The dreaded 'C' word: Cougar

 “God, I loathe that term, I really hate it!,” says my single girlfriend, 40. “It’s the image of growling and prowling and pouncing on young men that I can’t stand. It’s a total male fantasy. I’m single. That’s all.”
 A new survey by Prevention magazine has quizzed 1000 Australian women over 40 about their sex lives. Among the findings: “… a third admitted to a cougar experience – having sex with someone at least five years younger” is the way it was reported by news.com.au.
  If I’d had a chance to do that quiz, I would have raised a couple of other points:
*At what age, exactly, does one become a “cougar”?  For instance, a girlfriend of mine in her 30s had a serious relationship with a bloke seven years younger than her. Is there a name for that?
*What is the male equivalent term for “cougar”? Is it “Sugar Daddy”? If it is, why does the male equivalent imply some financial arrangement, while the female term does not? (BTW, I hear the latest internet slang for a man looking for a younger woman is “rhino”. It’s a jungle out there!)
*In the news.com.au report the word “admitted” was used in relation to being a cougar. Is there something shameful about the idea of an older woman shagging a younger bloke?
*Exactly why do older woman hate the term “cougar” so much? Who made it dirty?
 
 In the news.com.au report, there’s also the curious case of one radio shock jock Steve Price and so-called NRL “cougar” Charmyne Palavi. Palavi, mother of three, launched her case for “damages and aggravated damages” after Price and celebrity reporter Peter Ford referred to her on-air at radio 2UE as a “slut” on May 14, 2009. At the time she said: “I’m not a slut. I’ve had past and present (NRL) players, men and women, old people and young contact me and say all you’ve done is gone out as a single person and led a single life – people do that every weekend; why does that make you different to anyone else?” she said.
  “Who determines what is a slut, who determines who is too many, and who knows who I’ve been with? The only person is me. If I had been a woman in her 20s who had no children, you would never have heard of me.”
 Back in April, Price said he felt justified after he and Ford were cleared by a jury of defaming her. After the case, he said: “I used the word slut and by any definition, if you look in the dictionary, it’s what I thought she was and the jury agreed. She should have realised she’d put herself out there…she would have been a lot better shutting up and keeping right out of it.”
  As news.com.au added in their report on the decision: “Forty-one-year-old Palavi, who has confessed to sexual liaisons with several professional footballers, last year split with her toyboy husband Michael Browne.”

“Toyboy”, “cradle snatcher”, “gold-digger”, “slut”, “stud”, “sleazeball”.

 Just who is taking advantage of whom? And why do we feel the need to assign these labels to anyone of any age?

Things that go bump in the night.....

This story was sent to me in an e-mail and thought it was amusing and thought I'd share it with you. Enjoy!

 Ladies, if you’ve ever slept at home sans your man folk, this next little tale with leave you goose pimply. And you will, like me, sympathize whole heartedly with my girlfriend Sarah who, while home alone encountered an intruder and called the police.

