Pinning down the Pin-Up Calendar Fiasco

I spotted some stunningly unequivocal reportage of a Nottinghamshire county councillor and his calendar today. The "PC-gone-mad"-based (AGH!) explanation given by Cllr. David Taylor, when challenged over his soft porn pictorials for 2009 clearly struck a chord with the Daily Fail, who prefixed his description in the paper with 'MARRIED Tory Councillor..' in a bit to highlight his credibility, apparently?

A ridiculous story, but the fact that it found its way to the tabloids is probably a good thing, because at least someone somewhere has escalated it. Unfortunately this seemed to me more about political point scoring than any desire to address the issue itself, highlighting the fact that the people administering laws and supposedly holding court over their communities are so hopelessly out of touch with what is and isn't acceptable. The message here, as highlighted on the F word far more succinctly than here, is 'Don't mess with my male privilege.' Or, apparently in the case of Kay Cutts, the dubious female "privilege" to be completely blinkered: Yes, because his fellow councillor, apparently enjoys the pleasures of soft porn herself, issuing a statement that said she was like, totally cool with it, saying;

"The calendar is not in a public area, it's in a private office, and it's only displayed when Councillor Taylor is in. He takes it down when he has visitors," she said. 'This is David's way of taking a stand against the PC (political correctness) brigade who are so busy telling us what to do. David has had enough of it."

Good to know, Kay, good to know... OH NO WAIT, WHAT? He's at his wits with those raving 'PC' zealots that have the audacity to object to what is effectively porn in the workplace, and yet he's still scared enough that one of them might call him out for it that he to has to pop his blonde lovelies in a filing cabinet for every meeting? Some protest, huh, some Stand.

I'm not going to pretend I can really get genuinely incensed over the objectification debate anymore - I've got female circumcision and the rape laws for that - plus we're osmosing gruesomely sexualised images every single day, so I don't think anyone can realistically live in the 'real (western) world' and pretend as though these images really shock - but, to put a clumsy comparison in place, the fact that I might not weep gently at the sight of every homeless person doesn't make poverty okay at all, just proliferated to the point of social numbness.

Really though, If Councillor Taylor really wanted to make some protest against 'people telling him what to do' - a slightly bizarre grudge to harbour for a man who's gone into local government - I'd suggest he man up and paper his office walls with Penthouse, or better still go swing his member of parliament around Nottingham City Centre and see what the 'PC' brigade have to say about that.

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