How do you meaningfully attack, in writing, a culture that is willing to commit genocide so people don’t feel weird about their boners when they masturbate to Olympic swimming?

This man wants you to know he is dedicated to protecting women's sports. Which he once watched for a whole three minutes during the last Olympics. 

It’s obvious to me that all spectator sport is a form of pornography. People relax and unwind by watching others use their bodies in a variety of ways. Consider how much skimpier and figure-hugging sports kit has gotten these days. Sure, the official explanation is couched in terms of ‘performance’, but it’s fooling no-one. It’s about showing off the goods. For the viewing audience. And some people in that viewing audience don’t want to wonder if the woman they’re jerking off to as she swims or runs or boxes might be trans, because then they’re going to feel weird about their boners. And we can’t have that, can we? 

And so a moral panic is created, and people’s lives are ruined, all to protect the erections of people who masturbate to televised sport. But you’ll never see that view articulated in one of the organs whose journalists rage daily against ‘cancel culture’ because, of course, as Nick Cohen’s career has taught us, the people who write for those papers are the same kind of wankers they pander to. They never put a hammer thrower on the front page during the Olympics, do they? But they sure loved running pictures of Kelly Holmes in her skimpy running knickers. 

Or indeed Penny Mordaunt in her swimsuit…it sucks to be called a pervert by a culture that is so relentlessly gagging for it, frankly. A culture I increasingly feel can only be summed up in one word: dirty. 

I don’t just mean that our culture is stained. I want you to imagine the word being spat at a policeman or a priest while the person spitting it is dragged away. A statement of moral outrage. Of utter condemnation. This culture has one thing on its mind and it’s disgusting, and those of us who have other things in mind are forced to see it all the time. In their ‘debates’ around sport, their relentless focus on trans peoples’ genitals, on the mechanics of how gay people have sex. In the way they talk about politicians like teenage girls ogling pictures of pop stars. I don’t read the newspapers these days because to read one is like taking a stroll through the psyche of a particularly pathetic sex case. It’s no surprise that’s what their readers turn into, if that’s what they get fed. 

No surprise too that as newspapers die their constituent elements seek desperately to metastasize into other media: Times Radio, GB News. The Daily Mail has been a printernet hermaphrodite for over a decade now, moralising on the front cover while using its online sidebar of shame to hoover up people who share its staff’s taste for pictures of fourteen year olds in bikinis. Twitter suits these old media operations down to the ground, and I suspect that TikTok probably does too (for one thing I gather the creator base for that network skews young and female, so the Mail can run lots of titillating content about it using the plausible deniability of moral outrage).  It’s an interesting question to imagine a social media site designed to be as unamenable as possible to the perverts gumming up legacy media. If you manage to invent one, maybe send me an invite? 

To return to a point buried in parentheses above, one thing which is particularly galling to see if you happen to be genuinely morally outraged is the way these people use pretended moral outrage as cover for their own prurience. Never forget that Mary Whitehouse was good friends with Jimmy Savile. There is a strain in this country’s culture which just loves to read about horrible things being done to children - provided you add a figleaf of condemnation or sympathy for the victims first. It’s why misery memoirs were so popular in this country, why JK Rowling (who really exemplifies this tendency in British culture better than anyone since Savile) spends so much time dwelling on poor little Harry’s abuse at the hands of the Dursleys before she introduces the reader to her boring, British public school version of magic. It goes back at least as far as Jack the Ripper and probably further still. It’s in our media’s DNA, this combination of censoriousness and pornomania. And obviously, like most of the worst thingsabout this country, it got absolutely turbo-charged by Thatcher (another Friend of Jimmy), whose speeches about‘Victorian Values’ were enthusiastically talked up and cheered for by the same papers that printed pictures of topless teens on Page Three. 

So of course the people this culture venerates as heroes and saints turn out to be nothing of the kind on the most cursory inspection, and the nearest thing to either that British politics has seen in years got absolutely monstered for the crime of very nearly getting elected and putting a stop to the merry-go-round. And it’s no surprise at all that, as they get close to putting all that unpleasantness behind them, our masters look around for someone they can scapegoat to distract from their own depredations and, not for the first time, they notice the queers. 

I can understand it, but I never can and never will accept it. I was raised to call out what was wrong, not to go along with it for personal advantage. I know from my own experience that most queers are more moral than anyone whose anilingual expertise has bought them a seat in the House of Lords. I know that nine times out of ten when a British journalist starts to moralise he wouldn’t want you looking at his hard drive (and the one journalist in ten who moralises with justification will never see print in a British publication). And so I try to survive without exploding in this world that sanctions liars, and I try to keep my expressions of rage restricted to the written word instead of just finding the nearest Tory and destroying their face, and occasionally I cop a Twitter ban for telling one of these mollycoddled masturbators that his dad gives good blowjobs. It’s not much of a life. But it’s all that’s available. 

If I search your newspaper’s archives,

I’ll find every op-ed where you moralise

about people like me. If I searched your garden,

would I find your buried hard drives?

I see you on my television,

telling everyone who’ll listen

that queers are groomers. How strange, 

though - your ex-wife won’t leave you alone with the children. 

One day I’ll pass you in the street 

and, hoping that I’ll be discreet,

you’ll try to pick me up. I’ll follow, but

where I leave your body? That’s a secret that I’ll keep.