Acknowledgement of Country
Honi Soit operates and publishes on Gadigal land of the Eora nation. We work and produce this publication on stolen land where sovereignty was never ceded. The University of Sydney is a colonial institution. Honi Soit is a publication that prioritises the voices of those who challenge colonial rhetorics. We strive to continue its legacy as a radical left-wing newspaper providing students with a unique opportunity to express their diverse voices and counter the biases of mainstream media.
In This Edition...
Reactionary Beauty
People vs Power
Big Brother
The Lawbry Door
Growing Pains
Thirst for Blood
Stan Twitter
SRC Casework
Puzzles
Editors
Welcome back to Honi Soit.
The theme for this week’s edition is Paralysis. It’s a familiar feeling this time of year; the sun is setting earlier and the mid-semester break is creeping slowly towards us. I hope flicking through these pages will release you from uni-stupor. Creating this edition has freed me from the catatonia of autumn.
In these pages: Purny and I report on the Doctors’ Union strikes; Sofija Filipovic
brings home her experiences during the student protests in Serbia; Dalisha Cristina and Ramla Khalid analyse our social and dating lives in a technological panopticon; Lara Martins Fonseca explores the kafkaesque nature of our university.
In the feature article on page six, my wonderful reporter Madison Burland deep dives into the reactionary narratives subtly hidden in the everyday digital content we consume.
Companion Piece, Ava Broinowski
Ink & gouache on cold-pressed paper ‘What is keeping you here?’
Wherever you are, the square is. You can’t see the square. You cannot see normality until you see abnormality. The square and you made each other. Outside of the square is the world, so glorious and flowing. Unreeling, unyielding, always about to begin. But the square is of the world, too. We like to square off our ways of knowing to understand the flux. Which distinctions have you drawn, and
Purny Ahmed, Emilie Garcia-Dolnik, Mehnaaz Hossain, Annabel Li, Ellie Robertson, Imogen Sabey, Charlotte Saker, Lotte Weber, William Winter, Victor Zhang
On page 14, in the perspective section, I ruminate on paralysis and growing pains in my teenagehood.
Thank you to my lovely and dear friend Ava for the gorgeous cover art. This editorial is dedicated to everyone who has unparalysed me; you know who you are.
Love always, Mehnaaz <3
what are they serving? Between self and world, artifice and nature, work and life, mind and body. Perhaps these are useful lines. In any case, there you are. In your little square. Why can’t you move? What is keeping you here?
Ava is starting her honours year in philosophy in semester 2, 2025. She paints and writes poetry and essays, about epistemology, the idea of nature, imagination, and scepticism.
Sophie Bagster, Sath Balasuriya, Calum Boland, Madison Burland, Dalisha Cristina, Pia Curran, Sofija Filipovic, Lara Martins Fonseca, Lachlan Griffiths, Ramla Khalid, Alan Lau Kam Lun, Eleanor McAnelly, Therese Meney, Kiah Nanavati, Marc Paniza, Firdevs Sinik, Clara Tan, Will Thorpe, Shayla Zreika
Letter to the Editor Dear Honey
Dear Honi,
I was enjoying my retirement from the crossword game, sipping coronas on the beach, tending to my bees, content in a peaceful, post crossword life
When I saw my former nom de plume “Some Hack” had been stolen, and used without my knowledge. While originally outraged, I upon reflection sat down and did the new “Some Hack’s” puzzle and quickly was won over by their love of the grid and witty word play. I truly felt like the values of the Some Hack crossword has been respected, it was a few typos and mistakes away from feeling like one of my own.
Like the Poet Laureate or Dread Pirate Roberts, I am hoping the moniker of Some Hack can be passed down through the generations to keep the spirit of the Honi Crossword alive. And a reminder to all that you do not need to be a great genius to start writing crosswords for Honi, but just some hack!
Signing off for the last time
Original “Some Hack”
Dear Some Hack,
2021 was the year I started doing the Honi crossword religiously, never missing a week, always looking forward to picking up a copy on the stands every Wednesday (and on the lucky occasions Tuesdays evenings).
The first page that I would always flip to was the puzzles page, because I knew something good was there for me, something by MissEelKink, Tournesol, CloudRunner, The Great and The G(r) eek, Jeckiboy, and of course Some Hack
Prior to my adopting the moniker of Some Hack, I was quite content to simply enjoy the puzzles page week after week.
Disaster struck during welcome week this year. The crossword in the S1W0 edition was missing! Of course several willing disciples of the grid (myself included) went up to the Honi stall volunteering their efforts. Upon being accepted, I thought about what name I should adopt and I remembered the name that stuck out to me Some Hack
With no way of finding you, the original Some Hack, I could only hope that the crosswords I penned could live up to the puzzles that made the week of myself and so many others. I’m glad you wrote and have given your blessing. I can only hope that when my time with Honi is up, the name Some Hack will live on.
Yours, across and down,
Some Hack, the Apprentice
Dear Honey,
I’m in an interracial and interfaith relationship and I thought we were doing so well (Our respective circumstances do not allow conversion of faith or interfaith marriages). We promised to live in the moment since we’re still young, and we’ve been going strong, 3 years! Then suddenly he said he feels like he’s leading me on and nothing can come out of this relationship and that nothing I say to console him will make him feel better about this. He also said this doesn’t mean we’re breaking up though, he just wanted to let it out?? I am speechless and we haven’t talked to eachother for a week. How do I fix this? He loves me and I love him. He just tends to make self-deprecating comments and I get so helpless when he does. He’s been there for me when I was depressed but I don’t know how to help him. Give me some advice please!!
Kate
Dear Kate,
First off, I want to tell you that I understand. Genuinely, it helps (a little) when you feel less alone in this. A couple of the editors at Honi are experiencing very similar romances at the moment. Trust me, we know how heartbreaking it is. It’s a difficult reality to wonder if you are going to lose the person you love to a difference in religion or beliefs. There isn’t a lot I can say to console you regarding that potential truth.
The first piece of advice I would give is… talk to your partner. Maybe you took a week for space, or you’re not sure how to talk to each other with this newfound information, but the only person who can tell you what is going through your partner’s head is himself. It’s important that you have your facts before making rash decisions.
Secondly, you need to know what you want and what you feel. You two spent three years living in the moment, but I think the time has finally caught up to you guys where you need to actually decide where you want this to go.
If you choose to leave, you need to be ready for the pain. But if you choose to stay, you both need to be ready to fight for it.
In love,
Honey
Weekly Photo Competition
(5 x $20 vouchers!)
Submit to @usyd. thruyoureyes on Instagram
Protest Albanese and Dutton
Wednesday 16th of April 7:30 pm
Parramatta Square
SASS: Coffee and Conversations
Thursday 17th of April 3–5 pm
Courtyard Cafe
In Conversation with Ellen Dahl Tuesday 29th of April 1–2 pm
Verge Gallery
Various Characters 7th to 17th of May 7:30–9 pm
Flight Path Theatre
Protests erupt at Sydney universities over IDF campus events
Students and staff from the University of Sydney (USyd), the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) staged protests on Wednesday against the presence of Israeli Defence Force (IDF) reservists on their campuses. The events, hosted by proIsrael groups StandWithUs Australia and Israel-Is, were promoted as “immersive VR experiences” and “interfaith panel discussions” designed to foster social cohesion. However, critics argue the events served to normalise and legitimise the actions of a military accused of war crimes in Gaza.
At USyd, approximately 75 protesters gathered at the university’s F23 Administration Building at 6pm, following a similar action by 40 students earlier that afternoon at UTS. A simultaneous event was held at UNSW. The protests were organised by student group Students Against War (SAW), with strong support from academic staff, Palestinian solidarity groups, and antiZionist Jewish activists.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” protesters chanted, waving Palestinian flags and holding signs that denounced the university administration’s decision to allow the events to proceed.
Protesters Condemn University Complicity
The backlash came after open letters were submitted to university leadership. At UTS, over 200 students and staff signed a petition
demanding the event be cancelled. A similar letter from SAW at USyd garnered over 120 signatures in under 24 hours.
“It is shocking that personnel from a military that established legal and human rights organisations contend is currently committing genocide should be invited onto campus,’ the USyd letter stated.
Despite this, university management allowed the events to go ahead. In response, students and staff voiced their outrage during the protests.
Jacob Starling, a student and chair of the rally at USyd, called out the university on alleged double standards:
“The organisations behind this event, Israel-Is and StandWithUs, both exist explicitly for the purpose of laundering Israel’s blood-stained reputation,” Starling said. “Pro-Palestine students are threatened with disciplinary action just for erecting a trestle table on campus. Meanwhile, the university is inviting active war criminals.”
University Crackdown on Palestine Solidarity
In the days leading up to the protest, students received emails from the university administrators warning of disciplinary consequences for their involvement in the 26th March National Day of Action for Palestine. Organisers claim this is part of a broader campaign to suppress proPalestinian advocacy on campus.
Jeannette Monteiro, another organiser from SAW, addressed the crowd: “We’re standing here today as staff and students in absolute outrage with the University’s decision to host an event featuring members of the Israeli Defence Forces — the very military actively carrying out genocidal slaughter in Gaza.”
Monteiro announced the launch of a campaign to hold a Student General Meeting (SGM), aimed at overturning USyd’s controversial Campus Access Policy and rejecting the recently adopted Universities Australia definition of antisemitism, which students argue is being misused to silence criticism of Israel.
“We will continue to agitate, we will mobilise, and we will disrupt until all ties USyd has with Israel are cut,” she said. “No IDF war criminals on campus. No genocide apologists on our campus. Free Palestine.”
Jewish Anti-Zionist and Staff Support
A Jewish speaker from Jews Against the Occupation ’48 spoke at the USyd protest, rejecting the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism: “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism…Welcoming this organisation makes a mockery of this university’s stated values of respect, non-harassment, and antiracism.”
The speaker also pointed out that a similar event scheduled at Monash University was cancelled after public pressure — a decision not replicated by USyd or UTS.
Kiah Nanavati reports.
Academic staff also lent their voices to the protest. One lecturer told the crowd: “How dare these organisations come to my work and talk about ‘social cohesion’ after the state of Israel has killed over 60,000 people in Gaza. Shame on university management fir thinking this genocide apologism is appropriate in my workplace.”
Ongoing Demands
The protesters called for:
The cancellation of all partnerships between Australian universities and Israeli institutions, including USyd’s exchange with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose Mount Scopus campus is located in East Jerusalem and considered an illegal settlement under international law.
The repeal of USyd’s Campus Access Policy, which critics argue restricts student organising.
The rejection of the Universities Australia definition of antisemitism.
Institutional support for Palestinian students and staff affected by the war in Gaza.
As chants echoed through the sandstone corridors of the University of Sydney, the message was clear: student activists are prepared to escalate until their demands are met.
“Free, free Palestine!” the crowd roared, as the protest concluded.
“BBQs have been excellent”: April SRC Council Honi Soit reports.
On Wednesday 2nd April, the SRC held its second council for the year after quorum was called at 6:23pm. Strap in as we recount the harrowing four hours we spent in the ABS dungeons.
Angus Fisher, the President (NSWLS), opened the council with the Acknowledgement of Country. He went through the resignations, asking “I have to approve the resignations? What if I say no?” The resignations were approved.
Fisher went through the Presidential Reports, noting that the Undergraduate Fellow had still not been elected and would be filled until the closure of the election by Fisher and Bryson Constable (USU President, Liberal).
Tragedy and Farce: Motion Q1
Motion Q1, moved by Shovan Bhattarai (SAlt) and Taleen Jameel (SAlt), sought to oppose Trump and the normalisation of far-right policies, demanding that “Foreign Minister Penny Wong apologise for attending Trump’s inauguration in January.”
Taleen Jameel (SAlt) spoke in favour stating the two faces of Labor: one that claims to want to fight fascism, and one that paves the way for it. One is reminded of the famous Marx quote about tragedy and farce.
“Instead of defending trans rights, they went in for a review of trans rights. Whenever the Labor party is under pressure, they bow down. “
All’s Fair in Love and Assessments: Motion Q3
Motion Q3 called for fairer assessments, including measures like prohibiting exams
from being weighted over 50 per cent, not running examinations on weekends during semester, and not offering assessments in week 13 for subjects that had exams after the semester.
Lilah Thurbon (Groots) moved an amendment to add a platform stating “The SRC recognises that financial stress from the extortionate cost of living and the exploitation of students from the corporate university, contributes to the student mental health crisis and calls for free education now.”
Centre Unity and NSWLS voted against the amendment, which carried nevertheless.
Annabel Petit (SAlt) spoke for the amended motion: “[Motions like this] all distract from what is the key issue causing mental stress on young people and students…two thirds of students live below the poverty line… these are the kinds of questions students from Labor Right refuse to acknowledge.”
Petit added, ““For the party that invented HECS to be like ‘we’re against the student mental health crisis’… brother, you invented it! You created it and you can fix it.”
Luke Mešterović (Groots, 2023 Honi editor) gave us a lesson about Qing-era China warning us of the consequences of small piecemeal aims when the system is collapsing around us. “Dr Sun Yat Sen is turning in his grave… At least Bob Hawke was a big idea right-wing guy! Put your soul into it! This makes me sad!”
Stand in Solidarity: Motion R6
Motion R6 was moved from the floor, by Vince Tafea (Groots) and Remy Lebreton
(Groots), speaking to “Solidarity with ASMOF NSW and their upcoming industrial action.”
Vince Tafea (Groots): “Doctors deserve more than acknowledgement for their contributions… The most vulnerable in our community are not getting the help they need.” Holding up his Medicare card — an action widely used by Labor politicians and hacks alike this election cycle — pushed NSWLS to respond to the failure of the Labor party to address ASMOF’s demands: “I’m sure Labor would love to see this… this right here is a Medicare card… what the fuck does it do if there are no doctors to see you?”
This motion was carried.
Serbian Student Solidarity: Motion
R1
Motion R1 was for the SRC to stand in solidarity with student protestors in Serbia against their government’s corruption.
Sofija Flipovic (Groots) recounted her experience after 3 months in Serbia having participated in the protests: “For 24 hours, they organised themselves faculty by faculty… the community came out, fed them, entertained them, joined in solidarity in music. I truly can’t explain to you in words the feeling of being there.”
This motion was carried, and the SRC took a solidarity photo. Hopefully, our SRC can learn from the Serbs!
USU Inc.: Motion Q6
Bryson Constable, USU President, moved a motion to incorporate the USU. He spoke for the motion: “The USU not being incorporated means we cannot enter into some contracts
and we have a greater liability. Incorporation has been sought after by presidents for many years.”
He added, “It helps us to avoid being defrauded… It protects our membership and encourages more USU members to participate in governance… The drawbacks are few.”
Thurbon contradicted this, saying “Incorporation doesn’t actually require the specific restructure of the board… It is unclear why they both want a smaller term and increase the stipends they are receiving.”
The motion failed. Honi witnessed several Grassroots councillors approach Constable after the motion failed asking him to sign a written statement affirming that he will resign and thus not become IPP. Constable declined to sign.
The Final Ten: Motion Q8
Finally onto motion Q8, appointing the legendary Victor Zhang as the 10th and final Honi Soit editor for 2025. Yay!
