Diane Abbott, a shadow health minister, will tonight warn that the \”pornification\” of culture is causing children to be \”hypersexualised\” at an early age.
At a meeting of the Fabian Women\’s Network, she will say parents are struggling to cope with the tide of sexual images available on social networking websites and the wider internet.
\”For so long, it\’s been argued that overt, public displays of sexuality are an enlightened liberation,\” she will say.
\”But I believe that for many, the pressure of conforming to hypersexualisation and its pitfalls is a prison. And the permanence of social media and technology can be a life sentence.
It was only a generation ago that the left in Britain were insistent that nudity was natural, that sex was fun that should not be denied as a result of outdated modes of morality. Hell, it was only a couple of decades ago that the left seemed almost insistent in ushering young men into their teenage daughters\’ bedrooms and locking them in for the night.
What happened? Ian\’ll be along in amoment to tell us it\’s all the Puritans. Or mebbe they don\’t like the results of what they campaigned for? In which case we should be seeing some interesting mea culpas soon enough.
My own diagnosis is that there are certain people, Dianne Abbott being a good enough example, whose existence is only validated by telling people to do something different from what they are. If everyone\’s a model of Victorian primness then the shriek will be that free love is a necessary part of civlised society. If everyone is indeed practising free love then Victorian modesty is the only valid more for society to allow. It\’s not that either is better or worse. It\’s that, by definition, whatever people are doing is wrong and they must be controlled to do the other. After all, Kips Esquire\’s Law does require that someone should do the controlling and there are those who do insist they are in the vanguard of those who ought to be.
What is being controlled and to what end is much less important than the controlling itself.
Yes, I have long believed that Progressive belief is mostly a reaction against the prevailing orthodoxy. It goes in cycles. Take alcohol for example. Prohibition, then liberalisation, and now lurching towards prohibition again, over the space of four or so generations?
‘there are certain people…whose existence is only validated by telling people to do something different from what they are.’
Couldn’t that be a good definition of a politician in our society. Very very rarely do we have any political figure saying ‘we’re doing fine’ or ‘we’re doing great and let’s do it better’.
Their main mode of operation is to offer solutions or opinions on problems they ‘create’, and the sleight of hand is to get the discussion on the solution instead of the validity of the problem.
Yes, yes and yes again.
People like Abbott can only realise themselves through pontification and bossing people about. She is a prime example of why I have moved ever further away from the left (or Left, if you prefer). As we say in Spain, ‘da asco’. Intellectually challenged is being kind. Dogmatic, tribal and disgusting. Like our very own attack dog Elena Valenciano of the PSOE.
When a heavily overweight ex-minister gets her authoritarian knickers in a twist over poor diet and junk food as she did recently, one despairs. Especially when the answer is control and telling people what to do, or even better obliging them, the poor stupid plebs, that we are!
She interviews appallingly because she cannot not tell people what to do. And she needs to be tele-directed too. Bigoted and thick.
Tim is absolutely right to call her out on this one where she moves back into her enemy’s territory without a hint of shame. ‘All I need is a bandwagon’ Abbott.
The left here in Spain is in similar dissarray. After the last humilliation in the elections, the PSOE talks about a new project to win back votes. Why?
You are irrelevant and only interested in power, money and job security or, alternatively, job security, power and money. What new project do Labour or PSOE have that could possibly interest us. They only have one, which is buy votes and make sure the people stay bought.
They are floundering about looking for a big new idea (whilst the worst of the bunch are looking back to Che and Stalin wistfully) to convince people to vote for them.
And in the meantime, they generously give us the benefit of their analysis and tell us what to do. Learn Abbot. Fortunately for us, you are not in power. Here Rubalcaba, after 7 years in power as deputy president ( and all powerful mover and fixer) had the gall to say during the run-up to the elections after 4 years of first ignoring the crisis and then being inactive, that he had the answer to the problem. You couldn’t make it up.
Thanks Tim, I appreciate your calling her out.
The feminist left have certainly had a problem with porn since the 1980s.
My own pet theory is that all of this is about how threatened some women feel by hookers and porn, which is why it spans the political divide, but is almost exclusively the reserve of the munters in both parties.
” It goes in cycles.” Anthony Burgess made this cycle explicit in “The Wanting Seed”: the State displays public statues that alternate between St Augustus and Pelagius to represent the current moral view (punishment during Gusphase or social modification during Pelphase). A strange and brilliant book, that seems to be out of print.
S’pose the clue’s in the description of the politics. Progressive rather than conservative.
The Left has never been much interested in destinations because their influence depends on the journey. Mao’s Permanent Revolution. The grass is always greener & the jam will be tomorrow. The perfect progressive society is unattainable, not only because of its impossibility but there’s no appetite for it. There’d be no room for progressives in it.
“In which case we should be seeing some interesting mea culpas soon enough.”
That’s the one thing you’ll NEVER see…
“My own pet theory is that all of this is about how threatened some women feel by hookers and porn…”
Generally, the uglier ones. The women, that is, not the hookers!
“Mao’s Permanent Revolution.”
That’s Trostky, comrade.
And of course I misspelled it, ugh.
“Generally, the uglier ones. The women, that is, not the hookers!”
Does remind me of one of the funnier comments i saw on a Guido Falwkes post
Dianna Abott’s not actually black she just so big light can’t escape her gravitational field
I thought this was obvious. There are certain people who just want to tell other people what to do. Quite a few of them would be equally happy on the left or the right, although since the left has cornered the market in telling people what to do since the war, this is where they are at the moment. Witness how all the communists became greens; they weren’t ever committed marxists, they just wanted to boss people about and feel more superior through ideological purity. When people stopped listening they found another excuse.
I loathe them, all of them.
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” R. Heinlein
You mean it wasn’t always The Patriarchy harming women through the negative liberty of unrestricted sexualisation?
Don’t expect the feminist left to admit that.
hmmmmmmm
No mention of the primary drivers of mass culture. Magazines, newspapers, film, television. Evidently these had nothing to do with the problem. The solution is, obviously, to impose control on the Internetz. quelle surprise
First they destroyed Mary Whitehouse….
…then they became her!