  When I’m home alone I have a little ritual. I lock ALL the doors and windows and check them twice, then close all the doors to all the rooms in the house. I put some manly clothes on the line and a pair of big work boots at the front door. I’m told that scares the burglars away as they think a man is home. Don’t laugh- I haven’t been robbed yet so it MUST work!
  Then I grab all the phones and some sort of weapon to sleep with. Not a knife-they may use that against you. I’ve been told a rolling pin is good, but as I don’t own one, don’t cook much, I use a wooden spoon. It comforts me to know that if someone breaks in, I’ll totally surprise them when I whip out the spoon and smack them round the head a couple of times, and maybe call them a naughty boy in the process. That should have them running and screaming out the door, never to return, shouldn’t it? Well my friend Sarah kinda did all of the above and STILL had a man infiltrate the family compound.
  Sarah has a new baby, and Hubby was away on business. She put her little one down to sleep, did the burglar proofing ritual for the home and went to bed. A few hours later she woke to the sounds of a man tapping on the doors and windows and whispering ‘is anyone home?’ Naturally she ‘FREAKED THE HELL OUT!!” She didn’t recognize the voice, and rightly assumed that the Mormons aren’t that desperate to recruit people to Jesus at 2 in the morning.  Besides, it didn’t matter who it was, she sure as hell wasn’t going to answer the door in the middle of the night. So she did what came naturally and hid under the bed. But not before grabbing her iPhone, which promptly lit up like a disco. So here she was, under the bed, in nothing but a t-shirt, lying on her iPhone to mask the light and breathing as quietly as she could, praying her daughter wouldn’t wake and cry alerting the intruder.
  Then the man did something very strange. He turned on the taps outside and started muttering ‘I found you didn’t I, I found you?” So she assumed he may have been either crazy, or crazy. At this stage she realized she needed manly help. So she rang her husband. Fat lot of good he could do in Adelaide or where ever he was. As he answered the phone she hoarsely whispered ‘call the police!’ he answered with a groggy ‘What?” again she said ‘call the police” panicked he asked ‘WHY?” , ‘Just call the police” she urgently whispered one more time and hung up, praying he would.
  He did, and 15 minutes later, 2 police cars, 6 police and one sniffer dog appeared like knights in shining armour to rescue this housewife in distress. Hauling herself from under the bed, in haste she thought, I’m in no state to answer the door. So she ran to the dresser to spritz on some perfume and promptly forgot to put on pants and answered the door in nothing but a t-shirt.
  But the Queensland Police are quite used to people (namely colleagues) running around in the nude-so this didn’t faze them. By now the intruder had escaped, perhaps frightened off by the blaring police sirens, so a few questions were asked and the sniffer dog was off and chasing the scent. Which he cleverly found and it led him next door. The next door neighbours were already awake. It seems the intruder had knocked on their door also. But why? Why was this intruder wandering around the streets of Brisbane knocking on doors and asking is anyone home?
  Turns out Sarah’s dog had escaped. The intruder, now a Good Samaritan, had found him and bought him home. The running water was him giving the dog a drink, and he went to the neighbours after assuming no-one was home to inform them the dog was getting out and to let Sarah know. And then went on his merry way. Utterly dying of embarrassment, in nothing but her t-shirt, but smelling quite lovely, Sarah thanked the police and went to bed. She still doesn’t know who the Good Samaritan is, but she now sleeps with the dog inside and wears pants.

I promise to end the love/hate relationship with the way I look.

Dear Body,  
 I’m writing to you to say I’m sorry. You have copped a major hammering over the years. Honestly, you could take yourself off to a home for battered bodies, on account of the physical and emotional abuse you have endured.
  Oh sure, I’ve never cut you, starved you or shoved heroin into you. But there’s something pretty ugly about constantly comparing you and always finding you wanting. Slimmer, more sculpted, wider-eyed, smaller-nosed, longer legs, less freckly, less spotted, less wrinkled, less….just less, freakin’ less of you. Especially you, flabby stomach – you’ve ruined my life.
  For a very long time, I thought I was the only one criticizing you for your shortfalls. As it turns out, we’re all at it. A new study has revealed that 85 per cent of us are our own worst beauty critic. One in four of us would surgically upholster or deflate our boobs and 40 per cent regard a bit of a nip, tuck and suck as the best way to “improve body confidence”. Ha! I bet you’re glad I’m such a wuss about pain.
  Anyway, you’ve patiently soldiered on for over thirty years now, so it’s time we made our peace. Here goes: sorry for the years I tortured you in the gym and rewarded you with half a cup of yoghurt and a bunch of steamed spinach. And apologies for drinking a Bloody Mary and a Cosmopolitan and believing that they made up five fruit and veg (2 x tomato, 2 x celery, and 1 x lime). There’s more: the cellulite massage (panel-beating at its least effective), and the watercress soup diet (oh joy!).
  The truth is, you’ve done me proud. Haven’t we achieved some stuff? The strength you gave me to endure those long hours before finally arriving at Rome Airport where I was whisked away to hospital to have my troublesome appendix removed, the school running carnivals and races that you endured as a child in primary school.
  Body, at worst, I’ve treated you with cruelty and disrespect. At best, I’ve taken you for granted. I should have been awed by your strength, resilience and amazingness. Take my heart – beat, beat, beat. It never misses.
  You’ll eventually succumb one day (May it be many decades from now!), but until then I promise to appreciate and honour all that you are and all that you do.

 With love, M.

PS: I’ll try harder to remember the fish oil.

How very smart are kids using Smart phones!