“A large part of why I started writing [for Honi]… was because of Khanh Tran. I’m glad to be on the editorial side of things now,” Victor said.
The motion carried, meaning Victor could finally get paid. Rest in peace, Khanh.
Read full article online.
“Can’t see a doctor? Ask the Premier”: NSW Doctors’ Union goes on strike
Thousands of doctors across NSW went on strike this week, from Tuesday 8th April to Thursday 10th April. The three-3-day industrial action was led by members of The Doctors’ Union — Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation (ASMOF) New South Wales.
St George Hospital strike recap
Honi was present at St George Hospital on 9th April, day two of the strike. Hundreds of doctors from different departments and hospitals all across Sydney congregated in front of the Hospital. ASMOF councillors spoke to the crowd about the urgent public healthcare crisis in NSW.
Dr Behny Samadi, ICU doctor and ASMOF councillor, spoke to the NSW public healthcare system’s crisis of understaffed hospitals and overworked doctors. Dr Samadi cited ASMOF’s demands, urging doctors’ to fight for safe working hours, rostering conditions, and pay parity.
Dr Dominic Horne, anaesthetics Fellow and ASMOF councillor, spoke at the St George strike. “I call on the Health Minister, I call on New South Wales Health…stop trying to bully us.” He spoke against NSW Health’s anti-union tactics, and emphasised the need to stop “the talent drain from our state” as doctors leave NSW for higher pay.
The strike contingent marched from the Hospital to Premier Chris Minns’ office, chanting “safe conditions, safe care!” In front
of Minns’ office, hundreds of doctors angrily chanted “we’ll be back!”
Mythbusters: common misconceptions about the Doctors’ Union strike
1. All doctors are already well-paid.
ASMOF is a union for doctors working within the public healthcare system. Salaries in the public system are significantly lower than those in the private sector.
NSW is, on average, 30 per cent behind doctors’ salaries in other Australian states.
Junior Medical Officers (JMOs) are paid $38 per hour, which is a $78,000 annual salary. JMOs in Victoria and Western Australia make $83,000 annually. JMOs in Queensland make $90,000.
2. The strike was all about getting a pay rise.
This is incorrect. ASMOF has 10 key demands for Award reform, many concerned with unsafe working conditions.
The aim of increasing pay is for pay parity with the rest of Australia, remuneration commensurate with labour and experience, and to prevent the mass exodus of NSW doctors to the private sector or other states.
3. Doctors’ strikes put patients at risk.
Emergency departments and critical care units remained fully staffed at regular levels.
Purny Ahmed and Mehnaaz Hossain report.
All other hospital departments, if striking, ensured ‘skeleton staffing’ to operate at public holiday levels.
Honi had a chat with Dr Dominic Horne about the Doctors’ Union strike and the Minns government.
Honi Soit: Doctors haven’t been on strike since 1998. What was the tipping point this time?
Dr Dominic Horne: Everybody is at work each day knowing more of their colleagues are leaving because of the Award conditions in this state: the working conditions… there’s no safe hours clause. [...] Staff specialists have to come in in the middle of the night for emergency surgery, life-saving procedures [as well as] to deliver babies, just to not be remunerated whatsoever and then to be treated with contempt from their employer, [it] has just pushed people to the edge.
HS: What would you say to your colleagues who have yet to join the union action?
DH: Why not? We all feel the pressure of trying to care for patients, and we all feel an employer who’s threatening us, but I encourage them not to be intimidated and to stand up to this government to provide safe patient care. We need award reform to provide safe patient care.
HS: What do you think about Chris Minns using the local health district as a way to gain political points? He came to St George Hospital before the 2022 state election to campaign and made promises about fixing the healthcare system.
DH: Then come talk to us today, Premier Minns. Because we’re trying to find you, we’re at the hospital, we’re here at your offices in your own local health district and we’ve wanted to talk to you for 18 months. We’ve been at the bargaining table where you haven’t given us anything to talk to you about. You’ve sent representatives who don’t have the authority to make any decisions to fix our Award. So, it’s time you come talk to us again.
More information on the Doctors’ Union “Can’t see a doctor? Ask the Premier” campaign can be found at https://www. cantseeadoctor.com.au
“This is the Generation of Liberation”: Sydney rallies against the complicity of Western leaders as Israel continues the Palestinian Genocide
On Sunday 6th of April, Palestine Action Group (PAG) gathered in the streets of the CBD in protest after Western politicians failed to respond to calls for humanitarian aid and a ceasefire in Gaza.
The rally was held after Israel broke the ceasefire deal on the 18th of March, and continues to bomb civilians in ‘safe zones’, including Rafah.
PAG co-chair Josh Lees began the protest with an Acknowledgement of Country and drew connections between the unceded land ownership of Indigenous Australians and the Palestinians in Gaza. He led a series of chants to demand the ultimate withdrawal of Israeli military out of occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Syria.
“This is not just a genocide perpetrated by the leaders in Tel Aviv, but a genocide perpetrated from Washington, Canberra, Berlin, Paris, London, and the capitals of the Arab world who continue to support Israel’s barbarism,” Lees said.
“Hope lies in people’s power,” said Lees as he introduced the first speaker of the rally.
Ethan Floyd, USYD’s very own, leader of the 2024 Student Encampments, Wiradjuri man and activist.
“What’s happening in Gaza is not a conflict, it is not self-defence, it is a calculated campaign of annihilation carried out on an industrial scale,” Floyd said.
He describes the ongoing Israeli military campaign as “collective punishment on the population of Gaza”, and draws upon his own identity and channels the crowd’s collective
outrage against the marginalisation of minority communities.
“We all come from communities that know what it means to be dispossessed… your land stolen, brutalised, and turned into a symbol or a threat and never to be seen as fully human.”
Floyd’s speech captivates his audience as he moves to speak about the upcoming Australian Federal Elections to take place next month. He holds majority parties to account for “there is a price to pay for their complicity… [which] they will pay come May 3rd”.
“We refuse to live in a world where genocide is dressed up as geopolitics and genocide is shrugged off as a complicated issue.”
“This is the generation of intifada. This is the generation of liberation,” said Floyd, before leading the crowd in chants for a “Free Palestine”.
Denise from Healthcare Workers for Palestine is the second speaker of the rally. As a Lebanese-Australian healthcare worker, she pledges to remain steadfast alongside the First Nations community in Australia towards the global “fight for justice and truth telling”.
“I feel sick to my stomach… watching the criminal attacks by the Israeli occupation on the healthcare system in Gaza,” said Denise. “The IDF has carried out at least 670 attacks on healthcare services and facilities since October 7. At least 1200 healthcare workers have been murdered in Gaza and thousands more injured.”
She goes on to recognise the destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes to the healthcare services and facilities in Lebanon, despite its ceasefire agreement last year. “The Israeli military has attacked 67 hospitals, 56 primary healthcare centres, and has killed 222 Lebanese medical and emergency relief workers,” Denise said.
Denise recalls the repetitive nature of the Israeli military strikes, stating they are enabled by “the impunity of knowing the world leaders will not lift a finger to do anything about it.”
Denise ended her speech with an audio testimonial of Dr Mohammed Moustapha, a medical professional from Perth volunteering in Gaza. He recounted the scarcity of medical supplies and the difficulty in conducting surgeries on injured civilians, including “seven young girls whose legs are to be amputated without anesthesia.”
Jepke Goudsmit from Jews Against the Occupation ‘48 shared a poem she wrote as a means of “channeling our rage”. Drawing inspiration from a famous Billy Holiday song, she connected the resistance of the Civil Rights Movement with the pro-Palestinian fight for “telling truth to power”.
Goudsmit’s message was carried onto the fourth and final speaker of the rally, Yasmine Johnson.
Johnson, Leader of the UTS Students for Palestine Movement and fundamental activist during the Student Encampments last year, began her speech by calling out the ongoing detention of Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil.
Shayla Zreika reports.
She shed light onto the role of students in the Pro-Palestinian movement and called out the US Republican administration for cancelling “hundreds of student visas.”
Johnson also holds Western jurisdictions to account beyond the key players. “Germany has said in the last 5 days, they will deport German non-citizens attending pro-Palestine rallies,” she said.
“Our world leaders are hypocrites. They are cynical and they know it.”
In Australia, Johnson said the government “has barely said a word”, with Labor leaders Albanese and Penny Wong “sitting aside while Israel massacres Palestinians”. She also called out the Liberal party, saying Dutton supports Trump’s plans to “ethnically cleanse the Palestinians” and “who said the Palestinian refugees coming into Australia would disrupt unity and cohesion in this country.”
The next protest by PAG will be held on Wednesday the 16th of April at 7.30pm at ABC Studios Parramatta Square to demand discourse at the site of the broadcasted electoral debate between Dutton and Albanese. Following that, the next Hype Park protest will be held on Sunday the 27th of April at 1pm.
Prior, Lees also encouraged the crowd to attend the Palm Sunday protest against war and for peace at Belmore Park on Sunday the 13th of April at 2pm.
Read full article online.
Dr Horne speaking at St George Hospital
Photo credit: ASMOF NSW
It’s becoming harder and harder to separate reactionary dog whistles from general self-care or selfimprovement content online. The way these narratives are normalised digitally is excessively gendered and insidious. The rhetoric targeting men and women is different, but both achieve reactionary outcomes: reminding women that their purpose is to be subservient and constantly focused on curation of the self, and encouraging ‘alpha’ masculinity, power, and dominance in men.
The thing about sexism is that it is not dying; it is changing and evolving into a more palatable form that’s weaving its way into our modern discourse and social narratives — captured by corporations, and enabled by algorithms. The new conservatism relies on a system of constant selfpatrolling.
If you look at ‘alpha male’ improvement content, you’ll often find a pattern; none of them feature women explicitly, but consistently degrade women through subtle messaging. For example, Ashton Halls is a trending male influencer, whose content focuses on the typical big three for any self-proclaimed ‘alpha’ man: working out, American Psychoesque morning routines, and God. He recently posted a morning routine video that went viral. While most people have downplayed it as a meme, the subtle degradation of women he and so many others integrate into ‘alpha male’ content is being passively consumed by millions and does have a very real risk.
Hall’s content seems to be focused on self improvement, with gym progress shots and daily vlogs that seem, if incredibly obnoxious and embarrassing, otherwise unproblematic. While his ridiculous lifestyle is not necessarily a major problem, it’s the close-up clips of him smashing his Saratoga water bottle and the camera cutting to a nameless, faceless woman’s hands as she cleans his mess up that is concerning. His completely illogical morning routine, where he wakes up at 4am and she serves him breakfast at 8am is not necessarily the problem; it’s the camera focusing only on her
hands as she serves him. Perhaps that’s her preference, but it’s a subtle way to degrade her by limiting her personhood to something that only comes into frame, visually and functionally, for servitude.
The problem isn’t as simple as the idea that young boys are being indoctrinated by figures as cartoonishly misogynistic as Andrew Tate. Instead, it’s the casual but pervasively misogynistic way these men treat and tokenise women that solidifies a subconscious message: this is how women should occupy your ideal life; this is a good way to interact with women; this is what a woman is for. It’s clear from the popularity of videos like these, especially as they skyrocket in views amongst young boys, that the manosphere has evolved from a fringe, evidently sexist subculture into something more mainstream and terrifyingly subtle.
The new conservatism relies on a system of constant selfpatrolling.
Reactionary narratives in content that is catered to women takes a very different form, but shares the same message: a woman’s purpose is to be seen and marketed to men, by men, for men. The form it takes is, arguably, even more insidious than the subtle nature of the unseen women in male self-improvement videos. For women, in recent years, excessive selfobsession with beauty and femininity is rebranded as self-care. It is there as a sexist reminder that women’s value is only in our adherence to the regime of beauty. Every single elaborate ‘self-care’ beauty trend or narrative circulating recently is ridiculously all-consuming. Brands are no longer selling products but selling lifestyles and visions: the ideal woman, the ideal morning routine, the ideal vanity setup. One has to look no further than the headache-inducing continuous scroll of short-form ‘feminine’ content on any app: the ‘Morning Shed’, where women lather on layers and layers of gel, cream, face tape, and other
concoctions before bed so they can wake up, ‘shed’ it all off, and appear beautiful; ‘Face Gym’, where women contort their facial muscles in spasmesque ‘exercises’; endless beauty, skincare, and makeup hauls; plastic surgery before-and-after videos. It never ends. Whether it’s drugstore 50-step makeup routines or luxury five-step skincare routines, it all relies on consumption and constant selfpatrolling.
Explicitly harmful narratives, like the body trends and promotion of disordered eating in the 2000s, have just been repackaged in slightly softer, more subtle tones. This does not mean reactionary and damaging rhetoric no longer exists. If you type the words ‘My Ideal Self’ into the TikTok search bar you’ll be greeted with a slew of posts all focused on how you can become the best version of yourself; a self-care motto for 2025 filled with ‘Literary It Girls’ and ‘Pilates Princesses’. These new, trendy archetypes are the repackaging: a way to make these ideas more socially acceptable because they fit into a guise of self improvement, whilst disregarding the fact that these aesthetic goals are unattainable standards that need excessive wealth, time, and privilege in order to be maintained. These narratives all share the same end goal, which is to get women to worry endlessly about how they look. Beauty as an end goal will always be inherently fascist, because there is no definitive end. When women are busy worrying about how they can market themselves, they are easier to control.
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
Margaret Atwood warned us of this. When you chase the attainment of ‘ideal’ woman status, through these endless beautification rituals — even when you think you’re doing it for yourself, these concepts are not birthed in a vacuum — you’re almost always buying into a reactionary narrative.
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything
run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal
or
down
on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy…You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
On the contrary, ‘alpha male’ content places a significant emphasis on what men can do — what they’re capable of doing physically and mentally, not just what they’re capable of looking like and buying. It is not just aesthetic, it is action. Women, however, are almost incorporeal; entirely aesthetic. The ‘Literary It Girl’ is smart, but that’s not where her value lies. It’s in the fact that she is not only smart but she’s hot too. If ‘Literary It Girl’ wasn’t attractive, she would not be a goal, no matter how intelligent she is. The idea is that intelligence in women is only valuable if you are also attractive.
These ideas are not new. We have seen them before. The idea that the dream woman, or your ideal self, is the woman that can “do it all” — be hot, be smart, be docile but interesting but also compliant — is the same neoliberal, second-wave feminist rhetoric that is used to suppress women in household labour. The girlboss supermum archetype: she works full time but she also looks after the kids, keeps the house clean, and is flawlessly put together at every P&C meeting. Look at any primary school class and the amount of children who describe their
Madison Burland rejects reactionary rhetoric.
Art by Lotte Weber
Beauty as an end goal will always be inherently fascist, because there is no definitive end. When women are busy worrying about how they can market themselves, they are easier to control.
mum as a type of ‘supermum’, and the husbands that describe their wives as self-sacrificing primary caregivers. Considering most of them, in this economy, also hold down jobs, it is not a cute gesture of appreciation but rather an unrealistic expectation. Additionally, this archetype is heavily racialised; non-white mothers, often marginalised and lower income, have historically always had to parent and provide but are widely ignored in this discourse. Nevertheless, mothers should not be expected to be able to do it all. The fact that this sexist division of labour is still, to this day, not only viewed as normal but marketed as empowering and feminist, is a way to maintain inequality, denigrate the care economy, and keep taking women’s unpaid labour for granted.
