Tweet Of The Day: The Modern Parent

The Onion never let's you down. https://t.co/9FmKxmm2oc

— Danny Baker (@prodnose) October 28, 2015

Peak Independent Voices.

PS If you have an issue with this tweet, please take it up with Danny.

Thank you.

Poldark: 'Hunky'

Textbook stuff from the sexless, pious fart machine that is Independent Voices.

STOP FANCYING GOOD LOOKING PEOPLE, PEOPLE!!!

And how priggish would you have to be to use the word 'hunky', Alice?

Boko Haram: #HashtagComplicated

Matt Bors.

'Oh, thanks for RTing that hashtag, I was worried you might support the mass kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls...'

An actual article on Independent Voices today begins...

You might expect this to be ironic.

It is not.

Look, here's a quick lesson in modern international relations; Boko Haram are terrorists.

The whole point of terrorism is to generate maximum publicity for a cause by committing atrocities that cause outrage.

Do you really think they are 'quaking in their boots' cause loads of people in the West have posted a selfie of themselves holding up a bit of paper while making the *boo hoo squish squish sad face*?

Or maybe they'll be laughing their heads off?

Still I'm sure they'll let all those poor girls go free when they see your online petition...

PS Chomsky on Nigeria and the rise of Boko Haram.

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!

Thought For The Day: Jerry Barnett, Sex & Censorship

When the formidable anti-filth campaigner Mary Whitehouse died in 2001, she arguably left behind a country that was far more relaxed in its sexuality than at any previous time in history. It seemed that her crusade for ‘traditional’ (i.e. repressive) moral values had failed. But the morality movement regrouped and reinvented itself for the new millennium. It abandoned the outdated language of Christian puritanical outrage and instead presented itself as a form of feminism, protecting the rights of women who - they claimed - were victims of the sex industries.

Jerry Barnett - founder of Sex & Censorship writes for Independent Voices.

A rare counter voice to the new puritans and sex police usually found on Independent Voices.  

Obviously, in the name of balance they've printed alongside it an article, Stop Porn Culture, about how watching porn makes you go blind or something.

Image from Ben Thompson's mirth-inducing Ban This Filth!: A Warning From History.

Gay Icons: GI Blues

Both Garland and Houston, sang songs of sorrow from such great heights, and the meaning willed out. Having fought to be the huge stars they became, and finding themselves locked in a fight to the death with their own celebrity, Garland and Houston invested their material with such devout sincerity that queer ears the world over pricked up. The combination of exploited naivety, mournful foreboding, relentless repression and utterly unique singing voices, gave unprecedented authenticity to their work...

On the first anniversary of her death yesterday, Independent Voices, runs a piece on Whitney Houtson comparing her threat pre-Stonewall gay icon, Judy Garland.
Usually when you see the phrase "gay icon" in print, it's used about people who aren't - maybe a "diva" who had a minor hit in the 80s, or a famous chap who's quite good-looking - and the article tells you nothing apart from the writer is clueless.
Or it'll be some whiny anti-gay snob with nothing more to say than; "Why are the gays still doing this?"
But this piece by performance artist, La JohnJoseph is thoughtful and sympatico.
Brava.

Plug! 'La JohnJoseph will be touring his autobiographical, raucously political and accidentally profound, Boy in a Dress which follows the life story thus far of La JohnJoseph, a third-gendered, fallen Catholic, ex-fashion model from the wrong side of the tracks, from the council estates of Merseyside to the strip clubs of New York. 
'The show will be running in London at the Battersea Arts Centre from the 14-16th March, after a UK tour through Liverpool (26th Feb) Bristol (28th Feb - 2nd March), Manchester (5-6th March), and Brighton (8th March).'

Independent Voices: Comment Of The Day

From Independent Voices.

As a general principle, Fagburn thinks the media shouldn't give attention-seeking Christian nutters the oxygen of publicity they so clearly crave.
And a Christian blaming a terrible disaster on The Gays is as predictable as a dog chasing after a stick. *
But the idea is so wonderfully laughable - and thus makes homophobia and Christianity look all the more ludicrous - I say bring it on.

* 10 major disasters blamed on The Gays from the Advocate.

Stockholm Syndrome: Evil Men

Stockholm Syndrome describes the strange propensity of hostages to feel positively towards their captors – sometimes to the point of defending them. It catalogues the “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” Gay men of Mr Starkey’s age remember well when the British establishment harassed and intimidated gay people, and the state’s reluctance to afford equal marriage rights continues those abuses today.
Mr Pierce, Mr Everett and Mr Starkey – as gay men, I do believe you have a touch of Stockholm Syndrome. The disappointing thing is that, deep down, I’m sure you would love to live in an equal society and enjoy the same rights as everyone else. It’s just so very sad, then, to see you lick the hands that push you down.

Paris Lees in Independent Voices.

Good piece as ever from Paris, but she neglects to state the obvious - gay men who are "anti-gay" are invariably middle/upper class snobs and/or really right-wing.
Mentioning no names [Cough! Mark Simpson].
What they hate is ordinary gay men - ie the rest of us.
Cause; "They're all so frightfully common and vulgar, yah?"
I wish them all dead.

PS Pierce looking slightly rougher there than the photo he uses in his Daily Mail by-line.