 Lately I have been noticing how scarily savvy small children are with smart phones. Like a moth to a flame my three year old next door neighbour can’t resist the magical pull of his mother’s iPhone and within seconds of zoning in on it in her handbag or nimbly pick pocketing it out of her jeans, his little hands seem to have an intuitive sense of how to slide the panels and push the buttons and before I know it he has unlocked the Fruit Ninja app and is playing it like a pro. He's THREE! He’s not alone, look around you, coffee shops, cars and doctors surgeries are filled with children of all ages being quietened and entertained by Mummy’s phone.    In a recent interview in the Sydney Morning Herald Associate Professor Jane Burns, of the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre (youngandwellcrc.org.au) said that ‘We are the last generation to know a world without technology. Kids are far savvier than parents; they can pick up things easily. But don’t just give your phone to your child as a babysitter, chose the apps that will help them learn’.
  That makes perfect sense to me but I still wonder if handing a phone to a child to quieten them while Mummy has a coffee or to make them behave while waiting for an appointment is good for learning social skills and manners? ‘No matter what parents do, (technology) it’s here to stay and parents need to become educated so we can support our kids. You can’t keep your head in the sand’ Jane explains ‘we had the same concerns when television started’
  Fair enough, but I doubt if parents will be so accepting and adapting of technology when in the future phones are being micro chipped into our kid’s eyeballs.....but I digress.  Along with noticing how young our children seem to be mastering the use of smart phones is the worrying trend of how young they own one.  The latest research shows that one in four seven-to 10-year-olds already have a phone. The study, commissioned by the Cartoon Network also documents a 17 per cent rise in phone ownership for children since 2006 and while I understand that in most cases it’s for safety and peace of mind, with phone ownership comes a whole other range of issues for our kids, like stumbling on apps they shouldn’t, social networking addiction, and even phone bullying.
  Professor Burns also stated that phone companies like Vodafone are already addressing the situation. ‘Vodafone Guardian, a new app for Android-powered smartphones is free and allows families to agree on parameters for their children’s smartphone use, including when children are permitted to make calls, receive texts, access the web browser and play games. Plus it’s hugely powerful for children to shut out bullying, allowing the blocking of numbers and bullying messages’
  Apps like the Vodafone Guardian certainly sound like they are needed by modern-day parents especially when bullying is no longer left in the playground and can be carried home in their back packs. It almost makes me mourn the days when mobile phones were only owned by your Dad and needed their own handbag and an antenna just to get reception. But who am I to criticise. There are daily photos, videos, and apps on my own phone. I couldn’t live without it. Plus the look on the faces of my friends and family when I show them the vision of my favourite moments filmed on my phone is priceless and I realise that whether I like it or not by the time young children start learning to read they’ll probably be learning to do so via an app downloaded onto a phone.

The photocopier that eats time.

 Offices have changed. They used to offer nerds a safe shelter from the outside world. The most physically demanding task of office life used to be emptying the waste paper basket or filling the stapler. But since cynical multinationals introduced “low maintenance” photocopiers, those days are over for good. Being able to fix the photocopier yourself instead of calling a technician saves everyone time and money. So they tell us…   Don’t believe a word of it. The “self-repairing” photocopier is the biggest con ever put-upon office staff since the swivel chair – an object that was maliciously designed to injure people who (naturally) use it as a stepladder while changing a light bulb. A DIY photocopier breakdown presents an opportunity for every alpha male in the office to descend on the copy room with sleeves rolled up, muscles oiled and well-thumbed technical blueprints in hand. “Fixing the photocopier” is now the office equivalent of returning from the hunt with a bloodied mammoth hindquarter slung over your sabre-tooth-scarred, animal-pelted back.
  For the rest of us, this is a depressing ordeal. Suppose you’ve fended off the Neanderthals and installed yourself as the dominant patriarch of photocopier repairs. Your work colleagues are sitting eagerly in the lunch room like the extended family of Lazarus, waiting excitedly for you to emerge with perfectly printed letterhead in hand. Meanwhile, you are confronted with a series of lettered green knobs labelled A to E with additional subdivisions labelled “A3X” and “Bii”. Lacking an advanced degree in nuclear biomechanics or the like, you find this unhelpful.
  “How’s it going in there?” your boss asks. “Fine!!” you lie. “Turn knob A until paper emerges” the instructions innocently state. Of course, the paper never emerges. That would be too simple! The most painful aspect of photocopier instructions is their inflexibility. For example, what happens if you turn knob A, yet none of the promised paper emerges? “Well”, you say to yourself, “I’ll turn knob B instead”. But turning knob B at the non-approved time only makes the machine angrier. This marks the start of the human versus photocopier psychological war, a conflict of slow destruction in which you have already unknowingly violated the Alphabetical Knob Order Treaty.
  To throw you off the scent, the angry photocopier now tells you to open a series of fictional doors. “First, release the Cartridge Filler Door. Secondly undo the Waste Tank Disposal Hatch. Thirdly, unlatch the Surplus Paper Dust Receptacle Extractor Cover. Finally, jemmy the Spherical Pressurised Ink Release Repository Valve”. You haven’t heard of any of these doors and strongly doubt their existence. You’re about to give up hope when – aha! – you see a jammed piece of paper that you’d overlooked.
  Surely, that’s the problem? To release the paper, of course, you will have to plunge your hands into the only sharp and/or pointy part of the photocopier’s insides. As soon as you grip it, a confetti-sized piece breaks off in your hand. Removing the entire sheet requires 50 attempts and lots and lots of swearing. You emerge into the lunch room broken yet victorious. The copier’s green LED-eye glowers in the empty room, quietly plotting its revenge. The human/photocopier war continues...

