Hic Sunt Dracones
Ms Raccoon has undertaken a perilous and mind altering journey on your behalf. Not quite LSD, more LSE, but the effects are akin. I shall never be the same again.
I have seen nothing less than the future of our world. Like Orpheus, I rolled back the boulder at the gates of Hades, and descended into the netherworld whence our fœtal rulers are formed from mindless lumps of overfed lard, into sleek cloned apparatchiks fit to graze at the subsidised tables of our magnificent political institutions.
Of course, Orpheus’ first problem was finding the boulder – now’t so hard in our modern world of social media. Just click on Facebook, though I am told you can also squeeze in through the Twatter entrance. Once admitted, you will see paraded before you rack upon rack of congealed brain cells, carefully tended by learned Professors at great expense. Within two or so years, these will be presented to you as ‘bright and rising stars’ worthy of safe parliamentary seats, or perhaps ‘advisers’ to our Prime Minister, ‘academics’ responsible for works of learning upon which policy is formed, or maybe even Leader of the Opposition.
You may gasp in wonder that such an upturn in the fortunes of intellectual matter can be performed in a mere two years – or you may come to the conclusion that pigs will fly first, and you might as well slit your throat now. I know I did.
Cast your eye over the cultural visual stimulation that has replaced the Old Masters of yore, admired by 1533 of the little darlings, like Tim Hanna – oh God, he’s been let lose on the world already – ‘risk management analyst at Prestige Worldwide….’ with any luck it’s this one, and he can’t do too much damage there. Who else admires this image? There’s young Harry the Hunt – I don’t believe it, he’s been let out as fully formed too – ‘technician at C-MAX Seabed Sonar Systems‘ and lo! C-MAX have a fledgling Facebook page, all ready and waiting for Harry’s ‘likes’ to be cross posted to. Perfect for the prospective customer.
They do like moving pictures too, especially ones they can salivate in time to. ‘ifucklikeabeast’ (no00, really?) has uploaded ‘the worst nipple piercing ever – watch her squeal like a pig’ to even greater applause – 2,448 people clapped their hands (and depressingly, 15, 506, 799 took the time to watch it in its full technicolour glory, I suppose we should be grateful that only 2,448 managed to stay their shaking hands and press the ‘like’ button).
When they are not listening to educational tracks such as ‘Through the Cervix of Hawwah’ or belly laughing at the rape conviction rate:
“If the girl you’ve taken for a drink won’t spread for your head, think about this mathematical statistic: 85% of rape cases go unreported. That seems fairly good odds”.
These are the brains of the future. Oddly, no one has been concerned about this cesspit of juvenile humour, this window on the world of the future captains of industry, the £9,ooo a year semen covered students that our present crop of academics must leave their ivory towers, their learned tomes on Thermophilus genomes and rational metabolic engineering, in order to steer these brain dead specimens through a revision course on maths for Biologists.
No, what has woken the world up, was the above quote. The Feminista sisters went ballistic when the normal diet of boobs, backsides and infantile jokes regarding how far you can vomit, was interrupted to allow that ‘learned treatise’ on the odds against getting caught for rape. They landed on the head of young Jamie Street, a Plymouth student of web design, with such force that he was forced to take down the ‘Unilad‘ web site and issue a fulsome apology for having offended the sisterhood. He has been universally condemned by such luminaries as Estelle Hart, NUS Women’s Officer. Not one of the sisters, that I can find, has even bothered to mention that men are raped too…presumably I am free to suggest that men in tight trousers have only themselves to blame if some hairy arsed builder flattens them on the floor of Piccadilly men’s toilets and has his evil way with them.
As it happens, there are as many female as male students inhabiting certainly the accompanying Unilad Facebook site, (Unilad is still down whilst the owner recovers from his mauling on Twitter) and they are equally keen to cheer on the pictures of penis shaped snow men and exceptionally short men apparently being used as Tampax substitutes by some very large women…..
These are the young men and women who will be running this country when we are old and grey (pipe down Obnoxio) – I do wish I hadn’t looked…it’s been more depressing than a pension forecast.
British venues offering the spectacle of women publicly undressing for male edification typically were either less-than-salubrious pubs or working men’s clubs or found amid the red lights of London’s Soho.
But the past decade has witnessed the rise of the “gentleman’s club”, frequented by City bankers and Premiership footballers, their “VIP rooms” replete with expensive champagne.
One chain, Platinum Lace in London, insisted women made up 25% of its membership. The profile of dancers changed too. A 2010 University of Leeds study found that a quarter of lap dancers were graduates. (My thanks to Saul for the tip)
There they go, out into the future; they might look like adults, but they still have the minds and the aspirations of a five year old with Dad’s copy of Nature magazine. Watering the beer down might help.
We’re all doomed, doomed I tell you.
