Got the post-budget blues? A daily dose of The Feed could be what you need! Even if we obviously wouldn’t be able to escape the miserable beast’s claws in a half hour news slot.
The budget was given a cursory damning in the opening news collection, and as obvious as it was that a youth oriented news program on SBS wouldn’t support Abbott and Hockey’s new economic plans, it was (of course) worth bringing up. This is one of the most staggeringly newsworthy budgets of recent memory, and to avoid bringing it up would be pointless- even if there is depressingly little we can actually do about it. Combine this opening news montage with depressing reports from the Turkish mine collapse and the lack of progress on the returning of the kidnapped Nigerian girls and you sure had for a bummer of an opening.
The evening’s major story though, was a really lovely and perhaps eye opening piece from Jeannette Francis on asexuality. Often misunderstood, the story features firsthand accounts of the ‘forgotten’ sexual preference from a local 22 year old lady. Rather than being entirely ‘sexless’, asexuality simply indicates a lack of sexual attraction, not sexual activity. A libido can still be, and in this case was, present. Johanna explained that for her, the desire to have an orgasm was like an itch, yet fantasising about the body or any particular male or female was simply not what passed through her mind. Asexuality is so often invisible when people discuss non-hetero sexual preferences (look how long you have to get into LGBTQIA before you reach the ‘A’), so any light shed on it is worthwhile. The fact that Francis handled the topic with ease and charm, combined with Johanna’s own excellent explanations, made for wonderful viewing. And hey, any story that includes a quote like “You know, I could go for an orgasm right now” is always going to be gold.
Finally, Marc Fennell presented a brief overview of the Google+ (yes, it’s still a thing) app Us+. The awkwardly named service allows users engaging in Google video chats to be critiques by other users- not in what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it. That’s right- all the pleasures of anxiety without ever leaving your home! Ostensibly, the service is designed to have socially uncomfortable users be coached on speaking and conversation etiquette, yet seems more like an eerie cross between a potential cyber bullying, and the Google Machine learning how we interact as humans for its inevitable takeover.
Such as it was, it was a particularly ‘downer’ story episode- owing more to the budget and the news wrap up than anything else. Yet the surprising and positive story on asexuality, and the effortlessly charismatic hosting chops of Jeannette Francis (filling in for always-missed Mr. Fennell) more than carried the show along without it dragging or feeling too heavy.
Review Score: THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Feed airs Monday-Thursday, 7:35 (repeated 10:30) on SBS2
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