Category: Screeve

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Last weekend was the annual Pride march in my local city. I didn’t manage to go this year but my teenage nephew did. He went with a few friends, one identified as bi, one as pan and one as transexual; he self identifies as bisexual. All the young boys and girls (15 & 16 by the way) had a great time.

BUT…

Standing at the tram stop on their way back home a man walked by, with his young daughter. As he walked by he said “faggots” to my nephew and his group of friends. He saw the look on his daughter’s face, and he said she looked mortified.

My first reaction was to laugh out loud. How could someone be like that in the day and age and during Pride. It just sounded so ludicrous.

Then I got to thinking and all those thoughts from my youth came flooding back. How I was scared of anyone finding out about my sexuality for fear of being victimised and bullied. I could never have come out at school and I had to hide who I really was until I came out in my twenties.

Today people are more free to be themselves and that is a good thing. But there are still those people who feel they the right to shout abuse at others.

This BBC article tells the story of Alex Hardy, who committed suicide 2 years after undergoing a circumcision to cure his phimosis. He went to live in Canada, and while there he consulted a doctor who prescribed a steroid cream to stretch the foreskin. When Alex felt that wasn’t working he was referred to a Urologist who immediately suggested circumcision.

This is where the cultural differences kick in. In the UK we don’t circumcise as quickly or easily as they do elsewhere.

Those non-UK readers need to understand something of the British system. The NHS is publically funded through taxation and is free at the point of need. A consequence of this system is that the UK doesn’t provide any treatment that it considers unnecessary. Hence, the NHS will not circumcise boys on demand. (They also do not routinely perform tonsillectomies.)

I am against circumcision for non medical reasons, but sometimes, those medical reasons are not necessarily valid and depend on whichever culture you live in.
The article really moved me and I felt Alex should have been given more options and more after care, especially for someone so young who’s sexual identity is just as important.

If your website is more than two-thirds porn then from July, all sites will have to very all UK citizens accessing the sites will have to prove they are aged 18 or over. To do this, they will have to either input their credit or debit card details or they will have to pay for an age verification card. Either way, they will need to know your personal details. So every time you visit a porn site, you will have to verify your age and hence give your personal details. Does anyone else find this rather… unnerving.

One other thing. Who defines what porn is? Is it porn or erotica, or sex education?
And one question I would like anyone to read this to answer. Is this website porn? I do show the occasional picture and a lot of stories do contain explicit sex. Would you class these explicit stories as porn?

I fully understand the reasoning behind this initiative, they want to protect children from seeing extreme material, which I agree with. But is this the right way to go about it?