Protecting Children

Welcome to overblown media panic, the June edition 2011. Our subject is the sexualisation of children, which I'm sure you will all agree is a bad thing, unless your name is Paul Francis Gadd (Gary Glitter). Apparently much that is wrong with Britain is the attempt by wicked companies and advertisers to turn pre-pubescents into gyrating junior pole dancers. JK does wonder if Stripper Barbie, the Belle de Jour children's pillowcases and My Little Pony Horse Brothel were a step to far. The tricks horses do should be trotting in unison, not dressed in in PVC nurses uniforms.

It's all started by a report prepared by the Mothers Union - an interesting organisation that isn't a union and whose Chief Executive, Reg Bailey, is a man.  David Cameron is all in favour of the proposals - of course the animated shop dummy would be supportive, a man who resembles a regency painting of a Duke only with less depth of character than the canvas he's painted on. In a desperate attempt to live down his Bullingdon days, Dave will do or say anything to prove he has moral worth. One question has always troubled JK - when those Bullingdon boys were prancing round Oxford in blue velvet tailcoats like braying bell ends, where was a bunch of vicious bike chain-wielding hoodlums when you needed them?

JK digresses, though it's hard to shake an image of Boris Johnson being forced to eat his own bow tie by a group of street toughs...ah we can but dream. So the alleged issue is the destruction of our children's innocence. It all sounds very familiar. Back in the early 1980s, when New York was gripped by gang violence and a crack epidemic, people blamed the breakdown on society on films like Driller Killer. By the same weird logic, as in no logic at all, lad's mags are 'a problem'. Retailers will be encouraged to sell the likes of FHM  and Nuts in brown paper covers. It is understandable that their journalism should be treated like waste paper fit for recycling as their writing compromises hitting cut and paste on copy  from PR firms pushing some car, watch, suit or stupid gizmo that nobody wants or needs. Maybe a City Boy out of his tree of Columbian talc would buy an exact replica of Doctor No's chair for £4000, but for the rest of us these magazines are mostly adverts interspersed with ladies not wearing very much. The  real question however is this: does looking at picture of Holly Willoughby in her underwear lead to end of civilisation?

The answer in case you were in any doubt is no. Lads mags may be puerile and silly, but they are mostly harmless. What's more like most magazines, their circulation is on the wane. The internet, that vast repository of naked ladies, is just too powerful and costs nothing to access. However, JK feels that as usual politicians and campaigners missed the real problem on newspaper stands. If we are concerned about actual harm to impressionable minds, then what about women's magazines that pump an endless stream of unattainable body images into young girls' minds. Technically the body shapes are obtainable if you are a 13 year old boy dressed like a girl or an adult woman who never eats, or if she does, it's half a lettuce leaf (organic naturally) once every alternate Tuesday which she then promptly throws up into her toilet, a crystal skull designed by Damien Hirst.   If you want to help your children, then get them playing sport, eating a balanced diet and leave the stick-thin, chain-smoking, coke-tooting, flight-attendant-assaulting, lollipop-head models on the middle shelf along with their alcoholic, anti-Semitic designers.