Healthy and Respectful?

Much of what Virginia Hale writes here strikes me as a touch OTT.

But I have been unable to find anyone to write, even anonymously or pseudonymously, for The Lanchester Review about having attended one of those Oxbridge consent classes.

And I have tried. Moreover, if I have tried, then I think that we can safely say that Breitbart London and Spiked have tried, too. But also, manifestly, to no avail.

Writing for the Review is, after all, essentially a favour to me, even if one is Alan Sked, or Godfrey Boom, or Mike Nattrass, or the Mayor of Bethlehem using no other platform from which to communicate her reaction to the vote of the House of Commons to recognise Palestine.

But those sites are the big boys. Still, though, no one dare play with them.

By the way, I am banned from Breitbart London, blocked from so much as reading the tweets of James Delingpole, and unfriended and blocked by him on Facebook, after I told him to stop being such "an old softie" when he complained about having been heckled by Sixth Formers on BBC Three.

He had already been annoyed by me when I had called Toby Young "a talentless hack from the right family". Yesterday, Young discontinued his Unite The Right ballyhoo, having apparently discovered that UKIP and the Conservatives hated each other. Who knew?

With this week's dazzling revelations, dutifully ignored by the Retiring Footballer Broadcasting Corporation, about the sheer cost of "free" schools with handfuls of pupils or which have not opened at all, I look forward to primary legislation surcharging Young, Michael Gove and David Cameron by name.

But I digress.

Far from American-style legislation requiring universities to apply internally administered "balance of probabilities" or "preponderance of evidence" tests to sexual assault allegations, such policies need to banned pre-emptively by Statute in this country, before they take off over here.

A post last month that touched on the refusal of women's refuges, such of them as remain after the cuts, to accommodate teenage sons has led to several communications about just how big a problem that is.

Rather more astonishingly, I have been told to expect the transatlantic spread of the practice whereby boys sexually abused in adolescence by older women are later found to be financially liable, including for many years' worth of back payments, as a result of pregnancies that were caused by their having been abused. It would be interesting to hear of a case of this in Britain already.

And Hale makes an important point about calls for "sexual consent, healthy and respectful relationships, gender stereotypes and online pornography" to be taught in schools.

She writes that, "Given that for feminists, there is only one possible viewpoint to take on all these things, the petition basically ensures that third-wave feminism is beamed straight into children's heads."

Well, some of us rather sympathise with that view of online pornography, especially. We see it (like, for example, drugs) as simply capitalism in action. Presumably, that is why the Breitbart line is so very different.

Many years ago, or at least it feels that way, an old mate of mine who was finishing off a PhD on debt was planning a postdoctoral piece on the Christian and the feminist critiques of pornography.

Although he was duly doctored, he and academia decided to part ways at that point. So, while it was as well for him that he never pursued it, it is a great pity that no one ever did. It would have been far ahead of what now seem like those very innocent times.

More broadly, though, as always with these demands for something or other to be taught in schools, which invariably result in its being so, the curriculum time is clearly available. How, then, is it currently being filled?

Apply the Eton Test. Would this be taught in a school that assumed its pupils to be future Prime Ministers or Nobel Prize winners? If not, then fill the hours instead with something that is.

Rather than "sexual consent, healthy and respectful relationships, gender stereotypes and online pornography", teach Latin.

For be in no doubt, someone else will. And the people who did one will be able to distinguish themselves from the people who did the other.