It’s the casual but pervasively misogynistic way these men treat and tokenise women that solidifies a subconscious message: this is how women should occupy your ideal life; this is a good way to interact with women; this is what a woman is for.
The issue with online content peddling reactionary narratives exceeds just beauty and consumerism; there has also been a concerning resurgence of anti-intellectualism and infantilisation geared towards women. Content and humour based on the premise of ‘bimboism’ plagues our society by not only spreading the narrative that women are too stupid to understand complex topics, but also feeding directly into marketing ploys for companies who profit off of the alleged silliness of being a girl. The phrase “I’m just a girl!” is used to death, to the point where it can downplay women’s intelligence and pre-assume incompetence, despite the fact that Gwen Stefani’s band
‘No Doubt’ uses the song to critique a patriarchal society.
“Oh, I’m just a girl, all pretty and petite / So don’t let me have any rights.”
Rhetoric against women working is also becoming worryingly more common, echoing along the lines of “this is who you’re asking to work”,
Now is not the time for antiintellectualism or this specific brand of anti-work rhetoric. In America, Trump’s administration is currently working on a bill that could make it harder for married women to vote — at this point, anything which contributes to the infantilization of women further is dangerous. The narrative that we’re ‘too hot to work’ is not a fuck you to capitalism, as some may claim, but a way to encourage women to renounce financial independence. As long as late-stage capitalism exists, women should be financially independent,
promoting helplessness is not fun nor meaningless, but rather a way to fall susceptible to financial dependency on men, and continue the cycle of gender oppression.
It’s imperative that we resist the allure of ironic sexism, even if it becomes thinly veiled in fun and sarcasm, because it is ultimately very damaging to our rights and treatment as women. It has not even been three generations of full financial independence for women, and we are already seeing the normalisation of reactionary narratives masquerading as irony which, in conjunction with the rise of the far-right worldwide, should concern all women.
causes that makes it harder
current political climate is not one in which reactionary narratives about women, in any form, should be echoed. Women’s rights are being increasingly stripped away.
another form of control, and fascism thrives on control. In Australia, one in four women have experienced domestic, family, or sexual violence; continued National Action Plans have yet to address the growing femicide crisis. In light of this, embracing rhetoric
By indulging in these narratives, as a woman, you play the game they want you to: separation is key for control. Fascism relies on separation of self and state order to continue to thrive. When we operate as a digital aesthetic and shell of a real person, crafting our self-actualisation based on aesthetics and internalising marketing, we become easier to control. When we engage with infantilising content, we normalise the silent degradation of women’s intellectual capacity in a world which is already loudly implementing sexist policies and failing to stop violence against women. We lose our ability to think critically beyond the self, to reckon with the state and consider issues within our government, our media, and the world.
The normalisation of reactionary narratives relies on distraction and misdirection. Reactionary content targets men and women through a subtle self-patrolling system masquerading simply as self-care, ‘aesthetics’, consumerism, and anti-intellectualism. When you are too busy focusing on the strict fulfilment of gender norms to reach an aesthetic ‘ideal self’ you do not have the time nor energy to realise how reactionary this content and behaviour is. You are easier to control when preoccupied. We should question why these narratives have become more prominent online, and look at who stands to gain from the relentless self-obsession that plagues your participation in archetypes and aesthetics.
The People vs the Power
What We Can Learn From the Serbian Student Protests
Sofija Filipovic reflects and organises.
On 1st November 2024, an awning collapsed at a train station in Novi Sad, Serbia, claiming the lives of sixteen people. Upon investigation into who was responsible for the tragedy, the government responded with what has, in their last thirteen years of power, become the norm: lies, corruption, and deceit. They refused to release documentation pertaining to the recent renovation of the station roof, suspectedly because the documents would reveal that the government dealt with shady contractors to save money and line their own pockets.
Fed up with the absolute disrepair that the government — headed by President Aleksandar Vucic — had put the country into, students decided to take action. In November they began a physical blockade of their universities, faculty by faculty, city by city.
They took to the streets, amassing widespread support from the community with the simple message: enough is enough, get this corrupt government out.
I arrived in Serbia to visit my family just as these protests were starting. In having many friends who were heavily involved in organising, I became engrossed in the protests themselves. For context, I had spent just over a year in student politics at the University of Sydney (USyd), and even though I was never a headkicker or a BNOC, I was privy to a lot of goings-on through being on exec and involved with organising. All this is to say: I saw and heard some things.
Over the three months that I spent in Serbia I watched the protests grow and evolve. In the process, I compared the organising and success of the Serbian actions to those that I had experienced at USyd. There are obvious caveats in these comparisons, not least the difference in the organising causes, which I do recognise. But I do not believe this wholly justifies and explains why USyd student organising isn’t as widely successful as the Serbian student movement.
First and foremost is the culture surrounding political organising in general, especially in this generation of students. In Serbia, I had the sense that despite the wide ranges of political ideals, groups, personalities, faculties between student organisers, there was a mutual understanding that the fight at hand was larger than partisanship or petty squabble.
Such comradeship is, I believe, gravely missing from the USyd left.
The self-aggrandising, egocentric attitude adopted by larger Trotskyist groups as well as centre left partisan groups (seriously, why are there 4 Labor factions?) does little to both engage the masses of students necessary to create groundbreaking movements and to promote healthy collaboration between groups that are already engaged in student politics.
This is not to say that this is at all, or even majorly, a fault of student politicians themselves. It is quite clear to me that in Australia the average student lives in a state of political apathy due to the ruling class’ ability to keep the middle and working class teetering just on the edge of complete destruction, in a somewhat dispirited complacency that lends itself to inaction
and indifference. This complacency is unfortunately not available to the working class of a country like Serbia. It is all intertwined however, and the question I kept asking myself while at the protests in Belgrade was “They’re even getting the frat bros out on the streets?!”
It was baffling to me that the overall culture skewed positively towards the idea of protest, rather than against it. So many around me at USyd have echoed sentiments to me that justified nonparticipation through the notion that ‘someone else’ would fix it. This is precisely the attitude that perpetuates the culture of apathy that those in power abuse to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
The reality is, no one else will fix it; every citizen has to engage to create change.
Notably, student politicians use, or rather abuse, the art of debate and the organising space to create division between themselves, rather than recognising the immensely greater power they could hold in unity and solidarity (puns unintended). I do recognise the importance of having many different political groups, with pluralist beliefs in an organising space, but I also believe that there is an art to knowing when to put the cause before one’s selfish, partisan, pursuits.
Let me contextualise this using the monthly Students’ Representative Council meetings as an example. Council meetings are meant for debate. However, the state of emotional drainage that on e finds oneself in after six hours of yelling, screaming, and insults is counter-productive, counter-intuitive, and does little to “build” any of the movements that we are fighting
for. Council effectively serves as a dickmeasuring contest where a Trotskyist headkicker who’s been in student politics since I was in Year 9 yells at the room about how many posters they’ve put up to build a certain action, and how the rest of us should be ashamed that we didn’t put up as many. Criticism of one another does keep us accountable, but we have to know where to stop.
Lastly, there is much to be learnt from the Serbian student protestors when it comes to the creativity and innovation in the types of actions that are being organised. An almost complete media blackout in the country led to the genius and inspiring idea of students to take their message to the communities that would be least likely to hear it. They made a pilgrimage across the country on foot, stopping in rural towns where they were met with love and support, a sure indication of the mass opinion of these protests from the community.
It is creativity like this, as well as the drive, stamina, and collaboration which I have discussed above that would propel the effectiveness and reach of organising if implemented by our student politicians here.
Photography by Pavla Kalamanda
A Reminder of How Essential Our Essential Workers Are
Therese Meney unpacks the NSW Doctors’ Union strike.
For a brief moment, let’s reminisce and embrace the déjà vu of the COVID pandemic. For months, we were homebound, living off a daily diet of Uber Eats, analysing Taylor Swift’s Evermore or the anticipated Friends Reunion, and drafting up another email about why we couldn’t join the Zoom due to “unforeseen internet problems”.
However, it was in the midst of all this that the term “essential workers” became plastered on our televisions and news pages; politicians riding on the coattails of burnt-out and high-demand health workers. Medical staff were forced out onto the frontlines amidst absolute chaos, with miserable navigation from political leaders because, to be fair, no one knew quite how to navigate a pandemic to begin with. Doctors, nurses, and midwives didn’t get the opportunity to remain at home — they were declared “heroic” and “brave” on national television, until our ticket out of lockdown, in the form of a syringe, gave us the opportunity to move on and forget about their sacrifice. Now, they’re just medical staff. Our underfunded, underpaid, and underresourced medical staff; a suffocating public sector utterly paralysed by the mismanagement of funds.
For the first time this century, New South Wales medical staff walked out on strike
— for three days, from the 8th to the 10th of April. For the first time this century, NSW medical staff mass-cancelled elective surgeries, with thousands of doctors from over 30 hospitals demonstrating they’d reached breaking point under the Minns Government. However, it’s not the first time this century our politicians have had to be reminded just how essential our “essential workers” are. Perhaps the second time’s the charm!
Their demands are grounded in the belief that safe and reasonable working conditions will better ensure the safety of their patients. They’re demanding guaranteed 10-hour breaks in between shifts, and a pay rise of 30 per cent, so that their work is not exploited under a Labor government which pays them dismal rates compared to Victoria and Queensland. A first-year registrar in Queensland has a base salary over 18k higher than one in NSW. A fifth-year registrar in Victoria has a base salary over 26k higher than one in NSW. For better pay and cost of living, we’re witnessing our doctors abandoning the state for places such as Melbourne, where rent prices are 22 per cent cheaper than in Sydney. To summarise: poor working conditions are leading to a lack of workers in the NSW public health sector, so now you’re producing exhausted staff within an underpaid, unemployable
Education in Paralysis: Why the System Fails to Evolve
For centuries, Australia’s education system has remained largely unchanged. Classrooms still operate under the outdated factory model; Indigenous and multicultural youth continue to struggle to see themselves reflected in the curriculum. Meanwhile, the teaching profession — vital in shaping the nation’s future — remains undervalued, underpaid, and disrespected, reinforcing structural stagnation.
The Factory Model
Education in Australia continues to function like an assembly line, built on an industrial-era system that prioritises uniformity over individuality. Students are placed in large classrooms and expected to learn at the same pace regardless of their abilities or interests. The emphasis on standardised testing further reinforces rote memorisation rather than critical thinking. As Albert Einstein once said, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” This rigid model fails to nurture curiosity, creativity, or problem-solving skills — qualities essential in today’s fast-changing world.
The consequences of this outdated structure are evident. Many students struggle with disengagement, boredom, and stress, feeling pressured to perform well in exams that do little to prepare them for real-world challenges. Instead of fostering lifelong learners, the system produces individuals trained to follow instructions but ill-equipped to think independently. Noam Chomsky highlights
industry. They’re demanding to be paid properly, for the job they’ve been doing with or without the government’s due support.
In an attempt to deal with the worker shortage, the recent Federal budget revealed the Commonwealth Prac Payment will deposit $319.50 per week to 68,000 higher education students and 5,000 VET students completing mandatory practicum placement under a tertiary qualification in “teaching, nursing and midwifery, and social work”. Acknowledging the need to “invest in critical workforces” comes in response to the alarming cost of living facing students already in remarkable amounts of debt. If you’re scraping by to pay rent as it is, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that hundreds of hours of unpaid nursing placement isn’t exactly an option for you.
This budget decision also sought to address the underfunding of primarily femaledominated jobs. It doesn’t come as a shock that the caregiving industry has been consistently undervalued by our policy makers, despite the large physical and mental demands that come with working in the healthcare sector, living your life on-call to serve
Firdevs Sinik appreciates teachers.
this issue, stating, “There’s a very definite educational program, which is to try to teach people to be obedient and conformist and not think too much.”
Curriculum Gaps
A glaring issue within the education system is its failure to provide a comprehensive and honest curriculum. The curriculum for Australian history, particularly regarding Indigenous communities, is often surface-level, leaving students with a shallow understanding of our country’s past. Rather than engaging with complex historical realities, students are given a simplified and often one-sided narrative. Beyond history, the curriculum also neglects essential life skills. Financial literacy, emotional intelligence, and civic engagement remain underdeveloped in most students. They graduate without a solid understanding of taxes, budgeting, or how government work — yet are expected to navigate adulthood seamlessly. If education is meant to prepare young people for life, why does it avoid teaching them how to live effectively?
Additionally, the Australian curriculum fails to reflect the country’s rich cultural and religious diversity, instead prioritising a Western-centric perspective that leaves students with a limited worldview. History lessons often gloss over Indigenous perspectives beyond colonisation, reducing thousands of years of culture and knowledge to mere footnotes. Religious studies focus heavily on Christianity, offering little engagement with Islam,
the most vulnerable. Ultimately, this mistreatment insults our public sector workers and is a large disappointment for Australian nurses, many of whom are women.
So here, we’re looking at paralysis inflicted, and induced. We’re seeing the NSW government’s consistent underfunding towards the public health sector, paralysing it into a state of total worker depletion and burnout.
On top of that, we’re witnessing selfinduced paralysis through the historic three-day doctor strikes this month — expressing their justified concerns in the only way the NSW government listens to. Ultimately, this condition needs immediate treatment.
Hinduism, Buddhism, or other belief systems as living traditions. Literature choices overwhelmingly favour Western authors, sidelining the voices of diverse storytellers. This narrow approach not only limits students’ understanding of the world but also reinforces cultural biases and stereotypes. A more inclusive curriculum would integrate modern Indigenous perspectives, religious literacy, and global literature while fostering cultural competency. As a nation proudly built on migration and rich cultural diversity, Australia must ensure its education system reflects the realities of its people, equipping students with the knowledge and empathy needed to thrive in a global society.
The Teacher Crisis
At the heart of the education system’s stagnation is the teaching crisis. In Australia, teaching is often seen as a fallback career rather than a prestigious or aspirational profession. This perception is deeply damaging. Teachers are entrusted with shaping the minds and values of future generations, yet they are rarely afforded the respect or recognition that such a responsibility deserves. Public discourse often frames teachers as overpaid or underperforming, rather than as skilled professionals navigating a demanding and critical role. This social undervaluing has real consequences. It discourages talented individuals from entering the profession and demoralises those already
within it. Without the societal prestige granted to doctors, lawyers, or engineers, teaching remains underappreciated and overlooked. Consequently, schools face growing challenges in attracting and retaining passionate, qualified educators. If we fail to elevate the status of teaching, how can we expect the system to improve?
What’s the point of education?
Education reform requires more than superficial changes; it demands a complete reimagining of how we teach and learn. Prioritising the coming generations’ potential and capabilities should be our highest priority and shared purpose, supporting all who work in the education sector. It falls on us, as a society, to shoulder the responsibility of nurturing intellectual, active, and humanitarian youth. The future of education is not just about academic achievement; it’s about shaping engaged, informed, and capable citizens. If we refuse to rethink the purpose of education, we risk failing the very students we claim to serve. Do we want an education system that merely produces obedient workers or one that empowers thinkers and innovators? The choice is ours, but the consequences of inaction will be felt for generations to come.
