationship to any other you see or hear about. If one of you snores so you have to sleep apart most of the time, so what? At least the marriage will be intact.

The most common state romantic partnerships end up in is with one party holding most of the emotional and decision making power. Fight against it like you've never fought anything. Respect her and her choices, but assert your right to have your own.

Make jokes about her being your property and belonging to you. If she really loves you, she'll roll her eyes but smile and love every minute of it.

If you're ever unhappy and feel like you can't stand life anymore, remember – everything changes. Everything. It'll get better with time, even without you really trying. Talk to someone and hold on.

It's true women love a man who can cry, but pick your moment. There's a feminine and a masculine side, and you can be too much of either.

Be brave. Even if you don't feel it, do it anyway. Courage isn't in how you feel, it's in what you do (often despite how you feel). Even if people can see you're scared, they'll respect you for doing it.

If you're terrified of public speaking, remember one thing – go slow. It's when you speed up trying to get through it you stumble over your tongue and sound like an idiot. Speaking slowly gives you the time to get your words right and you'll make fewer mistakes. If you shake, hold the podium. Make eye contact from one face to another. You'll even find yourself enjoying it – promise.

Put it in softer terms for the sake of social grace if you have to, but say what you mean and think.

They don't tell you this, but just like her, you'll have days when you feel fat, ugly and pasty and just want to hide.

Relax. No matter what you feel like a man should be, you can't be in control of everything in the world around you.

You'll probably never rule the world. Just relax and get over it. You don't have to be in control of everything every minute of the day.

No woman on the face of the Earth is out of your league.

Development hell for freelance writers

We all know the phrase 'development hell' as it applies to the film industry. But you'll be surprised who else besides studio executives and independent producers spends a lot of time there – freelance journalists.

Frankly, if we spent as much time writing as we did developing material, we'd produce more content that Facebook.

Movie projects are born when someone has a great idea. Maybe they have a script they've written and really believe in. Maybe there's a novel or comic strip they can see great visual potential in and own the rights to.

If they're also a mining magnate or dotcom billionaire, they're ten steps ahead of most movie people – they can use their own money to get their movie made exactly the way they want. But most studio execs, indie producers or filmmakers work tirelessly to bring their project to life, often with nothing but belief in the idea to sustain it, forever waiting for The Call.

They have ideas and wish lists for casting, they imagine scenes and occasionally visit locations they fancy. They play their favourite songs and imagine them on the soundtrack. They tell people about it when the opportunity strikes, figuring they never know when somebody who hears the idea will know (or be) somebody important who can get something done. It's a process of occasionally stoking the embers of an idea alive, and it can take years.

It seems easy because we only ever see the success stories – they're the ones that get made, after all. But when they get made, it starts with a phone call or email that sparks off a period of unalloyed productiveness bordering on manic frenzy, a near-panicky period of the fevered business of creation. If you score name actors, they'll have only a certain period of availability. The skies might open up on the day of your big exterior shot. The financier's stocks might take such a battering their accountant convinces them to abandon media investments and go into natural gas fracking.

Even if things go right, the stories we hear from tiny productions of only a few grand right up to those costing hundreds of millions is always the same – there's never enough money or time.

And when your movie's finished, the distributor has the right to completely change it and edit it (unless you're clever or powerful enough to have final cut written into your contract – good luck if you're just starting out). They might buy the finished product and then bury it with no publicity and advertising budget whatsoever after deciding it wasn't worth the investment after all. The executive you've been dealing might leave or get fired, his or her replacement not nearly as excited by your movie as their predecessor.

The process above will be familiar to anyone who's ever written a magazine, newspaper or website article on a freelance basis. It starts with a great idea you think a) is worth sharing with the world, and b) you want to make a living out of.

We're sometimes jealous of our professional colleagues on staff at newspapers, magazines or major websites because they have a platform to write virtually whatever they want (no matter how vacuous or unoriginal) and they can bring the resources of their employers to bear to make it happen.

And not just material resources, either. If you want to interview some important people for a story, which do you think will get you further past their gatekeepers – telling them you're writing for The New York Times/Wired/South China Morning Post/Gawker or saying you're working on an idea you hope to get published somewhere?

