A case of penile dementia

Our education is progressive, isn’t it? Of course it is, and I for one observe its progression with unflagging interest.

Each new step follows the previous one inexorably: from ineffectual to ideological to immoral to wicked to sinister to evil to downright satanic. The recent reports I’ve seen suggest that the satanic phase has already been reached, leaving me wondering what the next step will be. Human sacrifice?

As part of the compulsory RSE classes (Relationships and Sex Education), children, both boys and girls, are taught to masturbate and given masturbation as homework.

This invaluable tuition is graphically illustrated with line drawings of boys and girls engaging in that activity. Meanwhile, girls as young as 12 are told to seek amorous pleasure in vaginal, anal and oral sex.

Children are also offered a way out of a lexical conundrum I always find baffling: the difference between sex and gender. Gender to me has always been a purely grammatical category, but I can’t help noticing that the word has acquired new meanings. One of them overlaps with what I previously described as sex.

So, along with 9-year-old readers of a school textbook, I have gratefully learned that “gender is the state of being male or female socially or culturally” while “sex is the state of being male or female biologically”. The two may or may not coincide.

So defined, sex can be dismissed as an utter irrelevance. It’s gender that defines a person, and the definition is endlessly fluid.

Some people, explain our educators, are born in the wrong body. If that’s how they feel, they owe it themselves, and implicitly also to the good of society, to change their gender by publicly identifying as something else. At the same time they are encouraged to change their sex as well – which apparently is going to cost the state a pretty penny in legal settlements.

Over 1,000 families are launching a massive group lawsuit against the NHS for rushing children into taking puberty-blockers. The children sought that help because they were encouraged by their teachers to take charge of their own sexuality.

The other day I was doing a podcast on this very subject, and one of my listeners commented – correctly – that it should be up to the parents to take care of their children’s sex education. I readily agreed, but added that how things should be isn’t necessarily how they are.

In this case, parents are helpless to save their children from such satanic indoctrination. One mother, Clare Page, demanded to see the contents of the lessons taught to her 15-year-old daughter in her RSE classes.

The school refused, explaining that it was none of Mrs Page’s business – she is nothing but a mother after all. The irate woman sued, but the judge predictably found for the school.

Now, you might think this is a fight in which I have no dog: not only my son but also his children are way past school age. That is true, but, quite apart from my general abhorrence of any satanic practices, our progressive education has a direct effect on what I do.  

You see, I often rely on satire to make a point, but modernity conspires to knock that weapon out of my hands. It outpaces the most fecund satirical imagination, making it superfluous and irrelevant.

In this case, I’ve been known to suggest that, if children are encouraged to identify as anything they wish, why should it be limited to gender? Why can’t they identify as members of other species? After all, specism goes against the most sacred tenet of modernity, inclusion.

However, the beauty of modernity is that it can make the most dystopic, hyperbolic fantasy come true. Hence I wasn’t especially surprised to read that teachers are now encouraging pupils to identify as cats, horses or dinosaurs.

Such anthropomorphised animals (or bestiamorphised humans) are called ‘furries’, and they must be accepted on their own terms. When some pupils refuse to do so, all hell breaks loose. One 13-year-old girl, for example, was branded as “despicable” by her teacher for rejecting the idea that her classmate was now a cat because she identified as such.

One pupil at a state secondary school in Wales answers her teacher’s questions not in English but with “meow”. And no, she isn’t just speaking Welsh, and if that’s what you think I’ll have to report you to the Equalities Commission.

Two teenage pupils in East Sussex were ordered to stay behind in class after being nasty to their classmate who identifies as a cat. One of the girls secretly recorded their teacher reprimanding them for their reactionary intransigence and also for their view that gender is strictly binary. According to the teacher such views are “very sad” and “really despicable”.

The number of furries is growing, and the Safer Schools organisation has issued guidance on how to support children identifying as animals. The organisation’s website talks about the furry “community”, sometimes described as “fursonas”. Members of that community do something Safer Schools describes as “normal”.

William Golding managed to publish his Lord of the Flies in the nick of time. Today every self-respecting publisher would reject his manuscript as being too anodyne and oh-so-yesterday. Young people no longer have to act like animals. They can act as the animals they identify as being.

In Michigan, some parents took exception to their school district that allegedly provides lavatory litter boxes for pupils who identify as furries. The superintendent of the school district denied the rumour and called it “unconscionable”. He should change his tune sharpish if he wants to keep his job. Furries have the same rights as all other pupils who are all free to identify as anything they want – and have their lavatorial rights protected by law.

It’s not only my modest satirical abilities that modernity renders useless. Even Messrs Juvenal, Rabelais and Swift, giants of the genre, would find themselves unemployed in today’s West.

The question we need to ask is “Why?” Why have our schools stopped being educational facilities, becoming instead centres for satanic ideological indoctrination? Do our ‘educators’ genuinely think they thereby benefit their pupils, preparing them to face the vagaries of grown-up lives?

I might think that had I not seen it all before, in the Soviet Union. There school curricula, certainly in the humanities but also in the natural sciences, were designed to act as smithies of the new species, Soviet Man. The aim of education, if it existed at all, was subservient to the aim of indoctrination.

Thus, when I was 10, I was taught that “the atom was the smallest and further indivisible particle of matter”. My teachers knew – and even I did – that the Soviet Union was already making thousands of godawful bombs based on the fact that the atom was very much divisible. But that was neither here nor there: ideology trumped facts.

Our teachers don’t believe that girls can be boys (or furries) any more than Soviet teachers believed that (as one of them tried to convince me) the Berlin Wall had been built to keep at bay hordes of West Germans rushing towards the communist paradise of the DDR.

Their beliefs don’t matter, reality doesn’t matter, morality doesn’t matter, sanity doesn’t matter. Only the ideology does.

And any ideology can only ever be shoved down people’s throats by coercive means. In the Soviet Union they had prisons and concentration camps for those who dared to resist. In today’s West, we rely on reprimands, sackings and ostracism – for the time being.

When such vegetarian measures stop working, more carnivorous ones will come into play. They always do, sooner or later.

I describe the current obsession with deviant sexuality and insane identifications in our schools as satanic, a term some may find too emotionally charged. It isn’t. It strikes me as an accurate description.

But fine, I’ll settle for penile dementia with a touch of bestiality. Yes, that works.