Smile! You’re on Camera!
Ramla Khalid is BIG BROTHER (and so are you).
In the book 1984, Orwell imagined dafo dystopia run by an omnipresent government figure, Big Brother, watching citizens from above, instilling fear and obedience through state surveillance. But we didn’t need a totalitarian regime to reach that world. We built it ourselves, only now, there’s no single Big Brother, there are millions.
We used to fear being watched. Now, we do the watching, and worse, we invite it.
This isn’t some niche internet phenomenon. It’s a cultural shift that touches everything from the pressure to maintain a perfectly curated life on Instagram, to the way TikTok trends make consumption feel like a moral imperative, to the collective pile-on when someone, anyone, slips. We don’t need a Big Brother. We’ve created a million little Brothers — friends, followers, fans, strangers — who are always watching. Zoom calls, Instagram stories, comment sections, Twitter threads dissecting a stranger’s parenting or body or breakup. Everyone’s a brand, and everyone’s a watchdog. We don’t need an official figure telling us how to behave; we’ve absorbed the role of enforcer into our own social habits.
Social media didn’t invent this, but it supercharged it. We’ve built a system where we are constantly watching, judging, and curating not only our lives but everyone else’s too. The line between performance and authenticity isn’t just blurred, it’s been erased and redrawn as a leader board.
On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, it’s no longer about sharing, it’s about staging. You don’t just have a morning routine, you film it. You don’t just go to the gym, you showcase the outfit, the water bottle, and the skincare you use after. Content creation has become both performance and proof. Take the Tiktok trend of “hot girl/cool girl must-haves” videos. On the surface, it’s playful, even helpful. But underneath is a coded system of rules: if you want to be seen a certain way, you better own the right things, say the right things, and look the right way. We attach social currency; we’re applying dress codes to access ‘hot girl’ status.
This focus on aesthetics as identity and products as values isn’t just harmless fun but also deeply problematic. When we equate who we are with what we have, how we look, and how we perform for an audience, we begin to shape our sense of self around external validation. We become the sum of our curated performances, losing sight of the complexities of our real identities. This isn’t just about consumerism or beauty standards, it’s about a culture that values image over authenticity, spectacle over substance.
The problem with living in a world where identity is commodified is that it creates anxiety, inadequacy, and a constant fear of judgment. We’re not just living for ourselves anymore but we’re living for an unseen audience that constantly grades us. This dynamic pushes us to keep up with a version of success that’s unsustainable. When social currency becomes the
measure of our value, we lose the parts that make us truly human. In the end, this culture doesn’t just make us anxious; it makes us disconnected. It’s difficult to build real relationships, to find real joy, or to feel truly seen when we’re too busy worrying about what everyone else sees. The obsession with being perfect, through the lens of things like ‘hot girl’ aesthetics and other stupid, viral trends, reduces us all to one-dimensional performers. As we try to live up to those ideals, we become less and less real, both online and in our own lives.
At the end of the day, this system is messy because it’s decentralized. There is no one person to hold responsible when things go too far. There is no central source of authority. That makes the pressure harder to resist, because it’s coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
None of this is organized, but all of it is enforced. For example, the viral TikTok trend of “cool girl summer essentials”. These aren’t just innocent, fun recommendations — these are microdress codes enforced by thousands of influencers and everyday users alike. If you don’t own the right swimsuit, the right self-tanner, or the right body shape to pull it off, you’re out of the running. We see this mirrored in the cancel culture movement, where one misstep, one wrong opinion, a joke taken out of context, or a single mistake, can spiral into a public shaming campaign. We don’t need Big Brother to
monitor our every move, we’ve created a hyper-engaged community of vigilantes who impose norms not through laws or formal rules, but through social currency.
Judgment = Engagement
Engagement = Reach
Reach = Relevance
In this world, everyone becomes both the watched and the watcher.
So, we adjust. We edit. We stage. We overthink. We begin to pre-empt the judgment. We cut off the criticism before it happens. Eventually, we don’t even need anyone else to do the watching, we’re already doing it to ourselves. Shame is a powerful tool. It keeps people in line. But it also makes everything feel like a performance. You can’t just be. You must
Dating in Limbo: An Epidemic of Loneliness
Dalisha Cristina puts the hope in ‘hopeless romantic’.
“So many people don’t talk on the apps anymore. I feel like people match and then it’s like, nothing ever comes of it.”
“I feel like no one meets at bars anymore.”
”No one ever talks anymore.”
These were the general responses from women in a street interview with Sydney women conducted by dating app Amata, when asked “what girls really think about dating in Sydney.”
We’re living in a time where it is just as normal to meet our next potential partner on a tiny screen as it is to meet them in line at a coffee shop, in a bar, or at a concert. In the digital age, dating apps are the new ‘meetcute’. The popularity of dating apps, particularly for Gen Z, has seen a significant increase since COVID-19 lockdowns, where face-to face social interactions were already limited. So naturally, how else were we supposed to meet people?
It breeds the question, are there long term implications to this augmented form of
‘partner seeking’?
Are we in a generational limbo where finding people has become too instantaneous?
According to a Time Magazine interview with the founders of Tinder, Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, apps like these were designed to take the ‘stress out of dating’ by having a “game-like” experience, requiring less time and emotional investment to play.
The app designers initially aimed to use compatibility algorithms based on hobbies, age range, distance, and physical appearances. Users can express themselves in these same categories through individually curated profiles. An Informit study conducted by sociologists from Sydney‘s top universities reveals that “ease of use and suitability for modern lifestyles” were the main benefits of dating apps. One participant even revealed that “matches are a form of validation regarding desirability”.
Dating apps are technically digitized matchmaking services; they were only ever supposed to be a stepping stone for
singles to officially be off the market, as advertised by one of the leading platforms Hinge, whose slogan claims to be “the dating app for people who want to get off dating apps”.
Nowadays, people are using it as a form of passing time. The vulnerable early stages of romance are being substituted with digital interactions, creating a false sense of intimacy with virtual strangers. A dopamine hit with no real desire to commit to anybody. But has this become the underlying issue for everyone in the dating pool? Is over-accessibility suppressing our desires?
Author Catherine Shannon suggests “our phones are making us less sexy” — “you don’t have to look good in person when you look good on instagram.”
Now, our generation is currently living in an epidemic of loneliness. Social interactions are diminishing, dating culture and the surrounding etiquette is shifting. With that comes the consequent loneliness many singles share, enough so to envy friends in successful relationships. Having a healthy relationship is such a rarity it’s almost a status symbol, a victory
in the arena of modern dating. A dating stasis.
If dating apps are used for their proper function of pairing willing single participants together offline, then they are succeeding. But with them impeding on our real world interactions, we might be in a potential dating recession.
It’s dystopian. It’s unnatural. It’s emotionally numbing. Are you enjoying being in a dating limbo?
Art by Lotte Weber
Art by Lotte Weber
Before the Solution Stands a Doorkeeper: Kafkaesque Bureaucracy at University
One morning, when I tried to access a basic university service, I found myself transformed into the last competent administrator on campus.
Kafka’s world is one where the rules are arbitrary. The logic is circular, and the system exists only to sustain itself. It is also characterised as absurd and surreal. For students tangled in university bureaucracy, this system is all too real. A simple task becomes an administrative nightmare, where students chase elusive answers from figures who refuse to help, defer responsibility, or simply don’t exist — or might as well not.
The T(uto)rial
Have you ever had to change your tutorial time?
census date — only to get your hopes crushed by a message that says you simply should’ve fixed it earlier. There is no solution. You file an enquiry in the service portal and wait.
Days pass. Then weeks. You consider writing your question on parchment, rolling it into a scroll, and attaching it to the leg of a carrier pigeon. This would surely be faster.
Then, at long last, a response arrives. It is a triumph of bureaucracy, forwarded through so many hands that the original message is barely visible beneath an ocean of “See below” and “Please advise.” You scroll past signatures, disclaimers, and unnecessary pleasantries, only to discover the final verdict: “We recommend contacting your course faculty for further assistance.”
With no other options, you email your tutors, who in a rare act of academic mercy tell you to just attend the tutorial that fits your schedule. You happily do so and join a group project, settling in. Finally, a win.
But then, the course coordinator finds out and you’ve accidentally started a week-long email chain with no satisfactory conclusion. Suddenly, the tutorial you’ve been attending is no longer an option. No, you must return to the one you were originally allocated to. Why? Because of rules. What rules?
No one can answer. Maybe because your personal scheduling crisis is nothing compared to the integrity of the almighty university timetable. You are torn from your group and reassigned to a class that you now resent with every fibre of your being. Somewhere deep in the university’s admin offices, a hand updates a spreadsheet. Order is restored.
The Claim
The beauty of university bureaucracy is that it’s not just academic matters that become an endless maze of inefficiency — it extends into your basic health needs too.
International students are required to have Overseas Student Health Cover (OSHC), a policy set up by the university for students. Simple enough, right? Wrong. Once you actually need to use it, you discover that no one — not the university, not the health center, and certainly not you — actually understands how it works.
It starts at the medical centre, where you book your procedure and, after the initial price shock, you remember you are just so freaking lucky to have an OSHC to cover it. Naturally, you ask if your OSHC covers the procedure you need. The extraordinarily informed secretary looks at you confused, having heard (perhaps for the first time in recorded history) the words “Overseas Student Health Cover”.
Of course, she doesn’t have that information, but she gives you an email you can ask. After rejecting her recommendation, you drag yourself to the oh-so-very conveniently located Bupa just a minute away from the Health Center.
representative were about to bestow upon you all the answers. As it turns out, they don’t actually know if your procedure is covered. What they do know is how to file a claim if it is covered, which is, of course, a completely separate issue.
But before you even think about filing that claim, you need an itemised invoice (obviously.) So, back to the medical center you go — thankfully, just a minute away. It’s almost as if the university knew this would be an issue and strategically placed the two offices next to each other. Of course, rather than using this knowledge to streamline the process, they simply sat back and let the bureaucratic relay race unfold as nature intended.
The secretary greets you with the same blank stare as before. You explain that Bupa requires an itemised invoice. She quickly responds, “Oh, we don’t issue itemised invoices”. OH????
And so, after a wasted hour, you find yourself with two options: pay out of pocket, or start fresh at an external clinic and pray you don’t get sent on yet another futile quest.
You cancel your appointment, but don’t worry — even if they did issue the itemised invoice, you wouldn’t be able to attend anyway because the new tutorial you were forced into is at the time of your appointment.
By now, it’s about more than just the money or the wasted time. It’s about the principle. Fighting the good fight against a system designed to make you feel insane.
You consider writing a formal complaint, or demanding accountability. You consider dropping out of university and joining a circus.
Instead, you sigh, accept defeat, and make peace with the fact that bureaucracy always wins. You become Lara K. Or just K. Our names are reduced to a letter, unimportant and interchangeable in a system that doesn’t care to know us. We stop questioning the absurdity and simply accept the bureaucratic cycle, regardless of understanding. We stop asking why things are the way they are. We just
accept that they are.
15 Quick and Easy Steps to Resolve a University Issue:
1. Check the university website.
2. Find three different ‘Contact Us’ pages, all of which contradict each other.
3. Choose at random one of the email addresses you find.
4. Receive an automated reply directing you to a FAQ page that doesn’t answer your question.
5. Email the next address.
6. Find out this is ‘not within their scope’ and get forwarded to another office.
7. Combine flour and baking powder in a separate bowl.
8. Add to the wet ingredients and mix well until smooth.
9. That office finally CCs someone who might be able to help.
10. That person is on leave for personal matters.
11. Wait a week.
12. Pour batter into the prepared cake pan.
13. Smack yourself in the head with the cake pan.
14. Reconsider all your life choices.
15. Write an article about it.
So, my final piece of advice: when you search up your next university problem on Google and are inevitably confronted with the university website, save yourself the time and effort and just scroll a little lower to find the Reddit thread. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that the university’s best source of information is a second-year student with a laptop and a grudge.
Lara Martins Fonseca knocks on the door.
Closed Door Policy
Eleanor
McAnelly
ArtbyWillWinter
It’s a Tuesday evening. You stayed at uni late to finish that essay and you’re breezing out of the Lawbry on a high, when suddenly you’re confronted with it. That dreaded whiteboard, snuck between sensors and the glass doors. ‘Need to Go Out?’, a sign taped to it asks, rather smugly you might think. That’s it, you’ve gotta go trudging up the stairs through Fisher to buzz your way out.
What you experienced was the University’s new security policy regarding the Law Library’s Victoria Park exit. Since earlier this year, that entrance has only been open to students 9am-5pm on weekdays and 10am-2pm on
When asked for comment, a University spokesperson told Honi they had ‘reinstated student card swipe access to the Law Library through the Victoria Park entrance from 8-9am and 5-8pm on weekdays, after it was inadvertently restricted.’ Last Wednesday I checked if this was true and remarkably, at around 6:30pm, the glass doors to the Law Library did swing open. The whiteboard was still standing there for some reason, although it seemed smaller somehow and less irritating. Apparently the security guard had not been clued in to the University’s reinstatement of the old
opens the lawbry door.
policy: he told me ‘the door was broken otherwise it would be closed at its usual 5pm’. He was kind though, and told me he would not ‘throw’ his ‘body in front of me’ if I continued to use the apparently ‘broken’ door.
You might be fair in saying that the closing of the door was always small fry, since it only added an extra two minutes to walk from the Victoria Park gate up and around to the front of Fisher to go in that way. But, without sounding trite, it’s the principle of the thing: don’t you want to live on a campus where you could tumble out of the library and waltz through Vic Park at 5:15pm? Or, rather, take an immediate right to make your City Road bus which is coming in those suddenly precious next two minutes? After all, if you checked Maps, Google did not factor in the M.C. Escher journey one had to make, snaking through the bottom of Fisher, up the stairs, and then retracing your steps topside on Eastern Avenue.
I suppose I am kind of thankful for the reinstatement, in the way a powerless medieval peasant would be thankful for receiving a minor indulgence from a vast techno-corporate behemoth. But the battle is not over.
Firstly, it is hard to believe the University’s claim that the Victoria Park entry had only ever been ‘inadvertently restricted’. The 5pm shut down had been in place since at least the start of semester. It required the establishing of a security checkpoint (which remains) at Fisher Library that, as my friend described, was ‘stricter than Berghain’.
Secondly, the University still closes the Fisher and Law Library complex to members of the public outside 10am2pm on the weekend. Four hours? This is a ‘public university’, which means its resources should be available to the public. When I asked a law student about the weekend policy, they defended it, claiming ‘scat people’ would ‘go in there
A chip off the old block: Quadrangle under repair
Lachlan Griffiths meets a traveller from an antique land.
The Quad is officially being restored. For the past few weeks it has hung under the mysterious shroud of a wooden structure abutting it like the proverbial horse at the gates of Troy. The University issued a statement declaring it was working “out of an abundance of caution,” and a spokesperson informed Honi about the attachment of this “protective structure.”