After you come up with the great idea for a story, you'll enter the same development period a movie goes through. You'll do research, work a little on the structure, take a lot of notes, maybe have a document dedicated to marketing the idea to prospective buyers.

In some cases you might even write the whole thing just to see where it takes you and have a finished product ready to sell (upside; if somebody buys it it's all ready. Downside; if nobody buys it you've done a whole lot of work for no financial recompense – always shaky ground when you work for yourself).

You might have the perfect outlet for it, one that buys a lot of your work and gives you the go ahead quickly. Or it might descend into your very own development hell, one that can last anything from weeks to years (the oldest 'live' ideas in my stock of stories are easily a decade old).

Something will emerge that will give you a new angle or more material to contribute. You'll make notes as new ideas about it pop into your head unbidden. You'll read and discover more about the topic, find new angles, hear or read the words of people in the field who have the potential to comment or contribute. It will morph, evolve and change with your own tastes and knowledge.

Then one day out of the blue when you pitch or even mention it, you'll get The Call – a commission. Like a movie that suddenly finds itself with financial backing, you'll have an investor, albeit one that pays you when it's all over rather than funding the project up front (that is, pays you after you call and email them a few more times and then go through their accounts payable lady who's only at work Monday and Tuesday. Oh, and she's at a dentists appointment at the moment, can you try her back tomorrow?)

The project will move into the most intensive period it will ever see as you scramble to bring it to fruition. The publication is like the film distributor or financier – they'll probably never give you enough time or money to do it the way you originally conceived, so you'll work day and night to get it done, alternately panicking and cutting corners.

Resources you were counting on will fall through because they're not available until it's too late to use them. More recent developments might have rendered your original thesis outdated or useless. You'll have to kill countless darlings because of time, availability and other constraints but you'll probably also find new ways of doing it better.

Luck, talent and tenacity will see you turn it in before the deadline, and it's then out of your hands. Just like passing it off to a distributor who might bury it, decide to release it next year or re-edit it to get a PG-13 rating, the publication who's paid you for content now owns it, and they can do whatever they like with it.

By the time it reaches an audience an often-indeterminate time later (a process you'll likely have little to no involvement with) it might have been through the hands of an overzealous subeditor who's completely changed the subtext. They might spell your name wrong in the byline. If it's in print it might get chopped carelessly and bloodily in half because of a late ad booking, losing so much content it doesn't even make sense anymore.

Of course, we (aspiring producers and freelance journalists) all toil under such conditions because there's always a chance of being one of the lucky few. Your small indie movie might really catch on, build slowly because of great buzz and end up conquering the cinematic world. Films from Slumdog Millionaire to Beasts of the Southern Wild have done just that.

In the same way, your story might appear in its entirety the way you intended, with your prose intact and the resources you fought so hard to gather in time – interviews and comments by prominent people, images and video clips - present and well-displayed. It might similarly catch on, spread out far and wide throughout the social media universe and make (or maintain) your name.

But whatever your experience of the final result, next time you hear that a movie studio or production company is looking for a development executive, go right ahead and call them. You're well qualified.

Lad mags, porn and objectification

I understand and sympathise with the Lose the Lad Mag movement and the people who support it, but their efforts are misdirected.

Any man will tell you how tempting the lure of naked or half-clothed women is because of lad mags, internet porn and the average billboard. Emotionally and physiologically, we know they appeal to our deeper, reptile brains.

But intellectually, most educated men in the western world know the poses, the big hair, the clothes painstakingly crafted to look like they're falling off and all the digital manipulation that goes on after the picture is taken is a carefully constructed artifice, presenting a cypher no real woman could possibly represent.

Consider the reason we have such trouble staying clear of sugary, salty and fatty foods. In nature (unaided by human ingenuity, that is), deep fried chicken, ice cream and crackers slathered with cream cheese are as rare as eternally teenaged, 36-24-36-shaped women who are constantly sexually receptive and have blemishless skin, gravity defying breasts, heavy lidded eyes and a sultry pout.