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1
February 8, 2012 at 13:20 -
Hasn’t it always been thus? Nobody ever really starts growing up until their 20s once they have to start taking responsibility for themselves and their actions.
It does seem,however, as if our whole culture is becoming increasingly crassly sexualised and infantilised.
I think you’re being a bit hard on the “sisterhood” in the case of Unilad. That comment is not a wry post modern observation of crime in the UK; it can be clearly read as an incitement to rape, specifically, of a girl.
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February 8, 2012 at 13:48 -
A very ineffective incitement – they appear to be so permanently pissed they’d be lucky to get their trousers off without Mummy’s help.
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February 8, 2012 at 14:44 -
Gladiolys, the big difference is that the world is watching; the mob psychology that eggs teenagers on to uncharacteristic excess in front of their friends has been taken to its logical extreme.
‘Female Chauvinist Pigs’, Ariel Levy’s book on women and raunch cutlture – a chilling read – cites the example of ‘Girls Gone Wild’, a US franchise that encourages ordinary young women (often students) to behave provocatively on film in exchange for series merchandise. The resulting footage is widely aired and circulated on DVD; influences such as this have engineered a paradigm shift in behaviour over the past decade.
As a teacher, I find myself increasingly echoing Brave New World and Bernard’s desparing “And what makes it worse, she thinks of herself as meat.” The girls in whom I try to instil intellectual curiosity and a sense of their own academic worth seem to assess themselves and each other purely in terms of appearance and status boyfriends – and what they have to do to acquire and keep them.
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February 8, 2012 at 20:34 -
“The girls … seem to assess themselves and each other purely in terms of appearance and status boyfriends – and what they have to do to acquire and keep them.”
Isn’t that what we have evolved to do? Everything that lives has one base instinct – to procreate and make more to carry on the gene line. All animals perform in some way or another to attract the best mate possible. In some it’s the male, in others the female. In our case both do their best to attract the perfect mate. Some may have the wrong idea about the best mate, but in general, there are more good matings then bad and the human line carries on into the future.
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6
February 8, 2012 at 20:38 -
Blimey SBML – great minds think alike!
(Perhaps I should refresh page before typing comment next time!)
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7
February 8, 2012 at 21:18 -
Good point – whoever thought of it first!
I must admit that my one-time feminist hackles rise at the thought of potentially well-educated young women wasting their educational opportunities, prepared to settle for a minimum of work and mediocre exam results in order to devote their full attention to securing the approval of as unprepossessing a set of thugs as ever ran out onto a sports field.
My main area of concern is not the preoccupation with attraction – par for the adolescent course – but the way the competition for what pass in school as alpha males means that these girls, some as young as 13 or 14, anxious to please the older boys, are persuaded to indulge in the sort of practices their spotty paramours have seen on the internet.
The ubiquitous laptops have upped the ante to a point where girls are barely into adulthood are judging themselves by the standards of internet porn; this is the climate that has generated the celebration of excess Anna describes.
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8
February 8, 2012 at 20:37 -
Isn’t that just human nature, though? ‘Civilisation’ may have somewhat masked the natural instinct to breed, but it hasn’t eliminated it.
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9
February 8, 2012 at 17:30 -
“… it can be clearly read as an incitement to rape, specifically, of a girl.”
It can, yes. And Paul Chambers’ Tweet re: Robin Hood Airport can be clearly read as a terrorist threat.
If you are a complete cretin, anyway.
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12
February 8, 2012 at 14:30 -
I have officially become old. I have tried, really I did, to raise a wry smile at this. A tolerant ‘we were all like this at Uni really’, ‘Anna might be getting her knickers in a twist about this one’….. I failed.
Arrrrghhhhh. Dammit. Bloody youth of today… there I’ve said it.Aw hell, I’m going to go for broke: It isn’t really music y’know. There are no tunes and what are they singing? can’t understand a word of it.
Chinless witless wonders spending their nights jouncing up and down on their toes to tuneless music in the students union, hoping some girl will be drunk enough to sleep with them, crowding in scared little packs at the bar only to finish the night going home so drunk they pass out halfway through masturbating and waking up in the morning with one cheek in a congealing donor kebab. Can todays students manage that? Can they? No – bloody amateurs the lot of them!
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13
February 8, 2012 at 15:03 -
It’s not really the ‘bloody youth of today’ angle which go to me – it was the knowledge that this is the CREAM of the youth of today, this is as good as it gets. I can handle the thought of the dispossessed on a sink estate in Cardiff being of this mentality…but can you imagine having devoted your entire life to the study of the lesser spotted doormouse’s toenails – and having to finance it by standing in front of this lot knowing you are wasting your time, that it’s not just a bad bunch foisted on you – but entirely representative of the average university intake?