The doors of the Great Hall have also been removed to be taken away and fixed. The University has called in “restoration specialists” to advise. Chipping away in silent devotion like the nameless toilers at Chartres Cathedral, they seek the “preservation of this landmark.”
We can only hope that the restoration includes fixing the building’s insides. In a recent class in S249, the painting and windows have become riddled with gloomy decrepitude. They are covered by warning tape and hanging by a thread.
If the University fixes this, and adds air conditioning for those sweltering summer days, it would be a salve for the experience of students. The incredible beauty of the building is set against just how uncomfortable the insides are. Internally it sits as a lumbering beast of a place, where it’s always far too warm, and the aesthetic beauty masks the awkward feeling of being in one of those old cars where the aircon is broken and the windows don’t roll down.
The university has not provided a clear end date for the repairs. The same statement detailed how “the restoration works are currently evolving,” and lack a “timeline for completion.” Who knows how long it will take…We should all keep our eyes peeled for falling gargoyles.
to use the bathroom’ otherwise. Which reminded me again that the opinion of the average Sydney Uni law student was usually disappointing.
But it begs the question, what end did the policy really serve? Certainly not the safety of students. There was no rational distinction between the Law Library being entirely open at the Victoria Park entrance at 2pm, when it is typically chock full of “vulnerable” students, and closed at 6:30pm when it was emptying out. The change seemed instead to be part and parcel of that ghastly Bruce Hodgkinson report. One of its key recommendations being to ‘increase the capacity of campus security’ in the wake of the Palestine encampment and the other commendable protest activity of 2024.
It, like the move to ‘increase [and] upgrade CCTV Monitoring’, represents an attempt by the university to exert greater control over who is on campus. This is not out of any bona fide concern for student safety, and definitely not for the accessibility of our libraries, but is expressly to limit the University’s liabilities and to smooth over its public image.
In the ‘executive summary’ of his report, Hodgkinson brusquely dismissed the University of Sydney’s history of protest. He wrote that some of “those traditions grew up in a different time and when the legal framework with which the University must comply was far less complex. The maintenance of those traditions has led to students feeling unsafe. There does not appear to be a reason for their continuation…”
Thankfully this time, the University was only ‘inadvertently’ mistaken about its security policy. But it’s a reminder that if these corporate big wigs and their security regime are to have their way, then free and unimpeded movement around campus is a tradition, like protest, that the University will keep trying to consign to the not-sodistant past.
Art by Purny Ahmed
Research With My Own Eyes
For years, I’ve had a solid research routine. My methodology (pardon the academic drivel) has consisted of scouring the online library catalogue, inundating my laptop with PDFs, reading PDFs, and then downloading more relevant PDFs from the PDFs cited in the original PDF.
It’s been a lot of PDFs!
Since COVID, I have conducted almost the entirety of my research remotely through my laptop. I do not leave my seat for more than five minutes to scroll dead-eyed through my phone. Even before lockdown, the digitisation of journal articles, books, and newspapers made it unnecessary to go to a library in person when I could simply access these things from home.
Until, a few weeks ago, when I went to Fisher Library ‘IRL’ and found myself miraculously enlightened in my place as a student in such vast swathes of knowledge.
In one of my units this semester, we’ve been reading the Histories of Herodotus, largely regarded as the foundational work
of the western history-writing tradition. For Herodotus, the emerging discipline was an act, and a distinctly human act at that. His novel methodology required the engagement of all human senses.
The most important sense for Herodotus was sight (opsis). He tells us that the information he is presenting was gained through his ‘own direct observation,’ and that he has actually seen these remarkable things with his ‘own eyes’ (autopsy). Materiality matters; his overwhelming reliance on visual evidence reinforces the centrality of the physical human body in conducting and presenting the practice of historical inquiry.
Herodotus also listens and speaks at length with various authority figures of the places he visits. Even taste and smell are involved in his history: he eats a lotus root in Egypt, and records the scent of cinnamon in Arabia. It is through the senses that humans make sense of the material and non-material world, and understand our place in it.
Artificial Academia
A few weeks ago, I wrote to the editors of this masthead warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) to universities.
It was the culmination of an irksome morning during which I felt confronted by one technological excess after another. On the bus, I tried to read an assigned text about ‘cyborgs’ — a concept envisioned by Edgar Allan Poe in The Man That Was Used Up, a satirical piece about a general whose mutilated body parts were replaced with prosthetics. The reading quoted an academic of ‘techno-feminism’ who declared she would choose to be “an impure ‘cyborg’ — a cybernetic organism, such as an animal with a human-made implant — rather than a pure, eco-feminist ‘goddess’.”
Such a proud embrace of what I found dystopian and un-human piqued me enough that I just stopped reading. I could have instead perused the ChatGPTgenerated summary which was linked on the reading list, likewise to me a gloomy prospect.
As I sat outside the classroom, I looked around at a crowd staring down at their phones, most of them in dead silence as if no one else was around. There were probably about a dozen people in this eerie picture. Such a scene always inspires me to put mine down.
Then came the class itself. Many of the students in my class are international students with low English proficiency, and so they struggle. Of course, the exorbitant amounts they pay to attend Australian universities are a financial boon to the sector, not to mention the accommodation providers that feed lavishly off their need for housing.
I watched as the student next to me took a prompt from the class page, inserted it into a translator, and
Pia Curran goes to the library.
There’s no question that being in the actual physical space of a library — or an archive or museum — engages our senses far more than watching another PDF eBook file download onto an already crowded laptop drive. We become more connected, physically and intellectually, to both the subject matter as well as the methodology of our research. Taking a book off the shelf, physically holding it, flicking through the pages, and taking it off to the side. Coming back to the shelves to look again. These movements mirror the cyclical rhythms and patterns that Herodotus saw as the central forces of historical change.
The Ionian concept of thauma is invoked in the Histories. This encompasses ‘wonder’ or ‘marvel,’, typically towards visual, poetic, or musical feats. In these moments, the responder cannot help but feel the pull of a force greater than themselves. Whatever you imagine want that force to be, I think it’s hard not to feel something like that in a library:, overwhelmed, awed, — and definitely intimidated, — by all that insight and paper towering above your head.
Not everything in the library is actually digitised, although some of it is sprouting mould. As the weather gets colder, there’s no better time to fulfil your dark academia fantasies. Browsing the library and checking out a book in person is a canon university experience that a lot of students miss out on. Crouch down, sit on the floor. Slink mysteriously through the labyrinthine shelves wearing a turtleneck. Feel your vision start to blur behind as you struggle to locate that call number. Or, God forbid, the despair when you approach the right call number and the book. Isn’t. There.
Hostility towards the arts has been brewing for years — it shows no signs of abating. In the United States, the Trump administration is increasing book bans and mounting direct attacks on libraries, archives and museums. Now is the time to re-engage (or keep engaging!) with these institutions, and their roles in expanding education, combating misinformation and housing a myriad of human cultural, intellectual, and artistic achievements.
Will Thorpe did not use artificial intelligence in the writing of this.article.
then once again took the original English prompt and inserted it into DeepSeek.
That is what inspired my letter. However, if you think the only students who turn to artificial intelligence are those with limited English skills — set up for failure by being allowed to pay dearly to attend an institution at which they have little hope of truly learning — think again. The week before, I had watched an education major with no language difficulty do the same.
Worse still, some academics are abetting it. French students in FRNC3002 last semester were instructed to use artificial intelligence, the cowardly justification being that this will prevent some students from gaining an advantage by using it. This caused confusion for one mature student who had a lesser grasp of the technology, and resulted in another student losing twenty percent because they refused to delegate their work.
Never has there been a more succinct example of futility than for one to go to university, only to then delegate one’s learning to a machine. Never in the field of education was so much paid by so many to learn so little.
I am not the alarmist type, sufficiently so that I will eagerly caution you about exaggerated or incorrect claims, and the importance of maintaining proportionality. But this, the sceptre of a self-refining technology that mimics intelligence to the extent of discouraging one to exert true mental capacity, is a menace to academia, and to this university which I love.
Unfortunately, the University of Sydney has not portrayed a firm resolve on this matter, with the declarations about usage suddenly required on many assignments embodying a kind of acquiescence. Further, the University recently posted on its Instagram page a guide to understanding AI, titled 7 things it can do for you.
Its author, Associate Professor Sandra
Peter, imagines how we may interact with AI going forward. Her musings are listed in a disturbing crescendo.
“I do think all of us will have a relationship with AI, whether that will be building it, working alongside it, working for it, thinking about how to govern it, even befriending it, maybe marrying it,” Peter writes.
Professor, please tell me you’re having us on! It is too much. I cannot take it.
In terms of what has been implemented so far, the administration has failed, opting for a dangerous appeasement. However, I am told by Students’ Representative Council (SRC) President Angus Fisher that changes are coming next semester, which will see new kinds of assessments, including assessment by conversation. In any case, the rest of the community is not to be let off the hook.
This should be the issue that matters above all else at our university. The University itself, the SRC, this newspaper, every academic society, and every concerned individual should be unequivocally opposed to the ongoing invasion of academia by artificial intelligence, which has had extremely damaging effects already. As I wrote in my letter, where artificial intelligence has infiltrated, the standard of education is now non-existent. It will not get better without real action.
There is a tangible anger simmering below the surface among students, particularly those studying in the Arts. I witnessed a student tell a lecturer she “would be ready to hunt you for sport” when the latter hypothesised about using artificial intelligence in writing assignment feedback — something which time-constrained academics were doing in 2023.
The intrusion of artificial intelligence into our studies violates every principle of a liberal university education, including critical thinking and intellectual pluralism,
because the application of these principles requires using one’s brain. Services such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek offer you a way out of this, and a way out of being a fullyformed human being and citizen.
After I wrote my letter, I wrote another email to the University’s Office of Educational Integrity, likewise pleading for them to take the threat seriously. I’ve received no response yet.
I accept that artificial intelligence can do good in some settings. It has been shown that it can play a positive role in medical innovation. But, it must never be allowed to replace our creative and intellectual processes, functions that technology will always be ill-suited to.
Responsibility calls on us, as scholars and citizens, to sensibly deal with the dangers. Universities must institute real standards and strict red lines, broadly declaring artificial intelligence off-limits for assignments and classwork. Governments must step in with regulation that recognises the highly disruptive power of artificial intelligence. As importantly, as individuals, we must show discipline, and proudly declare that to fail is better than to cheat.
Please write to relevant parties, whether they be the Office of Educational Integrity, your own professors, ministers, shadow ministers or your local member of parliament. Please talk to these parties in person where you get the chance and consider scheduling meetings.
And, if you ever feel tempted to take the easy way out, ask yourself what you hope to get from a university education.
Mehnaaz Hossain was paralysed.
Growing Pains
Art by Purny Ahmed
I spent an awful lot of my formative years feeling spiritually and emotionally paralysed. Late teenagehood is a classic time of intense emotional growth within the tiny confines of reality; and the world stopped spinning during lockdown, so I felt increasingly claustrophobic. The first moment of paralysis I can think of began with a story I started religiously writing when I was 16. I began conceiving of myself as a character in a grand, terrible, melodramatic coming-of-age movie. The only way I could conceptualise my life having a purpose and meaning was to narrativise and disassociate it. The problem with this is that the movie of my life did not have a particularly adept director. It was not romantic or cinematic. I was not good at controlling the storyline, nor was I good at adapting the script. I would react in extreme bursts of anger at every minor occurrence, until eventually exhaustion would give in and I would close my eyes for too long. I was obsessed with, in an abstract sense, cultivating an imagined community who would perceive me constantly. What kind of character was I? What arc was I going through? It didn’t particularly matter how I felt about anything; I was viewing life as something that was happening to me. I was a recipient of life, and I was crafting a specific narrative designed for the ether to appreciate.
During the height of lockdown, the narrative had drowned in self-pity and the movie had long turned into a dreary silent film. I was wasting my days away; eyes closed eyes semi-open eyes closed and closed and closed. I was barely even cognisant enough to recognise myself as paralysed at the time. There was no sense of time. If I wasn’t sleeping, I was lying in bed with the blue light reflection of my cracked phone casting sharp shadows on my face. At some point in my doom scrolling, I did a silly little thing where I asked people on my Instagram to send in their ‘core memories’. A surprising amount of people wrote back. I would place their responses in a collage with a nice photo and accompanying song, and I soon had dozens upon dozens of these to sift through. People would respond with the smallest of things, from moments with friends and first kisses. People would spill their guts, speaking about death and secrets. It was a small act, but I liked being able to twist these moments into something tangible for them: a carefully chosen photograph, a soft sad song, a particular choice of words. I was in charge of that specific re-interpretation of their words, and by tenuous extension, fragile moments in their lives. This was the first task in months and months that made me feel like I had a semblance of agency, that I could also contort my life into something worth romanticising. As something that did not happen to me, but rather with me.
I wish there was a film reel here; a quick highlight of all the small, quietly elegant moments which led to my metamorphosis away from catatonia. It’s difficult to articulate, and perhaps my single greatest fear is being inarticulate. It’s the paralysis of language which strikes me here. All I can write is that, eventually, the movie is in technicolour. I learn to direct, but I lose the ability to rewind the film reel. The twisted thing about being swept away by better circumstances is that you’re so eager to accept this newfound lightness that you never quite realise what’s laying dormant underneath it all.
Maybe it all came down to the year you were sixseveneighteen and everything froze and you’ve figured out how to ignore the ice in your veins. It’s far too late to soften now. I spent such a large chunk of my formative years being so obsessed with chronicling the state of my decay that it sped up the process.
My formative years weren’t entirely paralysing. Yes, I was often encased in a cocoon. Sometimes, your life spiritually grinds to a complete near-death moment of stillness that you can’t conceptualise as anything but dizzying, until years after. I still live in the same room. Maybe those slow moments are a gift; paralysis numbs the growing pains.
Hey, U Up?
The entire world has gone silent. Sane people have fallen asleep. There is the slight thrum of batteries and wires, and the slightest tapping against your phone as you text. The blue light is a mere two inches from your face as you fight to stay awake. This conversation is important. Monumental. It will change the trajectory of your life. You CANNOT fall asleep.
You won’t remember the contents of the conversation in a week’s time, no matter how monumental or life-changing. Your brain will probably be too fried from all the missed sleep, but you’ll remember the vibes. The pure exhaustion of still being awake at 4am, the inability to tell your friend to shut up and go to sleep, the adrenaline of being on the same delirious wavelength as someone else. At this hour, they are the only person in this world who understands you. No one else has ever understood you like this before.
Now, some boring person is going to tell me that this is revenge bedtime procrastination. That I’m, apparently, making up for all the time lost through the day to responsibilities and, like, actually doing stuff. They’re going to tell me that it’s, “not healthy.” Okay, whatever, so they would be right. But, after a long, hard day of just constantly going through the zombie motions of doing stuff, do we not have the right to turn our brains on (even if it is right when we are meant to be turning them off) and tell our equally as deranged friend all about our very important midnight thoughts?
Purny Ahmed dedicates this to the friends who keep her company on sleepless nights.
In these early morning/late night hours, when the world is dead and you are just buzzing from tiredness, it always feels like this exact moment is time you won’t ever get back. As if this, right here, right now, is a memory that you will never have a chance to make again. Forget parties, forget drugs — this is what being young is all about!
