I don’t know why (I do really) the word ‘naked’ seems to jump start views of this blog but I’m grateful for it.
I’m not big fan of political correctness so my mind was full of interesting stuff as I made my way to the changing room at my local swimming pool.
I was wondering – what difference will Barack Obama make to the world and how he will cope on a world stage when oratory is not always enough.
I was thinking about some crazy stories I have read in the UK press and online. One was about a move to provide girls as young as 13 with a contraceptive drug that makes them temporarily barren and unable to conceive. How crazy is that? This is tantamount to saying go forth and multiply. Forget about any kind or moral or spiritual values, they’re for the birds. Well, they argued, we can’t have 13 year olds and older getting pregnant, now can we? Well, what about abstinence? What about self-control?
Then I read that some clever spark is thinking about giving illegal immigrants thousands of pounds to leave the country. Can you believe it?
And then, to top everything off, some school somewhere is now stipulating that music teachers shall not touch their students to demonstrate how to hold the bow of a violin I mean, have we gone absolutely mad? What kind of PC psychosis has taken hold of these do-gooding, quango loving bureaucrats? It is one thing to take care of our children and quite another to go so far over the top that they are sliding down the other side out of their minds.
When I grew up, kids played in the streets till the sun went down. Or they roamed across fields and streams scrumping apples, tickling trout and getting into innocent mischief. And before anyone chimes in with ‘it’s different now. We have oddballs on every corner’ I will admit traffic is the biggest change and danger to children’s welfare. There have always been paedophiles but in those days no one but the upper classes could understand Latin. And children had life tough in those far gone days. It wasn’t all bucolic dancing across sunlit meadows or playing conkers in the playground. But children have to be allowed to live while being subtly channelled away from hoodie drug dependence. But, maybe it is just too late.
And, as for sexism. Don’t get me started. I arrived in the swimming pool locker room to find a class full of small boys (infant school age) getting dressed. And, there were two female teachers helping them do so. In the male changing room! And these two women showed absolutely no sign of leaving.
So, I got changed in front of them. Later, I mentioned it to the attendant and was told that they had no male teachers so the ladies had to go into the gents locker room. When I grew up, I didn’t have teachers helping me get dressed and undressed. What’s going on?
So, I suggested that next time a bunch of little girls is getting changed that I could help them in the female changing room.
For some reason that didn’t seem to go down too well. If a man did something like that today he’d be arrested.
Now, that’s what I call real sexism.