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14
February 8, 2012 at 15:30 -
I can well appreciate that lecturers find students like this depressing but surely they can’t all be like Unilad? It was ever thus. I went to uni straight from school and was pretty studious with a few days skipped and the odd nodding off in a certain droning lecturers’ class. But then I was from a poor background and terrified of failing exams. We had our fair share of drunken muppets, we just didn’t have websites and facebook.
I found far more depressing that there are a load of female students going along with Unilads tasteless witless musings like they find it funny. The same for those women who go along to strip clubs. Maybe some of them find it entertaining but I doubt it. Are they scared of being labelled humourless frigid dykes? Do they think being cool = being part of the herd? Baaaa. Macheath makes a valid point about the backward journey of young women. Instead of reaching for best of male behaviviour- they reach for the worst.
I wasn’t kidding about the music though ;D
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February 8, 2012 at 17:31 -
They certainly are the cream. Thick, and full of clots.
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February 8, 2012 at 15:32 -
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February 8, 2012 at 15:38 -
I may have had a flashback to a rather revolting sticky floored student union filled with dubious male specimens. But I was one of the girls they hoped would be drunk enough to sleep with them – so some of it is imagination! As a laydee I always managed to put my half-eaten donor kebab in the bin.
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18
February 8, 2012 at 16:40 -
I echo M Barnes, I’ve given up too. I feel positively ancient. Although I question her qualifications as a laydee because as every gentleman knows ‘a half eaten kebab is kept on the pillow and consumed the next morning for breakfast’, at least in polite society anyway (Oh and for those curious as to the correct culinary etiquette, burgers are kept unwrapped under the pillow whilst pizza is draped stylishly over ones chest, face side down so as to stick to ones chest hair, although in risqué circles it’s use as an impromptu ashtray does lead to a piquant ‘crunchiness’ to the morning repast)
My take? I think that this is a matter of some concern (Oh damn I’m turning into my granddad now, cardigan and slippers here we come) it’s not that this sort of thing is happening, after all we all had wild and extreme occurrences at university (at least I think so because most of it is a bit of a blur, well except for the roasting I regularly received for bringing my kebab and pizza smelling laundry home to wash) it’s that it is now both main-stream (as opposed to we few brave p*ss-heads) and something to be proud of (whereas we at least pretended to be mortified).
As to the ‘rape’ comment, I agree it’s neither funny or acceptable. The other side of course is the thought of how many of those non prosecuted rape allegations were malicious in nature, and what’s the prosecution rate for that crime I wonder?
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February 8, 2012 at 16:44 -
Oops! That should have read ‘neither’ and ‘nor’. Sorry my gramma is atrocious, but she can still roll a fag one-handed, kills a bottle of gin a day and has a mean right hook. God love her!
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February 8, 2012 at 17:27 -
“…ifucklikeabeast’ (no00, really?)…”
That one’s probably quite accurate – for 2.5 seconds, with a quadruped, drooling all the while….
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22
February 8, 2012 at 17:53 -
I can honestly say, hand on heart, I have absolutely no desire to watch anyone get their nipple pierced. Not. Ever.
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24
February 8, 2012 at 20:30 -
Good Lord – this sort of thing never happened in my day! (*cough*). Might have done had we had Facebook and all that new-fangled gadetry, though.
Wonder how much of this is down to youngsters that have been coralled and organised all through their schooldays, wrapped in cotton wool to keep the safety elf happy and given no opportunity to develop risk-taking activities and the personal responsibility and confidence that goes with it, suddenly being let off the leash?
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25
February 8, 2012 at 22:34 -
Sharia law will sort you out.
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February 9, 2012 at 21:28 -
Can’t be bothered to read the whole thread- sorry.
The young ladies who perform at strip clubs are simply taking the best choice actually available to them.
Many are ill educated and cannot get the same pay by other means.
A good quarter are raising money to pay their way through college (the actual value of their education is a debate for another time).
Something like a third are paying off their student debt.
If we wish to make their lives better give them better choices.
If we can’t do that, leave them alone.
And yes that does mean leaving strip clubs to operate freely.
Of course, if we were to ban advertising of education- and hence reduce the number of people taking pointless degrees, not to mention pointless A levels, we would considerably reduce the phenomenon. but everyone has by law to listen to thirteen years worth of advertising as to the universal benefit of education. -
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February 10, 2012 at 18:32 -
The rape clip says “85% go unreported”. How can anyone know how many go unreported? The sheer stupidity of anyone who pays any credulity to that statement demonstrates the decline in intellectual standards accompanying New Labour’s target of sending 50% of each age-group to university.
Anna seems to think no-one taking it seriously is capable of undressing without Mama’s help – I regretfully differ: Chimpanzees can dress and undress themselves.
In the long-distant past when I was an undergraduate we had a few drunks (of the two I knew, the quiet trouble-free one became a Professor of Computing, the one who threw up in the communal bathroom became a Professor of Law) but *no-one* *ever* mentioned contemplating rape.
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