Who needs to look good naked?

 Suck-me-in undies are God’s gift to women, our secret weapon, and the answer to Visible Panty Lines, belly bulges and thunder thighs. And the most satisfying part-men have no idea that our tight bum and smooth tum could explode at anytime from the beige spandex and nylon prison we’ve squished our wobbly bits into.
 It’s nothing to be ashamed of - admitting that your Bridget Jones-type underwear is your answer to the shake, soup and starve yourself diets. No need to bother yourself eating a carrot stick a day when for the low price of $50 we can pop into DJ’s and solve all our muffin top woes with a pair of the most unattractive underpants known to man or woman. 
  I remember my cousins and I giggling at nannas elephantine undies swinging on the clothesline in the breeze, then being horrified coming home from school seeing a whole row of my mother’s on the line - I hadn’t remembered her graduating to granny pants status. 
 Then as my school formal loomed and 17-year-old puppy fat had failed to disappear, my mum lovingly gave me a pair and told me it would be our little secret. So - ahem - yes!  I wore a pair of monster-sized undies to my school formal. I often wonder if it was Mum’s sneaky plan to ensure my pimply date didn’t slide his hand where it shouldn’t have been, as there was no way any boy was getting a gawk at my heinous ...um, I mean new slimming secret.
 The fact is, however, that men really couldn’t give a toss. It’s not like they are going to spend all that time wooing you, coaxing you to take your kit off, clumsily attempt to unclip your bra and then “Whoa - what the hell, sorry I didn’t realise your arse had been taken captive by Triumph - sorry gotta go, I’ll call you next lifetime”.
  No. They rip them off and dig in, so to speak. Support underwear is just another torture tool to assert authority over our bodies, like the push-up bra and 10-inch stilettos; they make us appear as if we would look smoking hot naked and hurrah it usually works.
  Channel 10 premiered a show called Look Good Naked and quite frankly it was a brilliant show. They got average, everyday women and taught them to either love their bodies - or master the art of hiding their flaws and accentuating their assets. From fake tan, to tidy body hair to investing in body contouring underwear, by the end of the episode women almost had enough confidence to strip their food-stained trackie-dacks off in front of a crowd and start swinging around a pole – that’s how sexy they felt!
  OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating slightly - but they did learn to love themselves so much that maybe, just maybe, they’ll be confident enough to have sex with the lights on.

 Just make sure it’s soft lighting, oh and not too close. 

No ifs ands or butts about it: Just put some damn pants on!