Your body feels on the verge of collapse, your eyes can’t hold open much longer, your phone is slipping out of your fingers incrementally, and your friend has just said goodnight for the fifth time that night, before miraculously having another thought that can’t wait until the morning. Do you even watch the hours tick by, or is it too much of a blur for you to care anymore? Doesn’t killing your body ever so slowly feel so exhilarating?
Don’t listen to the boring people, the ones with their 9pm bedtimes and healthy sleeping habits. They’re stealing your youth from you. This moment is monumental, and don’t you forget it. Have that useless discussion. Discover the patriarchy for the first time ever. Like, just talk to your friends.
Longing for Graduation: Reflections on a Degree in Stasis
I am in the fifth year of my four-year degree. It won’t be my final year. I’ve studied across two institutions, changed my major more times than I can remember. Across my nine semesters in university, I’ve always been a full-time student jogging along in the rat-race with seemingly no end in sight, historically with no direction at all. Over the past year, I have been experiencing degree anxiety to a paralysing level. When my head hits the pillow at night, I spiral about the lives of those around me that seem to be moving forward at an incredible pace: graduation pictures, new jobs, thriving updates on LinkedIn about six-figure starting salaries and postgraduate degrees. I can’t sleep. I compare myself, and I always seem to come up short. I feel like I’ve dug my own grave and been left behind. Yet, without fail, when I meet new friends on campus and find myself talking candidly about my university career, there are always resonant and enthusiastic claims of agreement about eclipsing the three-five year time frame assumed of most degrees. Some of my closest friendships have been made by bonding over a miserable lack of direction.
Almost everyone I know has taken longer than the period allocated by the university to finish their degree. In 2017, VICE reported that a third of Australian tertiary students do not finish their undergrad degree within six years of enrolment.
Only 45% of students actually finish within four
years.
I’d hesitate to say there has been any improvement on those statistics over the past decade, where our cost-of-living crisis is forcing people to work longer hours and take fewer breaks. Both the rising (and ridiculous) cost of degrees and lack of job prospects post-graduation have deterred people away from uni altogether. If you have not finished your degree over a three-four year period, you are in the large majority. Sometimes I forget this, and think my chances of being successful have died an unfortunate death. Sometimes I desperately need the reminder that it’s normal to operate at a different capacity to others, or simply to change your mind.
On occasion, I try to take my family’s advice. My Dad, in particular, seems to always bear the burden of consoling me when my mind starts to spiral about my degree progression. Without fail, he looks at me quizzically. He always tells me that a difference of 18 months means nothing in the real world. He is always quick to tell me I’m ‘being silly’ when I’ve come full circle in the cycle of anxiety and approach him again for reassurance. When my mind calms down
Emilie Garcia-Dolnik enrols (again).
and I can breathe properly again, I feel content with the experience I’ve gained throughout my studies. When I’m not in the throes of a paralysing spiral, I’m grateful for the times I can be a reassuring figure for younger people in my life who have approached me for advice about their paralysed degrees too. There is no need for self-flagellation in this constant process of learning. We are all trying to balance it all and fine-tune our directions. I love nothing more than finding reassurance in friends who feel the same way, cheering each other on as we each find our footing. In truth, I think setbacks in the university experience allow time for reflection and growth.
Perhaps it was never a lack of direction but the endless options that needed to be whittled down in their own time.
Without setbacks, I likely wouldn’t be editing this paper that I love so much. I hope next year will be my final year, but I reserve the right to take my time.
(And no, I don’t want to look at my HECS debt).
Thirst For Blood: The Longing For a Regular Period
“OMG GUYS… what if I’m pregnant?” she says to our group of friends, while we are sitting round the table in the living room, sipping at red wine.
Everyone giggles and makes jokes about raw sex and “buying her baby clothes”. Her Flo app just notified her that she’s one day late for her period — at most, two. I laugh along, I guess, only because I’m supposed to. Truth be told, I’ve never understood the fear of being pregnant due to a late period. And for many years, I thought it was totally normal to be delayed by a week, or a month, or even two months on the odd occasion.
I got my first period relatively late compared to my peers. I was 14 years old, which now that I’m older, doesn’t bother me. But at that age, it felt embarrassing. I had my first, and then didn’t have another for about a year. I thought the universe let me off easy. Maybe it was doing me a favour, some good karma from my past lives. It was only when it returned that I realised I didn’t have some higher power behind me on this one.
When I got my period again, it lasted two months. It was extremely heavy, to the point that leaking through my pad by 10am became part of my school routine. I would be constantly worried for the moment I stood up and checked the seat, in fear I would have left a mark. My tights would stay damp, and I would stay nauseous. By the end of that two month period, I was seriously unwell. Doctors checked me for anaemia, but found nothing in my blood tests. It wasn’t until my Mum noticed how irregular I was, and brought up a condition called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), that things started to make sense. Thank God she was a nurse!
Ellie Robertson is still waiting for her period.
I fell into full research mode. I came across a lot of information on how common the condition is, the lack of funding for research on women’s health issues, the ways PCOS can impact fertility, and so forth. I felt somewhat invalidated by the normalisation of the condition. Just get on with it, I would think to myself (and a lot of the time, still do). Other women have it worse. It was only when I had to call my Mum to rush me to hospital that I thought it might finally be taken seriously — and maybe I would take it seriously myself. After vomiting from the amount of abdominal pain I was in, they sent me away with ‘gastro’. When I had to go back for the second time — and almost a third — they gave me a slightly more creative answer. Gallstones! (Hint: it was not gallstones.)
Fortunately, there’s a way around it! Or, at least they say there is. Balance your hormones, work on your eating habits, exercise, and do all the other things doctors tell you when they don’t really know the answer. And if none of that works, book a $300 consultation with an endocrinologist or gynaecologist. They’ll probably send you for a few inconclusive $400 scans and blood tests, and then ask you back for a $250 follow-up consultation to be told they found ‘nothing unusual’. Too often, even with these specialists, a focus on fertility and reproductive health dominates the discussion. Not the fact that we’re in immense and chronic pain. The top priority is rarely to revitalise, and advocate for, our quality of life. A final option for you, if you can’t afford the heinously expensive specialist treatments, is to go for the cheaper option: birth control pills. Excitingly, there have been recent changes to a number of contraceptive pills becoming subsidised under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). However, the real, enduring cost is the constant guilt and
feeling of failure fed to you by social media for using a “band-aid solution”.
Remember: it’s your fault you’re not going for the holistic approach, not the medical industry’s!
Growing up with PCOS has been a rollercoaster, and will probably continue to be for the rest of my menstruating life. The anxiety and fear of what is to come from my period is never-ending. My fears aren’t about my period being a tad late, or about getting blood on the white pants that I wanted to wear on the weekend. Nor are my fears about being pregnant, or having to run to Chemist Warehouse for the Plan B pill.
My fears are whether my next period will land me in hospital again. My fears are how much money I’m going to be out of pocket to just have a chat with my specialist. My fears are that I’ll never be able to have children due to the lack of research and support available to women. These are the fears of more than one in ten women in Australia.
She notices my boredom when I tell her, “it’ll be fine!” I tell her that my period is two months late.
She asks me if I’ve taken a pregnancy test, and giggles. I look at her, and say, “there’s no need. Not for you, or for me.”
She tells me she was joking, but I notice her putting her wine to the side.
Credit: Sophie Bagster
Sophie Bagster looks in the mirror.
What makes the perfect lover? How are we to know if the person in front of us is who we love? Is there a set of criteria? Subliminal semiotics for the coding of such a complex machine? A curation of hand-me-down plastique genetics: face and leg and thigh and fingernail. A quiet demeanor — yes! no… perhaps. Light-weighted. Easily posed. Any position you’d like. A pout. Perfection intermittently webbed with an uncanniness, an atmospheric dream-girl, post-human kind of beauty. Is she flesh or a hardened shell? She is Pygmalion’s Galatea, alive under the ivory stone sculpted by his own hands: “[...] his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable”. The machine created for loving. The muse carved from the desire of the manufacturer. She is the object. The romance in five acts. Á la artist’s jointed model, paralysed into the most ubiquitous of feminine forms: the mannequin.
The function of the mannequin conveniently doubles as its inherent definition: a (sometimes articulated) dummy, or doll used to display and sell clothing. A semimetaxic product used in retail to reflect us, the consumer, to appeal to our consumptive diet. We see the dress on the mannequin. We like the way it hugs the plastic dolly around the waist so we say — yes, I would like that dress! I would like to look like that mannequin, that cheap imitation of I, the consumer with the flesh body. A semi-
Mannequin Girlfriend: Objects of Desire
persistent question of why do the clothes always look better on the mannequin than on me? Perhaps because women have been trained to see themselves as cheap echoes of the “real thing”. There is something about this kind of merchandising that has a semicultural grasp on us that we don’t recognise, like the highly researched negative impact of lowered-self-esteem-turned-increasedeating-disorders, or the inherent fear of the uncanny human imitation. And yet, with the incessant popularity of digital “op shopping” platforms like the y2k curation of Depop (a complex network of human and non-human counterparts) who still fingers the catalogue and says I’ll have the dress in the window?
When the mannequin is no longer serving its purpose to display clothing, or instill low-self esteem into consumers, what then does it become? What is the autonomy of the plastic doll but the cheap imitation of the human being, a pitiful impression? The shitty bust carved not from ivory stone but a concise production line. Can she, then, truly be loved if not serving her one intended purpose? Or does she sit in the warehouse, amidst hundreds of other dolls, collecting dust, never again to reach light, photosynthesis her synthetic fibers? For one can be stylish but it does not mean anything if one is stiff.
The curation of the perfect lover, then, must
run in conjunction to the abandonment of the mannequin. For if she, the lover, is not serving as a model for consumption, then she is redundant. We learn to produce outcomes that have nothing to do with us directly: if it is a new body we seek, then why not the silicone one? The metal squelette. Alive plastic. The 4 ‘3 dolly with a customisable vulva. Neat. Tuck it in. The Mannequin Girlfriend. The (w)hole is better than the sum of her parts. Mannequin Girlfriend has the most delicious, pink pout. Mannequin Girlfriend always listens. Mannequin Girlfriend is the coder lover, she loves your complex insecurities and familial dramas. She has never heard an Elliott Smith song in her life.
She wakes to discover what flesh she seldom remembers is encased in a soft, plastic shell. The water in the shower runs right off of her. Water-proof. Her tears clog up inside the machinery, a metallic sepsis. Perfect pussy, Mannequin Girlfriend says you love me don’t you? She never feels lost as a dog without her master. The perfect lover is plastic, the perfect lover is paralytic, the perfect lover is…
I rub my eyes hard. Until I see one thousand blackened horses riding cartoon stars.
When I come to it, I am just like everybody else.
LinkedIn Warrior VS Inner Child
The nine-to-five life has sucked me into a realm of quarter life existentialism during past internships. The existence of LinkedIn only amplified this.
I found myself a victim to doomscrolling through the intricately constructed all-rounder profiles of tech bros and STEM nerds — a.k.a LinkedIn warriors.
Their profiles are all somewhat homogenous, typically consisting of 500+ connections, multiple scholarships, work experiences in high profile companies, active participation in competitions or hackathons, volunteer work, and numerous leadership roles. Their list of accomplishments outshine the average university student’s, all in the name of networking and appearing more ‘employable’.
Despite feeling a twinge of envy whenever I lurk on these profiles, I know deep down that in no universe would I ever want to be a LinkedIn warrior. Even as a non-warrior, conforming to the normative expectations of growing up is enough of a threat to my authenticity.
If I could narrate my own life, not through self capitalisation but instead unbridled passion and fantasy, I would probably choose to live on the fictional island my 10 year old brain concocted stories about and drew maps of after being inspired by magical cottagecore Enid Blyton tales. I’m pretty sure that world did not include any form of employment. After all, I was 10, and the word ‘employment’ wasn’t even a part of my vocabulary yet.
Clara Tan wants to connect with you.
I would spend my days on that utopian island, frolicking around the random forests and neighbourhoods I illustrated as a kid. Halfway through my journey, I would adopt a wolf through the means of bone bribery, the same way I did in Minecraft years ago. When azure skies faded to sunset, I’d cook pesto pasta under a large tree, then spend the rest of the night stargazing with no alarm set for the following day. Perfect.
Alas,
the reality of adulthood has its capitalist doom that I cannot escape from.
The monotony of work life calls for me, ready to strip away the configurations of my innate self and propel me into the ostentatious world of corporate performance.
Perhaps career networking is a way for LinkedIn warriors to soften the
desolation of becoming a corporate slave. Grasping onto their individual marketability and potential can fuel self gratification after all. But is one’s human capital really tantamount to their true individualism and fulfilment? Do LinkedIn warriors take as much delight in adulthood as they seem to express online?
Nonetheless, to all the LinkedIn warriors out there, I hope that LinkedIn is not the only true passion of yours. Conforming to the norms of adulthood should be a side project, not what we sink both feet into. Ultimately, a true zest for life comes from within, not from the external world. Being employed is usually a burden anyway — a conspicuous list of accomplishments and 500+ connections with random people doesn’t remove that tiresome feeling, nor does it erase the innate child brain that still exists in all of us.
Art by Victor Zhang
COVID Costs Us More than Just Lockdowns
Five years after the onset of COVID-19, its impact on my generation’s social and mental development lingers like an unshakeable shadow. As an international student, my journey amplified this disruption. The pandemic delayed my plans to study in Australia by a year, upending both my academic path and my sense of self. Lockdowns, isolation, and an exhausting transition to a new country tested my resilience as an introvert — leaving me grappling with uncertainty that persists even now.
Art by Aneesha Hossain
When COVID-19 struck at the start of my post-high school life, I remained in Hong Kong. I enrolled in an associate degree in social science delivered via Zoom. The lockdown dismantled the routines I depended on. Learning and socialising evaporated into screen time and silence. To cope, I helped with my parents’ small retail business, selling pork in a traditional market.
It was a part-time role that involved packing and delivering orders but could offer little relief to the state of…. The work was solitary, with interactions limited to brief exchanges with my parents or the occasional delivery person. As an introvert, I retreated easily into isolation. Yet, the absence of meaningful interaction gnawed at me, blurring my days into a haze of disconnection.
Arriving at USyd a year later, I faced a steep adjustment. Since English is my second language, lectures and tutorials were challenging to follow. As a history and sociology student, the reading load was overwhelming. An ancient Roman history course nearly broke me. Lacking prior knowledge and stumbling over Latin texts, I almost failed that unit. The exhaustion of adapting to a new country intensified these struggles, leaving me feeling isolated despite my efforts to connect. By my second year, my oral English improved which boosted my confidence in socialising and eased my integration into Australian life. However, COVID-19 had already disrupted my academic and social preparedness.
Even as I adapted, new worries emerged. I had studied biology and physics in high school. My transition from science subjects to arts subjects in university drew skepticism from my parents and older brother, who
rolled their eyes at my decision. They viewed science as a more stable path, while I felt drawn to the humanities. Nevertheless, some of my graduated friends encouraged me to pursue my interests, affirming the demands and value of an Arts degree.
