Pulp Friction
Late afternoon. Café Rouge. Annie (ponytail, black bootcut trousers,
Columns: Issue 4:a friend in need
Sex, as we have already established, is an essential part of life. However, it is not always as easy to come by as it should be. Far from being able to recruit an attractive partner at the drop of a hat, or a pair of trousers, it is common to find oneself alone and sadly frustrated. In the interests of public health, the Park End solution is wisest dismissed. So, what to do? At university, as at every other stage of existence, we find ourselves lamenting our plight to our nearest and dearest. What else are friends for?...
Columns: Ask Ruby
Dear Ruby,
Columns: Whatever you want...
Last week Vivienne Raper gave us her opinion on what we ought to be wearing. She rejected the notion that women ought to become more masculine in order to achieve equal status and offered an alternative, of sorts.
Columns: Tony's Virgins
It has been puzzling to observe the government's recent campaign to encourage teenagers to remain virgins, namely because the campaign's muffled tone suggests that its own proponents are somewhat embarrassed of it. Why should this be ? After all it is stating a truism: abstinence is a 100% effective means of preventing unwanted pregnancies. We hear constant complaints that Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in western Europe. However it is clear that virginity here is being promoted as a means to an end; it is given a utilitarian value rather than being valued in itself. We need to realise is that there are unspoken and unacknowledged assumptions operating behind calls to reduce teenage pregnancy. One such assumption is that as more people stay in state education beyond the age of sixteen, an unwanted pregnancy is highly disruptive of a girl's educational and career prospects. The age of consent and of the right to marry (with parental approval) is sixteen, so any encouragement of people over sixteen to remain virgins would be a completely different kettle of fish from encouragement of it among under-sixteens. The utilitarian grounds - damage to education and career prospects, unwanted abortions - while important, are insufficient by themselves. No-one from the campaign has voiced the view that everybody (not just teenagers) has the right to remain virgins out of self-respect, or talked about the pain caused by an unwanted pregnancy, agonising choice of whether to keep the child and then being abandoned by the father. This brings me to another point, a more sinister one, that is not really seriously addressed whenever the issue gets discussed, which is that the vast majority of such campaigns are aimed almost exclusively at girls, not boys, as if the latter had little or no responsibility for fathering children. The problem of 'single mothers' or 'teenage mothers' ought to be renamed 'the problem of absent teenage fathers'. However there seems little chance of that if Tony Blair didn't take paternity leave, despite his wife's public pronouncements, when their son Leo was born. The psychiatrist Anthony Clare in his recent book 'On Men: Masculinity in Crisis', criticises Blair for this and complains that men are not on the whole encouraged to take fatherhood seriously....