 I tell you what Australia; it’s time to put some damn pants on. I know this isn’t going to be as easy as it sounds. Australia sometimes struggles even to work out what pants are. We need a pants definition. By “we” I mean the young woman who walked in to my local RTA (Roads and Traffic Authority) office in an essentially pants-less condition.   Now, this girl wasn’t wearing a dress instead of pants. Oh no, she was trying to kid herself – and every other set of bulging eyes in that RTA – into thinking her T-shirt was a dress. A T-shirt that barely went past her hips no less. And, just to add to the unconvincing nature of her cheek-flashing ensemble, this girl had popped on a pair of sheer pantyhose. Sheer, I tell you! As in see-through! Even the garter straps on the stockings were on show for the entire world to see – along with her white undies.
  For a moment there I thought she was lost. I wanted to go over to her with directions to the nearest police station so she could report her stolen pants. Because pantyhose are just not pants. Even though they go over your legs and contain the letters P-A-N-T, they are not pants. They are underwear. Underwear as outerwear is a disturbing trend among would-be pretty young things these days.
  Fashion trends for young women have become tighter, shorter and – let’s face it – sluttier with every season. Sydney in particular, has become the smutty city thanks to these revealing wardrobes. When Mardi Gras partygoers decked out in buttless chaps make you look like a skank by comparison, then you know we have a problem. At what point does skimpy dressing become indecent exposure? Because I’m more than happy to make a citizen’s arrest on anyone who assaults my eyeballs. Girls, at the risk of sounding like your mother, please cover yourselves!
  I’m not for a second suggesting we bring back girdles and neck-to-knee swimming costumes. That’s just nasty. All I’m asking for is a little bit of common sense. Tights are not pants. Yet every second young woman (and even the odd not-so-young woman) is trekking around town in tights with nothing else covering their arse. Well, quite frankly, that makes you an ass.
  Even on a rake-thin model, tights do not count as pants. If the garment coating your arse is 99% Lycra and in no need of zippers or buttons to do them up then, I can tell you now, they are not pants. Tights are an undergarment. As in they belong under another garment, such as a dress that goes past your cellulite-ridden upper thigh region. When you try to present them in public as stand-alone pants, you just look ridiculous.
  Those stares following you around are not stares of “doesn’t she look great?!” They are stares of “what the fuck is she wearing?!” And just doing it because everyone else is wearing the same disgustingly stretched and transparent tights is no excuse. Rolling with the majority isn’t always right. Once upon a time the majority thought the world was flat. Look at us now.
  The only time tights are acceptable in public is during exercise. Running is exercise. Walking the dog is exercise. Wandering around Westfield mall is not exercise.
  It’s not just the tights-as-pants craze that has taken off and turned my stomach in the process. It’s the super-short skirts on not-so-super figures; and the cut-off denim shorts (so short the pockets hang longer than the hemline) that look like they will cut a girl in half when she sits down. My personal opinion is that if you can’t sit down without your bare arse touching the seat, then the skirt is too short. Where are your parents in all this? Have they seen what you’re wearing?
  I will admit that my mother has hurled the occasional hurtful comment my way regarding my outfits. She’s developed a catalogue of nicknames for my clothes. But for every backhanded compliment my mum pays me, I’m sure glad she’s honest about my wardrobe. And I’ve never, ever worn tights as pants. So please, ladies, PUT ‘EM ON!

Winter blues.

By: Benjamin Law – Good Weekend Magazine. June 2, 2012.

 People pinpoint the start of winter in all sorts of ways. Australians like to keep things neat and go by the calendar: winter officially starts on June 1 and finishes at the end of August. Simple. For those inclined towards astronomy, the cold season is defined by earth’s orbital position in relation to the sun, with its midpoint – winter solstice, the shortest day of the year – signalled by the midday sun appearing at its lowest point above the horizon (June 21 this year). My personal method is far more instinctive. I know winter has arrived when I find myself making roasts, craving nothing more than hot tea and a doona, and waking up so cold that I weep ice and question my will to live.