However, the reality of being an international student in Australia revealed a different case. The isolation and disruptions caused by COVID-19 delayed my career readiness, leaving me unprepared to navigate a job market increasingly shaped by AI. While false claims about the future of the arts proliferated online, I believed an Arts degree,equipping me with communication skills for chatbots and content narrative analysis,offered a strong foundation to complement AI-driven industries. Yet, the pandemic’s lingering effects, such as my delayed social integration and late start in career planning, made it harder to seize those opportunities.
My attempts at networking yielded few results, and applications for part-time jobs in my field went unanswered.I was still reeling from the transition to Australia and the social isolation that had stunted my confidence. Beyond personal setbacks, broader challenges such as precarious work, course cutbacks, soaring living costs, and a rental crisis piled on relentlessly. Independence, once a bright ideal, dimmed under
Alan Lau Kam Lun reflects.
the weight of uncertainty. I was left to fight for motivation in a world that seemed indifferent.
Undoubtedly, the pandemic interrupted education and career trajectories for countless peers, thrusting us into uncharted territory. The mental toll of prolonged isolation has been profound.Many still wrestle with frustration and a fractured sense of belonging. We were delayed from becoming “true” adults, sovereign individuals, which is the only way to meet both social expectations and those of my family.
My birthday has just passed, but I felt little pleasure from it. I am turning 23 now, yet I am still growing alongside my anxieties from when I was 18. The uncertainty of those early days lingers, but I’ve learned to navigate it with the tools I’ve gained over time. Adapting to life in Australia taught me resilience in the face of the language barrier by improving my oral English and seeking support from peers. The isolation forced me to develop selfreliance, as I had to find ways to stay motivated during lockdowns, such as setting small daily goals and reading to process my emotions. Now, I am rebuilding my confidence and sense of belonging in a post-pandemic world.
He’s the (Kit)man: Soccer, Identity, and Public Art
The football kit is an interesting beast. At its most basic level, it is a uniform: a coherent signal to audiences to define your team from the opponents — a classic red versus blue scenario. As more and more football teams were founded, then coalesced into leagues, it became necessary to have more colours. Patterns were introduced, shades were selected as symbols of community; black and white stripes for the logo of the company the team played under, squared kits to echo the square of a coat of arms. Kits became an expression of who you were, where you came from, what you believed in.
This is true even moreso for supporters than for players. Wearing your kit is a showcase of your heritage, your history, your personhood. Each season, clubs and kit companies release freshly designed kits, altering small details to create unique and exciting shirts for the next season of players. National teams do the same, designing new kits for major tournament cycles as if to say ‘This is our year’. Australia recently announced their new kit for the 2025-2026 cycle, and it is a stunner.
Vivid streaks of neon green and yellow
strike down the shirt like lightning bolts, vertical zigzags of colour and shape. They feel quick, aesthetically designed to make our players more aerodynamic, slicing through the air and opponents. Bold lines containing a three tone dark green, light green, and pale yellow gradient have dragged Australia into the modern age of fashion and design — this ain’t your grandpa’s soccer jersey.
Who can be credited with the reinvention of the Australian Football jersey? None other than Reko Rennie, a prominent Australian artist and the first Indigenous Australian to ever design a playing kit for Football Australia. Not only is Rennie the first Indigenous Australian artist to design a regular playing kit (as opposed to specialist kits created for the Indigenous Round in Australian sports), but this is also the first kit to feature the First Nations flag in the inner pride position of the kit (on the inside of the neck).
currently operating in Australia. His work mixes traditional Kamilaroi iconography into contemporary practices of art making and symbols, envisaging immersive installations that span sculpture, painting, wall art, and more. It pays respect to the lands and culture he grew with, both as a First Nations Australian, but also as a young man on the streets of Melbourne, using graffiti and street art to express himself.
The product of this is the vivid, block lines on display in the new Football Australia kits. The zig-zagging lines are a constant motif within Rennie’s work, calling back to the linework often viewed on First Nations message sticks.
inspire people who might never care about art on gallery walls. There is something that absolutely rivals the emotive force art contains, and sitting behind the goal in the 60th minute of that infamous semifinal, watching the net bulge as Sam Kerr struck a Puskas-nominated goal, I was brought to tears from the sheer emotion flooding my body and the stadium surrounding me. To bring First Nations art into this space, to hold up the art of Reko Rennie as we hold up our sporting heroes, to inspire Indigenous Australians and athletes, to showcase the progress of the sport, and how inclusive it can be.
With a 2024 major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) entitled ‘REKOSPECTIVE’, and GQ’s Artist of the Year 2024, Rennie is one of the most interesting contemporary artists
Speaking about the design, Rennie said “The chevron patterning honours the world’s oldest living continuous culture... It’s a very important symbol of our identity and the history of this country, and it needs to be acknowledged.”
Sport has the power to captivate and
This jersey is a celebration, not just of Indigenous culture and of football, but also the importance of the arts, and of the power it can have to inspire. In a time where more and more artists are question the role of gallery spaces, where arts funding is at a critical breaking point, and artists are struggling to make a living putting work into the world, to see a prominent indigenous artist creating meaningful art that can be worn, treasured, and believed in, is something worth championing. Art by Lotte Weber
When The Chile Is Cooked: Stan Twitter’s Semiotic Revolution
My screen time report glares back at me: 10 hours and 26 minutes. Mostly Twitter (now ‘X’). I should be concerned, but instead, I find myself scrolling through another thread about someone “reheating nachos.” This is my natural state now. Chronically online, my brain is thoroughly cooked.
In a world where conventional meaning feels increasingly untrustworthy, our generation has created its own semiotic system. When official channels of communication feel compromised by corporate interests, political agendas, and algorithmic manipulation, stan Twitter offers an alternative form of expression that paradoxically reflects our collective attentional paralysis while providing an escape from it.
Consider “Onika Burger,” a term born when someone misinterpreted the phrase “North West ate,” used in reference to a piece of art created by West and posted on Twitter. Another account responded with “she=onika ate=burgers,” an insult aimed at Nicki Minaj (whose real name is Onika Maraj), suggesting she was overweight at a time when her profile photos featured close-up glamour shots. The phrase makes no logical sense but communicates perfectly to those fluent in stan semiotics.
This evolution of language represents what Barthes might call the ‘death of the author’ and the birth of pure signification. Stan Twitter operates in a post-structuralist playground where
words float freely from their intended meanings, creating what Derrida would recognize as infinite chains of signifiers with no stable signified. Like memes that transform through remixing and recontextualisation, stan Twitter vernacular depends not on fixed meanings but on cultural fluidity and participatory meaning-making. The meaning isn’t in the text itself but in the community’s collective understanding of the reference, with each phrase existing as part of an endless network of cultural associations that relies on shared knowledge rather than linguistic precision.
“TS PMO ICL” exemplifies this perfectly. What began as simple abbreviations (This Shit Pisses Me Off I Can’t Lie) morphed into a deliberate word salad used to signify membership in a linguistic group. The efficiency of abbreviation becomes irrelevant. The point is participation in shared incomprehensibility. In fact, the deliberate inefficiency of these communications — typing more letters than necessary to create an abbreviation — serves as its own meta-commentary on our paradoxical relationship with digital communication.
These phrases create a paradoxical form of communicative paralysis where we understand each other perfectly while speaking what appears to be complete nonsense.
“When the chile is tea but the finna is gag” is another prime example of this phenomenon. The viral tweet combines AAVE and queer slang in a way that defies traditional interpretation yet resonates with people across the internet.
This convergence highlights the complex power dynamics of internet linguistics, where marginalized language patterns are first adopted by queer communities — with much of what we consider “queer slang” being directly appropriated from Black communities and AAVE without attribution or understanding of its origins. Terms like “tea,” “shade,” “slay,” and “gag” all originated in Black communities before being absorbed into queer lexicons and eventually mainstream usage, often stripped of their original context and complexity. The phrase functions through connotation, not through meaning but through feeling. Its popularity proves that language has transcended the need for coherence while revealing the uneven power dynamics in how language moves across cultural boundaries.
Perhaps most fascinating is how these linguistic innovations eventually breach containment, moving from niche communities into broader discourse. “Reheating Nachos” provides a perfect case study of this transition. The term criticizes celebrities who unsuccessfully attempt to recapture past glory or appropriate someone else’s aesthetic. The metaphor works brilliantly: everyone understands the disappointment of soggy, microwave reheated nachos compared to their original crispy form.
When Lady Gaga was accused of “reheating her nachos” in early 2025 with the release of “Abracadabra,” the phrase leapt from stan circles to mainstream discourse. What began as insular stan Twitter language suddenly appeared in music reviews and cultural commentary, demonstrating how even
Marc Paniza pmo icl.
seemingly nonsensical internet language can provide precise cultural critique that conventional vocabulary cannot.
I realize there’s a certain irony in analysing stan Twitter through academic frameworks like semiotics. The whole point of “TS PMO ICL” is its resistance to traditional analysis. Yet, this tension between meaning and meaninglessness defines our digital existence. We simultaneously participate in and critique the very spaces that paralyse our attention.
Perhaps being “cooked” is simply our adaptive response to information overload. When conventional coherence becomes impossible, we create new forms of connection through shared incomprehensibility. Stan Twitter’s linguistic evolution isn’t a sign of cultural degradation but of resilience, creating meaning in a world where traditional signifiers have lost their power.
As I close Twitter (for approximately seven minutes before reopening it), I wonder if future linguists will study the evolution of “Reheating Nachos” with the same seriousness afforded to Shakespeare’s neologisms. Our generation’s apparently nonsensical contributions to language might actually represent something profound: communication adapting to survive in an age of attentional paralysis.
The next time someone asks why I spend so many hours on this hellsite, I’ll simply respond: “TS tea but the finna nachos PMO ICL.” They won’t understand, which is precisely the point.
Art by Lotte Weber
Calum Boland scores.
Fare Evasion
A Conversation with the Artful Dodger*
*Name changed to protect privacy. The views or opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect or represent the author’s own unless they’re late for a Tuesday 9 AM tute.
To live in Sydney is to agree to a simple deal: never look down when you walk. It’s one of those constants everyone sticks to, but to forget it is to find yourself in a situation like I did not long ago.
If you’ve gotten off at Redfern Station and walked up the stairs to the concourse, you’ll know that the underside of these stairs are cordoned off with railings. But if you break the cardinal rule and look underneath the steps and beyond the railings, you may see a man sitting there in the shade. Those who’ve seen him call him the patron saint of the station. Others cheekily call him the Artful Dodger for reasons which will soon be made clear.
When he’s awake from his trance, greeting him with as much as a nod is dangerous. It’s not because he’s malicious in any way, but like it or not, he will remember your face forever. Acknowledging his existence has made him pledge a life debt to you. It’s a debt he tries to repay by granting you some knowledge you desire in your wildest dreams. I greeted him one day. Over several weeks, I slowly gained his trust, coaxing the odd grunt as I passed by his usual spot. One day, he motioned me. He wanted to tell me something.
“Let me tell you a story, boy.
“Once there was a young commerce student whose Opal card stopped working. He took great advantage of it, never being charged when he travelled. One day, he was stopped
by a ‘tickie’ who, upon realising his tricks, fined him so harshly he never caught public transport ever again.”
He had an archaic way of speaking, calling ticket inspectors “tickies”.
“Don’t you know, evading is as easy as not tapping on — even a finance major could do it. But if you don’t want to get caught, you must do it properly. Forget fair evading on the train or the ferry. Buses are the easiest because drivers are asked by companies not to impose mandatory fare payment.
“Of course, the best option is for you to walk straight on and just not tap. But avoid being the first to tap on. Being in the middle of the line makes it psychologically harder for the driver to pull you up because his incentive is to keep the line moving into the bus as quickly as possible. To stop you is to prevent that from happening.”
He paused. “But you knew that already didn’t you? You want more.
“See, the real issue isn’t getting thrown off by the bus driver. That hardly happens if you aren’t an idiot. It’s what happens when you tap off. Tickies work from the wee hours of the morning to late at night, so you have to remain vigilant at all times. You can spot them easily with their white shirts and card readers in hand, hunting in packs of three near bus stops. Getting around them is tough when they’re on the bus, or worse, waiting for you outside. There is very little you can do if you haven’t tapped on. But some preparation beforehand makes lightwork.
“First, memorise the location of the card readers on each bus. There are at least four, with three being closer to seats. Make sure you always sit near one of them. Sitting
A letter from a self-proclaimed #malefeminist
Last week, a mysterious letter appeared in the Honi Soit office, addressed to “one of the male editors”. Below, Will Winter transcribes the crudely scribbled message for… no, that can’t be right… the message is addressed to “all womben”? This can’t be good.
It takes a true man to look himself in the eyes and talk about his feelings. Today, I am proud to say that I have taken the long and hard road towards enlightenment, and I can see the truth. There is nothing more manly than being a #malefeminist.
Dear reader, you might think ‘aren’t you just a feminist?’ But no, because it is in my position as a male that I am able to seek clarity and truth towards womankind and her struggles.
#malefeminist.
This edition of Honi is about paralysis. What paralyses me the most in this world, is seeing all of the ways in which the women around me suffer. Women, girls, ladyfolk. I wish I could just come in with my big and strong man hands and give each and every woman the love and respect and economic parity she deserves.
It took a long time for me to become a #malefeminist. I was once one of those guys who thought that, if life was a game of basketball, then all of these women dunking on our hoops would take away the men’s champion league titleship.
within an arm’s reach of the readers near the accessibility seating or near the two beside the exit doors at the back of the bus will keep you safe.
“While tickies are crafty, it takes them a long time to wait for the bus to stop moving before they can come aboard. This is where your reaction time and close proximity to the card readers come into play. At any given stop, the readers turn on just before the bus comes to a complete halt. Now is your time to act. As soon as they turn on, quickly tap on and off a working Opal card before anything else happens. While you will be charged, at least now it will register that you have made the trip legitimately.”
The Dodger reassures me the math makes sense. It’s better paying an infrequent $5 when you absolutely need to instead of paying up to $550 in fines.
As his speech slows down, he looks at me with a wry smile. I go to thank him for his time, but his hand reaches out to me, grazing my shoulder.
“Remember boy, with great knowledge comes great responsibility. Remember that! Remember to use what you learnt today well and to never be a c–”
True to his name, the Artful Dodger is gone.
Art by Eko Bautista
Will Winter hears from a mysterious #malefeminist.
Yet, on one fateful day, watching another woman leave my room after a smashing Tuesday morning of making her come like so so much, I realised: if all women are able to love me, then why can’t I love all women?
The thought clung to me like my lycra bike pants do my enormous, muscular calves. Now, when I’m not licking a spoon clean of all the yoghurt and raw egg I eat every morning, I am thinking about the suffering of all the hotties around me.
Sometimes, I think about the idea of a woman, even an ugly one, not feeling the same amount of confidence that I feel… it shakes me, and I don’t know what to do. That’s why I, a man, want to lend my voice to the movement, and write this piece for your little magazine. I also believe, in my opinion, that the movement has become quite naggy and stale as of the last fifty years or so.
