Most literate adults in the UK know that The Daily Telegraph wants the Conservative Party to win the upcoming General Election. Those who have been following the recent public unravelling of that newspaper’s opinionist Christina Odone—she is to the Telegraph what Madeleine Bunting is The Guardian—know that she particularly wants the LibDems to do badly in the same race. (Odone is a Catholic; prominent LibDem MP Evan Harris kills babies with laboratory rats and gasses old people, or something. Plus: Nick Clegg, the party’s leader, is an uncloseted atheist.)
a free school
Given that the Daily Telegraph always does its best to keep its circulation up (along with the circulations of retired red-faced colonels) with its notorious titillating inside-front-page provincial sex scandal stories (“toast droppers”) and its traditional method of reporting on GCSE exam results—what Sadie describes as: “Look at all those lovely young blondes who have got A*******************s in Jumping Up And Jiggling Their Ripe Young Bazoombas Studies”—is Ms Odone wise to try to scare Telegraph readers out of voting LibDem with the prospect of a LibDem government making it legal for 16-year-olds to star in porn movies?
[Thanks, Andrew.]
Perish the thought that you have resorted to gratuitously presenting your readers with invitingly underclad nubile young women dressed as schoolgirls in order to single out for critique the far from unique practice of a newspaper you don’t like in presenting its readers with authentically posed pictures of well endowed nubile young schoolgirls under the pretext of reporting public examination results.
Shouldn’t you stick to featuring the rather more grown-up Nigella for male fantasy titillation purposes?
The central figure in the triptych above is Britney Spears, famous for her album Oops, I Did It Again, so what appears at first to be a childishly provocative image is, in fact, part of a searingly clever play-on-words.
Duh! Yes I did indeed clock that you were punning on Odone’s name & Britney’s hit, but my point about your use of gratuitous girly image when caning a rightwing rag for its use of similarly gratuitous girly images still stands. You don’t usually use images in your posts and could have made your pun point just as clearly without the image.
Oh, my previous comment was ironic and my use of a gratuitous “girly” image was deliberate. Britney Spears was above the legal age of consent (in England and Wales) and she looked it when that video was shot. I make no apology for it.
Ironically, my view about this sort of thing is that it’s time Britain, especially its newspapers, grew up about sex and its depiction. One reason that there’s still mileage in the whole schoolgirl/nurse/policewoman costume thing is that, on both the Left and the Right, people in this country talk about sexual matters at the level of children sitting around a dressing-up box, giggling at “naughty” words. Very little attention is paid to material harm done by laws or their absence; instead there’s lots of ideology—usually either pseudo-socialist or superstitious or both, but always sexist and about a hundred years out of date—and much use use of loaded and ill-defined words like “dignity” and “exploitation”, instead of objective and measurable ones like “morbidity” and “mortality”.
(I’m also in favour of the liberalisation of the sale of hardcore pornography, the legalization of public nudity, and licensed prostitution. Check out this excellent blog for some adult discussion of sex, public health, and the law.)
I’m also in favour of the liberalisation of the sale of hardcore pornography…
Unless buying a broadband connection is now illegal, it’s about as liberal as it gets. 🙂