  Winter can be one brutal bastard of a season. It humiliates us and renders our behaviour ridiculous. In the mornings, we stay absolutely still in bed, knowing that the slightest movement can dissipate the warmth afforded by the just-so equilibrium of body, blanket and bed. From bed, we rush to the bathroom with the grim determination of a Russian widow facing the snow, before spending the rest of the day dragging an oil heater from room to room, like a hospital patient attached to an IV drip.
  And sometimes we end up on such a drip. Hospitals are inundated in winter, with staff having to adjust to drastically changed working conditions due to the cold (“winter illness impact”) and an increased demand for beds. All around the country, we contract influenza, last year in record numbers, and suffer from something delightful called “winter vomiting”, also known as viral gastroenteritis or stomach flu.
  And even if we don’t get ill, we get unhealthy. Our until-now-disciplined several-kilometres-a-week swimming regimen is swiftly replaced by other non-traditional, non-Olympic sports such as extreme soup making, marathon hot showering and competitive sleeping. At night, we cling more closely than ever to our partners (or pets, or children), not because we love each other more in winter, but because other people are a great source of body heat and we could, hypothetically, kill them and use them as a protein source in an extreme survival situation, should it ever come to that.
  Australians just aren’t made for this kind of weather. We live in complete denial that it ever gets cold at all. Central or in-built heating is rare, and come June, we’re always caught off guard by the sudden necessity of wearing, say, trousers.
  Many countries have far more brutal winters, of course, the kind that make you reassess humanity’s collective wisdom in thinking any of these places were fit for human habitation. Take the remote Russian village of Oymyakon (population: fewer than 500), to which Stalin’s regime exiled political prisoners. Now regarded as the coldest permanently inhabited area on earth, Oymyakon boasts average yearly highs of minus 8.5C and average lows of minus 22.7C. Its record low is minus 71.2C.
  It isn’t just the environment that changes hideously in winter: our bodies transform in magical and revolting ways too. For a start, we get fatter. Even the fittest people gain an extra kilo or two during winter.
  This fat rarely helps our cause: it’s a myth that our bodies are designed to pack on the kilos to feel warmer (as Slate magazine has noted, women tend to have more fat, and therefore a higher core temperature, but colder extremities). Instead, the fat we gain is most likely due to an evolutionary tic whereby we associate the cold with famine. We essentially hold on more tightly to an energy reserves we don’t use. Some research also suggests that melatonin – the sleep-inducing hormone activated by darkness – comes into full force in winter and makes us hungrier. Other studies hypothesise that if we are lacking exposure to sunshine, and therefore have lower vitamin D levels, we retain more fat. I just hypothesise pudding.
  If you think you’re rushing off to the toilet more often, too, it’s not your imagination. During, winter, we pee a LOT. Partly, this is because we tend to perspire less in winter, but in low temperatures we also undergo something called peripheral vasoconstriction. To minimise heat loss in cold conditions, blood vessels in our skin narrow to stop blood flowing to outer tissues. Blood pools towards the core of our bodies, which pushes up blood pressure in our arteries. Our kidneys – which regulate blood volume and pressure – reabsorb or shed water according to our hydration and blood pressure levels, and, voila, more pee.
  And, contrary to the myth that we become bear-like in winter to insulate our bodies, our hair grows more slowly in winter. Lower body heat means slower cell division and blood circulation, which makes our hair growth sluggish; the rate usually drops by about 10 per cent.
  We yawn more, too. Studies have been done (God bless those scientists, whoever they are) that suggest – counter-intuitively – that people yawn more in the cold to suck in outside air and ensure the brain is kept cool and functioning. We yawn less in summer, only because be sucking in hot air that would cause our brains to overheat. Apparently, our brains function better in winter.
  Or maybe not. Because all the mental gains we enjoy as a result of yawning are probably cancelled out by the fact that winter makes us more depressed. Winter will always flatten out our moods, since the lack of sunshine wipes out our vitamin D production and affects our serotonin levels, which in turn alters our alertness and moods. Most people adjust to this as winter ploughs on, but some suffer from fully blown seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Originally labelled “seasonal depression” in the 1980’s, seasonal affective disorder is notable for having symptoms – such as weight gain, increased sleep, carb cravings – that are seemingly opposite to some more common signs of depression.
  In any case, we probably shouldn’t complain. The lowest temperature ever recorded in Australia is Oymyakon’s average low. Plus, most of this story was written in luxurious conditions: under a doona, wearing a beanie, with the heating jacked up to roughly simulate a Finnish sauna.
  Still, I know I’m not alone when I say, “Bring on spring already!” It’s that brief interlude between mind-shattering winters and summers of natural disasters, where the heat destroys us and we’re forced to lie in bed moaning and nude with ice packs over our foreheads. By then, we might be sweating out our weight in salt and water again, and our minds will have turned to mush.
  It won’t matter though. We’ll be fitter, happier, and hairier than ever.

Napalm photo girl from Vietnam turns 40.

