‘We should be looking to protect young women’ (Image: Getty)
It’s becoming a bit of a pattern. One week there is some grave announcement about the state of the younger generation’s mental health; the next there is a recommendation bound to make matters even worse.
And here it is… last week we heard about huge numbers of youngsters suffering from depression; this week a study has announced that girls were having their creativity stifled because they are often called “sweet” or “cute”.
Better that they be praised using words such as “brave” or “cool”, words that are used to praise boys, says the study. My sainted aunt.
I won’t bore you with the tedious waffle that follows, explaining how calling a little girl “sweet” is going to hold her back, but having once been a little girl myself, here are a few suggestions as to how they should be treated.
First, make sure no one under the age of 18, boy or girl, has access to pornography because that, I can tell you, is going to harm a young girl an awful lot more than calling her “cute”.
Secondly, and this is related, make it totally unacceptable for anyone to ask for or send nude selfies. Girls (and some boys) have been driven to suicide on the back of this. It is unacceptable bullying and young girls have no idea how this has the potential to blow up in their face.
Make boys treat them with respect and if that means banning smartphones for all under-18s, then so be it. In fact, good.
Accept that females are physically (but not mentally) weaker than males and should be treated accordingly. Praise them and boost their self-confidence, and that includes calling them “cute”.
And do not let them start transitioning because they think that they’re male, whereas in reality they’re just going through a tomboy phase. That can damage them for life.
I do not think anyone born male can quite understand how vulnerable a young girl can feel and we should be looking to protect our young women, not fob them off with a load of tosh.
Oh, and the first time someone called me cute, I was about 12. I was shy but delighted.
The majority of young girls will feel just the same.
Taxing time for ‘hypocrite’ Ange
Angela Rayner appears to be in increasingly deep doo-doo following the sale of her council house and whether or not she should have paid thousands of pounds in tax.
Just another Labour hypocrite, following Diane Abbott sending her son to private school, David Lammy flying 5,000 miles to Brazil
to talk about the environment, etc, etc.
It puts me in mind of a lecturer I had at university, whose communist sympathies didn’t stop him from having a very cushy job with a nice house in a famous university: “I’m a Utopian socialist,” he once declared. “I want it to happen after my lifetime.”
Uncle Gary is a family jewel
We should all have an Uncle Gary: the Princess of Wales’s redoubtable reli has quite rightly had a go at the ghastly Harry and Meghan for slamming Catherine when she couldn’t answer back. And not only that, but the people the horrible duo singled out as the “racists” in the royal family (yeah, right), namely the King and the PoW, are now both seriously ill. I wonder if they feel any guilt?
Shoplifting nightmayor for capital
I livein the leafy London suburb of Chiswick, which is gaining an increasingly alarming reputation as a hotbed of shoplifting.
On Chiswick High Road and Turnham Green Terrace, two of the chi chi-est streets in the capital, it is now routine for shopkeepers to keep their doors locked to keep the riff-raff out.
The first time I came across this was in Cape Town, 25 years ago: I was shocked at the level of threat it signified.
Not in a million years did I think this would take place near my own home.
Well done, Sadiq Khan.
NOT ONLY TRUMP’S TAN THAT’S FAKE
As he is looking increasingly likely to win the next US presidential election, Donald Trump has been pictured surrounded by beaming members of the American black community.
Sharp-eyed observers have since spotted that the pictures were actually generated by AI.
The Donald is usually the first to shout about fake news. Do you think he’ll do so now?
■ Therapists are setting up services to help people who are child-free, due to the levels of “discrimination, pressure and stigma” they face. What a complete load of old trollocks. I am voluntarily child-free, and have never experienced discrimination from anyone. I am well-travelled and well-read, both a direct result of sproglessness, and have never had the stress of screaming at teenagers at three o’clock in the morning. It’s my chums who have had children who need the calming voice, thank you very much, not me.
■ One of the very many reasons I love to travel is that it teaches you so much about other cultures, but it can’t half teach you about yourown too.
We have just spent a weekend in Belfast, and touring the previous no-go areas, I learnt the following: the Republicans are very pro-Hamas, whereas the Loyalists are so pro-Israel that there are Israeli flags around the Shankill Road. I offer no comment, merely the observation. Just sayin’.
■ Who knows what really happened between the F1’s Christian Horner and the subject of his unsavoury texts. But what has really been an eye-opener are the comments directed towards his wife, the former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell.
Far from being sympathetic, most of it has been downright nasty and all of it boiling down to, “Just who does she think
she is?”
This is nothing but sheer jealousy. Geri married relatively late in life, to a rich man, and has an enviable lifestyle. And so now the very many people who did not have a similar good fortune have crawled out from under their stone and can hardly conceal their glee that she might have come a cropper.
What absolute jerks.