But photography, printing, Photoshop, mass-produced corn starch and the refining of sugar have let us surround ourselves with everything that gives us our drives but which nature provides only scarcely. From the genes on up we know how bad it is for us but it just... tastes... so... good.

The image presented by lad mags, porn and their economic cousins are similarly an oversupply of a very rare quality we're programmed to spend our lives seeking but were supposed to find very rarely – surviving instead on real food and real sex appeal.

The objectification path

Here's what the anti-porn and anti-lad mag crowd have right. Whether it's the hardcore kind anyone can find online or the (almost innocent, by comparison) coquettish looks and colour-corrected breasts staring out of lad mags, porn across the whole spectrum provides a big step towards letting men objectify and dehumanise women. A big step, but not the first one.

That first step is as much a part of nature as breathing and sleeping, something that goes back to our grunting, hairy, stone-tool beginnings. It's a woman looking at a powerful, socially worthy man and imagining babies with him. It's a man looking at a young, fertile woman and imagining sex with her.

Of course that's a very simplistic generalisation, but as both visual and sexual creatures our first interaction with a member of the opposite sex in our natural state is to look at them. The factor that restricted further objectification used to be that – long before you could move on to sex with them – you had to navigate the delicate social process that preceded it, whether it was offering her food with soft, assuring vocalisations or taking her to the movies.

Going through that process meant you had to get to know and accept the whole person, which by its very nature removes any trace of objectification. As human society has become more complicated, that process of familiarizing ourselves with potential mates sometimes convinces us they weren't worth pursuing in the first place, no matter how visually attractive we first found them.

Porn (and the technology that enables it, from cave paintings to computers) has always been about taking that step away. As porn says to its consumer; 'here's a stand-in for a real woman; just a body part in some cases, and she's the perfect mate – as receptive as she is attractive. There's no social groundwork to lay to win her over and she doesn't care how fat your are or your social status'.

That means when a man looks at a naked girl in a lad mag or a porn video, he is absolutely objectifying and dehumanizing her. The reason that can be harmful is because as any psychologist will tell you, men who dehumanise women are more likely to harbour a whole spectrum of detrimental intent – from holding negative or sexist attitudes to rape.

Often in sexual assault a woman is reduced to a vagina, a set of breasts, a body, maybe even a stand-in for someone else her attacker really wants to hurt – from his suffocating mother to hatred about his own 'impure' desires. In some ways it's the ultimate in objectification because her heart, mind and the rest of her humanity aren't even considered to exist as she suffers for the object her attacker has made her.

And when internet porn, suggestive billboards, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns for jeans and fragrances, lad mags and beauty sections in womens' magazines also exist, we don't just have the opportunity to objectify women, we're encouraged to.

Looking too closely

So if objectification is the problem, lad mags are certainly responsible. Problem is – as the above paragraph suggests – they're just one head of the hydra. The hearts of those who want to ban them are in the right place, they're just targeting too slender a locus of the whole issue.

But they're easy targets. Stopping online porn is probably impossible at this point, so the next likely offender on the scale is porn in print, produced by highly visible businesses in our own legal jurisdictions against whom we can lobby and protest. It's an effort to show society that objectifying women is not okay, and a worthy one.

But where's the line? Do we ban womens' underwear in department store catalogues? High school dance dresses? Make-up? Do we forbid women from showing an inch of skin like the extreme elements of Islam do, restricting their freedom altogether instead of objectifying them?

There's actually only one place the line can be drawn, only one potential preventative measure to stop the objectification from hurting women as individuals. Broad-strokes institutional measures and blanket bans isn't it.

The line rests with every individual man who might be tempted by a lad mag or porn site and might enjoy himself using them, but who can turn off the computer or close the magazine and go back to his life where women are his family members, co-workers, bosses, children, lovers or friends. He might fantasise about some of women in his life, but it's impossible for him to objectify them by virtue of the fact that he knows them as people, not body parts or fantasy figures.

