Hollyoaks: Male Rape

HOLLYOAKS bosses are planning the soap’s most hard-hitting storyline yet — where a gay teacher is raped by his pupil.

After suffering months of homophobic bullying teacher John Paul McQueen — played by James Sutton — will be raped by 16-year-old Finn O’Connor (Keith Rice) in a humiliating assault.

As Hollyoaks is shown on weekdays at 6.30pm C4 bosses will not screen the actual attack. Instead they will focus on the aftermath.

The soap worked with charities, expert advisers and male rape victims on how to bring the story to the screen.

Executive producer Bryan Kirkwood said: “We have an important story to tell that has not been told before. Hollyoaks is known for talking about difficult issues.”

The Sun.

Fagburn's learned to be sceptical of The Sun breaking big scandalous soap stories, but this has been confirmed on the E4 website.
Like Channel 4's recent Sex Box, these TV programmes always tread a fine 625 lines between audience-grabbing sensationalism and helping open taboo subjects up for discussion.

Interesting to note that even The Sun these days use the term "male rape" - not "gay rape".

MediaGuardian today however got extremely confused...

Update: An eagle-eyed viewer informs me that Hollyoaks has done a groundbreaking and "important story to tell that has not been told before" etc male rape story before, back in 2000. 

Oops to Fagburn and the 'Oaks!

Dolphins: Not Actually Bisexual After All

'Dolphins have been defamed. Six weeks ago, the Daily Mail informed us about The dark side of Flipper: He's a sexual predator who resorts to rape to get his way.
'And the Daily Telegraph also told a similar tale: "according to scientists", dolphins resort to "rape" to assert authority.
'Other news outlets around the world carried similar reports. Examples: bisexual and exclusively gay dolphins (MSN); male dolphins are bisexual, US scientists claim (Australia's News Ltd); and male bottlenose dolphins engage in extensive bisexuality (ZeeNews, India).
These reports appear to be follow-ups to an article on Discovery.com that said male bottlenose dolphins engaged in extensive bisexuality, combined with periods of exclusive homosexuality.
'The allegation was included in Discovery's otherwise reasonable account of an academic study into the behaviour of 120 or so adult dolphins in Western Australia led by Professor Richard Connor from the University of Massachusetts and Dr Bill Sherwin of the University of New South Wales.
'But the gay-bisexual-rapist dolphin story turns out to be bunkum. According to postings by Sherwin's university colleagues, Rob Brooks (here) and Stephen Hamblin (here), it is due to a misreading of the serious scientific paper by Connor, Sherwin and others called A novel mammalian social structure in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins: complex male-male alliances in an open social network.
'Brooks writes: "The whole circus arose from a misconstrual of a simple phrase in the paper, 'bisexual philopatry.'"
'He says that Sherwin explained that the bisexual philopatry simply means: "males stay near where they were born, AND females stay near where they were born". Sex, gay, straight or otherwise, is not involved. Nor are the animals rapists.
'Perhaps the dolphins might like to make a formal complaint to the PCC, aka the Pisces Complaints Commission.
'And please, please don't all rush to tell me that dolphins aren't fish.'

Roy Greenslade, Media Guardian.
Tabloid hacks ignorant of the finer points of academic marineology terminology shock!
Anyway, here's Fagburn's indepth analysis of the initial coverage.

The Guardian: Letter To The Editor

As the Metropolitan police have said people protesting against the royal wedding could be arrested under the Public Order Act, perhaps your ads for Unroyal Wedding T-shirts should have a warning attached.
As people who wish to abolish the monarchy are, of course, pro-democracy campaigners, the Met's decision is quite shameful. Perhaps the UK could ally itself with the Arab spring?
I like the sound of the Royal Zombie Flashmob organised by Queer Resistance – could the Met confirm if dressing up as a zombie is to be a criminal act?

Richard Smith
Brighton
From The Guardian.

•  On the "absurd claims" that 2 billion people will be watching the wedding on TV see this letter to Media Guardian last Monday.

Update: The cops did try and arrest people - fucking hell!

BBC: Bigots As "Balance"

Stonewall's Ben Summerskill writes for Media Guardian on Auntie's failings; 'More Straight Talking From The BBC'.
Failings! Such as, Mr Ben?
"In September last year, 62-year old Ian Baynham was brutally attacked in the middle of Trafalgar Square in a homophobic attack [CCTV image above]. The outrage, which caused significant levels of fear among gay people, never made the BBC's national TV news even after Baynham's life support was turned off 18 days later.
"In late October, Newsnight chose to follow up the killing.
"Accompanying a live interview with the Independent's Johann Hari was the bizarre controversialist Anne Atkins. Her contribution was to suggest darkly that there might be something mysterious about the murders of so many gay men recently.
"It wouldn't have taken a Googling BBC intern more than a minute to establish that Atkins has form around the issue of homosexuality. The Press Complaints Commission censured her in 1998 for "failing to distinguish between conjecture and fact" when writing in the Sun that "a gay man is, alarmingly, 17 TIMES more likely to be a paedophile than a straight man. This is not opinion; it is fact."
"And the BBC's extraordinary explanation for Atkins' appearance on Newsnight?
"Balance."
The solution - according to Mr Summerskill - would appear to be for the BBC to join Stonewall's Diversity Champions scheme.
Which rather handily involves coompanies - or indeed a corporation - giving Stonewall lots of money.
Bizarrely, on the Media Guardian online version this article was headed; 'Why aren't there any openly gay staff at the top of the BBC?'
Hardly his main point...