Recently in Current affairs Category

If I showed you a door and told you that if you pass through it you would face a one in 300 chance of being killed would you take the risk?
Me neither.

But those are the odds we both face if we happen to pass through the front door of our local hospital for any kind of treatment.

MPs on the House of Commons Children's Committee were shocked to be told that more than three children die each week because of abuse and neglect.

After being given the grim facts, chairman Barry Sheerman declared them to be "the most horrific figures I've ever seen brought into the public domain".

But why were he and his colleagues so shocked?

These appalling figures are well-known to the rest of us. Three weeks ago, in fact, they were reported in detail in the George Tyndale column.

When I first heard that a health authority had attempted to force a 13 years old child to have a heart transplant I was appalled.

And that was before I knew anything about Hannah Jones.

Now that it has become clear that Hannah is a remarkable, intelligent, courageous and articulate young woman the sense of outrage has simply escalated.

Teenage girls who watch a lot of sexual activity on TV are twice as likely to get pregnant as those who don't.

This is the finding of a major research project in the United States which studied 2,000 youngsters aged between 12 and 17.

Researchers identified 23 programmes popular with teenagers which had high levels of sexual content, including Sex In The City and Friends.

By the end of their three year project a quarter of those who watched a lot of these shows ended up pregnant. In the group which did not watched less the figure was just 12 per cent.

Confectionary giant Nestle has launched an offensive new TV ad for its product Aero Bubbles.
It features a naked man--well naked all but for a strategic towel--posing, strutting and burbling about body temperature.

This is an advertisement aimed directly at those women who Nestle obviously believe are so simple minded that they can be lured into buying chocolate by sex.

Any male who--like me--finds himself contemplating why he finds this few seconds of TV time so gratuitously awful will find himself chewing over some familiar arguments.

This ad is sexist and demeaning. It undermines masculine dignity by portraying the male involved--who is model turned actor Jason Lewis--as meat.

These thoughts are familiar because they are exactly the arguments deployed by the feminists of the Seventies and Eighties who so strongly objected to the portrayal of women as what we used to call "sex objects".

Well, a quarter of a century later, I see what you meant sisters.

Back then all red blooded males would respond by suggesting that the feminists lacked a sense of humour. It was all just a bit of fun, wasn't it?

Well, obviously, the Bubbles ad is--at some level--supposed to mock itself.
But to this male it's not so much a belly laugh as stomach churning.

Mr. Lewis, an American, was previously best known for a role in Sex In The City where he was, apparently, called the Absolute Hulk. It can only be a matter of days before he becomes known as the Aero Hulk. And amongst the homosexual community as Bubbles.
I do hope he objects.

I understand, of course, that this is just the most blatant example yet of the inversion of male/female sexual dominance. But Nestle should feel utterly ashamed of itself for indulging in such depths of naked sexism and vulgar titillation.

Meanwhile any air-headed female who is lured by this sleazy piece of work into actually buying the product deserves to put on at least two pounds overnight.

And if this makes me a masculinist--which is a feminist approaching from the opposite direction--then I'm proud of it.