A well-adjusted man knows a woman in a magazine seemingly begging him for sex is a carefully constructed and empty symbol, and he probably knows very well he's objectifying the real woman who forms its basis by being a consumer of it. It doesn't mean he's going to go out and rape the next woman he sees.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that there are men who will do that, and porn/lad mags/department store catalogues aren't helping – they're making it worse. But it's also why our target to combat the objectification of women can't be one slender facet of its propagation like lad mags (or jeans billboards, or the catwalk model industry), and neither can it be about top-down blocks or bans imposed upon them.

The answer; there's no simple answer

What should we do as a society? That's far less clear – it's probably got a lot to do with healthy sexual education in childhood, exposing young boys to representations of strong women in their lives, breaking the cycle of domestic violence, punishing and judging rapists instead of their victims and making feminism a conversation for (and about) everyone.

Boys are going to grow up seeing naked girls in magazines. They're going to see a consumer culture that places a woman's physical attractiveness as her most important value. They're going to see women in porn videos who say yes to anal sex every time and let their partners ejaculate on their faces, and they're going to think all women do that (girls are going to see that and think so too). Those ships might have well and truly sailed.

The answer is to use information and education to promote the kind of respect well-adjusted men grow up with, and use it early when objectification starts to take effect.

A lot of people die in car crashes. But instead of banning cars, we try to influence behaviour in individuals and change culture – make drink driving something to be ashamed of, educate drivers about road fatigue, etc.

I know – cars provide far more benefit than detriment to society so in cold statistical terms. The same can't be said about lad mags, which merely contribute to a publishing company's bottom line and as critics claim, might do more harm than good socially.

But the point is that banning lad mags is both looking at the problem too narrowly and enforcing top-down measures that will just enhance the effectiveness of every other potential trigger out there. The solution is to be found much farther back in the objectification pathway. It's far more complicated and nuanced than blanket bans, and it should be preventative instead of reactionary.

Measuring humanity

Here's what's tricky about explaining humans in scientific terms. When you consider yourself, your mental state, it's a series of wildly shifting points along a huge number of spectra. How you're feeling at the moment exists anywhere along degrees of attractiveness, contentedness, creativity, arousal, relaxation, anger, a sense of romance – even states we think of as purely physical such as hungry or tired have uniquely emotional elements.

The shifts along spectra in those waking states fill your waking hours. From the inside, they define you – you live inside them and will never escape them, and that's the constraining envelope we think of when we describe ourselves with the attribution 'I'. Everything else going on – from breathing to muscle contraction, dreams, fatigue after exercising – we attribute with the word 'my'. They're things that belong to us and we control, regulate and live with, but they're not 'I'.

The interesting thing is all that stuff going on in our bodies but outside 'I' is our only insight into that constant inner state. We can measure the extent to which heart rate speeds up, the adrenal glands start to overproduce, the bowel decouples any nervous sensation that it needs emptying and our pupils dilate, and that can tell a scientist when we're in fight or flight mode. We can measure heart rate, nasal dilation and blood flow to the genitals to signify sexual arousal, but any measurement we can take of anything in the realm of 'my' is crude and doesn't tell anything like the whole story.

Why is that 'I' so locked off? How hungry, horny, relaxed, frightened or creative we feel– all those points on spectra that define us are very ill-defined scientifically. The only evidence we have that they exist at all is because we all live in them.

At least, I know I do – because I can never experience the same sense of immersion in what you're feeling, I can only assume you have it too because your actions in the social and physical environment are the same as mine, but for all I know I might be the only living thing on Earth, the rest of you cleverly-programmed robots that don't experience the sensation of an 'I' any more than the toaster in my kitchen does.

Empirically there's no such thing as sexual arousal, there's just increased heart rate, increased blood flow, pupil dilation and all the other physical hallmarks of it. Evolution tells us they must combine to form some function to the organism, but that doesn't explain the feeling going on in the 'I'.

It seems all the machinations in the realm of 'my' give rise to that locked-off experiential narrative, inform on it, serve and comprise it, but everything in that inside realm is impossible for science to measure. It's built on far too many varying factors from far too many independent (and interdependent) physical, psychological and physiological systems that our measuring equipment of today can ever hope to keep track of.

Will that always be the case?