07:15 AEDT Sat Jun 2 2012.
Margie Mason.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8477340/napalm-girl-photo-from-vietnam-turns-40

In the picture, the girl will always be nine years old and wailing "Too hot! Too hot!" as she runs down the road away from her burning Vietnamese village.

 She will always be naked after blobs of sticky napalm melted through her clothes and layers of skin like jellied lava.

  It only took a second for Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut to snap the iconic black-and-white image 40 years ago. It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of America's darkest eras.
  "I really wanted to escape from that little girl," says the subject of photo, Kim Phuc, now 49. "But it seems to me that the picture didn't let me go."
  It was June 8, 1972, when Phuc heard the soldier's scream: "We have to run out of this place! They will bomb here, and we will be dead!"
  Seconds later, she saw the tails of yellow and purple smoke bombs curling around the Cao Dai temple where her family had sheltered for three days, as north and south Vietnamese forces fought for control of their village.
  The little girl heard a roar overhead as the South Vietnamese Skyraider dropped canisters like tumbling eggs.
  Then fire evaporated her cotton clothes and searing pain bit through skin and muscle.
In shock, Phuc sprinted down Highway 1 behind her older brother. She didn't see the foreign journalists gathered as she ran toward them, screaming.
  Then, she lost consciousness.
  Ut, the 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer who took the picture, drove Phuc to a small hospital. He was told the girl was unlikely to survive, but he flashed his American press pass and demanded that doctors treat her.
  "I cried when I saw her running," said Ut, whose older brother was killed on assignment with the AP in the southern Mekong Delta. "If I don't help her - if something happened and she died - I think I'd kill myself after that."
  Back at the office in what was then US-backed Saigon, he developed his film. When the image of the naked little girl emerged, everyone feared it would be rejected because of the news agency's strict policy against nudity.
  But veteran Vietnam photo editor Horst Faas took one look and knew it was a shot made to break the rules. He argued the photo's news value far outweighed any other concerns, and he won.
  A couple of days after the image shocked the world, another journalist found out the little girl had somehow survived.
  After multiple skin grafts, Phuc was finally allowed to leave, 13 months after the bombing. She had seen Ut's photo, which by then had won the Pulitzer Prize, but she was still unaware of its reach and power.
  She just wanted to go home and be a child again.
  She worked hard and was accepted into medical school to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. But all that ended once the new communist leaders realised the propaganda value of the napalm girl in the photo.
  Then suddenly, once again, the photo that had given her unwanted fame brought opportunity.
  Phuc travelled to West Germany in 1982 for medical care with the help of a foreign journalist. Later Vietnam's prime minister, also touched by her story, made arrangements for her to study in Cuba.
  She was finally free from the minders and reporters hounding her at home, but her life was far from normal. Ut, then working at the AP in Los Angeles, travelled to meet her in 1989, but they never had a moment alone. There was no way for him to know she desperately wanted his help again.
  "I knew in my dream that one day Uncle Ut could help me to have freedom," said Phuc, referring to him by an affectionate Vietnamese term. "But I was in Cuba. I was really disappointed because I couldn't contact with him. I couldn't do anything."
  While at school, Phuc met a young Vietnamese man. She had never believed anyone would ever want her because of the ugly patchwork of scars across her back and arm, but Bui Huy Toan seemed to love her more because of them.
  The two married in 1992 and honeymooned in Moscow. On the flight back to Cuba, the newlyweds defected during a refuelling stop in Canada. She was free.
  Phuc contacted Ut to share the news, and he encouraged her to tell her story to the world. But she was done giving interviews and posing for photos.
  "I have a husband and a new life and want to be normal like everyone else," she said.
  The media eventually found Phuc living near Toronto, and she decided she needed to take control of her story. A book was written in 1999 and a documentary came out, at last the way she wanted it told. She was asked to become a UN goodwill ambassador to help victims of war. She and Ut have since reunited many times to tell their story, even travelling to London to meet the Queen.
  "Today, I'm so happy I helped Kim," said Ut, who still works for AP and recently returned to Trang Bang village. "I call her my daughter."
  After four decades, Phuc, now a mother of two sons, can finally look at the picture of herself running naked and understand why it remains so powerful. It had saved her, tested her and ultimately freed her.
  "Most of the people, they know my picture but there's very few that know about my life," she said. "I'm so thankful that ... I can accept the picture as a powerful gift. Then it is my choice. Then I can work with it for peace."