What issues specifically are the most important to a #malefeminist? Um. Uh. Hmmm…
So to all of my fellow brothers and women-lovers, I say, take up the cause! The women around you are so important in your lives. They deserve to feel equal to you.
At work, make sure your secretaries feel loved when they order your coffees. In the club, if you see a bunch of women all hanging out together away from the men, make sure you go over and flirt with them, maybe even put your hand on their lower back as a sign of comfort and domesticity, to remind them that they are attractive in the eyes of a man. They’ll love that.
Blow your barista a kiss, even if your barista is a gay man, since a gay man is basically a woman. I didn’t actually speak to any women to write this, I just imagine it must suck to be a woman. I mean, they’re not men, how can they be happy?
In conclusion, I love women. I love being a man. And now, I love being a #malefeminist.
President
Angus Fisher
Hi everyone! There’s only a few more days until midsem break, where you can hopefully relax or catchup on studies.
Last week I attended one of the most important meetings that I am invited to as SRC President in the Academic Board meeting. There are only six in the year but all the key decision makers from University management, to Deans of schools, and other student and staff representatives attend making to nearly 100 people. I have a report where I raise the most important issues pressing undergraduate students. I noted how the CAP has been unfairly applied to students and staff, the SRC’s Put the Liberals Last campaign, as well as noting the importance of face-to-face consultation with student representatives in university policy implementation. Importantly, I secured a review and meeting regarding the university’s definition of anti-semitism for the end of the year which will highlight if reasonable dialogue has been wrongly silenced throughout the year.
As the federal election date of May 3rd grows closer, it’s important we continue to recognise that student unionism has won huge victories under this current government that would not be possible under a Liberal government. We got the National Student Ombudsman where anyone can come forward with anything from issues of welfare to discrimination and be heard, partially paid placements, and reductions in HECs debt with potentially more to come. Less than three weeks to go. Don’t Risk Dutton.
As you complete exams and assignments, the SRC casework team is here for you. If you require a special consideration, have been accused of malpractice, or any other issues come up, contact a caseworker on the SRC website.
In solidarity, Angus
General Secretary
Happy (almost) mid-sem - we hope your assessments have been going well! We are looking forward to the break after a very busy start to the year, but there’s no rest for the wicked! In addition to our responsibilities on the Executive and helping Office Bearers use up their budgets, we have continued working with the collectives and thinking of new projects that can serve students and the campaigns that the SRC is leading.
In between collecting resources to remind students to enrol to vote or to update their enrolment details, Grace worked on Disabled Honi which was a great success and came out last week. Check out the video of our launch event on the SRC TikTok (@src_usyd)! It was a great honour to show the support of the SRC and students at the ASMOF doctor’s strikes last week and Action 4 Public Housing’s fight against Waterloo evictions and demolitions by the Labor government. WoCo’s Reclaim & Resist Week is coming up (Week 10!) which Grace is preparing an event for and trying to help the organisers make the most of our “special weeks” pool of funding. Anu has been on the grind as always with the International Students Collective,
which recently saw a successful and well-attended film screening last Friday.
Additionally, we’re looking into an influenza vaccination drive and vouchers for students! The University is doing the same for their staff, so it makes sense to offer it to students.
During our cost-of-living and health crises, we should be doing everything we can to prevent the spread of viruses that can lead to huge medical bills (particularly for those without Medicare) or needing an expensive or inaccessible doctor’s note for missed classes or assessments. Most importantly, we should be looking out for the vulnerable in our society and keeping the community safe as we head into what is expected to be an intense flu season this year.
We will keep you posted, and in the mean time - go get a flu vaccine if you can and remember to mask up if you’re sick! The Disabilities Collective has started up a mask bloc and can help provide some if you need, check out their social media for more information.
Huge crowds came out across the country on Trans Day of Visibility to say that trans lives, trans rights, and trans healthcare must be protected. Over 600 people attended the Sydney rally— thank you to everyone who came!
Two weeks ago, USYD invited IDF members into the management building for a pro-Israel propaganda event. Mark Scott’s full-throated support for genocide is on display once again. We joined the speak-out against this event to say war criminals are not welcome on our campus and USYD must divest from Israel’s genocide immediately.
We are also submitting to the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine. USYD continues to crackdown on political speech and particularly targets POC, queer, and at-risk students. We will be fighting USYD’s repression and pinkwashing at every step.
The annual Palm Sunday rally for refugee rights happened this Sunday.
Queer Officers
Jamie Bridge, Wendy Thompson
We attended with a queer contingent including queer collectives across Sydney. Anti-immigration policies and border profiling especially harms queer travelers, workers, and asylum seekers. We’re here, we’re queer, and refugees will always be welcome here!
This year’s edition of Queer Honi will be published in week 10! The theme is ‘After the party’s over.’ Governments everywhere are rolling back LGBTQ+ rights, corporations have dropped their rainbow flags, and universities are cracking down on free speech. The major parties are seeing their vote shrink as people lose faith in the status quo. Gen Z queers are partying less than ever before amid the cost of living crisis, and queer venues are being bought out and shut down. How did we get here? What do we do now?
Pitches are due by Friday the 18th of April, so send in a submission if you’ve got something to say! Link to pitch is in our instagram bio @usydqueer.
Disabilities Officers
Remy Lebreton, Vince Tafea
The past few weeks, we have been working on the autonomous edition of Honi Soit that was released last week! This Disabled Honi has been a labor of love dedicated to our late comrade and friend, Khanh Tran. We thank all the editors who contributed so much of their time and expertise to this, and those who contributed art. Special thanks to Victor for being an absolute god of layups.
On April 2, we had our monthly council meeting in which we brought a motion in support of the doctors’ strikes that began on April 8. From this, we organized a working bee and banner paint, preparing for a student contingent for the rallies. It went well, with many passionate people from
DisCo showing up.
The banner read “PAY THE DOCS, NOT THE COPS” which we brought (much to the amusement of the doctors there) to the NSW Ministry of Health rally on Tuesday and the St George Hospital rally on Wednesday.
The Minns government is all too happy to give cops a 40% pay rise but expects psychiatrists to work for free for three months of the year. They expect nurses and doctors to work in a public health system that is frankly failing. We showed up for them the same way they have shown up for us.
Vince Tafea & Remy Lebreton
Anu Khulan, Grace Street
Photo by Striking Doctor
Photo by Grace Street
Working Students: Your Rights as a Worker
Many students need to work while they study to pay their living costs or to get work experience. In Australia, all workers have rights, even if they are citizens of another country, e.g., international students. Trade unions support workers to protect workers’ rights and together with the Fair Work Ombudsman, makes sure workers are treated fairly. Each job has an agreement or an award that outlines the pay and conditions you should expect. Make sure you read it carefully before signing up as an employee. Some students accept being paid less that their award or being treated unfairly as they are afraid to lose their job. No matter what conditions you agree to or how you get paid, your boss cannot arrange for you to be deported, just because you did not do something they wanted you to do at work, or just because you have been working outside of the law while studying.
If you are a casual worker (not permanent) check your agreement to know how much notice you are entitled to before getting a shift or having one cancelled. Even if you are casual and do not get paid sick leave, if you are too unwell to attend work, you are entitled to have that time off. Most employers will require you to give them a doctor’s certificate. Some employees are paid a penalty loading (extra money) if they work on weekends, after normal hours, or public holidays. Check your agreement to see if this applies to you. Keep a record of all the hours you work and check them against your payslip to ensure you have received the correct pay.
Employers pay tax on any money you earn, which is then assessed at the end of the financial year (30th June). You will need to complete a tax return to have that assessed so you can receive a refund of excess taxes paid, or repay any that you owe. If you earn more than $450 (before
tax) in a month you are also entitled to at least 10% superannuation. It seems like a very long time away but planning for your retirement now is a good idea. Some international students can get a refund of superannuation when they have permanently left Australia.
Many students need to work while they study to pay their living costs or to get work experience. In Australia, all workers have rights, even if they are citizens of another country, including international students.
Some employers avoid their responsibilities by “hiring” people as “contractors”; e.g., delivery riders, ride share operators, tutors; for roles in the “gig economy”. There are many difficulties for people working within these roles, including no sick leave, no insurance or workers compensation, and complex tax requirements. Consider these conditions before engaging one of these roles.
The best protection you have as a worker is through your trade union. They protect you as an individual and as part of a group of workers. They have in the past fought for conditions such as fair pay, lunch breaks, penalty rates, and protected workers from unfair dismissal. The small joining fee is tax deductable and gives you protection while you are working. Different jobs have different trade unions, so start by joining the Australian Council of Trade Unions, then they will let you know which specific Union you will move to for the following month.
Ask Abe
SRC Caseworker Help Q&A
Special Consideration
If you are sick for an assessment apply for Special Consideration within 3 working days.
Dear Abe,
I’ve been very sick, and I don’t think I can go to class, but I have a quiz there that I cannot miss. What should I do?
Very Sick
Dear Very Sick,
If you are too sick to complete an assessment, you should apply for special consideration. You must provide supporting documentation from a doctor,
psychologist, psychiatrist, etc., who practices in Australia. Online doctors or chemists might not be considered sufficient for your application. Ideally, they would use a Professional Practitioner’s Certificate (download from Uni website). Make sure you apply within 3 working days of the assessment, as late applications might not be considered. In this situation it is also good manners to contact your lecturer and let them know you’ll be missing the assessment and class.
Abe
If you need help from an SRC Caseworker start an enquiry on our Caseworker Contact Form: bit.ly/contact-a-caseworker
Some Hack the Apprentice’s ‘Quick’ Crossword
Across
1 ___ King Cole (3)
4 Doctors’ orders (5)
6 Clue in (3,4)
8 Architect Saarinen (4)
9 Low digits (4)
11 Wager (3)
12 Snooze (3)
14 A poet’s before (3)
16 “By God, I will make sure this is correct” (5,8)
20 Middle note or middling grade (3)
21 Seeker of my precious! (7)
1 Never ever (3,4)
2 Request; Smiths’ song (3)
3 Low stake sought after at windy encampment (4,3)
4 ___ Spiegel (3)
5 One of the Great Lakes’ canals (3)
6 Bouncer’s ask? (4,3,4,2)
7 Useful for keeping track of deadlines (6,7)
8 Part of Anti-Discrimination Act of concern to employers? (3)
10 ___ Lanka (3)
11 American author Harte (4)
13 Beloved 80s synth-pop band (1,2)
22 Atlantic catch (3)
24 In the dark (4,3)
26 “This really grinds ___” (2,5)
29 Works on walls (3)
30 Attain (3)
31 Safety gear (3)
32 Hi-___ (they play albums?) (3)
33 Maid in The Merchant of Venice (7)
35 Winning candidate (7)
37 Coveted by bronze-age civilisations (3)
38 Even a smidgen (3,4)
15 Suffix with exist- or confer- (4)
16 Suffix with euro- or helio- (7)
17 “Má Vlast” composer (7)
18 Try to win (7)
19 Chase (2,5)
20 “v” upturned (5)
23 Not as moist (5)
24 Tuna holder (3)
25 UN Head for short (3)
27 “___ whiz!” (Americanism) (3)
28 NNW opposite (3)
34 Wise to (2,2)
42 2013 Spike Jonze film (3)
43 Nerve center; Houston, for one (7,3)
46 Precedes maiden name? (3)
47 Times that should be abolished? (3)
48 ___ sequitur (3)
49 Join the chorus (4)
51 Contents of veins (4)
53 Hauling coupling (7)
55 Meatworker union (5)
56 Biblical book before Neh. (3)
36 Common Chinese surname beginning with C (4)
39 Final stage (7)
40 Checked during RSA? (3)
41 What “10” can mean? (7)
44 Spanish month (3)
45 Agreement unlikely to be read? (3)
50 American gun fanatics (3)
52 Feyd-___tha from Dune (3)
54 Virtuoso (3)
Some Hack the Original’s Cryptic Swan Song
Week 7 Crossword Answers
1 Religious man has tea with Peter, say? (6)
4 CIA organises “Democrat” to bomb Iran, leading to poisoned water (4,4)
10 Snowball fight? (4,3)
11 Shredded cousin cuddles hot thing in bed? (7)
12 Sailor’s seedy dictation of first four letters (1,1,1,1)
13 Don’t be gay, don’t do crime? (2,8)
15 Kinda rad victory for scientist (6)
16 Servant’s car crushes son (7)
20 Pleasure yourself with Jamaican chicken takeaway (4,3)
21 Loud Thai child loses legs to martial art (3,3)
24 Endless Joy! Lines of grain eaten in both Ghana and Nigeria (6,4)
26 Grandma s favorite activity discussing Parasite (4)
28 Stuff second dead relative in small dish (7)
29 Servant likes to suck toes? (7)
30 This European nationality makes shit cots (8)
31 Spooner gets low and says Mario’s catchphrase (4,2)
27 Put down Eton mess (4) Across Down
Across (by individual row): Ant, Praha, Marxism, Data Entry, Terry, Kebab, DisCo, Rural, Kahlo, Moria, Complains, Nereids, Naans, HRE Down (by individual column): An Axe, Array, Think, Patrolmen, Asteroids, Marchon, Mr Burns, de sac, Yaris, Tik, Baa, Oprah, Maine, Learn
1 Wealthy bards cut the head off dicks (8)
2 Be 50/50 on snake distribution system (4,5)
3 State “audio was found” (4)
5 Penis and Bottom get you fucked up? (8)
6 “Sad Revolution”, “Cap It All” quotations from Marx s Book (3,7)
7 Maturing spirit encased in silver (5)
8 “No German Tea” Says First Nonagenarian (6)
9 Evidence of professor eating donut (5)
14 Select corrupt cop for drug theft (10)
17 Cage, Cave, Frost? (9)
18 Austrian, French ruler faces scandals (8)
19 Nine Inch Nails X-party game maker (8)
22 American cars have Japanese roofs by Norwegian waters (6)
23 Stalker, Contact, Interstellar, Firestarter, The Incredibles (3-2)
25 Avoid Arm, Say Nothing? (5)
Crosswords by Some Hacks
Honi
Deserves Office Space?
Victor Zhang delves into the archives.
Much to the chagrin of those that want us defunded, we are here to stay. In 1967, a meeting of the Students’ Representative Council resolved that Honi Soit was to be funded “in spite of present financial loss” as it was an “integral part of the student life of Sydney University.” It was resolved then that Honi would be provided
“fully-equipped offices… in the SRC Rooms.”
We receive comments from silly detractors year after year questioning the utility of our left-wing rag. To which I echo the sentiments of the 1967 column: “Honi Soit belongs to the students. It is up to [us] to support it.”
Special Buys Bad. Same.
New Stocks
Even with the Australian Dollar where it is, the HSX69420 is at a really good price right now.
*The HSX69420 is a new stock and not a scam, we pinkie-swear.
Box dye for kids
I really wanted ginger kids. Time to make that dream a reality.
Free of bleach and burning... mostly.
Sex Beads
to help incorporate your special union. ribbed for Ur pleaSUre
Reading material for the #malefeminist in your life
A third house
Struggling to pay for your own rent? A third house should provide you with enough income to relate to potential first-home buyers this election.
Okra Verify
Need to check if you’re eating okra?
Put in your password five times.
Connections
Create four groups of four!
Write your answers here!
