Independent Voices: Keep Your Shirt On

A quite ridiculous article by Howard Jacobson that could perhaps only have appeared in the hysterically prudish and puritanical and anti-sex Independent Voices.

It's so barking and tenuous an 'argument' it's hard to summarise, but essentially he manages to go from the Satanic sight of Zac Efron being briefly shirtless at last week's MTV Movie Awards, straight into - I kid you not - the Cyril Smith child abuse cover-up, and then onto sexism in the UK and - with a certain inevitability - Page 3.

An actual thing The Sun did briefly in the 80s.

To be clear: I am not using the sexualisation of Zac Efron’s body to discredit those who complain about the sexualisation of women’s. On the contrary, I consider the one to be the mirror image of the other. The Page 3 girl pinned on a workshop door degrades all parties to its being there: the inanely objectified girl and those who inanely ogle her. And we should not discount the coarsening effects of inanity itself. To trivialise is also to dishonour. Dumb also degrades. Similarly degraded and inane, anyway, are the girls who shout “phwoar” the minute a boy, a man, a Chippendale, a birthday stripper, undoes a button...

Howard surely missed a trick though by not drawing a wobbly line to the silent epidemic of sexual assault on the gay scene Patrick Strudwick warned us about in The Independent last week. 

Or claimed internet porn has turned us into a nation of bum-sniffing feral dogs.

Or said all sex workers are slaves in service to patriarchy.

Regular sententious Indy Voices clichés both.

What a load of utter erotophobic cock.

And as with so much of the bourgeois lemon-sucking joyless journalism on Independent Voices, next time why not save everyone's time and write just two words; 'Sex? Boo!'

BAN THIS FILTH!!! DOWN WITH FUGLYISM!